A Jini-Based Solution for Electronic Prescriptions

In most countries today, handwritten, paper-based medical prescriptions are the norm.While efforts have been made in the past and are being made at present to migrate toward electronic dispensation of prescriptions, these have generally omitted to incorporate ubiquitous computing technology in their proposed solutions. In this paper, we focus on this issue and describe a Jini-based prototypical solution for electronic prescriptions, which allows for their wireless transmission to in-range pharmacies and the augmentation of the service levels rendered to the user, with, for instance, information about queue lengths and estimated waiting times being provided to the patients. Clinical and user evaluation revealed that there were high levels of agreement as regards the prototype’s effectiveness, ease of use, and usefulness

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

Description and Experience of the Clinical Testbeds

This deliverable describes the up-to-date technical environment at three clinical testbed demonstrator sites of the 6WINIT Project, including the adapted clinical applications, project components and network transition technologies in use at these sites after 18 months of the Project. It also provides an interim description of early experiences with deployment and usage of these applications, components and technologies, and their clinical service impact

A framework for safe composition of heterogeneous SOA services in a pervasive computing environment with resource constraints

The Service Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm, defines services as software artifacts whose implementations are separated from their specifications. Application developers rely on services to simplify the design, reduce the development time and cost. Within the SOC paradigm, different Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) have been developed. These different SOAs provide platform independence, programming-language independence, defined standards, and network support. Even when different SOAs follow the same SOC principles, in practice it is difficult to compose services from heterogeneous architectures. Automatic the process of composition of services from heterogeneous SOAs is not a trivial task. Current composition tools usually focus on a single SOA, while others do not provide mechanisms for ensuring safety of composite services and their interactions. Given that some services might perform critical operations or manage sensitive data, defining safety for services and checking for compliance is crucial. This work proposes and workflow specification language for composite services that is SOA-independent. It also presents a framework for automatic composition of services of heterogeneous SOAs, supporting web services (WS) and OSGi services as an example. It integrates formal software analysis methods to ensure the safety of composite services and their interactions. Experiments are conducted to study the performance of the composite service generated automatically by the framework with composite services using current composition methods. We use as an example a smart home composite service for the management of medicines, deployed in a regular and in a resource-constrained network environment

Towards pervasive computing in health care – A literature review

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>The evolving concepts of pervasive computing, ubiquitous computing and ambient intelligence are increasingly influencing health care and medicine. Summarizing published research, this literature review provides an overview of recent developments and implementations of pervasive computing systems in health care. It also highlights some of the experiences reported in deployment processes.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>There is no clear definition of pervasive computing in the current literature. Thus specific inclusion criteria for selecting articles about relevant systems were developed. Searches were conducted in four scientific databases alongside manual journal searches for the period of 2002 to 2006. Articles included present prototypes, case studies and pilot studies, clinical trials and systems that are already in routine use.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The searches identified 69 articles describing 67 different systems. In a quantitative analysis, these systems were categorized into project status, health care settings, user groups, improvement aims, and systems features (i.e., component types, data gathering, data transmission, systems functions). The focus is on the types of systems implemented, their frequency of occurrence and their characteristics. Qualitative analyses were performed of deployment issues, such as organizational and personnel issues, privacy and security issues, and financial issues. This paper provides a comprehensive access to the literature of the emerging field by addressing specific topics of application settings, systems features, and deployment experiences.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Both an overview and an analysis of the literature on a broad and heterogeneous range of systems are provided. Most systems are described in their prototype stages. Deployment issues, such as implications on organization or personnel, privacy concerns, or financial issues are mentioned rarely, though their solution is regarded as decisive in transferring promising systems to a stage of regular operation. There is a need for further research on the deployment of pervasive computing systems, including clinical studies, economic and social analyses, user studies, etc.</p

D7.5 FIRST consolidated project results

The FIRST project commenced in January 2017 and concluded in December 2022, including a 24-month suspension period due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Throughout the project, we successfully delivered seven technical reports, conducted three workshops on Key Enabling Technologies for Digital Factories in conjunction with CAiSE (in 2019, 2020, and 2022), produced a number of PhD theses, and published over 56 papers (and numbers of summitted journal papers). The purpose of this deliverable is to provide an updated account of the findings from our previous deliverables and publications. It involves compiling the original deliverables with necessary revisions to accurately reflect the final scientific outcomes of the project