Service-Oriented Framework for Developing Interoperable e-Health Systems in a Low-Income Country

e-Health solutions in low-income countries are fragmented, address institution-specific needs, and do little to address the strategic need for inter-institutional exchange of health data. Although various e-health interoperability frameworks exist, contextual factors often hinder their effective adoption in low-income countries. This underlines the need to investigate such factors and to use findings to adapt existing e-health interoperability models. Following a design science approach, this research involved conducting an exploratory survey among 90 medical and Information Technology personnel from 67 health facilities in Uganda. Findings were used to derive requirements for e-health interoperability, and to orchestrate elements of a service oriented framework for developing interoperable e-health systems in a low-income country (SOFIEH). A service-oriented approach yields reusable, flexible, robust, and interoperable services that support communication through well-defined interfaces. SOFIEH was evaluated using structured walkthroughs, and findings indicate that it scored well regarding applicability, usability, and understandability

A Survey on the Web of Things

The Web of Things (WoT) paradigm was proposed first in the late 2000s, with the idea of leveraging Web standards to interconnect all types of embedded devices. More than ten years later, the fragmentation of the IoT landscape has dramatically increased as a consequence of the exponential growth of connected devices, making interoperability one of the key issues for most IoT deployments. Contextually, many studies have demonstrated the applicability of Web technologies on IoT scenarios, while the joint efforts from the academia and the industry have led to the proposals of standard specifications for developing WoT systems. Through a systematic review of the literature, we provide a detailed illustration of the WoT paradigm for both researchers and newcomers, by reconstructing the temporal evolution of key concepts and the historical trends, providing an in-depth taxonomy of software architectures and enabling technologies of WoT deployments and, finally, discussing the maturity of WoT vertical markets. Moreover, we identify some future research directions that may open the way to further innovation on WoT systems

Adaptation Conflicts of Heterogeneous Devices in Iot Smart-Home

A promising technology such as Internet-of-Things have been introduced into traditional homes, buildings and cities to become smart and offer a wide range of services to simplify and enhance people’s lifestyle, a complex rule structure with a large number of sensing and actuating devices increases the chances of creating rules with faulty behaviors. Detection of sophisticated conflicts in an IoT system is one example of such faulty systems. In this paper, a mechanism is presented to detect such sophisticated conflicts among multi-resident smart-home services. Formally a model considering the functional properties of devices to distinguish a specific new kind of conflicts among the other basic types. Service User Regularity (SUR) conflict detection algorithm is proposed to trace resident habitual usage and behaviour conflicts and regulate them within the rules of the smart-home IoT-system. The system achieved good result; it could detect a reasonable number of targeted type conflicts within a synthesized data set

Privacy Preservation and Analytical Utility of E-Learning Data Mashups in the Web of Data

Virtual learning environments contain valuable data about students that can be correlated and analyzed to optimize learning. Modern learning environments based on data mashups that collect and integrate data from multiple sources are relevant for learning analytics systems because they provide insights into students' learning. However, data sets involved in mashups may contain personal information of sensitive nature that raises legitimate privacy concerns. Average privacy preservation methods are based on preemptive approaches that limit the published data in a mashup based on access control and authentication schemes. Such limitations may reduce the analytical utility of the data exposed to gain students' learning insights. In order to reconcile utility and privacy preservation of published data, this research proposes a new data mashup protocol capable of merging and k-anonymizing data sets in cloud-based learning environments without jeopardizing the analytical utility of the information. The implementation of the protocol is based on linked data so that data sets involved in the mashups are semantically described, thereby enabling their combination with relevant educational data sources. The k-anonymized data sets returned by the protocol still retain essential information for supporting general data exploration and statistical analysis tasks. The analytical and empirical evaluation shows that the proposed protocol prevents individuals' sensitive information from re-identifying.The Spanish National Research Agency (AEI) funded this research through the project CREPES (ref. PID2020-115844RB-I00) with ERDF funds

Pragmatic oriented data interoperability for smart healthcare information systems

Smart healthcare is a complex domain for systems integration due to human and technical factors and heterogeneous data sources involved. As a part of smart city, it is such a complex area where clinical functions require smartness of multi-systems collaborations for effective communications among departments, and radiology is one of the areas highly relies on intelligent information integration and communication. Therefore, it faces many challenges regarding integration and its interoperability such as information collision, heterogeneous data sources, policy obstacles, and procedure mismanagement. The purpose of this study is to conduct an analysis of data, semantic, and pragmatic interoperability of systems integration in radiology department, and to develop a pragmatic interoperability framework for guiding the integration. We select an on-going project at a local hospital for undertaking our case study. The project is to achieve data sharing and interoperability among Radiology Information Systems (RIS), Electronic Patient Record (EPR), and Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS). Qualitative data collection and analysis methods are used. The data sources consisted of documentation including publications and internal working papers, one year of non-participant observations and 37 interviews with radiologists, clinicians, directors of IT services, referring clinicians, radiographers, receptionists and secretary. We identified four primary phases of data analysis process for the case study: requirements and barriers identification, integration approach, interoperability measurements, and knowledge foundations. Each phase is discussed and supported by qualitative data. Through the analysis we also develop a pragmatic interoperability framework that summaries the empirical findings and proposes recommendations for guiding the integration in the radiology context

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

Middleware Technologies for Cloud of Things - a survey

The next wave of communication and applications rely on the new services provided by Internet of Things which is becoming an important aspect in human and machines future. The IoT services are a key solution for providing smart environments in homes, buildings and cities. In the era of a massive number of connected things and objects with a high grow rate, several challenges have been raised such as management, aggregation and storage for big produced data. In order to tackle some of these issues, cloud computing emerged to IoT as Cloud of Things (CoT) which provides virtually unlimited cloud services to enhance the large scale IoT platforms. There are several factors to be considered in design and implementation of a CoT platform. One of the most important and challenging problems is the heterogeneity of different objects. This problem can be addressed by deploying suitable "Middleware". Middleware sits between things and applications that make a reliable platform for communication among things with different interfaces, operating systems, and architectures. The main aim of this paper is to study the middleware technologies for CoT. Toward this end, we first present the main features and characteristics of middlewares. Next we study different architecture styles and service domains. Then we presents several middlewares that are suitable for CoT based platforms and lastly a list of current challenges and issues in design of CoT based middlewares is discussed.Comment: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352864817301268, Digital Communications and Networks, Elsevier (2017

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