A model-driven approach for constructing ambient assisted-living multi-agent systems customized for Parkinson patients

The Parkinson disease affects some people, especially in the last years of their lives. Ambient assisted living systems can support them, especially in the middle stages of the disease. However, these systems usually need to be customized for each Parkinson patient. In this context, the current work follows the model-driven engineering principles to achieve this customized development. It represents each patient with a model. This is transformed into an agent-based model, from which a skeleton of programming code is generated. A case study illustrates this approach. Moreover, 24 engineers expert in model-driven engineering, multi-agent systems and/or health experienced the current approach alongside the three most similar works, by implementing actual systems. Some of these systems were tested by Parkinson patients. The results showed that (1) the current approach reduced the development time, (2) the developed system satisfied a higher percentage of the requirements established for certain Parkinson patients, (3) the usability increased, (4) the performance of the systems improved taking response time into account, and (5) the developers considered that the underlying metamodel is more appropriate for the current goal

TABSAOND: A technique for developing agent-based simulation apps and online tools with nondeterministic decisions

Agent-based simulators (ABSs) have successfully allowed practitioners to estimate the outcomes of certain input circumstances in several domains. Although some techniques and processes provide hints about the construction of these systems, some aspects have not been discussed yet in the literature. In this context, the current approach presents a technique for developing ABSs. Its focus is to guide practitioners in designing and implementing the decision-making processes of agents in nondeterministic scenarios. As an additional technological innovation, the ABSs are deployed as both mobile apps and online tools. This work illustrates the current approach with two case studies in the fields of (a) health and welfare and (b) tourism. These case studies have also been developed with the most similar technique from the literature for comparing both techniques. The presented technique improved the simulated outcomes in terms of their similarity with the real ones. The obtained ABSs were more efficient and reliable for large amounts of agents (e.g. 10,000 – 400,000 agents). The development time was lower. Both the framework and the implementation of a case study are freely distributed as open-source to facilitate the reproducibility of the experiments and to assist practitioners in applying the current approach

A Component-Based Approach for Securing Indoor Home Care Applications

eHealth systems have adopted recent advances on sensing technologies together with advances in information and communication technologies (ICT) in order to provide people-centered services that improve the quality of life of an increasingly elderly population. As these eHealth services are founded on the acquisition and processing of sensitive data (e.g., personal details, diagnosis, treatments and medical history), any security threat would damage the public's confidence in them. This paper proposes a solution for the design and runtime management of indoor eHealth applications with security requirements. The proposal allows applications definition customized to patient particularities, including the early detection of health deterioration and suitable reaction (events) as well as security needs. At runtime, security support is twofold. A secured component-based platform supervises applications execution and provides events management, whilst the security of the communications among application components is also guaranteed. Additionally, the proposed event management scheme adopts the fog computing paradigm to enable local event related data storage and processing, thus saving communication bandwidth when communicating with the cloud. As a proof of concept, this proposal has been validated through the monitoring of the health status in diabetic patients at a nursing home.This work was financed under project DPI2015-68602-R (MINECO/FEDER, UE), UPV/EHU under project PPG17/56 and GV/EJ under recognized research group IT914-16

The Impact of Digital Technologies on Public Health in Developed and Developing Countries

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on String Processing and Information Retrieval, ICOST 2020, held in Hammamet, Tunisia, in June 2020.* The 17 full papers and 23 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 49 submissions. They cover topics such as: IoT and AI solutions for e-health; biomedical and health informatics; behavior and activity monitoring; behavior and activity monitoring; and wellbeing technology. *This conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic

Improving Access and Mental Health for Youth Through Virtual Models of Care

The overall objective of this research is to evaluate the use of a mobile health smartphone application (app) to improve the mental health of youth between the ages of 14–25 years, with symptoms of anxiety/depression. This project includes 115 youth who are accessing outpatient mental health services at one of three hospitals and two community agencies. The youth and care providers are using eHealth technology to enhance care. The technology uses mobile questionnaires to help promote self-assessment and track changes to support the plan of care. The technology also allows secure virtual treatment visits that youth can participate in through mobile devices. This longitudinal study uses participatory action research with mixed methods. The majority of participants identified themselves as Caucasian (66.9%). Expectedly, the demographics revealed that Anxiety Disorders and Mood Disorders were highly prevalent within the sample (71.9% and 67.5% respectively). Findings from the qualitative summary established that both staff and youth found the software and platform beneficial

The Impact of Digital Technologies on Public Health in Developed and Developing Countries

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on String Processing and Information Retrieval, ICOST 2020, held in Hammamet, Tunisia, in June 2020.* The 17 full papers and 23 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 49 submissions. They cover topics such as: IoT and AI solutions for e-health; biomedical and health informatics; behavior and activity monitoring; behavior and activity monitoring; and wellbeing technology. *This conference was held virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic

NoMoDEI : A framework for Norm Monitoring on Dynamic Electronic Institutions

With the growth of the Internet, computational systems have become more and more complex, often including complicate interconnected networks of autonomous components. The need to bring some organisational structure into autonomous systems becomes urgent, as this allows regulating the behaviour of the different autonomous components to ensure their objectives are aligned with the holistic objectives of the system. Normative Systems are one of the mechanisms that can be applied to define and enforce acceptable behaviour within distributed electronic systems which should comply with some (human) regulations. One of the requirements to effectively implement Normative Systems is to be able to assess, at runtime, the state of the normative environment. Existing lines of research have already tried to tackle this issue on some simple scenarios. However, more complex scenarios may appear, for instance, scenarios where the normative context is not static, but it expands and contracts as new norms are added to the institution and removed from it respectively. As in human legal systems, it is easy to foresee that some of these electronic normative environments will not be static. They should be able to evolve through time as regulations change, effectively adapting to new situations and behaviours. Under these conditions, a monitoring system must be able to continue computing the state of the normative environment at runtime, as often we can not afford to perform the changes on the normative context off-line. Furthermore, it must be guaranteed the monitoring system can keep producing states of the normative environment that are consistent with the changes performed on the normative context. For instance, if a norm has been removed from the normative context, it does not make sense anymore to compute normative states where the norm has been violated. In this thesis we present NoMoDEI, a normative monitoring framework for dynamic Electronic Institutions. We formalize and develop an extended normative framework and architecture to cope with scenarios where the normative context is dynamic, therefore norms can be added, removed and updated. The operations are to be performed at run-time, without having to stop computing the normative state. The normative states computed are consistent with the expansion and contraction operations. NoMoDEI is introduced in three steps. First, we formally define the operations to be supported in order to allow for expanding and contracting the normative context. Then, we instantiate the formal operations, providing implementation details. Finally, we demonstrate our framework by applying it to two use cases: E-health systems and waste-water management on a river basin.Amb l'expansió d'Internet els sistemes computacionals han esdevingut més complexos, sovint incorporant complicades xarxes interconnectades de components autònoms. Es per això que la necessitat d'incorporar estructures organitzacionals en el sistemes autònoms s 'accentua, donat que aquestes estructures permeten regular el comportament dels diferents components autònoms, tot assegurant que els seus objectius es troben alineats amb els objectius generals del sistema. Els Sistemes Normatius (i.e. Normative Systems) són un dels mecanismes que podem aplicar per definir i imposar patrons acceptables de comportament dintre de sistemes electrònics distribuïts. Això esdevé especialment important quan el sistema es troba regimentat per regulacions (normalment humanes). Un dels requeriments per implementar Sistemes Normatius és ser capaços de determinar, en temps d'execució, l'estat de l'entorn normatiu. Existeixen línies de recerca que ja han tractat aquest problema en alguns escenaris simples. El món real però ens ofereix escenaris més complexes, com per exemple, escenaris on el context normatiu no és estàtic, si no que s'expandeix i contrau a mesura que noves normes són afegides o eliminades de la institució. Tal com passa als sistemes legals humans, és fàcil preveure que alguns contextos normatius electrònics no seran estàtics. Aquests contextos haurien de ser capaços d'evolucionar a través del temps a mesura que les regulacions canvien, adaptant-se a noves situacions i comportaments. Sota aquestes condicions, un sistema de monitorització ha de ser capaç de continuar calculant l'estat de l'entorn normatiu en temps d'execució, ja que sovint no ens podem permetre realitzar els canvis a l'entorn normatiu aturant el procés de monitorització. És més s'ha de garantir que el sistema de monitorització sigui capaç de continuar produint es tats de l’entorn normatiu de forma consistent amb els canvis realitzats. Per exemple, el fet d'eliminar una norma fa que no tingui gaire sentit continuar calculant es tats normatius on aquesta norma ha es tat violada. A aquesta Tesi presentem NoMoDEI, una infraestructura de monitorització normativa per institucions electròniques dinàmiques. Formalitzem i desenvolupem una infraestructura de monitorització normativa estesa capaç d'operar en escenaris on el context normatiu es dinàmic. Es a dir, diverses normes poden ser introduïdes, eliminades o actualitzades del context normatiu en qualsevol moment. Aquestes operacions s'han de poder realitzar en temps d'execució, es a dir, sense deixar de calcular l'estat normatiu. Es més, els estats normatius calculats han de ser consistents amb les respectives operacions d'extensió o contracció del context. Durant la Tesi presentem NoMoDEI en tres passos. Primer proporcionem una definició formal de les operacions que la infraestructura ha de suportar per permetre expandir i contraure el context normatiu. A continuació instanciem aquestes operacions proporcionant detalls d'implementació. Finalment demostrem que la nostra infraestructura pot ser aplicada a casos d'ús del món real introduint dos casos: sistemes de salut electrònics (i.e. E-health) i sistemes de tractament d’aigües residuals a la conca d’un riuPostprint (published version

Model Checking Real-Time Conditional Commitment Logic using Transformation

A new logical language for real-time conditional commitments called RTCTLcc has been developed by extending the CTL logic with interval bounded until modalities, conditional commitment modalities, and fulfillment modalities. RTCTLcc allows us to express qualitative and quantitative commitment requirements in a convenient way. These requirements can be used to model multi-agent systems (MASs) employed in environments that react properly and timely to events occurring at time instants or within time intervals. However, the timing requirements and behaviors of MASs need an appropriate way to scale and bundle and should be carefully analyzed to ensure their correctness, especially when agents are autonomous. In this paper, we develop transformation algorithms that are fully implemented in a new Java toolkit for automatically transforming the problem of model checking RTCTLcc into the problem of model checking RTCTL (real-time CTL). The toolkit engine is built on top of the NuSMV tool, effectively used to automatically verify and analyze the correctness of real-time distributed systems. We analyzed the time and space computational complexity of the RTCTLcc model checking problem. We proved the soundness and completeness of the transformation technique and experimentally evaluated the validity of the toolkit using a set of business scenarios. Moreover, we added a capability in the toolkit to automatically scale MASs and to bundle requirements in a parametric form. We experimentally evaluated the scalability aspect of our approach using the standard ordering protocol. We further validated the approach using an industrial case study