258,306 research outputs found
Context-aware healthcare adaptation model for COPD diseases
Nowadays, ubiquitous computing and mobile applications are controlling all our lifeâs aspects, from social media and entertainment to the very basic needs like commerce, learning, government, and health. These systems have the ability to self-adapt to meet changes in their execution environment and the userâs context. In the healthcare domain, information systems have proven their efficiency, not only by organizing and managing patientsâ data and information but also by helping doctors and medical experts in diagnosing disease and taking precluding procedure to avoid serious conditions. In chronic diseases, telemonitoring systems provide a way to monitor the patientâs state and biomarkers within their usual lifeâs routine. In this article, we are combining the healthcare telemonitoring systems with the context awareness and self-adaptation paradigm to provide a self-adaptive framework architecture for COPD patients
A Fault-Tolerant Emergency-Aware Access Control Scheme for Cyber-Physical Systems
Access control is an issue of paramount importance in cyber-physical systems
(CPS). In this paper, an access control scheme, namely FEAC, is presented for
CPS. FEAC can not only provide the ability to control access to data in normal
situations, but also adaptively assign emergency-role and permissions to
specific subjects and inform subjects without explicit access requests to
handle emergency situations in a proactive manner. In FEAC, emergency-group and
emergency-dependency are introduced. Emergencies are processed in sequence
within the group and in parallel among groups. A priority and dependency model
called PD-AGM is used to select optimal response-action execution path aiming
to eliminate all emergencies that occurred within the system. Fault-tolerant
access control polices are used to address failure in emergency management. A
case study of the hospital medical care application shows the effectiveness of
FEAC
Chronic infection: punctuated interpenetration and pathogen virulence
We apply an information dynamics formalism to the Levens and Lewontin vision of biological interpenetration between a 'cognitive condensation' including immune function embedded in social and cultural structure on the one hand, and an established, highly adaptive, parasite population on the other. We iterate the argument, beginning with direct interaction between cognitive condensation and pathogen, then extend the analysis to second order 'mutator' mechanisms inherent both to immune function and to certain forms of rapid pathogen antigenic variability.
The methodology, based on the Large Deviations Program of applied probability, produces synergistic cognitive/adaptive 'learning plateaus' that represent stages of chronic infection, and, for human populations, is able to encompass the fundamental biological reality of culture omitted by other approaches.
We conclude that, for 'evolution machine' pathogens like HIV and malaria, simplistic magic bullet 'medical' drug, vaccine, or behavior modification interventions which do not address the critical context of overall living and working conditions may constitute selection pressures triggering adaptations in life history strategy resulting in marked increase of pathogen virulenc
Degeneracy: a link between evolvability, robustness and complexity in biological systems
A full accounting of biological robustness remains elusive; both in terms of the mechanisms by which robustness is achieved and the forces that have caused robustness to grow over evolutionary time. Although its importance to topics such as ecosystem services and resilience is well recognized, the broader relationship between robustness and evolution is only starting to be fully appreciated. A renewed interest in this relationship has been prompted by evidence that mutational robustness can play a positive role in the discovery of adaptive innovations (evolvability) and evidence of an intimate relationship between robustness and complexity in biology.
This paper offers a new perspective on the mechanics of evolution and the origins of complexity, robustness, and evolvability. Here we explore the hypothesis that degeneracy, a partial overlap in the functioning of multi-functional components, plays a central role in the evolution and robustness of complex forms. In support of this hypothesis, we present evidence that degeneracy is a fundamental source of robustness, it is intimately tied to multi-scaled complexity, and it establishes conditions that are necessary for system evolvability
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