Double Secret Protection: Bridging Federal and State Law To Protect Privacy Rights for Telemental and Mobile Health Users

Mental health care in the United States is plagued by stigma, cost, and access issues that prevent many people from seeking and continuing treatment for mental health conditions. Emergent technology, however, may offer a solution. Through telemental health, patients can connect with providers remotely—avoiding stigmatizing situations that can arise from traditional healthcare delivery, receiving more affordable care, and reaching providers across geographic boundaries. And with mobile health technology, people can use smart phone applications both to self-monitor their mental health and to communicate with their doctors. But people do not want to take advantage of telemental and mobile health unless their privacy is protected. After evaluating the applicability of current health information privacy law to these new forms of treatment, this Note proposes changes to the federal regime to protect privacy rights for telemental and mobile health users

Ubiquitous Knowledge-based Framework for Personalized Home Healthcare Systems

[[abstract]]In this paper, a personalized home healthcare system with the ubiquitous knowledge-based framework is presented. This system aims to facilitate the in-person service of healthcare and mobility support. To this end, an efficient rule-based reasoning model and flexible knowledge rules are constructed for providing the necessary physiological support and medication treatment procedures. Among the utilized sensing and control technology, software modules, video camera sensors, communication devices, physiological sensors, and a robotic walking support platform are integrated in our system. The proposed system can offer high flexibility and further meet the demands in the practical healthcare support for different patients and caregivers by updating the knowledge rules in the inference mechanism. The various experimentations can demonstrate the system feasibility and interaction with users under numerous healthcare tasks, intelligent personalized services, remote healthcare and walking support and monitoring.[[conferencetype]]國際[[conferencedate]]20140407~20140411[[booktype]]電子版[[iscallforpapers]]Y[[conferencelocation]]Miami, US

Double Secret Protection: Bridging Federal and State Law To Protect Privacy Rights for Telemental and Mobile Health Users

Mental health care in the United States is plagued by stigma, cost, and access issues that prevent many people from seeking and continuing treatment for mental health conditions. Emergent technology, however, may offer a solution. Through telemental health, patients can connect with providers remotely—avoiding stigmatizing situations that can arise from traditional healthcare delivery, receiving more affordable care, and reaching providers across geographic boundaries. And with mobile health technology, people can use smart phone applications both to self-monitor their mental health and to communicate with their doctors. But people do not want to take advantage of telemental and mobile health unless their privacy is protected. After evaluating the applicability of current health information privacy law to these new forms of treatment, this Note proposes changes to the federal regime to protect privacy rights for telemental and mobile health users

ContextCare: Autonomous Video Surveillance System Using Multi-camera and Smartphones

Proceedings of: 1st International Symposium on Management Intelligent Systems (IS-MiS 2012), Salamanca, July 11 -13, 2012.In the future, Ambient Intelligence (AmI) technology could assist people autonomously and interpret their intentions. Current technology can already be used to recognize the presence of a person in a private or public space and trigger an automatic response or reaction depending on the user activity. This work describes ContextCare, an extension for an video surveillance system in a health care scenarios based on activity recognition using sensor smartphones. Both systems are coordinated using ECA parading.This work was supported in part by Projects CICYT TIN2011-28620-C02-01, CICYT TEC2011-28626-C02-02, CAM CONTEXTS (S2009/TIC-1485) and DPS2008-07029-C02-02Publicad

East Timor's transition to independence: Building up an economy from scratch

After the extensive destruction caused by the violence that followed the vote for independence on August 30th, 1999, the reconstruction of East Timor's infrastructure inevitably was the top priority. Supported by massive aid inflows, achievements in this area have been quite remarkable. As a result, East Timor's production capacity is likely to return to pre-crisis levels within a few years. The much more difficult task is to initiate and then sustain a long-run development process. This requires a whole bundle of measures of which only a part has been introduced up to now. At the macroeconomic level, three policy areas figure most prominently. First, to ensure a certain degree of macroeconomic stability as a prerequisite for growth, it is recommended to implement a combination of a Currency Board regime for the exchange rate and a sound fiscal policy based on a broad domestic revenue base. Second, permanent growth can only be achieved via the accumulation of physical and human capital. Secure property rights and a transparent investment code are among the essential conditions for physical capital formation. Human capital formation can be fostered by reallocating public resources towards basic services, which were seriously neglected under Indonesian rule. Third, a country like East Timor with its very small domestic market and its limited technical knowledge can reap large benefits from adopting an open trade and foreign investment regime. From a sectoral perspective, agriculture will remain the backbone of the economy in the foreseeable future. Incentives that lead to a more dynamic development of this sector are thus of particular importance, not only for growth but also for poverty alleviation as the vast majority of poor people live in rural areas. Such incentives include a market-oriented pricing policy, a stable and competitive exchange rate, access to credit, a basic rural infrastructure, and the provision of adequate research and extension facilities. A development strategy based on agriculture alone would, however, leave the economy vulnerable to shocks. Only a diversification of production will open the way to more robust growth. One significant step in this direction could be the exploitation of existing oil fields. If future oil revenues live up to expectations, the main policy challenge will be to avoid an overvaluation of the domestic currency (Dutch Disease). In the medium run, the establishment of labor-intensive industries could be another step towards a more diversified economy. Whether this option can be realized will depend to a large extent on East Timor's ability to import capital and know-how via foreign direct investment. Overall, if political stability prevails, the outlook for sustained progress seems better than in many other low-income countries, where the international community is less consistently engaged and where much stronger vested interests block reform efforts. At the moment, the most significant danger for long-term development in East Timor arises from the uncertainty of land and property rights, which is likely to hamper investment and agricultural development. Moreover, it has to be kept in mind that various important measures, such as investments in education, will take considerable time to materialize fully. --

Robotic ubiquitous cognitive ecology for smart homes

Robotic ecologies are networks of heterogeneous robotic devices pervasively embedded in everyday environments, where they cooperate to perform complex tasks. While their potential makes them increasingly popular, one fundamental problem is how to make them both autonomous and adaptive, so as to reduce the amount of preparation, pre-programming and human supervision that they require in real world applications. The project RUBICON develops learning solutions which yield cheaper, adaptive and efficient coordination of robotic ecologies. The approach we pursue builds upon a unique combination of methods from cognitive robotics, machine learning, planning and agent- based control, and wireless sensor networks. This paper illustrates the innovations advanced by RUBICON in each of these fronts before describing how the resulting techniques have been integrated and applied to a smart home scenario. The resulting system is able to provide useful services and pro-actively assist the users in their activities. RUBICON learns through an incremental and progressive approach driven by the feed- back received from its own activities and from the user, while also self-organizing the manner in which it uses available sensors, actuators and other functional components in the process. This paper summarises some of the lessons learned by adopting such an approach and outlines promising directions for future work

Continuous maintenance and the future – Foundations and technological challenges

High value and long life products require continuous maintenance throughout their life cycle to achieve required performance with optimum through-life cost. This paper presents foundations and technologies required to offer the maintenance service. Component and system level degradation science, assessment and modelling along with life cycle ‘big data’ analytics are the two most important knowledge and skill base required for the continuous maintenance. Advanced computing and visualisation technologies will improve efficiency of the maintenance and reduce through-life cost of the product. Future of continuous maintenance within the Industry 4.0 context also identifies the role of IoT, standards and cyber security