Trust and Privacy Permissions for an Ambient World

Ambient intelligence (AmI) and ubiquitous computing allow us to consider a future where computation is embedded into our daily social lives. This vision raises its own important questions and augments the need to understand how people will trust such systems and at the same time achieve and maintain privacy. As a result, we have recently conducted a wide reaching study of people’s attitudes to potential AmI scenarios with a view to eliciting their privacy concerns. This chapter describes recent research related to privacy and trust with regard to ambient technology. The method used in the study is described and findings discussed

Integral multidisciplinary rehabilitation treatment planning

This paper presents a methodology to plan treatments for rehabilitation outpatients. These patients require a series of treatments by therapists from various disciplines. In current practice, when treatments are planned, a lack of coordination between the different disciplines, along with a failure to plan the entire treatment plan at once, often occurs. This situation jeopardizes both the quality of care and the logistical performance. The multidisciplinary nature of the rehabilitation process complicates planning and control. An integral treatment planning methodology, based on an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation, ensures continuity of the rehabilitation process while simultaneously controlling seven performance indicators including access times, combination appointments, and therapist utilization. We apply our approach to the rehabilitation outpatient clinic of the Academic Medical Center (AMC) in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Based on the results of this case, we are convinced that our approach can be valuable for decision-making support in resource capacity planning and control at many rehabilitation outpatient clinics. The developed model will be part of the new hospital information system of the AMC

Authorization and access control of application data in Workflow systems

Workflow Management Systems (WfMSs) are used to support the modeling and coordinated execution of business processes within an organization or across organizational boundaries. Although some research efforts have addressed requirements for authorization and access control for workflow systems, little attention has been paid to the requirements as they apply to application data accessed or managed by WfMSs. In this paper, we discuss key access control requirements for application data in workflow applications using examples from the healthcare domain, introduce a classification of application data used in workflow systems by analyzing their sources, and then propose a comprehensive data authorization and access control mechanism for WfMSs. This involves four aspects: role, task, process instance-based user group, and data content. For implementation, a predicate-based access control method is used. We believe that the proposed model is applicable to workflow applications and WfMSs with diverse access control requirements

Towards a reusable architecture for message exchange in pervasive healthcare

The main objective of this paper is to present a reusable architecture for message exchange in pervasive healthcare environments meant to be generally applicable to different applications in the healthcare domain. This architecture has been designed by integrating different concepts and technologies of ubiquitous computing, software agents, and openEHR archetypes, in order to provide interoperability between healthcare systems. The architecture was demonstrated and evaluated in controlled experiments that we conducted at three cardiology clinics, an analysis laboratory, and the cardiology sector of a hospital located in Marília (São Paulo, Brazil). Three applications were developed to evaluate this architecture, and the results showed that the architecture is suitable to facilitate the development of healthcare systems by offering generic and powerful message exchange capabilities. The reusable architecture speeds up the development of new applications, reducing the number of mistakes and the development time. The proposed architecture facilitates message exchanging between caregivers, contributing in this way to the development of pervasive healthcare systems that allow healthcare to be available anywhere, anytime, and to anyone

Future bathroom: A study of user-centred design principles affecting usability, safety and satisfaction in bathrooms for people living with disabilities

Research and development work relating to assistive technology 2010-11 (Department of Health) Presented to Parliament pursuant to Section 22 of the Chronically Sick and Disabled Persons Act 197

An intelligent multi-agent memory assistant

World population is ageing and increasingly scarce resources are required to cover the needs of everyone adequately. Medical conditions, especially memory problems, restrict the daily life of a broad slice of the elderly population, affect their independence. To prevent this, providing the right care and assistance while having in mind the costs implicated is essential. One possible path is to work with resources that we already have today and create innovative solutions to achieve the required level of support. There are not many solution either technological or not to prevent memory loss. In this work we present a possible solution aimed at restoring or maintaining the independence of elderly people, through the use of so-called Memory Assistants. We thus present an Intelligent Multi-Agent Memory Assistant designed to help people with memory problems remember their events and activities. The implementation of an event manager, free time manger, medication remainder and a sensory system, to manage and monitor the user, we aim to improve their quality of life and increase their independence

A Learning Health-Care System for Improving Renal Health Services in Peru Using Data Analytics

The health sector around the world faces the continuous challenge of improving the services provided to patients. Therefore, digital transformation in health services plays a key role in integrating new technologies such as artificial intelligence. However, the health system in Peru has not yet taken the big step towards digitising its services, currently ranking 71st according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). This article proposes a learning health system for the management and monitoring of private health services in Peru based on the three key components of intelligent health care: (1) a health data platform (HDP); (2) intelligent technologies (IT); and (3) an intelligent health care suite (HIS). The solution consists of four layers: (1) data source, (2) data warehousing, (3) data analytics, and (4) visualization. In layer 1, all data sources are selected to create a database. The proposed learning health system is built, and the data storage is executed through the extract, transform and load (ETL) process in layer 2. In layer 3, the Kaggle dataset and the decision tree (DT) and random forest (RF) algorithms are used to predict the diagnosis of disease, resulting in the RF algorithm having the best performance. Finally, in layer 4, the intelligent health-care suite dashboards and interfaces are designed. The proposed system was applied in a clinic focused on preventing chronic kidney disease. A total of 100 patients and six kidney health experts participated. The results proved that the diagnosis of chronic kidney disease by the learning health system had a low error rate in positive diagnoses (err = 1.12%). Additionally, it was demonstrated that experts were “satisfied” with the dashboards and interfaces of the intelligent health-care suite as well as the quality of the learning health system.Revisión por pare

Open Science: Tools, approaches, and implications

The Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing is an annual meeting whose topics are determined by proposals submitted by members of the community. This document is the proposal for a session on Open Science, submitted for consideration for the PSB meeting in 2009