A Federated Architecture for Managing Health Information in Ethiopia

Electronic health systems can be leveraged to aid in the delivery and management of health care for patients in developing countries. The delivery of health information by mobile devices is playing an increasing role in health information management

A critical analysis of research potential, challenges and future directives in industrial wireless sensor networks

In recent years, Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) have emerged as an important research theme with applications spanning a wide range of industries including automation, monitoring, process control, feedback systems and automotive. Wide scope of IWSNs applications ranging from small production units, large oil and gas industries to nuclear fission control, enables a fast-paced research in this field. Though IWSNs offer advantages of low cost, flexibility, scalability, self-healing, easy deployment and reformation, yet they pose certain limitations on available potential and introduce challenges on multiple fronts due to their susceptibility to highly complex and uncertain industrial environments. In this paper a detailed discussion on design objectives, challenges and solutions, for IWSNs, are presented. A careful evaluation of industrial systems, deadlines and possible hazards in industrial atmosphere are discussed. The paper also presents a thorough review of the existing standards and industrial protocols and gives a critical evaluation of potential of these standards and protocols along with a detailed discussion on available hardware platforms, specific industrial energy harvesting techniques and their capabilities. The paper lists main service providers for IWSNs solutions and gives insight of future trends and research gaps in the field of IWSNs

Ontology-driven monitoring of patient's vital signs enabling personalized medical detection and alert

A major challenge related to caring for patients with chronic conditions is the early detection of exacerbations of the disease. Medical personnel should be contacted immediately in order to intervene in time before an acute state is reached, ensuring patient safety. This paper proposes an approach to an ambient intelligence (AmI) framework supporting real-time remote monitoring of patients diagnosed with congestive heart failure (CHF). Its novelty is the integration of: (i) personalized monitoring of the patients health status and risk stage; (ii) intelligent alerting of the dedicated physician through the construction of medical workflows on-the-fly; and (iii) dynamic adaptation of the vital signs' monitoring environment on any available device or smart phone located in close proximity to the physician depending on new medical measurements, additional disease specifications or the failure of the infrastructure. The intelligence lies in the adoption of semantics providing for a personalized and automated emergency alerting that smoothly interacts with the physician, regardless of his location, ensuring timely intervention during an emergency. It is evaluated on a medical emergency scenario, where in the case of exceeded patient thresholds, medical personnel are localized and contacted, presenting ad hoc information on the patient's condition on the most suited device within the physician's reach

RSS Management: An RSS Reader to Manage RSS Feeds That Efficiently and Effectively Pulls and Filters Feeds With Minimal Bandwidth Consumption

In the early 2000s, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) was launched into cyber space and rapidly gained fame by existing as the underlying technology that fueled millions of web logs (blogs). Soon RSS feeds appeared for news, multimedia podcasting, and many other types of information on the Internet. RSS introduced a new way to syndicate information that allowed anyone interested to subscribe to published content and pull the information to an aggregator, (RSS reader application), at their discretion. RSS made it simple for people to keep up with online content without having to continuously check websites for new content. This new technology quickly had its shortcomings though. Aggregators were set to periodically check a feed for new content and if the new content did exist then the whole feed may be downloaded again and content filtering was either completely absent or filtering was performed once the file was already downloaded. Users who may have only occasionally checked a site for new content were now equipped with the ability to subscribe to content all over the web and have an aggregator poll the sites periodically for new content. However this presented a serious scalability problem in terms of bandwidth utilization. The same users that were checking a site once a day for new content were now checking the sites with the aggregator on a specific interval such as every hour. Bandwidth utilization increased dramatically where RSS was involved. The aim of this thesis is to design a better RSS aggregator that effectively and efficiently polls, downloads and filters RSS content while using a minimal amount of bandwidth and resources. To meet these needs, an RSS aggregator named FeedWorks has been developed that allows for users to create subscriptions to content and set a interval to poll that subscription for newly published material. The aggregator uses specific HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) header information to check for new content before it downloads a file and if new content is found, downloads the file but filters it based on user-created filter criteria before it writes the information to disk. Filtering and searching algorithms have been researched to tune the performance and limit the strain on the processor. Caching mechanisms have also been used to enhance the performance of the application. The aggregator contains content management functionality to allow users to create subscriptions and subscription groups and to apply filters to a specific subscription or groups of subscriptions. This thesis compares the aggregator with other currently available products and services. It provides detailed information regarding the end user\u27s interface and the content management functionality it provides. Descriptive information is also presented that explains the content filtering and feed polling functionality and their respective algorithms

RSS Management: An RSS Reader to Manage RSS Feeds That Efficiently and Effectively Pulls and Filters Feeds With Minimal Bandwidth Consumption

In the early 2000s, RSS (Really Simple Syndication) was launched into cyber space and rapidly gained fame by existing as the underlying technology that fueled millions of web logs (blogs). Soon RSS feeds appeared for news, multimedia podcasting, and many other types of information on the Internet. RSS introduced a new way to syndicate information that allowed anyone interested to subscribe to published content and pull the information to an aggregator, (RSS reader application), at their discretion. RSS made it simple for people to keep up with online content without having to continuously check websites for new content. This new technology quickly had its shortcomings though. Aggregators were set to periodically check a feed for new content and if the new content did exist then the whole feed may be downloaded again and content filtering was either completely absent or filtering was performed once the file was already downloaded. Users who may have only occasionally checked a site for new content were now equipped with the ability to subscribe to content all over the web and have an aggregator poll the sites periodically for new content. However this presented a serious scalability problem in terms of bandwidth utilization. The same users that were checking a site once a day for new content were now checking the sites with the aggregator on a specific interval such as every hour. Bandwidth utilization increased dramatically where RSS was involved. The aim of this thesis is to design a better RSS aggregator that effectively and efficiently polls, downloads and filters RSS content while using a minimal amount of bandwidth and resources. To meet these needs, an RSS aggregator named FeedWorks has been developed that allows for users to create subscriptions to content and set a interval to poll that subscription for newly published material. The aggregator uses specific HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) header information to check for new content before it downloads a file and if new content is found, downloads the file but filters it based on user-created filter criteria before it writes the information to disk. Filtering and searching algorithms have been researched to tune the performance and limit the strain on the processor. Caching mechanisms have also been used to enhance the performance of the application. The aggregator contains content management functionality to allow users to create subscriptions and subscription groups and to apply filters to a specific subscription or groups of subscriptions. This thesis compares the aggregator with other currently available products and services. It provides detailed information regarding the end user\u27s interface and the content management functionality it provides. Descriptive information is also presented that explains the content filtering and feed polling functionality and their respective algorithms

Safe Beacon: A Bluetooth Based Solution to Monitor Egress of Dementia Sufferers within a Residential Setting

The global population is ageing, as a consequence of this there will be a greater incidence of ageing related illnesses which cause cognitive impairment–such as Alzheimer’s disease. Within residential care homes, such cognitive impairment can lead to wandering of individuals beyond the boundaries of safety provided. This wandering, particularly in urban areas can be life threatening. This study introduces a novel solution to detect, and alert caregivers of, egress of at-risk inhabitants of a care home. This solution operates through a combination of wearable Bluetooth beacons and beam-formed listening devices. In an evaluation process involving 275 egress events, this solution proved to offer accurate operation with no incidence of false positives. Notably, this solution has been deployed within a real residential care home environment for over 12 months. Proposed future work discusses improvements to this solution

Integrated sensor and management system for urban waste water networks and prevention of critical situations

[EN] This work describes the design and implementation of improvements to the monitoring system of an urban waste water network, resulting in more efficient management of the system. To achieve this objective, the latest communications technology has been incorporated into heterogeneous networks and sensor systems. This technology includes mobile systems, which take measurements and transmit images in real time, an intelligent platform for processing and management of variables, and the implementation of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) designed with specific protocols and tools that allow the rapid deployment of the network and allow measurements to be taken in emergency situations. The sensors in this type of installation are extremely important for the management of the system as they allow us to collect information and make decisions with sufficient time to deal effectively with critical situations such as flooding or overloading of the waste water system, or environmental problems such as dumping of possible pollutants, as well as to make the best use of the water cycle. The solution presented here automates large portions of the processes, minimizing the possibility of human error, and increasing the frequency and accuracy of the measurements taken, ensuring a robust communication system covering all the elements involved to provide ubiquity of information, and finally gives an application layer to manage the system and receive alerts. © 2011 Elsevier Ltd.This work was supported by the MCyT (Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology) under the projects PET2007-0316 and TIN2010-21378-C02-02, which are partially funded by ERDF (European Regional Development Fund).Sempere Paya, VM.; Santonja Climent, S. (2012). Integrated sensor and management system for urban waste water networks and prevention of critical situations. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems. 36(1):65-80. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2011.07.001S658036