Mobile Emergency, an Emergency Support System for Hospitals in Mobile Devices: Pilot Study

BACKGROUND: Hospitals are vulnerable to natural disasters, man-made disasters, and mass causalities events. Within a short time, hospitals must provide care to large numbers of casualties in any damaged infrastructure, despite great personnel risk, inadequate communications, and limited resources. Communications are one of the most common challenges and drawbacks during in-hospital emergencies. Emergency difficulties in communicating with personnel and other agencies are mentioned in literature. At the moment of emergency inception and in the earliest emergency phases, the data regarding the true nature of the incidents are often inaccurate. The real needs and conditions are not yet clear, hospital personnel are neither efficiently coordinated nor informed on the real available resources. Information and communication technology solutions in health care turned out to have a great positive impact both on daily working practice and situations. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this paper was to find a solution that addresses the aspects of communicating among medical personnel, formalizing the modalities and protocols and the information to guide the medical personnel during emergency conditions with a support of a Central Station (command center) to cope with emergency management and best practice network to produce and distribute intelligent content made available in the mobile devices of the medical personnel. The aim was to reduce the time needed to react and to cope with emergency organization, while facilitating communications. METHODS: The solution has been realized by formalizing the scenarios, extracting, and identifying the requirements by using formal methods based on unified modeling language (UML). The system and was developed using mobile programming under iOS Apple and PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor My Structured Query Language (PHP MySQL). Formal questionnaires and time sheets were used for testing and validation, and a control group was used in order to estimate the reduction of time needed to cope with emergency cases. First, we have tested the usability and the functionalities of the solution proposed, then a real trial was performed to assess the reduction in communication time and the efficiency of the solution with respect to a case without Mobile Emergency tools. RESULTS: The solution was based on the development of a mobile emergency application and corresponding server device to cope with emergencies and facilitate all the related activities and communications, such as marking the position, contacting people, and recovering the exits information. The solution has been successfully tested within the Careggi Hospital, the largest medical infrastructure in Florence and Tuscany area in Italy, thus demonstrating the validity of the identified modalities, procedures, and the reduction in the time needed to cope with the emergency conditions. The trial was not registered as the test was conducted in realistic but simulated emergency conditions. CONCLUSIONS: By analyzing the requirements for developing a mobile app, and specifically the functionalities, codes, and design of the Mobile Emergency app, we have revealed the real advantages of using mobile emergency solutions compared to other more traditional solutions to effectively handle emergency situations in hospital settings

MPEG-21 digital item declaration and identification - Principles and compression

Telecommunications and Information Technology Research Institute. At the core of the MPEG-21 Multimedia Framework is the concept of the Digital Item, a virtual container for a hierarchical structure of metadata and resources. This paper considers the Digital Item Declaration Language (DIDL), gives examples of its usage, and discusses how it is used to integrate other parts of MPEG-21. The paper then discusses how Digital Item Identification integrates with the DIDL to allow MPEG-21 to utilize standard identifiers from many application spaces. Finally, an alternative, compressed form of the XML Digital Item Declaration is described. This uses schema-based compression to significantly reduce the size of these XML documents

Strategies for digital preservation of information

With the advent of the digital era, the digital information produced has grown exponentially. According to Seamus Ross, digital information is a cultural product [1]. The growing dependency on digital information is changing the way our culture is recorded. There is no longer a strict relation between the logical structure of information, the physical storage support and its interpretation. Internet provided the right environment not only for the thriving of new communities but also for the growth of the information produced by them. Software and hardware have also evolved. Along with them came new capabilities of producing more accurate and space demanding information. One good example is multimedia content, audio and video, but there are many more. This new reality rose an awareness for the need to preserve all this information for future generations to come. Unlike their analogue peers, digital formats require a different effort to maintain as they are exposed to such threats as the deterioration of the medium they are stored in or formats obsolescence. A number of actions must be taken to ensure their long-term access. To address this need, digital repositories have evolved, accommodating now sets of features capable of implementing different strategies for the digital preservation of information. This thesis presents an analysis of the current state of the art open source repository software for the digital preservation of information identifying the five most relevant solutions. From those solutions, we picked the most feature rich and broader user community software, RODA, to which we propose and implement further improvements to an existing preservation strategy: federation. These improvements consist in building into the system an interoperability mechanism capable of allowing RODA to interact with other systems. This improvement is made by implementing a prototype composed by a CMIS server inside the repository, which communicates with client applications through the implementation of the CMIS protocol. We name this prototype RODA OpenCMIS Server, or in short, RODA-OCS. The prototype allows RODA to expose contents stored inside it publicly, under a controlled environment, in an authenticated and secure way. This goal is achieved by integrating our prototype with RODA native permissions system. RODA-OCS not only implements a file browser mechanism for content navigation but also a query engine capable of searching and retrieving contents based on their metadata, either technical or descriptive. Finally, we present a demonstration of the functioning of RODA-OCS. Through the use of a dataset conceived to test the functionalitie

Persönliche Wege der Interaktion mit multimedialen Inhalten

Today the world of multimedia is almost completely device- and content-centered. It focuses it’s energy nearly exclusively on technical issues such as computing power, network specifics or content and device characteristics and capabilities. In most multimedia systems, the presentation of multimedia content and the basic controls for playback are main issues. Because of this, a very passive user experience, comparable to that of traditional TV, is most often provided. In the face of recent developments and changes in the realm of multimedia and mass media, this ”traditional” focus seems outdated. The increasing use of multimedia content on mobile devices, along with the continuous growth in the amount and variety of content available, make necessary an urgent re-orientation of this domain. In order to highlight the depth of the increasingly difficult situation faced by users of such systems, it is only logical that these individuals be brought to the center of attention. In this thesis we consider these trends and developments by applying concepts and mechanisms to multimedia systems that were first introduced in the domain of usercentrism. Central to the concept of user-centrism is that devices should provide users with an easy way to access services and applications. Thus, the current challenge is to combine mobility, additional services and easy access in a single and user-centric approach. This thesis presents a framework for introducing and supporting several of the key concepts of user-centrism in multimedia systems. Additionally, a new definition of a user-centric multimedia framework has been developed and implemented. To satisfy the user’s need for mobility and flexibility, our framework makes possible seamless media and service consumption. The main aim of session mobility is to help people cope with the increasing number of different devices in use. Using a mobile agent system, multimedia sessions can be transferred between different devices in a context-sensitive way. The use of the international standard MPEG-21 guarantees extensibility and the integration of content adaptation mechanisms. Furthermore, a concept is presented that will allow for individualized and personalized selection and face the need for finding appropriate content. All of which can be done, using this approach, in an easy and intuitive way. Especially in the realm of television, the demand that such systems cater to the need of the audience is constantly growing. Our approach combines content-filtering methods, state-of-the-art classification techniques and mechanisms well known from the area of information retrieval and text mining. These are all utilized for the generation of recommendations in a promising new way. Additionally, concepts from the area of collaborative tagging systems are also used. An extensive experimental evaluation resulted in several interesting findings and proves the applicability of our approach. In contrast to the ”lean-back” experience of traditional media consumption, interactive media services offer a solution to make possible the active participation of the audience. Thus, we present a concept which enables the use of interactive media services on mobile devices in a personalized way. Finally, a use case for enriching TV with additional content and services demonstrates the feasibility of this concept.Die heutige Welt der Medien und der multimedialen Inhalte ist nahezu ausschließlich inhalts- und geräteorientiert. Im Fokus verschiedener Systeme und Entwicklungen stehen oft primär die Art und Weise der Inhaltspräsentation und technische Spezifika, die meist geräteabhängig sind. Die zunehmende Menge und Vielfalt an multimedialen Inhalten und der verstärkte Einsatz von mobilen Geräten machen ein Umdenken bei der Konzeption von Multimedia Systemen und Frameworks dringend notwendig. Statt an eher starren und passiven Konzepten, wie sie aus dem TV Umfeld bekannt sind, festzuhalten, sollte der Nutzer in den Fokus der multimedialen Konzepte rücken. Um dem Nutzer im Umgang mit dieser immer komplexeren und schwierigen Situation zu helfen, ist ein Umdenken im grundlegenden Paradigma des Medienkonsums notwendig. Durch eine Fokussierung auf den Nutzer kann der beschriebenen Situation entgegengewirkt werden. In der folgenden Arbeit wird auf Konzepte aus dem Bereich Nutzerzentrierung zurückgegriffen, um diese auf den Medienbereich zu übertragen und sie im Sinne einer stärker nutzerspezifischen und nutzerorientierten Ausrichtung einzusetzen. Im Fokus steht hierbei der TV-Bereich, wobei die meisten Konzepte auch auf die allgemeine Mediennutzung übertragbar sind. Im Folgenden wird ein Framework für die Unterstützung der wichtigsten Konzepte der Nutzerzentrierung im Multimedia Bereich vorgestellt. Um dem Trend zur mobilen Mediennutzung Sorge zu tragen, ermöglicht das vorgestellte Framework die Nutzung von multimedialen Diensten und Inhalten auf und über die Grenzen verschiedener Geräte und Netzwerke hinweg (Session mobility). Durch die Nutzung einer mobilen Agentenplattform in Kombination mit dem MPEG-21 Standard konnte ein neuer und flexibel erweiterbarer Ansatz zur Mobilität von Benutzungssitzungen realisiert werden. Im Zusammenhang mit der stetig wachsenden Menge an Inhalten und Diensten stellt diese Arbeit ein Konzept zur einfachen und individualisierten Selektion und dem Auffinden von interessanten Inhalten und Diensten in einer kontextspezifischen Weise vor. Hierbei werden Konzepte und Methoden des inhaltsbasierten Filterns, aktuelle Klassifikationsmechanismen und Methoden aus dem Bereich des ”Textminings” in neuer Art und Weise in einem Multimedia Empfehlungssystem eingesetzt. Zusätzlich sind Methoden des Web 2.0 in eine als Tag-basierte kollaborative Komponente integriert. In einer umfassenden Evaluation wurde sowohl die Umsetzbarkeit als auch der Mehrwert dieser Komponente demonstriert. Eine aktivere Beteiligung im Medienkonsum ermöglicht unsere iTV Komponente. Sie unterstützt das Anbieten und die Nutzung von interaktiven Diensten, begleitend zum Medienkonsum, auf mobilen Geräten. Basierend auf einem Szenario zur Anreicherung von TV Sendungen um interaktive Dienste konnte die Umsetzbarkeit dieses Konzepts demonstriert werden