Software Development Support for Ambient Assisted Living

Key issues in software development support for Ambient Intelligence and Ubiquitous Computing are briefly discussed; special requirements in the context of Ambient Assisted Living are discussed

Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects 2015

These are the Proceedings of the 4th IUI Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects. Objects that we use in our everyday life are expanding their restricted interaction capabilities and provide functionalities that go far beyond their original functionality. They feature computing capabilities and are thus able to capture information, process and store it and interact with their environments, turning them into smart objects

A survey of acceptance of e-government services in the UK

This paper gives an insight into the readiness of small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) for accepting e-government services in he UK. We conducted a survey of 128 SMEs, which revealed that there is a moderate demand for e-government services, but they were not rated as efficient and essential for SMEs' businesses as conventional services. The proliferation of the UK government's Web sites, which requires co-ordination between several organisations/multiple sites, and inadequate awareness of such services, do not comply with the common concepts of e-governance and consequently have an impact on the SMEs acceptance of e-government services in the UK

Medical Legal Aspects of Telemedicine in Italy: Application Fields, Professional Liability and Focus on Care Services During the COVID-19 Health Emergency

Telemedicine services can be classified into the macro-categories of specialist Telemedicine, Tele-health and Tele-assistance. From a regulatory perspective, in Italy, the first provision dedicated to the implementation of Telemedicine services is represented by the Agreement between the Government and the Regions on the document bearing “Telemedicine—National guidelines,” approved by the General Assembly of the Superior Health Council in the session of 10th July 2012 and by the State Regions Conference in the session of 20th February 2014. Scientifically, several studies in the literature state that information and communication technologies have great potential to reduce the costs of health care services in terms of planning and making appropriate decisions that provide timely tools to patients. Another clear benefit is the equity of access to health care. The evolution of telemedicine poses a series of legal problems ranging from the profiles on the subject of authorization and accreditation to those concerning the protection of patient confidentiality, the definition and solution of which, in the absence of specific regulatory provisions, is mainly left to the assessment of compatibility of the practices adopted so far, with the general regulatory framework. In terms of professional liability, it is necessary to first clarify that the telemedicine service is comparable to any diagnostic-therapeutic health service considering that the telemedicine service does not replace the traditional health service, but integrates the latter to improve its effectiveness, efficiency and appropriateness

GeoHealth:a location-based service for home healthcare workers

We describe a map-based location-based service ‘GeoHealth ’ for home healthcare workers who attend patients at home within a large geographical area. Informed by field studies of work activities and interviews with care providers, we have designed a mobile location-based service prototype supporting collaboration through information sharing and distributed electronic patient records. The GeoHealth prototype gives the users live contextual information about patients, coworkers, current and scheduled work activities and alarms adapted to their geographical location. The application is web-based and uses Google Maps, Global Positioning System (GPS) and Web 2.0 technology to provide a lightweight, dynamic and interactive representation of the work domain supporting distributed collaboration, communication and peripheral awareness among nomadic workers. Through a user-based evaluation, we found that the healthcare workers were positive towards the use of location-based services in their work, and that the dynamic and interactive geospatial representation of the work domain provided by GeoHealth supported distributed collaboration, communication and peripheral awareness. We also identified areas for improvements

Proceedings of the 2012 Workshop on Ambient Intelligence Infrastructures (WAmIi)

This is a technical report including the papers presented at the Workshop on Ambient Intelligence Infrastructures (WAmIi) that took place in conjunction with the International Joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI) in Pisa, Italy on November 13, 2012. The motivation for organizing the workshop was the wish to learn from past experience on Ambient Intelligence systems, and in particular, on the lessons learned on the system architecture of such systems. A significant number of European projects and other research have been performed, often with the goal of developing AmI technology to showcase AmI scenarios. We believe that for AmI to become further successfully accepted the system architecture is essential

Proceedings of the 2012 Workshop on Ambient Intelligence Infrastructures (WAmIi)

This is a technical report including the papers presented at the Workshop on Ambient Intelligence Infrastructures (WAmIi) that took place in conjunction with the International Joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence (AmI) in Pisa, Italy on November 13, 2012. The motivation for organizing the workshop was the wish to learn from past experience on Ambient Intelligence systems, and in particular, on the lessons learned on the system architecture of such systems. A significant number of European projects and other research have been performed, often with the goal of developing AmI technology to showcase AmI scenarios. We believe that for AmI to become further successfully accepted the system architecture is essential

Social brokers: looking for new players to support both e-services and e-participation

The role of ontology in social research. Technology and information technology through the lenses of a cognitive approach and a phenomenological approach. Social brokers: players for mediating participation in political and institutional systems. The role of social brokers in three Italian public bodies. Participation: what is it?. E-participation: the Partecipa.net case

Cooperation as a Service in VANET: Implementation and Simulation Results

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET), specializing from the well-known Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANET) to Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) wireless communications. While the original motivation for Vehicular Networks was to promote traffic safety, recently it has become increasingly obvious that Vehicular Networks open new vistas for Internet access, providing weather or road condition, parking availability, distributed gaming, and advertisement. In previous papers [27,28], we introduced Cooperation as a Service (CaaS); a new service-oriented solution which enables improved and new services for the road users and an optimized use of the road network through vehicle\u27s cooperation and vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The current paper is an extension of the first ones; it describes an improved version of CaaS and provides its full implementation details and simulation results. CaaS structures the network into clusters, and uses Content Based Routing (CBR) for intra-cluster communications and DTN (Delay and disruption-Tolerant Network) routing for inter-cluster communications. To show the feasibility of our approach, we implemented and tested CaaS using Opnet modeler software package. Simulation results prove the correctness of our protocol and indicate that CaaS achieves higher performance as compared to an Epidemic approach