Agent-Oriented Privacy-Based Information Brokering Architecture for Healthcare Environments

Healthcare industry is facing a major reform at all levels—locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. Healthcare services and systems become very complex and comprise of a vast number of components (software systems, doctors, patients, etc.) that are characterized by shared, distributed and heterogeneous information sources with varieties of clinical and other settings. The challenge now faced with decision making, and management of care is to operate effectively in order to meet the information needs of healthcare personnel. Currently, researchers, developers, and systems engineers are working toward achieving better efficiency and quality of service in various sectors of healthcare, such as hospital management, patient care, and treatment. This paper presents a novel information brokering architecture that supports privacy-based information gathering in healthcare. Architecturally, the brokering is viewed as a layer of services where a brokering service is modeled as an agent with a specific architecture and interaction protocol that are appropriate to serve various requests. Within the context of brokering, we model privacy in terms of the entities ability to hide or reveal information related to its identities, requests, and/or capabilities. A prototype of the proposed architecture has been implemented to support information-gathering capabilities in healthcare environments using FIPA-complaint platform JADE

Feature-based generation of pervasive systems architectures utilizing software product line concepts

As the need for pervasive systems tends to increase and to dominate the computing discipline, software engineering approaches must evolve at a similar pace to facilitate the construction of such systems in an efficient manner. In this thesis, we provide a vision of a framework that will help in the construction of software product lines for pervasive systems by devising an approach to automatically generate architectures for this domain. Using this framework, designers of pervasive systems will be able to select a set of desired system features, and the framework will automatically generate architectures that support the presence of these features. Our approach will not compromise the quality of the architecture especially as we have verified that by comparing the generated architectures to those manually designed by human architects. As an initial step, and in order to determine the most commonly required features that comprise the widely most known pervasive systems, we surveyed more than fifty existing architectures for pervasive systems in various domains. We captured the most essential features along with the commonalities and variabilities between them. The features were categorized according to the domain and the environment that they target. Those categories are: General pervasive systems, domain-specific, privacy, bridging, fault-tolerance and context-awareness. We coupled the identified features with well-designed components, and connected the components based on the initial features selected by a system designer to generate an architecture. We evaluated our generated architectures against architectures designed by human architects. When metrics such as coupling, cohesion, complexity, reusability, adaptability, modularity, modifiability, packing density, and average interaction density were used to test our framework, our generated architectures were found comparable, if not better than the human generated architectures

Especificando privacidade em ambientes de computação ubíqua

Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Centro Tecnológico. Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciência da Computação.A computação ubíqua provê ambientes com serviços e dispositivos interconectados que promovem a integração de infra-estrutura digital na vida das pessoas. Porém, por haver muitos empecilhos técnicos que impedem que a computação ubíqua se torne realidade, o foco da pesquisa atual acaba voltando-se, na maioria dos casos, para os assuntos técnicos como, por exemplo, como conectar novos dispositivos e construir aplicações úteis para melhorar a funcionalidade desses ambientes. Contudo, assuntos como segurança e privacidade ainda são pouco tratados. Além disso, nesses ambientes torna-se difícil a separação entre a segurança física e a segurança digital. Assim, fica claro que o paradigma da computação ubíqua introduz novas vulnerabilidades e exposições aos usuários dos seus ambientes, mostrando que as tecnologias, políticas e leis existentes não estão adequadas para lidar com essas novas situações. Nesta dissertação, os desafios em garantir privacidade em ambientes de computação ubíqua são explorados. Além disso, um metamodelo que endereça alguns destes desafios é descrito, apresentado e simulado na ferramenta Opnet

Ubiquitous Computing

The aim of this book is to give a treatment of the actively developed domain of Ubiquitous computing. Originally proposed by Mark D. Weiser, the concept of Ubiquitous computing enables a real-time global sensing, context-aware informational retrieval, multi-modal interaction with the user and enhanced visualization capabilities. In effect, Ubiquitous computing environments give extremely new and futuristic abilities to look at and interact with our habitat at any time and from anywhere. In that domain, researchers are confronted with many foundational, technological and engineering issues which were not known before. Detailed cross-disciplinary coverage of these issues is really needed today for further progress and widening of application range. This book collects twelve original works of researchers from eleven countries, which are clustered into four sections: Foundations, Security and Privacy, Integration and Middleware, Practical Applications