National Hospital Management Portal (NHMP): a framework for e-health implementation

Health information represents the main basis for health decisionmaking process and there have been some efforts to increase access to health information in developing countries. However, most of these efforts are based on the internet which has minimal penetration especially in the rural and sub-urban part of developing countries. In this work, a platform for medical record acquisition via the ubiquitous 2.5G/3G wireless communications technologies is presented. The National Hospital Management Portal (NHMP)platform has a central database at each specific country’s national hospita

'First Portal in a Storm': A Virtual Space for Transition Students

The lives of millennial students are epitomised by ubiquitous information, merged technologies, blurred social-study-work boundaries, multitasking and hyperlinked online interactions (Oblinger & Oblinger, 2005). These characteristics have implications for the design of online spaces that aim to provide virtual access to course materials, administrative processes and support information, all of which is required by students to steer a course through the storm of their transition university experience. Previously we summarised the challenges facing first year students (Kift & Nelson, 2005) and investigated their current online engagement patterns, which revealed three issues for consideration when designing virtual spaces (Nelson, Kift & Harper, 2005). In this paper we continue our examination of students’ interactions with online spaces by considering the perceptions and use of technology by millennial students as well as projections for managing the virtual learning environments of the future. The findings from this analysis are informed by our previous work to conceptualise and describe the architecture of a transition portal

A Web portal for situated Interaction

The combination between ubiquitous computing environments and ambient displays enables a broad range of new scenarios for situated interaction. In this paper, we describe our web based approach for situated displays. The concept of situated portal is introduced as a web portal that is targeted for presentation at a specific situation and that is based on interaction metaphors that are radically different from hypertext and oint-and-click interactions. We have created a prototype in which a situated portal is used for managing content presentation and user interaction at two different displays. This prototype has provided an important proof-of-concept and has allowed us to gain considerable feedback on its usage and scientific challenges, based on which we will now deploy a new large-scale prototype where some of the key issues will be addressed by a multi-disciplinary team

Integrating local services and applications into external user home environments

Users moving between different ubiquitous computing environments should be able to take a full profit of the resources existent there, if their home environment (e.g. a mobile portal) could seamlessly integrate with local infrastructure. Pursuing such goal, this paper focuses on the aspects of integrating local applications and services into an external user home environment, with particular emphasis on the interoperability and performance issues. Based on the concept of Value ADded Environment (VADE), as an administrative and physical domain, where the locally available facilities can be combined with external user home environments, the paper presents a middleware solution supporting the integration of local services and applications available in VADE environments into an external portal

Experiences and challenges in deploying potentially invasive sensor systems for dynamic media applications

This paper describes a series of projects that explore a set of dynamic media applications built upon a potentially invasive sensor system - the Ubiquitous Media Portal, featuring high-resolution video and audio capture with user ID/tracking capabilities that we installed throughout our facility. In addition to sensors, the portals provide a display and loudspeaker to locally display information or manifest phenomena from virtual worlds. During an eight-month long period, we implemented four different applications to explore acceptance by our buildingwide users. Our results provide insight into how different levels of information presentation and perceived user control can influence the user acceptance and engagement with such sensor platforms in ubiquitous deployments.Things That Think ConsortiumNokia Research Cente

Situated web portal for local awareness and transient interaction

When used as part of a larger ubiquitous computing infrastructure, public displays have a great potential for enriching transitional spaces. They can enable brief encounters with information that is relevant for their specific situation, improving local awareness, promoting information sharing and enabling new and much engaging user experiences. The research presented in this paper introduces the concept of situated portal as being a web portal of situational relevant information, targeted for the public display and using large screens or wall projections,. In this paper we will briefly describe the architecture of our system, our initial prototype and our early results. Building in our experience of creating this system we then describe some of the main open issues that we plan to address in a multi-disciplinary research project

Leveraging the Grid to Provide a Global Platform for Ubiquitous Computing Research

The requirement for distributed systems support for Ubicomp has led to the development of numerous platforms, each addressing a subset of the overall requirements of ubiquitous systems. In contrast, many other scientific disciplines have embraced the vision of a global distributed computing platform, i.e. the Grid. We believe that the Grid has the potential to evolve into an ideal platform for building ubiquitous computing applications. In this paper we explore in detail the areas of synergy between Grid computing and ubiquitous computing and highlight a series of research challenges in this space

An active, ontology-driven network service for Internet collaboration

Web portals have emerged as an important means of collaboration on the WWW, and the integration of ontologies promises to make them more accurate in how they serve users’ collaboration and information location requirements. However, web portals are essentially a centralised architecture resulting in difficulties supporting seamless roaming between portals and collaboration between groups supported on different portals. This paper proposes an alternative approach to collaboration over the web using ontologies that is de-centralised and exploits content-based networking. We argue that this approach promises a user-centric, timely, secure and location-independent mechanism, which is potentially more scaleable and universal than existing centralised portals