A Jini-Based Solution for Electronic Prescriptions

In most countries today, handwritten, paper-based medical prescriptions are the norm.While efforts have been made in the past and are being made at present to migrate toward electronic dispensation of prescriptions, these have generally omitted to incorporate ubiquitous computing technology in their proposed solutions. In this paper, we focus on this issue and describe a Jini-based prototypical solution for electronic prescriptions, which allows for their wireless transmission to in-range pharmacies and the augmentation of the service levels rendered to the user, with, for instance, information about queue lengths and estimated waiting times being provided to the patients. Clinical and user evaluation revealed that there were high levels of agreement as regards the prototype’s effectiveness, ease of use, and usefulness

A framework for development of android mobile electronic prescription transfer applications in compliance with security requirements mandated by the Australian healthcare industry

This thesis investigates mobile electronic transfer of prescription (ETP) in compliance with the security requirements mandated by the Australian healthcare industry and proposes a framework for the development of an Android mobile electronic prescription transfer application. Furthermore, and based upon the findings and knowledge from constructing this framework, another framework is also derived for assessing Android mobile ETP applications for their security compliance. The centralised exchange model-based ETP solution currently used in the Australian healthcare industry is an expensive solution for on-going use. With challenges such as an aging population and the rising burden of chronic disease, the cost of the current ETP solution’s operational infrastructure is certain to rise in the future. In an environment where it is increasingly beneficial for patients to engage in and manage their own information and subsequent care, this current solution fails to offer the patient direct access to their electronic prescription information. The current system also fails to incorporate certain features that would dramatically improve the quality of the patient’s care and safety, i.e. alerts for the patient’s drug allergies, harmful dosage and script expiration. Over a decade old, the current ETP solution was essentially designed and built to meet legislation and regulatory requirements, with change-averting its highest priority. With little, if any, provision for future growth and innovation, it was not designed to cater to the needs of the ETP process. This research identifies the gap within the current ETP implementation (i.e. dependency on infrastructure, significant on-going cost and limited availability of the patient’s medication history) and proposes a framework for building a secure mobile ETP solution on the Android mobile operating system platform which will address the identified gap. The literature review part of this thesis examined the significance of ETP for the nation’s larger initiative to provide an improved and better maintainable healthcare system. The literature review also revealed the stance of each jurisdiction, from legislative and regulatory perspectives, in transitioning to the use of a fully electronic ETP solution. It identified the regulatory mandates of each jurisdiction for ETP as well as the security standards by which the current ETP implementation is iii governed so as to conform to those regulatory mandates. The literature review part of the thesis essentially identified and established how the Australian healthcare industry’s various prescription-related legislations and regulations are constructed, and the complexity of this construction for eTP. The jurisdictional regulatory mandates identified in the literature review translate into a set of security requirements. These requirements establish the basis of the guiding framework for the development of a security-compliant Android mobile ETP application. A number of experimentations were conducted focusing on the native security features of the Android operating system, as well as wireless communication technologies such as NFC and Bluetooth, in order to propose an alternative mobile ETP solution with security assurance comparable to the current ETP implementation. The employment of a proof-of-concept prototype such as this alongside / coupled with a series of iterative experimentations strengthens the validity and practicality of the proposed framework. The first experiment successfully proved that the Android operating system has sufficient encryption capabilities, in compliance with the security mandates, to secure the electronic prescription information from the data at rest perspective. The second experiment indicated that the use of NFC technology to implement the alternative transfer mechanism for exchanging electronic prescription information between ETP participating devices is not practical. The next iteration of the experimentation using Bluetooth technology proved that it can be utilised as an alternative electronic prescription transfer mechanism to the current approach using the Internet. These experiment outcomes concluded the partial but sufficient proofof- concept prototype for this research. Extensive document analysis and iterative experimentations showed that the framework constructed by this research can guide the development of an alternative mobile ETP solution with both comparable security assurance to and better access to the patient’s medication history than the current solution. This alternative solution would present no operational dependence upon infrastructure and its associated, ongoing cost to the nation’s healthcare expenditure. In addition, use of this mobile ETP alternative has the potential to change the public’s perception (i.e. acceptance from regulatory and security perspectives) of mobile healthcare solutions, thereby paving the way for further innovation and future enhancements in eHealth

One-Class Classification: Taxonomy of Study and Review of Techniques

One-class classification (OCC) algorithms aim to build classification models when the negative class is either absent, poorly sampled or not well defined. This unique situation constrains the learning of efficient classifiers by defining class boundary just with the knowledge of positive class. The OCC problem has been considered and applied under many research themes, such as outlier/novelty detection and concept learning. In this paper we present a unified view of the general problem of OCC by presenting a taxonomy of study for OCC problems, which is based on the availability of training data, algorithms used and the application domains applied. We further delve into each of the categories of the proposed taxonomy and present a comprehensive literature review of the OCC algorithms, techniques and methodologies with a focus on their significance, limitations and applications. We conclude our paper by discussing some open research problems in the field of OCC and present our vision for future research.Comment: 24 pages + 11 pages of references, 8 figure

Revisiting Actor Programming in C++

The actor model of computation has gained significant popularity over the last decade. Its high level of abstraction makes it appealing for concurrent applications in parallel and distributed systems. However, designing a real-world actor framework that subsumes full scalability, strong reliability, and high resource efficiency requires many conceptual and algorithmic additives to the original model. In this paper, we report on designing and building CAF, the "C++ Actor Framework". CAF targets at providing a concurrent and distributed native environment for scaling up to very large, high-performance applications, and equally well down to small constrained systems. We present the key specifications and design concepts---in particular a message-transparent architecture, type-safe message interfaces, and pattern matching facilities---that make native actors a viable approach for many robust, elastic, and highly distributed developments. We demonstrate the feasibility of CAF in three scenarios: first for elastic, upscaling environments, second for including heterogeneous hardware like GPGPUs, and third for distributed runtime systems. Extensive performance evaluations indicate ideal runtime behaviour for up to 64 cores at very low memory footprint, or in the presence of GPUs. In these tests, CAF continuously outperforms the competing actor environments Erlang, Charm++, SalsaLite, Scala, ActorFoundry, and even the OpenMPI.Comment: 33 page

Secure Interactive Electronic Negotiations in Business to Business Marketplaces

In this paper, we discuss security aspects of interactive bilateral multi-attribute negotiations. We introduce this type of electronic negotiations and maintain that it will be an important functional aspect of business-to-business electronic marketplaces. We discuss the general application architecture and the process flow for this type of negotiations. We introduce the relevant security issues and show how these issues can be dealt with, especially within a business relationship where a lower degree of trust prevails. To this purpose, we introduce and discuss a protocol for secure interactive electronic negotiations

Intelligent technologies for real-time monitoring and decision support systems

MPhilAutomation of data processing and control of operations involving intelligent technologies that is considered the next generation technology requires error-free data capture systems in both clinical research and healthcare. The presented research constitutes a step in the development of intelligent technologies in healthcare. The proposed improvement is by automation that includes the elements of intelligence and prediction. In particular automatic data acquisition systems for several devices are developed including pervasive computing technologies for mobility. The key feature of the system is the minimisation/near eradication of erroneous data input along with a number of other security measures ensuring completeness, accuracy and reliability of the patients‟ data. The development is based on utilising existing devices to keep the cost of Data Acquisition Systems down. However, with existing technology and devices one can be limited to features required to perform more refined analysis. Research of existing and development of a new device for assessment of neurological diseases, such as MS (Multiple Sclerosis) using Stroop test is performed. The software can also be customized for use in other diseases affecting Central Nervous System such as Parkinson‟s disease. The introduction of intelligent functions into the majority of operations enables quality checks and provides on-line user assistance. It could become a key tool in the first step of patient diagnosis before referring to more advanced tests for further investigation. Although the software cannot fully ensure the diagnosis of MS or PD but can make significant contribution in the process of diagnosis and monitorin