The OCareCloudS project: toward organizing care through trusted cloud services

The increasing elderly population and the shift from acute to chronic illness makes it difficult to care for people in hospitals and rest homes. Moreover, elderly people, if given a choice, want to stay at home as long as possible. In this article, the methodologies to develop a cloud-based semantic system, offering valuable information and knowledge-based services, are presented. The information and services are related to the different personal living hemispheres of the patient, namely the daily care-related needs, the social needs and the daily life assistance. Ontologies are used to facilitate the integration, analysis, aggregation and efficient use of all the available data in the cloud. By using an interdisciplinary research approach, where user researchers, (ontology) engineers, researchers and domain stakeholders are at the forefront, a platform can be developed of great added value for the patients that want to grow old in their own home and for their caregivers

Sharing Human-Generated Observations by Integrating HMI and the Semantic Sensor Web

Current “Internet of Things” concepts point to a future where connected objects gather meaningful information about their environment and share it with other objects and people. In particular, objects embedding Human Machine Interaction (HMI), such as mobile devices and, increasingly, connected vehicles, home appliances, urban interactive infrastructures, etc., may not only be conceived as sources of sensor information, but, through interaction with their users, they can also produce highly valuable context-aware human-generated observations. We believe that the great promise offered by combining and sharing all of the different sources of information available can be realized through the integration of HMI and Semantic Sensor Web technologies. This paper presents a technological framework that harmonizes two of the most influential HMI and Sensor Web initiatives: the W3C’s Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces (MMI) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) with its semantic extension, respectively. Although the proposed framework is general enough to be applied in a variety of connected objects integrating HMI, a particular development is presented for a connected car scenario where drivers’ observations about the traffic or their environment are shared across the Semantic Sensor Web. For implementation and evaluation purposes an on-board OSGi (Open Services Gateway Initiative) architecture was built, integrating several available HMI, Sensor Web and Semantic Web technologies. A technical performance test and a conceptual validation of the scenario with potential users are reported, with results suggesting the approach is soun

Brokerage for Quality Assurance and Optimisation of Cloud Services: An Analysis of Key Requirements

As the number of cloud service providers grows and the requirements of cloud service consumers become more complex, the latter will come to depend more and more on the intermediation services of cloud service brokers. Continuous quality assurance and optimisation of services is becoming a mission-critical objective that many consumers will find difficult to address without help from cloud service intermediaries. The Broker@Cloud project envisages a software framework that will make it easier for cloud service intermediaries to address this need, and this paper provides an analysis of key requirements for this framework. We discuss the methodology that we followed to capture these requirements, which involved defining a conceptual service lifecycle model, carrying out a series of Design Thinking workshops, and formalising requirements based on an agile requirements information model. Then, we present the key requirements identified through this process in the form of summarised results

Geoweb 2.0 for Participatory Urban Design: Affordances and Critical Success Factors

In this paper, we discuss the affordances of open-source Geoweb 2.0 platforms to support the participatory design of urban projects in real-world practices.We first introduce the two open-source platforms used in our study for testing purposes. Then, based on evidence from five different field studies we identify five affordances of these platforms: conversations on alternative urban projects, citizen consultation, design empowerment, design studio learning and design research. We elaborate on these in detail and identify a key set of success factors for the facilitation of better practices in the future

Towards the Humanisation of Programming Tool Interactions

Program analysis tools, from simple static semantic analysis by a compiler, to complex dynamic analyses of data flow and security, have become commonplace in modern day programming. Many of the simpler analyses, such as the afore- mentioned compiler checking or linters designed to enforce code style, may even go unnoticed or unconsidered by most users, ubiquitous as they are. Despite this, and despite the obvious utility that such programming tools can provide, many warnings provided by them go unheeded by programmers most of the time.There are several reasons for this phenomenon: the propensity to produce false positives undermines confidence in the validity of warnings, the tools do not in- tegrate well into the normal workflow of the developer, sometimes the warning message is simply too esoteric for most users to understand, and so on. A com- mon theme can be drawn from these reasons for ignoring the often-times very useful information given by a programming tool: the tool itself is difficult to use.In this thesis, we consider ways in which we can bridge this gap between users and tools. To do this, we draw from observations about the way in which we interact with each other in the most basic human-to-human context. Applying these lessons to a human-tool interaction allow us to examine ways in which tools may be deficient, and investigate methods for making the interaction more natural and human-like.We explore this issue by framing the interaction as a "conversation" between a human and their development environment. We then present a new programming tool, Progger, built using design principles driven by the "conversational lens" which we use to look at these interactions. After this, we present a user study using a novel low-cost methodology, aimed at evaluating the efficacy of the Progger tool. From the results of this user study, we present a new, more streamlined version of Progger, and finally investigate the way in which it can be used to direct the users attention when conducting a code comprehension exercise

When is Architecture Not Design?

If there?s nothing more to architecture than design, and to its attendant thinking processes than design thinking, then core dimensions of the enterprise from production and use angles have no special character over and above their counterparts in general design.  Yet that does not appear to be true by the lights of architects or design specialists or the public at large.  So what is it, at the core or periphery of the discipline or its objects, that makes architecture not design?  The ways in which architecture and design constitute artistic enterprises, drawing on and promoting aesthetic interest, differ such that architecture is not, or at least not only, a branch of or variation on design generally construed

Knowledge engineering for mental-health risk assessment and decision support

Mental-health risk assessment practice in the UK is mainly paper-based, with little standardisation in the tools that are used across the Services. The tools that are available tend to rely on minimal sets of items and unsophisticated scoring methods to identify at-risk individuals. This means the reasoning by which an outcome has been determined remains uncertain. Consequently, there is little provision for: including the patient as an active party in the assessment process, identifying underlying causes of risk, and eecting shared decision-making. This thesis develops a tool-chain for the formulation and deployment of a computerised clinical decision support system for mental-health risk assessment. The resultant tool, GRiST, will be based on consensual domain expert knowledge that will be validated as part of the research, and will incorporate a proven psychological model of classication for risk computation. GRiST will have an ambitious remit of being a platform that can be used over the Internet, by both the clinician and the layperson, in multiple settings, and in the assessment of patients with varying demographics. Flexibility will therefore be a guiding principle in the development of the platform, to the extent that GRiST will present an assessment environment that is tailored to the circumstances in which it nds itself. XML and XSLT will be the key technologies that help deliver this exibility

Enhancing quality of life: Human-centered design of mobile and smartwatch applications for assisted ambient living

Background: Assisted ambient living interfaces are technologies designed to improve the quality of life for people who require assistance with daily activities. They are crucial for individuals to maintain their independence for as long as possible. To this end, these interfaces have to be user-friendly, intuitive, and accessible, even for those who are not techsavvy. Research in recent years indicates that people find it uncomfortable to wear invasive or large intrusive devices to monitor health status, and poor user interface design implies a lack of user engagement. Methods: This paper presents the design and implementation of non-intrusive mobile and smartwatch applications for detecting older adults when executing their routines. The solution uses an intuitive mobile application to set up beacons and incorporates biometric data acquired from the smartwatch to measure bio-signals correlated to the user’s location. User testing and interface evaluation are carried out using the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ). Results: Six older adults participated in the evaluation of the interfaces. Results show that users found the interaction to be excellent in all the parameters of the UEQ in the evaluation of the mobile interface. For the smartwatch application, results vary from above average to excellent. Conclusions: The applications are intuitive and easy to use, and data obtained from integrating systems is essential to link information and provide feedback to the user.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Surform: An Architectural Vocabulary of Morphogenesis

The term morphogenesis in architecture is usually associated with parametric design strategies. I intend ‘morphogenetic’ in a different sense. Architecture in general, and architectural education in particular, are awash in proposals that might be best described as ‘biomorphic.’ Yet, in my experience, students and practitioners have neither fundamental understanding of shape-as-surface nor the vocabulary necessary to describe such designs. This vocabulary, including a powerful generalisation of biomorphic shape, is readily available in the work of Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855). Gauss’s generalisation recognised that there are only three types of surface: positively curved, negatively curved and surfaces of zero curvature. This paper offers a concise exposition of Gauss’s formulation, a proposal for a vocabulary sufficient to clearly discuss such shapes in design contexts and a plea for an architectural pedagogy that moves beyond notions of space as bounded emptiness (i.e. beyond perspectival constructions). These reflections are a product of an educational experiment conducted in a first year architectural studio during the spring of 2017. Surform is a neologism, shorthand for ‘shape conceived as surface.