Ethics of the health-related internet of things: a narrative review

The internet of things is increasingly spreading into the domain of medical and social care. Internet-enabled devices for monitoring and managing the health and well-being of users outside of traditional medical institutions have rapidly become common tools to support healthcare. Health-related internet of things (H-IoT) technologies increasingly play a key role in health management, for purposes including disease prevention, real-time tele-monitoring of patient’s functions, testing of treatments, fitness and well-being monitoring, medication dispensation, and health research data collection. H-IoT promises many benefits for health and healthcare. However, it also raises a host of ethical problems stemming from the inherent risks of Internet enabled devices, the sensitivity of health-related data, and their impact on the delivery of healthcare. This paper maps the main ethical problems that have been identified by the relevant literature and identifies key themes in the on-going debate on ethical problems concerning H-IoT

Pervasive computing reference architecture from a software engineering perspective (PervCompRA-SE)

Pervasive computing (PervComp) is one of the most challenging research topics nowadays. Its complexity exceeds the outdated main frame and client-server computation models. Its systems are highly volatile, mobile, and resource-limited ones that stream a lot of data from different sensors. In spite of these challenges, it entails, by default, a lengthy list of desired quality features like context sensitivity, adaptable behavior, concurrency, service omnipresence, and invisibility. Fortunately, the device manufacturers improved the enabling technology, such as sensors, network bandwidth, and batteries to pave the road for pervasive systems with high capabilities. On the other hand, this domain area has gained an enormous amount of attention from researchers ever since it was first introduced in the early 90s of the last century. Yet, they are still classified as visionary systems that are expected to be woven into people’s daily lives. At present, PervComp systems still have no unified architecture, have limited scope of context-sensitivity and adaptability, and many essential quality features are insufficiently addressed in PervComp architectures. The reference architecture (RA) that we called (PervCompRA-SE) in this research, provides solutions for these problems by providing a comprehensive and innovative pair of business and technical architectural reference models. Both models were based on deep analytical activities and were evaluated using different qualitative and quantitative methods. In this thesis we surveyed a wide range of research projects in PervComp in various subdomain areas to specify our methodological approach and identify the quality features in the PervComp domain that are most commonly found in these areas. It presented a novice approach that utilizes theories from sociology, psychology, and process engineering. The thesis analyzed the business and architectural problems in two separate chapters covering the business reference architecture (BRA) and the technical reference architecture (TRA). The solutions for these problems were introduced also in the BRA and TRA chapters. We devised an associated comprehensive ontology with semantic meanings and measurement scales. Both the BRA and TRA were validated throughout the course of research work and evaluated as whole using traceability, benchmark, survey, and simulation methods. The thesis introduces a new reference architecture in the PervComp domain which was developed using a novel requirements engineering method. It also introduces a novel statistical method for tradeoff analysis and conflict resolution between the requirements. The adaptation of the activity theory, human perception theory and process re-engineering methods to develop the BRA and the TRA proved to be very successful. Our approach to reuse the ontological dictionary to monitor the system performance was also innovative. Finally, the thesis evaluation methods represent a role model for researchers on how to use both qualitative and quantitative methods to evaluate a reference architecture. Our results show that the requirements engineering process along with the trade-off analysis were very important to deliver the PervCompRA-SE. We discovered that the invisibility feature, which was one of the envisioned quality features for the PervComp, is demolished and that the qualitative evaluation methods were just as important as the quantitative evaluation methods in order to recognize the overall quality of the RA by machines as well as by human beings

Configuration par modèle de caractéristiques adapté au contexte pour les lignes de produits logiciels: Application aux Smart Buildings

Software product lines aim at reusing documents, source code, architectures, and, all artefact created during software development achieved in a given domain. Nowadays, we use “feature models” to facilitate the reuse of such elements. The approach consists in describing, in this feature model, artefacts and their usage constraints, and then to identifyrepresentative features for creating a new product. In some situations, a feature represents an artefact associated to a context element that must be handled by the product. Such a feature, and its related constraints, can be cloned for each occurrence of instances of this element in a given context.In this thesis, we try to determine the impact of a product execution context on a future product features. We first explore different ways for representing feature models and a product context. Then, we propose a generic method to adapt a feature model to context elements. This thesis has been achieved in the context of the RIDER project (Research for ITDriven EneRgy efficiency). This project aims at reducing energy waste due to an inappropriate management of energy sources and needs. The heterogeneousness of building equipments and each building specificities require to adapt energy optimisation software. We propose to apply a software product line approach to this project. More precisely, we propose to apply to this project our feature model context adaptation methodology, in order to adapt energy optimisation software to each building specific context.Les lignes de produits logiciels ont pour objectif la réutilisation des documents, codes sources, architectures, et plus généralement tout artefact créé durant le développement de logiciels d’un même domaine. Pour cette réutilisation, on utilise aujourd’hui des “modèles de caractéristiques”. L’approche consiste à décrire dans ce modèle les caractéristiques desartefacts créés et les contraintes permettant de les assembler, puis à sélectionner les caractéristiques représentatives d’un nouveau produit en le générant en tout ou partie. Dans certaines situations, une caractéristique représente un artefact associé à un élément du contexte que le produit doit gérer. Une telle caractéristique, et les contraintes relatives à sa mise enoeuvre, peuvent être clonées pour chaque occurrence de l’élément dans le contexte. Dans le cadre de cette thèse, nous cherchons à déterminer l’impact du contexte d’exécution d’un futur produit sur les caractéristiques d’une ligne de produits logiciels. Nous explorons tout d’abord les différentes manières de représenter un modèle de caractéristiques et le contexte d’un produit. Nous proposons ensuite une méthode générique pour adapter un modèle de caractéristiques aux éléments d’un contexte.Cette thèse a été réalisée dans le contexte du projet RIDER (Reasearch for IT Driven EneRgy efficiency). Ce projet a pour objectif la réduction des pertes énergétiques subies à cause d’une gestion inappropriée des sources et des besoins énergétiques des bâtiments. La variété des équipements et les spécificités de chaque bâtiment nécessitent une adaptationau cas par cas des logiciels d’optimisation énergétique. Nous proposons donc d’appliquer à ce projet une approche par lignes de produits logiciels, et plus particulièrement, notre méthode d’adaptation de modèles de caractéristiques au contexte, pour adapter les logiciels d’optimisation énergétique au contexte spécifique de chaque bâtiment

Mango: A model-driven approach to engineering green Mobile Cloud Applications

With the resource constrained nature of mobile devices and the resource abundant offerings of the cloud, several promising optimisation techniques have been proposed by the green computing research community. Prominent techniques and unique methods have been developed to offload resource/computation intensive tasks from mobile devices to the cloud. Most of the existing offloading techniques can only be applied to legacy mobile applications as they are motivated by existing systems. Consequently, they are realised with custom runtimes which incur overhead on the application. Moreover, existing approaches which can be applied to the software development phase, are difficult to implement (based on manual process) and also fall short of overall (mobile to cloud) efficiency in software qualityattributes or awareness of full-tier (mobile to cloud) implications.To address the above issues, the thesis proposes a model-driven architecturefor integration of software quality with green optimisation in Mobile Cloud Applications (MCAs), abbreviated as Mango architecture. The core aim of the architecture is to present an approach which easily integrates software quality attributes (SQAs) with the green optimisation objective of Mobile Cloud Computing (MCC). Also, as MCA is an application domain which spans through the mobile and cloud tiers; the Mango architecture, therefore, takesinto account the specification of SQAs across the mobile and cloud tiers, for overall efficiency. Furthermore, as a model-driven architecture, models can be built for computation intensive tasks and their SQAs, which in turn drives the development – for development efficiency. Thus, a modelling framework (called Mosaic) and a full-tier test framework (called Beftigre) were proposed to automate the architecture derivation and demonstrate the efficiency of Mango approach. By use of real world scenarios/applications, Mango has been demonstrated to enhance the MCA development process while achieving overall efficiency in terms of SQAs (including mobile performance and energy usage compared to existing counterparts)

Industrialising Software Development in Systems Integration

Compared to other disciplines, software engineering as of today is still dependent on craftsmanship of highly-skilled workers. However, with constantly increasing complexity and efforts, existing software engineering approaches appear more and more inefficient. A paradigm shift towards industrial production methods seems inevitable. Recent advances in academia and practice have lead to the availability of industrial key principles in software development as well. Specialization is represented in software product lines, standardization and systematic reuse are available with component-based development, and automation has become accessible through model-driven engineering. While each of the above is well researched in theory, only few cases of successful implementation in the industry are known. This becomes even more evident in specialized areas of software engineering such as systems integration. Today’s IT systems need to quickly adapt to new business requirements due to mergers and acquisitions and cooperations between enterprises. This certainly leads to integration efforts, i.e. joining different subsystems into a cohesive whole in order to provide new functionality. In such an environment. the application of industrial methods for software development seems even more important. Unfortunately, software development in this field is a highly complex and heterogeneous undertaking, as IT environments differ from customer to customer. In such settings, existing industrialization concepts would never break even due to one-time projects and thus insufficient economies of scale and scope. This present thesis, therefore, describes a novel approach for a more efficient implementation of prior key principles while considering the characteristics of software development for systems integration. After identifying the characteristics of the field and their affects on currently-known industrialization concepts, an organizational model for industrialized systems integration has thus been developed. It takes software product lines and adapts them in a way feasible for a systems integrator active in several business domains. The result is a three-tiered model consolidating recurring activities and reducing the efforts for individual product lines. For the implementation of component-based development, the present thesis assesses current component approaches and applies an integration metamodel to the most suitable one. This ensures a common understanding of systems integration across different product lines and thus alleviates component reuse, even across product line boundaries. The approach is furthermore aligned with the organizational model to depict in which way component-based development may be applied in industrialized systems integration. Automating software development in systems integration with model-driven engineering was found to be insufficient in its current state. The reason herefore lies in insufficient tool chains and a lack of modelling standards. As an alternative, an XML-based configuration of products within a software product line has been developed. It models a product line and its products with the help of a domain-specific language and utilizes stylesheet transformations to generate compliable artefacts. The approach has been tested for its feasibility within an exemplarily implementation following a real-world scenario. As not all aspects of industrialized systems integration could be simulated in a laboratory environment, the concept was furthermore validated during several expert interviews with industry representatives. Here, it was also possible to assess cultural and economic aspects. The thesis concludes with a detailed summary of the contributions to the field and suggests further areas of research in the context of industrialized systems integration

Forschungsbericht Universität Mannheim 2006 / 2007

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