Service oriented centered e-health solution for monitoring and preventing chronic diseases

The modern and continuously changing lifestyles in almost all parts of the world resulted in an increase in the incidence of chronic diseases (CDs). To reduce risks associated with chronic diseases, health professionals are studying various clinical solutions. As a result of recent advances in sensing technology, wireless communications, and distributed communication, the monitoring of patients\u27 health condition and the elaboration of prevention plans are considered the most promising solutions for the treatment of chronic diseases. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for monitoring chronic diseases and tracking their vital signs. The framework relies on the service orientation concepts and standards to integrate various subsystems. Monitoring of subjects\u27 health condition, using various sensors and wireless devices, aims to proactively detect any risk of chronic diseases. The system will allow generating and customizing preventive plans dynamically according to the subject\u27s health profile and context while considering many impelling parameters. As a proof of concept of our monitoring and tracking schemes, we have considered a case study for which we have collected and analyzed preliminary data

AnaBench: a Web/CORBA-based workbench for biomolecular sequence analysis

Affiliation: Département de biochimie, Faculté de médecine, Université de MontréalBACKGROUND:Sequence data analyses such as gene identification, structure modeling or phylogenetic tree inference involve a variety of bioinformatics software tools. Due to the heterogeneity of bioinformatics tools in usage and data requirements, scientists spend much effort on technical issues including data format, storage and management of input and output, and memorization of numerous parameters and multi-step analysis procedures.RESULTS:In this paper, we present the design and implementation of AnaBench, an interactive, Web-based bioinformatics Analysis workBench allowing streamlined data analysis. Our philosophy was to minimize the technical effort not only for the scientist who uses this environment to analyze data, but also for the administrator who manages and maintains the workbench. With new bioinformatics tools published daily, AnaBench permits easy incorporation of additional tools. This flexibility is achieved by employing a three-tier distributed architecture and recent technologies including CORBA middleware, Java, JDBC, and JSP. A CORBA server permits transparent access to a workbench management database, which stores information about the users, their data, as well as the description of all bioinformatics applications that can be launched from the workbench.CONCLUSION:AnaBench is an efficient and intuitive interactive bioinformatics environment, which offers scientists application-driven, data-driven and protocol-driven analysis approaches. The prototype of AnaBench, managed by a team at the Université de Montréal, is accessible on-line at: http://malawimonas.bcm.umontreal.ca:8091/anabench. Please contact the authors for details about setting up a local-network AnaBench site elsewhere

Edge AI and Blockchain for Smart Sustainable Cities: Promise and Potential

Modern cities worldwide are undergoing radical changes to foster a clean, sustainable and secure environment, install smart infrastructures, deliver intelligent services to residents, and facilitate access for vulnerable groups. The adoption of new technologies is at the heart of implementing many initiatives to address critical concerns in urban mobility, healthcare, water management, clean energy production and consumption, energy saving, housing, safety, and accessibility. Given the advancements in sensing and communication technologies over the past few decades, exploring the adoption of recent and innovative technologies is critical to addressing these concerns and making cities more innovative, sustainable, and safer. This article provides a broad understanding of the current urban challenges faced by smart cities. It highlights two new technological advances, edge artificial intelligence (edge AI) and Blockchain, and analyzes their transformative potential to make our cities smarter. In addition, it explores the multiple uses of edge AI and Blockchain technologies in the fields of smart mobility and smart energy and reviews relevant research efforts in these two critical areas of modern smart cities. It highlights the various algorithms to handle vehicle detection, counting, speed identification to address the problem of traffic congestion and the different use-cases of Blockchain in terms of trustworthy communications and trading between vehicles and smart energy trading. This review paper is expected to serve as a guideline for future research on adopting edge AI and Blockchain in other smart city domains

A cooperative approach for QoS-aware web services\u27 selection

As Web services are becoming omnipresent on the Web, quality of Web services (QoWS) support and management is becoming a hot research topic. Several frameworks for Web service selection have been proposed to support clients in selecting suitable Web services. They are very often based on a middle-tier component to make the selection decision. These solutions suffer very often from scalability problems. To deal with this issue, we propose in this paper a new architecture for Web service selection based on a federation of cooperative brokers. Each broker of the federation manages the Web services within its domain and cooperates with its peers by exchanging information about Web services, such as reputation and QoS, to better serve client requests. We have developed a prototype of the architecture and we have conducted experiments using three broker selection policies mainly “random”, “round-robin”, and “cooperative brokers” to evaluate the degree of fulfillment of clients’ requests. Preliminary results show that the best results are obtained by using the cooperative brokers’ policy

SOA and cloud based architecture for non-invasive health monitoring

The increasing incidence of chronic diseases is becoming a heavy burden for both public and private healthcare sectors. Many industrial and academic efforts are trying to alleviate this burden using various clinical solutions. Establishment and execution of prevention plans and subjects\u27 monitoring are among the promising solutions. In keeping with these efforts, we describe in this paper our proposed architecture, for health monitoring of patients with chronic diseases. The architecture relies on the service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and cloud computing for the implementation and integration of services from various stakeholders. The monitoring scheme allows to proactively detect risks of disease\u27 aggravation and dynamically generates and customizes prevention plans according to the patient\u27s health profile and context. A prototype of our system is under development and preliminary data have been collected and analysed