VirtualECare: group support in collaborative networks organizations for digital homecare

Collaborative Work plays an important role in today’s organizations and normally in areas where decisions must be made. However, any decision that involves a collective or group of decision makers is, by itself, complex but is becoming normal in recent years. In this work we present the VirtualECare project (Figure 10), intelligent multi‐agent system able to monitor, interact and serve its customers, which are, normally, in need of care services. In the last years there has been a substantially increase in the number of people needed of intensive care, especially among the elderly, a phenomenon that is related to population ageing. However, this is not exclusive of the elderly, as diseases as obesity, diabetes, and blood pressure have been increasing among young adults. As a new reality, it has to be dealt by the health sector, and particularly by the public one. Thus, the importance of finding new and cost effective ways for health care delivery are of particular importance, especially when one want them not to be removed from their “habitat”. Following this line of thinking, the VirtualECare project will be presented, like similar ones that preceded it. Recently we have assisted to a growing interest in combining the advances in information society ‐ computing, telecommunications and presentation – in order to create Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS). Indeed, the new economy, along with increased competition in today’s complex business environments, takes the companies to seek complementarities in order to increase competitiveness and reduce risks. Under these scenarios, planning takes a major role in a company life. However, effective planning depends on the generation and analysis of ideas (innovative or not) and, as a result, the idea generation and management processes are crucial. Our objective is to apply the above presented GDSS to a new area. We believe that the use of GDSS in the healthcare arena will allow professionals to achieve better results in the analysis of one’s Electronically Clinical Profile (ECP). This achievement is vital, regarding the explosion of knowledge and skills, together with the need to use limited resources and get better results

Service Performance Assessment: A PI Toolset Methodology for VEs

Part 2: Knowledge-Based ServicesInternational audienceNowadays service sector is becoming more and more relevant in building successful collaborative economies. In this environment Virtual Enterprises (VEs) are forcing a change in the way traditional manufacturing systems are managed. Therefore measuring service performances plays an important role in turning company strategic goals into reality. Performance Indicators (PIs) consist in a supporting tool to assess service efficiency and effectiveness. Consequently, determining the most significant activities which need to be controlled and measured through proper PIs becomes essential. Within this paper, a PI Toolset is going to be presented and tested through industrial use case. The PI Toolset has been developed to support VEs in selecting significant activities, to manage governance processes and to support the design and implementation of specific PIs related to the precise use case objectives. Finally, a lesson learnt approach has been adopted so to stress strengths and weaknesses of both proposed methodology and tools

Should a Sentinel Node Biopsy Be Performed in Patients with High-Risk Breast Cancer?

A negative sentinel lymph node (SLN) biopsy spares many breast cancer patients the complications associated with lymph node irradiation or additional surgery. However, patients at high risk for nodal involvement based on clinical characteristics may remain at unacceptably high risk of axillary disease even after a negative SLN biopsy result. A Bayesian nomogram was designed to combine the probability of axillary disease prior to nodal biopsy with customized test characteristics for an SLN biopsy and provides the probability of axillary disease despite a negative SLN biopsy. Users may individualize the sensitivity of an SLN biopsy based on factors known to modify the sensitivity of the procedure. This tool may be useful in identifying patients who should have expanded upfront exploration of the axilla or comprehensive axillary irradiation

A Cloud Based Data Integration Framework

Virtual enterprise (VE) relies on resource sharing and collaboration across geographically dispersed and dynamically allied businesses in order to better respond to market opportunities. It is generally considered that effective data integration and management is crucial to realise the value of VE. This paper describes a cloud-based data integration framework that can be used for supporting VE to discover, explore and respond more emerging business opportunities that require instant and easy resource access and flexible on-demand development in a customer-centric approach. Motivated by a case study discussing power incident management in the Spanish Electricity System, an effective on-demand application is also implemented to demonstrate how to use this framework to solve real world problems

Taking the customer into account in collaborative design

This article describes the improvement of a model of collaborative design for the ceramic industry. A new stakeholder playing a crucial role is now included in the design process, i.e. the customer. Specifically, we present a pilot validation study for the framework that aims to analyse how the environment, experiences and reference criteria of different types of the customers (commercial dealers, final users, architects and interior designers, etc.) can affect their preferences. Information about these customer preferences could be very useful for designers during the early stages of product development. A multidisciplinary approach to the problem can introduce substantial improvements in defining a truly collaborative design chain

Tourism Destination Management: A Collaborative Approach

Collaboration is a key factor of sustainable growth across territories and industrial sectors. Tourism, one of the largest industries in the world, has been subject to strongest innovation in the last years. Main reasons of this reside both in the availability of new ICTs - Information and Communication Technologies - and organizational models, which directly connect tourists among them and with service providers, and in the always more personalized supply of tourism experience. Tourism destinations can benefit of such innovations if they are able to reorganize the territorial tourism offer around different pattern of collaboration in order to give 2.0 tourists opportunities to live an augmented tourism experience. This paper deals with the possible forms of collaborative networks that can rise within a destination with a focus on relationships between services delivered by the Tourism Destination and the requests of services at the different phases of the tourist 2.0 lifecycle