Self-managed cells and their federation

Future e-Health systems will consist of low-power, on-body wireless sensors attached to mobile users that interact with a ubiquitous computing environment. This kind of system needs to be able to configure itself with little or no user input; more importantly, it is required to adapt autonomously to changes such as user movement, device failure, the addition or loss of services, and proximity to other such systems. This extended abstract describes the basic architecture of a Self-Managed Cell (SMC) to address these requirements, and discusses various forms of federation between/among SMCs. This structure is motivated by a typical e-Health scenario

Policy-based management for body-sensor networks

Accepted versio

Secure dynamic community establishment in coalitions

Accepted versio

Towards supporting interactions between self-managed cells

Accepted versio

The lived experiences of nuclear medicine technologists during Covid-19 pandemic

This study presented the lived experiences of the nuclear medicine technologists (NMTs) during the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants of this study are nuclear medicine technologists working in healthcare facilities before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. A qualitative research design was used, specifically the phenomenological qualitative approach. The participants were chosen through purposive and snowball sampling. Based on the findings, it can be concluded that the experiences of the NMTs is an interplay of fear, sadness, and happiness. Fear of contacting COVID and/or spreading it to others has become a driving force to be more mindful of the infection control measures, specifically on the use of PPEs and appropriate physical distancing measures. The sadness, happiness, and fear felt by the participants have seemed to balance and helped the participants to cope with the pandemic. There had been notable changes in the personal-social (isolation from family and friends) and professional (workload change, redeployment) lives of the participants. Adaptation to the changes brought about by the pandemic has been evident in the participants. These reflect the resilience of the participants in the midst of the pandemi

An Information Plane Architecture Supporting Home Network Management

Home networks have evolved to become small-scale versions of enterprise networks. The tools for visualizing and managing such networks are primitive and continue to require networked systems expertise on the part of the home user. As a result, non-expert home users must manually manage non-obvious aspects of the network - e.g., MAC address filtering, network masks, and firewall rules, using these primitive tools. The Homework information plane architecture uses stream database concepts to generate derived events from streams of raw events. This supports a variety of visualization and monitoring techniques, and also enables construction of a closed-loop, policy-based management system. This paper describes the information plane architecture and its associated policy-based management infrastructure. Exemplar visualization and closed-loop management applications enabled by the resulting system (tuned to the skills of non-expert home users) are discussed. © 2011 IEEE.Accepted versio

Policy conflict analysis for diffserv quality of service management

Policy-based management provides the ability to (re-)configure differentiated services networks so that desired Quality of Service (QoS) goals are achieved. This requires implementing network provisioning decisions, performing admission control, and adapting bandwidth allocation to emerging traffic demands. A policy-based approach facilitates flexibility and adaptability as policies can be dynamically changed without modifying the underlying implementation. However, inconsistencies may arise in the policy specification. In this paper we provide a comprehensive set of QoS policies for managing Differentiated Services (DiffServ) networks, and classify the possible conflicts that can arise between them. We demonstrate the use of Event Calculus and formal reasoning for the analysis of both static and dynamic conflicts in a semi-automated fashion. In addition, we present a conflict analysis tool that provides network administrators with a user-friendly environment for determining and resolving potential inconsistencies. The tool has been extensively tested with large numbers of policies over a range of conflict types

Me and my veggies: The use of interactive, personalised picture books in healthy eating interventions

Increased fruit and vegetable consumption is important for children’s healthy eating. Although repeated taste exposures are effective in supporting children’s acceptance of healthy foods, more enjoyable interventions that increase children’s familiarity with foods through other sensory modalities can also be helpful. Picture book interventions, which draw on the principles of visual familiarity and social reinforcement, are effective in increasing pre-schoolers’ acceptance of vegetables. With the rise of digital technologies, e-books present a new tool for offering picture book interventions on a large scale and offer additional features that might potentially boost their effects. In this paper, we propose two specific mechanisms, interactive learning and personalisation, that could make e-book eating interventions especially effective with young children and we outline new directions for research to elucidate their effects. We then briefly describe an ongoing study that explores the effectiveness of a vegetable e-book intervention that incorporates the mechanisms described in this paper