AMUSE: autonomic management of ubiquitous e-Health systems

Future e-Health systems will consist of low-power on-body wireless sensors attached to mobile users that interact with an ubiquitous computing environment to monitor the health and well being of patients in hospitals or at home. Patients or health practitioners have very little technical computing expertise so these systems need to be self-configuring and self-managing with little or no user input. More importantly, they should adapt autonomously to changes resulting from user activity, device failure, and the addition or loss of services. We propose the Self-Managed Cell (SMC) as an architectural pattern for all such types of ubiquitous computing applications and use an e-Health application in which on-body sensors are used to monitor a patient living in their home as an exemplar. We describe the services comprising the SMC and discuss cross-SMC interactions as well as the composition of SMCs into larger structures

Globally unique product identifiers— requirements and solutions to product lifecycle management

Managing product information for product items during their whole lifetime is challenging, especially during their usage and end-of-life phases. A major challenge is how to keep a link between the product item and its associated information, which may be stored in backend systems of different organisations. In this paper, we analyse and compare three approaches for addressing this task, i.e. the EPC Network, DIALOG and WWAI

Wireless aquatic navigator for detection and analysis (WANDA)

The cost of monitoring and detecting pollutants in natural waters is of major concern. Current and forthcoming bodies of legislation will continue to drive demand for spatial and selective monitoring of our environment, as the focus increasingly moves towards effective enforcement of legislation through detection of events, and unambiguous identification of perpetrators. However, these monitoring demands are not being met due to the infrastructure and maintenance costs of conventional sensing models. Advanced autonomous platforms capable of performing complex analytical measurements at remote locations still require individual power, wireless communication, processor and electronic transducer units, along with regular maintenance visits. Hence the cost base for these systems is prohibitively high, and the spatial density and frequency of measurements are insufficient to meet requirements. In this paper we present a more cost effective approach for water quality monitoring using a low cost mobile sensing/communications platform together with very low cost stand-alone ‘satellite’ indicator stations that have an integrated colorimetric sensing material. The mobile platform is equipped with a wireless video camera that is used to interrogate each station to harvest information about the water quality. In simulation experiments, the first cycle of measurements is carried out to identify a ‘normal’ condition followed by a second cycle during which the platform successfully detected and communicated the presence of a chemical contaminant that had been localised at one of the satellite stations

Review of the mathematical foundations of data fusion techniques in surface metrology

The recent proliferation of engineered surfaces, including freeform and structured surfaces, is challenging current metrology techniques. Measurement using multiple sensors has been proposed to achieve enhanced benefits, mainly in terms of spatial frequency bandwidth, which a single sensor cannot provide. When using data from different sensors, a process of data fusion is required and there is much active research in this area. In this paper, current data fusion methods and applications are reviewed, with a focus on the mathematical foundations of the subject. Common research questions in the fusion of surface metrology data are raised and potential fusion algorithms are discussed

Facilitating the analysis of a UK national blood service supply chain using distributed simulation

In an attempt to investigate blood unit ordering policies, researchers have created a discrete-event model of the UK National Blood Service (NBS) supply chain in the Southampton area of the UK. The model has been created using Simul8, a commercial-off-the-shelf discrete-event simulation package (CSP). However, as more hospitals were added to the model, it was discovered that the length of time needed to perform a single simulation severely increased. It has been claimed that distributed simulation, a technique that uses the resources of many computers to execute a simulation model, can reduce simulation runtime. Further, an emerging standardized approach exists that supports distributed simulation with CSPs. These CSP Interoperability (CSPI) standards are compatible with the IEEE 1516 standard The High Level Architecture, the defacto interoperability standard for distributed simulation. To investigate if distributed simulation can reduce the execution time of NBS supply chain simulation, this paper presents experiences of creating a distributed version of the CSP Simul8 according to the CSPI/HLA standards. It shows that the distributed version of the simulation does indeed run faster when the model reaches a certain size. Further, we argue that understanding the relationship of model features is key to performance. This is illustrated by experimentation with two different protocols implementations (using Time Advance Request (TAR) and Next Event Request (NER)). Our contribution is therefore the demonstration that distributed simulation is a useful technique in the timely execution of supply chains of this type and that careful analysis of model features can further increase performance

The role of federation in identity management. Workshop presentation 19 Aug 2008

Presentation at the MAPS/QUESTnet identity management workshop, Emmanuel College, The University of Queensland, 18-19 August 2008