Uranus: A Middleware Architecture for Dependable AAL and Vital Signs Monitoring Applications

The design and realization of health monitoring applications has attracted the interest of large communities both from industry and academia. Several research challenges have been faced and issues tackled in order to realize effective applications for the management and monitoring of people with chronic diseases, people with disabilities, elderly people. However, there is a lack of efficient tools that enable rapid and possibly cheap realization of reliable health monitoring applications. The paper presents Uranus, a service oriented middleware architecture, which provides basic functions for the integration of different kinds of biomedical sensors. Uranus has also distinguishing characteristics like services for the run-time verification of the correctness of running applications and mechanisms for the recovery from failures. The paper concludes with two case studies as proof of concept

Technological and conceptual accessibility to measure the soundness of an e-business idea

The purpose of this paper is to present two new parameters that aim to support the selection phase of a new e-business idea in order to evaluate its soundness and effectiveness. The paper explains the reasons for the creation of these new parameters, the identification of the measures and the metrics to evaluate them, and presents the final results and their meaning. This new methodology should integrate the traditional business analysis concepts through the identification of new useful measures that are specific to the e-business field. The parameters identified have been called "Conceptual Accessibility" and "Technological Accessibility." In order to tune the new parameters and to execute all the needed subjective evaluations a user panel of 100 potential users was selected and utilized. In order to assess the soundness of the identified parameters and to give a definition and a metric that will allow a quantitative evaluation of the idea the reference user panel gave evaluations on an enterprise reference group of well known e-business ventures. All the components of the enterprise reference group are examples of successful implementation of e-business ideas. The users in the panel were carefully selected in order to represent the expected target of the new e-business idea to be evaluated. In the final sections of the paper we finally discuss the results and underline the advantages of this methodology