A Multiview Visualisation Architecture for Open Distributed Systems

Program visualisation is an attractive way for understanding collaboration structures of complex distributed systems. By using the concepts of the open distributed processing-reference model (ODP-RM) as entities for visualisation, a multiview visualisation architecture is presented, which provides a large degree of flexibility in visualising the actions of an ODP system. The architecture has been implemented for visualising the CORBA system resulting in a visualisation tool called OBVlouS

Service and device discovery of nodes in a wireless sensor network

Emerging wireless communication standards and more capable sensors and actuators have pushed further development of wireless sensor networks. Deploying a large number of sensor\ud nodes requires a high-level framework enabling the devices to present themselves and the resources they hold. The device and the resources can be described as services, and in this paper, we review a number of well-known service discovery protocols. Bonjour stands out with its auto-configuration, distributed architecture, and sharing of resources. We also present a lightweight implementation in order to demonstrate that an emerging standards-based device and service discovery protocol can actually be deployed on small wireless sensor nodes

Design of a middleware for QoS-aware distribution transparent content delivery

Developers of distributed multimedia applications face a diversity of multimedia formats, streaming platforms and streaming protocols. Furthermore, support for end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) is a crucial factor for the development of future distributed multimedia systems. This paper discusses the architecture, design and implementation of a QoS-aware middleware platform for content delivery. The platform supports the development of distributed multimedia applications and can deliver content with QoS guarantees. QoS support is offered by means of an agent infrastructure for QoS negotiation and enforcement. Properties of content are represented using a generic content representation model described using the OMG Meta Object Facility (MOF) model. A content delivery framework manages stream paths for content delivery despite differences in streaming protocols and content encoding. The integration of the QoS support, content representation and content delivery framework results in a QoS-aware middleware that enables representation transparent and location transparent delivery of content

Mobihealth: mobile health services based on body area networks

In this chapter we describe the concept of MobiHealth and the approach developed during the MobiHealth project (MobiHealth, 2002). The concept was to bring together the technologies of Body Area Networks (BANs), wireless broadband communications and wearable medical devices to provide mobile healthcare services for patients and health professionals. These technologies enable remote patient care services such as management of chronic conditions and detection of health emergencies. Because the patient is free to move anywhere whilst wearing the MobiHealth BAN, patient mobility is maximised. The vision is that patients can enjoy enhanced freedom and quality of life through avoidance or reduction of hospital stays. For the health services it means that pressure on overstretched hospital services can be alleviated

Adaptive persuasive messaging to increase service retention: using persuasion profiles to increase the effectiveness of email reminders

Contains fulltext : 129956.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)In this article, we describe the usage of persuasion profiles in a large scale, N = 1,129, field trial. Persuasive technologies-technologies intentionally designed to influence user behavior-are emergent and becoming more and more individualized and ubiquitous. Individual differences in people's responses to often used persuasion principles-different psychological means by which to influence users-motivate personalization. We describe how, through identification, representation, and measurement, persuasive technologies can personalize their persuasive attempts. Next, we show that dynamically adapting a persuasive technology to the responses of its users increases the effectiveness of the system. Ubiquitous computing systems are, because of their ability to unobtrusively measure user behavior, very well suited for these types of applications

SimuContext: Simply Simulate Context

Testing and demonstrating context-aware applications is challenging. Gathering and using ‘life’ contextual information for these purposes, often requires significant extra development effort. Furthermore, repeating tests and demonstrations of context-aware applications that use ‘life’ context information, in a controlled way, is difficult or often impossible to achieve. This paper presents a context simulation framework, called SimuContext, which abstracts from the complexity of interfacing with physical context sources and facilitates testing and demonstrating context-aware applications in a controlled way

Mobile Service Platform: A Middleware for Nomadic Mobile Service Provisioning

Ongoing miniaturization and power efficiency of mobile devices have led to widespread availability of devices that have an increasing amount of processing power and storage, and that support multiple wireless network interfaces connecting to various auxiliary devices and to the Internet. It is now feasible for a mobile device to host services and participate in a service discovery network. Roaming of a mobile device from one wireless network to another entails nomadic characteristics to the hosted services. We denote this class of services as Nomadic Mobile Services.\ud This paper discusses the requirements for Nomadic Mobile Service provisioning and proposes the Mobile Service Platform (MSP) as a supporting infrastructure and middleware which extends the Service Oriented Architecture paradigm to the mobile device. The MSP design is based on the Jini Surrogate Architecture Specification which enables devices that can not directly participate in a Jini Network to join a Jini network with the aid of a third party. MSP consists of an HTTPInterconnect protocol to meet the specifications of Jini Surrogate Architecture and provides a custom set of APIs to develop and deploy a Nomadic Mobile Service. This paper also presents case studies of MSP enabled services in diverse domains such as healthcare, robotics and positioning services. To conclude, we outline the need for a context-aware MSP

Context-aware QoS provisioning for an M-health service platform

Inevitably, healthcare goes mobile. Recently developed mobile healthcare (i.e. m-health) services allow healthcare professionals to monitor a mobile patient�s vital signs and provide feedback to this patient anywhere and any time. Due to the nature of current supporting mobile services platforms, mhealth services are delivered with a best-effort, i.e., there are no guarantees on the delivered quality of service (QoS). In this paper, we argue that the use of contextual information in an mhealth services platform improves the delivered QoS. We give a first attempt to merge contextual information with a QoS-aware mobile services platform in the m-health services domain. We illustrate this with an epilepsy tele-monitoring scenario