Personalized Service Creation by Non-technical Users in the Homecare Domain

AbstractOne of the conditions for the successful introduction of ICT-based homecare services is to allow non-technical persons such as home nurses to personalize these services. We refer to this process of homecare service personalization as service tailoring. Service tailoring can be done by configuring and composing previously developed and deployed service building blocks. In this paper, we describe an approach that employs predefined information of care-receivers, called user profile, to hide most of the technical details from care-givers who do the service tailoring. First, we define the information to be included in a user profile and patterns that represent composition structures corresponding to common homecare tasks experienced in homecare. Then, we define how the service tailoring process can exploit information contained in the predefined user profiles. After that, we illustrate the approach with a tailoring scenario

Service Tailoring: Towards Personalized homecare Systems

Health monitoring and healthcare provisioning for the elderly at home have received increasingly attention. Since each elderly person is unique, with a unique lifestyle, living environment and health condition, personalization is an essential feature of homecare software services. Service tailoring, which is creating a new service to meet individual requirements may be achieved in a cost-effective and time-efficient manner if new services can be configured and composed from already existing services. In this paper, we propose an effective service tailoring process and architecture to personalize homecare services according to the individual care-receiver’s needs. In addition, we present a scenario to highlight the need for service tailoring and to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach

Tetracycline aptamer-controlled regulation of pre-mRNA splicing in yeast

Splicing of pre-mRNA is a critical step in mRNA maturation and disturbances cause several genetic disorders. We apply the synthetic tetracycline (tc)-binding riboswitch to establish a gene expression system for conditional tc-dependent control of pre-mRNA splicing in yeast. Efficient regulation is obtained when the aptamer is inserted close to the 5′splice site (SS) with the consensus sequence of the SS located within the aptamer stem. Structural probing indicates limited spontaneous cleavage within this stem in the absence of the ligand. Addition of tc leads to tightening of the stem and the whole aptamer structure which probably prevents recognition of the 5′SS. Combination of more then one aptamer-regulated intron increases the extent of regulation leading to highly efficient conditional gene expression systems. Our findings highlight the potential of direct RNA–ligand interaction for regulation of gene expression

Dynamic Homecare Service Provisioning Architecture

The realization of homecare services is difficult because of dynamicity requirements and constraints that exist in this domain. These requirements call for a dynamic service provisioning, i.e., adaptivity and adaptability of the (compositionThe realization of homecare services is difficult because of dynamicity requirements and constraints that exist in this domain. These requirements call for a dynamic service provisioning, i.e., adaptivity and adaptability of the (composition of) homecare services in response to a) frequently occurring changes like change in the location or vital signs, or b) slowly developing changes like extent of impairments of a care-receiver. In this paper, we explain our understanding of a dynamic service provisioning platform, its requirements and constraints. As such, we design an architecture based on an existing hybrid service provisioning approach (a combination of process and rule) and related architectural patterns. Then, we implement this approach using the commercially available process and rule engines. We demonstrate how a homecare application can be deployed, executed and how the application can adapt itself to the frequently occurring changes at runtime. We also demonstrated how a care-giver can modify the behaviour of the application to adapt the slowly occurring changes. Finally, we discuss the pros and cons of the approach and explain our future plan

Toward Dynamic Service Provisioning in the Homecare Domain

Dynamicity is one of the main challenges in providing sustainable solutions for the homecare domain. The dynamicity of homecare systems, caused by external entities like care-receivers and care-givers, can be addressed through combining distributed and heterogenous services both in design and runtime. In general, several research fields such as dynamic service composition, context-aware service composition and dynamic configuration contribute to provide solutions to handle the dynamicity. However, the dynamicity requirements and constrains in homecare domain demands its own solutions. In this paper, we explain our understanding of a homecare provisioning platform and its external entities which interact with the platform. Based on our application scenario and literature study, we identify different types of changes which are imposed by the external entities. Moreover, the characteristics of the external entities, which need to be taken into account to address the dynamicity, are discussed. Then, we study the existing dynamic service composition approaches to see their feasibility for the homecare domain. Finally, we explain our motivation for choosing a hybrid service composition approach as our basis for the homecare provisioning platform with respect to the identified changes and characteristics coming from the external entities

Assumption-based Risk identification Method (ARM) in dynamic service provisioning

In this paper we consider service-oriented applications composed of component services provided by different, economically independent service providers. As in all composite applications, the component services are composed and configured to meet requirements for the composite application. However, in a field experiment of composite service-oriented applications we found that, although the services as actually delivered by the service providers meet their requirements, there is still a mismatch across service providers due to unstated assumptions, and that this mismatch causes an incorrect composite application to be delivered to end-users. Identifying and analyzing these initially unstated assumptions turns requirements engineering for service-oriented applications into risk analysis. In this paper, we describe a field experiment with an experimental service-oriented homecare system, in which unexpected behavior of the system turned up unstated assumptions about the contributing service providers. We then present an assumptions-driven risk identification method that can help identifying these risks, and we show how we applied this method in the second iteration of the field experiment. The method adapts some techniques from problem frame diagrams to identify relevant assumptions on service providers. The method is informal, and takes the ‿view from nowhere‿ in that it does not result in a specification of the component services, but for every component service delivers a set of assumptions that the service must satisfy in order to contribute to the overall system requirements. We end the paper with a discussion of generalizability of this method

Risk identication of tailorable context-aware systems: a case study and lessons learned

In this paper, we discuss possible risks posed by the application of tailorable context-aware systems in real-life practices. We use a tailorable context-aware system in the homecare domain as a case study to identify and analyse such risks. Next, we discuss which of these risks can be generalized to the use of tailorable context-aware system in other contexts than homecare. This would help the users of such systems to prevent the risks and guide the design and implementation of them

Decision as a service: Separating decision-making from application process logic

In a service-oriented architecture, adaptive and evolvable applications should be able to select, configure and compose different existing application services to deal with the changes which can arise from runtime contextual changes or the change of user requirements and preferences. To support this, hybrid service composition approaches have been proposed, in which the core of the application logic is specified in terms of processes, while rules are employed to specify the conditions and constraints to adapt the application behaviour. The rules are then exposed as a decision service which can be employed by the process to make adaptation decision with respect to runtime circumstances. The interaction between processes and decision services are generally performed in a synchronous request-response manner. We argue that such an interaction is not efficient to support different types of adaptation at runtime and therefore asynchronous interaction should also be supported. In this paper, we present an adaptive service provisioning architecture and a decision service template allowing both synchronous request-response interaction and asynchronous notification. To motivate the proposed architecture and the decision service template, we use a blood pressure monitoring scenario from the homecare domain. We also explain the implementation of the proposed approach based on commercially available rule and process engines. Finally, we discuss: 1) what is the efficient way (synchronous request-response interaction vs. asynchronous notification) of calling decision service to execute different types of decision rules; and 2) to what extent the use of a decision service facilitates dealing with unforeseen changes