Nowadays, personal context is extensively used in personalized mobile services. However, gathering this kind of information may compromise the privacy of the user. Moreover, the number of services that collect and share the personal context with others is growing. Yet, the users are not able to easily control what information is shared and with whom. An important step towards this goal is to understand how and when the user wants to share his personal context. The literature suggests that the willingness to disclose personal information depends on the level of intimacy perceived in given contexts. In this paper we show how the MDC data enabled us to estimate the level of intimacy of the user in a given contexts of his/her daily life.
People-centric sensing using people's smartphones offers new research opportunities for large case studies. It presents many challenges, e.g., efficient capture of person's mobility, understanding of context changes and preservation of user privacy. We propose an accurate and energy-efficient method able to capture user's mobility, thus the context changes, while preserving his/her privacy. Our solution can be applied to systems that aim to efficiently sense context on smartphones to study large scale phenomena or perform location management.
The emergence of high bandwidth public wireless networks and miniaturized personal mobile devices give rise to new mobile healthcare services. To this end, the MobiHealth system provides highly customizable vital signs tele-monitoring and tele-treatment system based on a body area network (BAN) and a mobile health care (m-health) service platform utilizing next generation public wireless networks. The developed system allows the incorporation of diverse medical sensors via wireless connections, and the live transmission of the measured vital signs to healthcare providers as well as real-time feedback to the patient. Since 2002 the system has undergone substantial development in consecutive EU and national research projects. Diverse trials with different healthcare scenarios and patient groups in different European countries have been conducted in all projects. These have been performed to test the service and the network infrastructure including its suitability for m-health applications.
The use of health BANs together with advanced wireless communications enables remote management of chronic conditions and detection of health emergencies whilst maximising patient mobility. MobiHealth1,2 has developed a generic Body Area Network (BAN) for healthcare and an mhealth service platform. Biosignals measured by sensors connected to the BAN are transmitted to the remote healthcare location over public wireless networks (GPRS/UMTS). The project results include an architecture for, and a prototype of, a generic service platform for provision of ubiquitous healthcare services based on Body Area Networks. The MobiHealth BAN and service platform haver been trialled in four European countries with a variety of patient groups. The MobiHealth System can support not only sensors, but potentially any body worn device, hence the system has potentially very many applications in healthcare which allow healthcare services to delivered in the community.
Several social-economical developments, like the ageing society, stimulate the use of ICT applications for mobile healthcare (e.g., tele-monitoring). To support novel m-health applications, the consequences of developing these applications should be considered in the scope of a comprehensive architecture. Additionally, contextual information plays an important role for personalised healthcare and should be considered in such architectures. This paper describes ongoing research that focuses on developing an application framework for supporting the development of context-aware m-health applications. It gives initial requirements for such a framework and it gives a first attempt for a functional decomposition. The use of the framework is illustrated by means of an epilepsy tele-monitoring scenario.
This paper describes a technique for integrating several (many) virtual hyperbooks in a digital library. We consider a virtual hyperbook model that comprises a domain ontology. By interconnecting the hyperbook's ontologies, we can create a multi-point of view ontology that describes a set of hyperbooks. A hypertext interface specification language can use this ontology to construct new semantically and narratively coherent hyperdocuments based on the content of several hyperbooks.
In urban semantic digital libraries, users need to access heterogeneous types of resources in order to achieve a given task. Contextualisation is known to increase the understanding of documents. With the use of 3D city models, we propose an alignment model that correlates, using the semantic annotations, the different resources of the repository with the different objects contained in the 3D model. The result of the application of the algorithm, will then allow the user to picture the relation of the documents with the city objects but also the relation they have between each other, as a whole, and with this contextualisation, increase its understanding of the resources.
Cloud computing has matured to become a valuable on demand alternative to traditional ownership models for the provisioning of services, platforms and infrastructure. However, this raises many issues for Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) and in particular in terms of Information Systems Security Risk Management (ISSRM). Considering such issues lack attention and knowledge, particularly for small and medium sized en- terprises (SMEs), and that cloud computing Service Level Agreements (SLA) provide very limited support outside of basic Quality of Service (QoS) parameters, this paper argues that SLAs for cloud computing ser- vices should be more customer oriented and aware of security and risk management. A design is proposed where the SLA process, from context initialization to negotiation and agreement is decoupled from the actual cloud service provisioning and itself turned into a Service : SLA as a Service (SLAaaS). This should provide customers with much more customized and fine-grained agreements compared with the ones currently offered.
The first part of the paper describes the design of a service module that assists customers with the leasing of cloud computing services by taking into account their require- ments on service provisioning. The service module introduces basic service level management functionality within a larger framework. The framework is illustrated as a web platform and uses a trusted third party (TTP) as a secure middle layer on service transactions. The second part of the paper focuses on the TTP role. Preliminary security requirements are identified and analyzed for the implementation and successful operation of such a TTP entity.
