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.
In the perspective of a sustainable urban planning, it is necessary to investigate cities in a holistic way and to accept surprises in the response of urban environments to a particular set of strategies. For example, the process of inner-city densification may limit air pollution, carbon emissions, and energy use through reduced transportation; on the other hand, the resulting street canyons could lead to local levels of pollution that could be higher than in a low-density urban setting. The holistic approach to sustainable urban planning implies using different models in an integrated way that is capable of simulating the urban system. As the interconnection of such models is not a trivial task, one of the key elements that may be applied is the description of the urban geometric properties in an “interoperable” way. Focusing on air quality as one of the most pronounced urban problems, the geometric aspects of a city may be described by objects such as those defined in CityGML, so that an appropriate air quality model can be applied for estimating the quality of the urban air on the basis of atmospheric flow and chemistry equations. It is generally admitted that an ontology-based approach can provide a generic and robust way to interconnect different models. However, a direct approach, that consists in establishing correspondences between concepts, is not sufficient in the present situation. One has to take into account, among other things, the computations involved in the correspondences between concepts. In this paper we first present theoretical background and motivations for the interconnection of 3D city models and other models related to sustainable development and urban planning. Then we present a practical experiment based on the interconnection of CityGML with an air quality model. Our approach is based on the creation of an ontology of air quality models and on the extension of an ontology of urban planning process (OUPP) that acts as an ontology mediator.
In 3D virtual environments (3DVE), we need to know what an object looks like (i.e. geometric information) and what the object is, what are its properties and characteristics and how it relates to other objects (i.e. non-geometric information). Several interactive presentation techniques have been devised to incorporate non-geometric information into 3DVEs. The relevance of a technique depends on the context. Therefore, the choice of an appropriate representation technique cannot be done once for all and must be adapted to the context. In this paper, we first present a preliminary classification of representation techniques for non-geometric information in 3DVE. Then we propose a formalism, based on description logics, to describe the usability of a technique in a given context. We show how these descriptions can be processed to select appropriate techniques when automatically or semi-automatically generating a 3DVE.
