Healthcare Device Security Assessment through Computational Methodology

The current study discusses the different methods used to secure healthcare devices and proposes a quantitative framework to list them in order of significances. The study uses the Hesitant Fuzzy (HF), Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) integrated with Fuzzy Technical for Order Preference by Similarities to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) to classify the best alternatives to security techniques for healthcare devices to securing the devices. The technique is enlisted to rate the alternatives based on the degree of satisfaction of their weights. The ranks of the alternatives consequently decide the order of priority for the techniques. A1 was the most probable alternative of all the alternatives, according to the ranks of the alternatives acquired. This means that the security of A2 healthcare devices is the greatest of all the alternatives picked. A corroborative guide for the developers and the makers in quantitatively determining the security of healthcare devices to engineer efficacious devices will be the findings drawn up with the assistance of the proposed framework. The assessments performed using the proposed framework are systematic, precise, and definitive. Therefore, the results of the present empirical analysis are a stronger and accurate choice than the manual assessment of the device’s security.     

From Facebook to the Neighbourhood: Infrastructuring of Hybrid Community Engagement

In recent years, social media have increased the resources that individuals and organizations are able to mobilize for the development of socially innovative practices. In this article, we engage with a naturally occurring development in a Trentinian neighbourhood to examine the cooperative interactions amongst members of a local community. The first author and local residents of the neighbourhood participated in online discussions, decision making, and physical activities that led to material changes in the area. The interventions are motivated by and based on the concept of Social Street that combines online interactions in a closed Facebook group with face-to-face meetings seeking to practically engage the collective in accomplishing certain immediate or ongoing needs. Over the course of two years, we studied this local instantiation of Social Street in Trento, Italy by way of an action-oriented (digital) ethnography. Through this work, we demonstrate how urban neighbourhoods might benefit from hybrid forms of community engagement that are enacted through a constant back and forth between online and face-to-face interactions. We further argue that the infrastructuring of local urban collectives should follow strategies that pay attention to the multiple issues in urban neighbourhoods and people’s attachments to them. Overall, the paper reflects upon the challenges and configurations of participation that this form of community-work entails.     

An Architecture Supporting Intelligent Mobile Healthcare Using Human-Computer Interaction HCI Principles

Recent advancements in the Internet of Things IoT and cloud computing have paved the way for mobile Healthcare (mHealthcare) services. A patient within the hospital is monitored by several devices. Moreover, upon leaving the hospital, the patient can be remotely monitored whether directly using body wearable sensors or using a smartphone equipped with sensors to monitor different user-health parameters. This raises potential challenges for intelligent monitoring of patient’s health. In this paper, an improved architecture for smart mHealthcare is proposed that is supported by HCI design principles. The HCI also provides the support for the User-Centric Design (UCD) for smart mHealthcare models. Furthermore, the HCI along with IoT`s (Internet of Things) 5-layered architecture has the potential of improving User Experience (UX) in mHealthcare design and help saving lives. The intelligent mHealthcare system is supported by the IoT sensing and communication layers and health care providers are supported by the application layer for the medical, behavioral, and health-related information. Health care providers and users are further supported by an intelligent layer performing critical situation assessment and performing a multi-modal communication using an intelligent assistant. The HCI design focuses on the ease-of-use, including user experience and safety, alarms, and error-resistant displays of the end-user, and improves user’s experience and user satisfaction.     

Infrastructuring for Cross-Disciplinary Synthetic Science: Meta-Study Research in Land System Science

Traditionally infrastructure studies are post-hoc analyses of emergent phenomena. While acknowledging the contextual complexity of co-evolution, there has been a turn toward exploring these processes from a design perspective. In this paper we examine a new interdiscipline, Land System Science, whose scientific inquiry is predicated on a deep and ongoing integration of radically disparate data from across the natural, physical, and social sciences. We report the results of a three-and-a half year field study of meta-study practice. In doing so, we perform infrastructural inversion to foreground the backstage scientific work practice to identify points of infrastructure. We used these insights regarding breakdowns and workarounds to inform the design of GLOBE, infrastructural tools that support this community’s needs for communication, cooperation, and knowledge construction. Our insight comes from being embedded both with domain scientists and software developers. Through four cases, we highlight the scientists’ unique challenges, strategies developed to address them, and the system components designed to better support many of these tactics. Specifically, we address the difficulties of finding, standardizing, interpreting, and validating data. This advances the infrastructuring literature by illustrating how design can be used to engage a scientific community in active self-reflection.     

Internet of Things in Healthcare: Architecture,Applications, Challenges,and Solutions

Healthcare, the largest global industry, is undergoing significant transformations with the genesis of a new technology known as the Internet of Things (IoT). Many healthcare leaders are investing more money for transforming their services to harness the benefits provided by IoT, thereby paving the way for the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT), an extensive collection of medical sensors and associated infrastructure. IoMT has many benefits like providing remote healthcare by monitoring health vitals of patients at a distant place, providing healthcare services to elderly people, and monitoring a large group of people in a region or country for detection and prevention of epidemics. This paper provides a review of IoT in the healthcare domain by first describing the enabling technologies for delivering smart healthcare, followed by some of the key applications of IoT in healthcare. Next, a fog-based architecture consisting of three layers for IoT-based healthcare applications is proposed. Finally, we focus on some of the open challenges of IoT in healthcare, like fault tolerance, interoperability, latency, energy efficiency, and availability. Existing solutions for these challenges are also discussed.     

Understanding the Complexities of Enterprise Architecture through Structuration Theory

ABSTRACT

Even though the interest in enterprise architecture (EA) has in recent years tremendously increased across industries, many organizations continue to encounter challenges, which affects the development, implementation, and practice. As a result, different approaches have been employed to ascertain the challenges, yet they persist. Thus, the objective of this study was to develop a framework, which can be used to examine and understand how various events and factors manifest in their natural settings to cause complexities, during development and implementation of EA in organizations. The qualitative research methods were employed, within which qualitative data were gathered. The interpretive approach was followed, using the Structuration Theory as a lens, to guide the analysis of the data. Based on the analysis, organizational structure, technology, social context, and process-oriented factors were found to be of critical and significant influence in the complexity of EA, from which a framework was developed.     

Healthcare Modelling through Role Activity Diagrams for Process-Based Information Systems Development

The aim of this paper is to introduce the socio-technical Role Activity Diagram modelling language to National Health Service (NHS) information systems requirements engineering using a process approach. Most requirements engineering in the NHS is done using data-driven methods such as data flow diagrams. Role Activity Diagrams provide not only a socio-technical method for analysing a particular systems development problem, but they also offer a process-based approach for capturing workflows and their associated information flows, and facilitate communication between analysts and users in an intuitive fashion. In particular, they elicit the important roles in a process and the interaction and collaboration required to achieve the goals of the process. The process approach has been applied in business information systems development. It is introduced here as a potential for systems development in the NHS.     

Infrastructuring and Ordering Devices in Health Care: Medication Plans and Practices on a Hospital Ward

In this paper, we analyse physicians’ and nurses’ practices of prescribing and administering medication through the use of paper-based, and digitalized medication plans. Our point of departure is an ethnographic study of the implications of upgrading an electronic medication module (EMM) that is part of an electronic health record (EHR), carried out at an endocrinology department. The upgrade led to a temporary breakdown of the EMM, and a return to paper-based medication plans. The breakdown made visible and noticeable the taken-for-granted capabilities of medication plans in their paper-based and digital versions, and the distribution of functionalities between medication plans and clinicians. We see the case as an opportunity to analyse infrastructuring in health care, the process by which medical practices and artefacts become parts of social and technological networks with longer reaches and more channels through which coordination among distributed actors is enabled and formed. In this case, infrastructuring means an extended scope and intensity of the coordinative capabilities of medication plans, and an increased vulnerability to, and dependency on events outside the immediate loci of interaction. We particularly note the capacity of the EMM to facilitate different kinds of ordering of information and practices, and propose the conceptualizing of such digitalized artefacts as ‘ordering devices’. Ordering devices order information, stipulate action, and coordinate interaction across and within social worlds, and achieve this through the flexible support of different kinds of ordering.     

Enriching the Notion of Data Curation in E-Science: Data Managing and Information Infrastructuring in the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network

This paper aims to enrich the current understanding of data curation prevalent in e-Science by drawing on an ethnographic study of one of the longest-running efforts at long-term consistent data collection with open data sharing in an environment of interdisciplinary collaboration. In such a context we identify a set of salient characteristics of ecological research and data that shape the data stewardship approach of the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) network. We describe the actual practices through which LTER information managers attend to the extended temporal scale of long-term research and data sets both through data care work and information infrastructure development. We discuss the issues of long-term and continuity that represent central challenges for data curation and stewardship. We argue for more efforts to be directed to understanding what is at stake with a long-term perspective and differing temporal scales as well as to studying actual practices of data curation and stewardship in order to provide more coherent understandings of e-Science solutions and technologies.     

Supporting Community Emergency Management Planning through a Geocollaboration Software Architecture

Emergency management is more than just events occurring within an emergency situation. It encompasses a variety of persistent activities such as planning, training, assessment, and organizational change. We are studying emergency management planning practices in which geographic communities (towns and regions) prepare to respond efficiently to significant emergency events. Community emergency management planning is an extensive collaboration involving numerous stakeholders throughout the community and both reflecting and challenging the community’s structure and resources. Geocollaboration is one aspect of the effort. Emergency managers, public works directors, first responders, and local transportation managers need to exchange information relating to possible emergency event locations and their surrounding areas. They need to examine geospatial maps together and collaboratively develop emergency plans and procedures. Issues such as emergency vehicle traffic routes and staging areas for command posts, arriving media, and personal first responders’ vehicles must be agreed upon prior to an emergency event to ensure an efficient and effective response. This work presents a software architecture that facilitates the development of geocollaboration solutions. The architecture extends prior geocollaboration research and reuses existing geospatial information models. Emergency management planning is one application domain for the architecture. Geocollaboration tools can be developed that support community-wide emergency management planning and preparedness. This paper describes how the software architecture can be used for the geospatial, emergency management planning activities of one community.     

Healthcare pioneers lead the way

Using the Pioneer space program as a metaphor for the spirit of adventure, the vision and the innovation embodied by all Computers in Healthcare Pioneers, CIH names four new Pioneers for 1992. These new Pioneers as well as our 13 current Pioneers will be honored at the Seventh Annual Computers in Healthcare Conference and Exposition May 27 and 28 in San Diego.     

深度学习在现代医疗领域中的应用

深度学习作为人工智能领域最为活跃的研究分支,近年来在计算机视觉、自然语言处理、语音识别等领域取得丰硕成果.同时,深度学习在医疗领域中的应用也逐渐成为研究热点,并且在医学图像和信号处理、计算机辅助检测与诊断、临床决策支持、医疗信息挖掘和检索等方面取得了一些成功,展现出了极大的应用前景.本文在介绍深度学习原理和常用深度神经...     

Provenance in Agent-Mediated Healthcare Systems

This article is part of a special issue on Intelligent Agents in Healthcare. Healthcare information systems can use agent-oriented cooperation techniques and standardized, electronic healthcare-record-exchange protocols to combine information about the different facets of a patient's therapy provided by different healthcare providers at different locations. Provenance is an innovative approach to tracing events in complex distributed processes. It also traces dependencies between such events and associated decisions by human actors. This article focuses on three aspects of provenance in agent-mediated healthcare systems. First, it defines provenance and shows how to apply it in agent-mediated healthcare applications. Second, it introduces a method that lets independent, autonomous healthcare agents that don't directly interact document their processes. Third, it shows how this approach helps institutions contend with privacy issues.     

Proportions in the Architecture Curriculum

Roger Herz-Fischler presents a revised version of a chapter entitled “Proportions” that appeared in the problems part of his book, Space, Shape and Form /An Algorithmic Approach, developed for a mathematics course he taught in the School of Architecture at Carleton University from 1973-1984.

Example of reckoning of a pyramid, Height 250, base 360 cubits. What is its seked?......(Answer:5+1/25 hands). From the Rhind Papyrus¹

¹The Rhind Papyrus is from the Fifteenth Dynasty (c. - 1800), but is known to be based on a Twelfth Dynasty text. For details of the pyramid problems, as well as a discussion of the archaeological, historical and philosophical aspects, related to the problem of determining how the Great Pyramid was designed, see [Herz-Fischler 2000].     

Healthcare partnerships for the 21st century

Traditional business models employed over the last 30 years began breaking down during the '80s and are completely disintegrating during this decade. Traditional organizational models have led to underutilization, waste and unnecessary excess. For healthcare institutions to survive and thrive, a new management model must be implemented by employing business partnerships and alliances to optimize information, systems, products and resources.     

中间件平台的反射技术

当前的中间件系统缺乏灵活性和适应性，难以适应环境改变和不同用户需求。反射机制提供了系统所需灵活性和适应性的理论方法，而对元信息的表示和管理是实现反射机制的关键。首先介绍了反射机制的原理；然后重点阐述了对元信息的管理，给出了关于元信息管理的现有标准；最后给出一个服务质量(QoS)管理的构架模型，并提出了中间件领域所面临的一些挑战。     

建筑设计中的女性思维

当今世界建筑的设计思维发生着改变,女性思维逐渐被提上了日程。本文通过分析两位当今顶级女建筑师的作品及其思想,来阐述女性思维对建筑设计所产生的影响。根据我国的基本现状,提出了在建筑设计中发展女性思维的重要性及方法。