Referenceable mobile crowdsensing architecture: A healthcare use case

A reference architecture for Engineering Data Control (EDC) in capital plant manufacture

Shrinking transistor sizes and recent trends toward many-core chips have heightened the need for an efficient on-chip communication network to integrate various cores. However, buses and point-to-point interconnection will not result in scalability, modularity, and explicit parallelism, as well as may suffer great performance bottleneck. While state-of-art packet-switched network increases the communication costs and is incapable of performing multicast service. In addition, the emergence of reconfigurable system needs a flexible and application-specific architecture which could dynamically customize the systems. HCR-NoC (Hybrid-Communication Reconfigurable Network-on-Chip) is proposed in this paper, which could dynamically reconfigure MPSoC architecture based on buses traffic. To satisfy different communication services, we use a TDMA shared bus for inter-cluster communication in a designable framework, which enables topology reconfiguration upon regular physical network topology. An analytical verification tool is presented to simulate HCR-NoC system performance. Finally, the evaluations of HCR-NoC using Multimedia benchmarks show that significant reduction in power and area as compared to optimal mesh architecture NoC.

This article outlines a reference architecture for social head gaze generation in social robots. The architecture discussed here is grounded in human communication, based on behavioral robotics theory, and captures the commonalities, essence, and experience of 32 previous social robotics implementations of social head gaze. No such architecture currently exists, but such an architecture is needed to: (1) serve as a template for creating or re-engineering systems, (2) provide analyses and understanding of different systems, and (3) provide a common lexicon and taxonomy that facilitates communication across various communities. A constructed reference architecture and the Software Architecture Analysis Method (SAAM) are used to evaluate, improve, and re-engineer two existing head gaze system architectures (Human–Robot Collaboration architecture and Robot Behavior Toolkit architecture). SAAM shows that no existing architecture incorporated the summation of functionalities found in the 32 studies. SAAM suggests several architectural improvements so that the two existing architectures can better support adaptation to a new environment and extension of capability. The resulting reference architecture guides the implementation of social head gaze in a rescue robot for the purpose of victim management in urban search and rescue (US&R). Using the proposed reference architecture will benefit social robotics because it will simplify the principled implementations of head gaze generation and allow for comparisons between such implementations.

A generic controller architecture for intelligent robotic systems

Many multimedia systems are focusing on the techniques of teleconferencing applications and discussing the general reference architectures. Generally speaking, a distributed multimedia application is constructed of four layers: the interactive layer, the data composition layer, the network transport layer and the database management system (DBMS) layer. Although these layers are the well-known reference architectures, the connections (multimedia modeling, module operations, and module communications) between them still need to be solved. To allow users easily, flexibly, and dynamically to create, query, and present multimedia documents, the authors propose five modules as an integration solution; they are, interactive user interface module, multimedia object manipulation module, object dynamically mapping module, network transport control module, and physical object file manipulation module. These modules are the essences of the behaviorally object-oriented distributed multimedia environment. Based on these modules, the multimedia object modeling, the query processing and the presentation schema are elaborated. >

In today’s dynamic IT environment with increased global competition, enterprises must achieve greater business agility and decrease the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of their system for service. As the need for innovative software circulation process emerges, SaaS (Software as a Service) is introduced for integrating software service framework. But most of current ASP (Application Service Provider) Players have difficulties to migrate their systems to SaaS Platform for the lack of maturity model and process. In this paper, we have surveyed several cases of SaaS service, and we identified the common key functions of SaaS service. We contend that the practical maturity model is a key enabler for achieving migration to innovative SaaS service platform. To assist in building our SaaS maturity model, we defined two important axes of maturity model and introduced the detailed components of each phase with the reference architecture which contains the essential activities according to the common functions of SaaS service.KeywordsSaaS ServiceASPMaturity ModelSoftware Business

This study presents an open standards-based information system supporting democratisation and consumer empowerment through flexibility activation. This study describes a functional technical reference infrastructure: a secure, standard-based and viable communication backbone for flexibility activation. The infrastructure allows connection, registering, activation and reporting for different types of granular consumer flexibility. The flexibility sources can be directly controllable set points of chargers and stationary batteries, as well as controllable loads. The proposed communication system sees all these flexibility provisions as distributed energy resources in a wider sense, and the architecture allows consumer-level integration of different energy systems. This makes new flexibility sources fully available to the balancing responsible entities in a viable and realistically implementable manner. The proposed reference architecture, as implemented in the FLEXCoop project, relies on established open standards as it is based on the Open Automated Demand Response (OpenADR) and OAuth2/OpenID standards and the corresponding IEC 62746-10 standard, and it covers interfacing towards other relevant standards. The security and access implications are addressed by the OpenID security layer built on top of the OAuth2 and integrated with the OpenADR standard. To address the data protection and privacy aspects, the architecture is designed on the least knowledge principle.

Pregnancy is a special condition in which women go through various health complications throughout the period of gestation. Conventional health monitoring systems are either too specific or too general, therefore not flexible enough to be suited for pregnant women. In this paper, requirements and challenges in health monitoring of pregnant women are summarized. First, the specific requirements for health monitoring are derived, including adaptive monitoring, need for big data, and real time monitoring. Then a first ever reference architecture is proposed specifically for health monitoring of pregnant women. Mobile devices, body sensors, cloud and thin client of health care professionals are integrated together through the proposed architecture for an end to end self adaptive health monitoring solution design. Apart from self adaptation based on system dynamics, other features of the proposed architecture are mobile device as a gateway for body and ambient sensors, risk factor evaluation and possible action identification, and prolonged monitoring. The proposed architecture facilitates big data analytic and real time monitoring by remote thin client of health professionals through the assistance of cloud infrastructure.

Organizational Information Systems (IS) collect, store, and manage personal and business information through web applications and services. Due to regulation laws and to protect the privacy of users, clients, and business partners, such information must be kept private. This paper proposes a privacy reference architecture that can serve as foundation for the analysis, design and development of web applications with privacy concerns. Using the proposed reference architecture, these applications can manage personal information in a more secure manner, protecting such information from different sources of privacy violation. Also, it can be used as a standardization model that facilitates system integration and communication. The architecture was evaluated regarding four key quality attributes: completeness, applicability, usability and feasibility. Results show that it brings values for the stakeholders and is an important tool in the analysis and implementation of applications with privacy protection.

This paper summarizes the information technology-related research findings after 5 years with the INTROducing Mental health through Adaptive Technology project. The aim was to improve mental healthcare by introducing new technologies for adaptive interventions in mental healthcare through interdisciplinary research and development. We focus on the challenges related to internet-delivered psychological treatments, emphasising artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction, and software engineering. We present the main research findings, the developed artefacts, and lessons learned from the project before outlining directions for future research. The main findings from this project are encapsulated in a reference architecture that is used for establishing an infrastructure for adaptive internet-delivered psychological treatment systems in clinical contexts. The infrastructure is developed by introducing an interdisciplinary design and development process inspired by domain-driven design, user-centred design, and the person based approach for intervention design. The process aligns the software development with the intervention design and illustrates their mutual dependencies. Finally, we present software artefacts produced within the project and discuss how they are related to the proposed reference architecture. Our results indicate that the proposed development process, the reference architecture and the produced software can be practical means of designing adaptive mental health care treatments in correspondence with the patients’ needs and preferences. In summary, we have created the initial version of an information technology infrastructure to support the development and deployment of Internet-delivered mental health interventions with inherent support for data sharing, data analysis, reusability of treatment content, and adaptation of intervention based on user needs and preferences.

BackgroundMental health smartphone apps provide support, skills, and symptom tracking on demand and come at minimal to no additional cost to patients. Although the Department of Veterans Affairs has established itself as a national leader in the creation of mental health apps, veterans’ attitudes regarding the use of these innovations are largely unknown, particularly among rural and aging populations who may benefit from increased access to care.ObjectiveThe objective of our study was to examine veterans’ attitudes toward smartphone apps and to assess whether openness toward this technology varies by age or rurality.MethodsWe conducted semistructured qualitative interviews with 66 veterans from rural and urban areas in Maine, Arkansas, and California. Eligible veterans aged 18 to 70 years had screened positive for postraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), alcohol use disorder, or major depressive disorder, but a history of mental health service utilization was not required. Interviews were digitally recorded, professionally transcribed, and coded by a research team using an established codebook. We then conducted a thematic analysis of segments pertaining to smartphone use, informed by existing theories of technology adoption.ResultsInterviews revealed a marked division regarding openness to mental health smartphone apps, such that veterans either expressed strongly positive or negative views about their usage, with few participants sharing ambivalent or neutral opinions. Differences emerged between rural and urban veterans’ attitudes, with rural veterans tending to oppose app usage, describe smartphones as hard to navigate, and cite barriers such as financial limitations and connectivity issues, more so than urban populations. Moreover, rural veterans more often described smartphones as being opposed to their values. Differences did not emerge between younger and older (≥50) veterans regarding beliefs that apps could be effective or compatible with their culture and identity. However, compared with younger veterans, older veterans more often reported not owning a smartphone and described this technology as being difficult to use.ConclusionsOpenness toward the use of smartphone apps in mental health treatment may vary based on rurality, and further exploration of the barriers cited by rural veterans is needed to improve access to care. In addition, findings indicate that older patients may be more open to integrating technology into their mental health care than providers might assume, although such patients may have more trouble navigating these devices and may benefit from simplified app designs or smartphone training. Given the strong opinions expressed either for or against smartphone apps, our findings suggest that apps may not be an ideal adjunctive treatment for all patients, but it is important to identify those who are open to and may greatly benefit from this technology.

The rapid expansion of health-related devices connected to the Internet, collectively referred to as the Internet of Medical Things, is on a trajectory of significant growth. According to projections by the International Data Corporation (IDC), it is estimated that by 2025, approximately 41.6 billion connected IoMT health devices will be responsible for the generation of 79.4 zettabytes of data [1].

Dynamic Reconfiguration of Intelligent Field Devices by using Modular Software Applications

The emergence of edge computing has also changed the way contemporary applications are designed, with the focus put on achieving high-resilience, low-latency software programs that are deployed on decentralized and resource-limited systems. Edge-native software is software purposely made to operate at the edge of a network, to allow processing of real-time data, lower bandwidth consumption, and greater fault resiliency. This paradigm is particularly critical to those areas, including autonomous systems, industrial automation, smart cities, and energy infrastructure, that need sub-second responsiveness and system trustworthiness. In this paper, an in-depth design framework of edge-native applications based on microservices architecture is described. Some of the main principles that we discuss are decentralization, data locality, stateless vs. stateful design, redundancy, fault domain isolation and so on. Reference architecture is proposed to support scalable deployments in the event of network partition, and self-healing and management qualities in processing consistent data across heterogeneous edge nodes. We consider powered-up technologies such as lightweight container orchestration (i.e., K3S, Docker), edge communication (i.e., MQTT, gRPC), and Chaos engineering. The performance of the architecture in the latency, fault, and resource stress situations is confirmed by experimental results on the Kubernetes-based edge testbed. The results show that edge-native solutions have the potential to surpass the cloud-based model in measures of latency, throughput, fault recovery, and energy efficiency. We also comment on representative use cases like cars on autopilot and predictive maintenance, and discover such issues as the complexity of orchestration, safety, and managing AI models at the edge

SummaryMobile devices play a vital role in people's day‐to‐day activities and are essential for communication, accessing Internet resources, entertainment, and so forth. In most cases, the performance of mobile applications is restricted due to the inadequate resources of mobile specifications such as controlled battery power, predetermined storage, and limited processing competence. Thus to improve the processing efficiency of resource‐constrained mobile devices, this research proposes a model developed on offloading technique based on the recent literature observations which transfer the resource‐consuming tasks from mobile devices to proximate computing entities. This generic architecture aiming for resource augmentation is formulated with five fundamental components including a mobile device, offloading engine, resource augmentation engine, scheduler, and synchronizer. The offloading engine identifies the resource‐intensive tasks that need to be executed on external entities using soft computing techniques such as neural network training algorithms, fuzzy logic, and neuro‐fuzzy logic processing. The augmentation engine chooses feasible edge computing entities such as Arduino, Raspberry PI controller, and fog devices. The scheduler prioritizes the resource‐consuming tasks for offloading based on their importance. The synchronizer coordinates all the central components by updating the execution status of tasks at regular intervals of time. Further extension of this research work, based on the proposed architecture three resource augmentation frameworks are developed namely (a) an adaptive proximate computing framework (b) a web service‐based IoT framework, and (c) a neuro‐fuzzy hybrid framework. Moreover, these frameworks are realized through the development of resource‐efficient intelligent edge computing IoT mobile apps namely (a) an inventory monitoring app (b) a lecture recording app, and (c) an intelligent transport app. The performance of these three resource augmentation frameworks is analyzed through the simulation results and it illustrates that the neuro‐fuzzy hybrid framework outperforms the other two. The outcome of the proposed research contributions improves the effectiveness of mobile communication by providing seamless services to mobile users regardless of their resource‐limited devices. Besides the devised edge computing architecture supports mobile application developers in the design and deployment of resource‐rich mobile applications in low‐specification mobile devices. Also, there is a strong scope for implementing the proposed generic architecture as an industrial smart product with adequate hardware and software configurations.