Alberto Bucciero

RFID, EPC and B2B convergence towards an item-level traceability in the pharmaceutical supply chain

The item-level tagging is one of the main challenges of many application scenarios. Among these, the pharmaceutical supply chain represents a very interesting case where the new auto-identification technologies, based on RFID and EPCglobal, will play a very import role. The authors present practical experiences gained from a recent research project on the item-level traceability in the pharmaceutical supply chain. Furthermore, a discussion on several areas of improvement opportunities for future large-scale deployments of these technologies is reported.

Multi-User Virtual Environments for Learning: Experience and Technology Design

Multi-User Virtual Environments (MUVEs) are often used to support learning in formal and informal educational contexts. A technology-based educational experience consists of several elements: content, syllabus, roles, sequence of activities, assignments, assessment procedures, etc. that must be aligned with the affordances of the technologies to be used. The design process, therefore, has to follow a dual track: the design of the educational experience as a whole and the design of the MUVE. Each design process has some degree of independence, while, at the same time, the two design processes are also deeply intertwined. The paper proposes a novel approach to design (both for the educational experience and the MUVE): a “biological lifecycle” design, where evolution (for survival and fitness) is crucial, while anticipating all the requirements (creating an engineering blueprint) is very challenging. This paper is based upon a number of large-scale case studies, involving nearly 9,000 high-school students from 18 countries in Europe, Israel, and the United States. Substantial educational benefits were achieved by these learning experiences, at the center of which were MUVEs. It cannot be claimed that MUVEs were the only factors for generating these benefits, but for sure they were exceptionally important components.

Supply Chain Management and Automatic Identification Management Convergence: Experiences in the Pharmaceutical Scenario

The need to implement and guarantee effective item-level tracing systems is becoming more and more important for a wide range of business applications, such as manufacturing, logistics, healthcare, and anti-counterfeiting. Among these, the pharmaceutical supply chain, with millions of medicines moving around the world and needing to be traced at item level, represents a very interesting reference scenario. Furthermore, the growing counterfeiting problem raises a significant threat within the supply chain system. Recently, several international institutions (e.g. Food and Drug Administration, European Medicines Agency, European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, GS1) are encouraging the use of innovative solutions in healthcare and in the pharmaceutical supply chain, to improve patient safety and enhance the efficiency of the pharmaceutical supply chain, with better worldwide drug traceability (FDA, 2004). Currently, the most popular auto-identification technology is optical one. Although the bar code (oneor bi-dimensional) is a very low cost solution, there are many valid reasons for not considering it as the primary auto-identification technique (Schroeter, 2008) in the near future. In fact, every kind of bar code technology requires line-of-sight (LoS), it cannot be written or read in bulk, it can be easily counterfeited, it can limit the speed of packaging line operations, etc. On the contrary, RFID (Finkenzeller, 2003) technology promises to optimize the critical processes in the Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems and to improve the patient safety, resolving problems of traditional optical auto-identification solutions. Passive RFID tags can be classified according to the frequency band used and the type of coupling between tag and reader antennas. The use of RFID solutions, in particular those working in Ultra High Frequency (UHF) band, could easily exceed the previous performance problems justifying the initial investment required by a process re-engineering of the pharmaceutical supply chain. Recent works (Uysal, 2008; De Blasi, 2010; Catarinucci, 2010) have highlighted that passive UHF RFID tags represent the more suitable solution for item-level tracing systems in a supply chain. Another fundamental element that is increasing exponentially the diffusion of the RFID in the automate logistics processes is the asserting of some international standards related to goods traceability, such as EPCglobal (Barchetti, 2009; Thiesse, 2009), GS1 (Global Standard 1) (Barchetti, 2010) and ebXML (Electronic Business using extensible Markup Language) (Barchetti, 2010), which are just a few interesting examples. The EPCglobal consortium,

Structuring repositories of educational experiences: A case study

Until now, a large amount of effort has been spent on structuring educational repositories. During the years, standard formats to describe learning resources have been provided, reference content models to exchange them among repositories and between repositories and Learning Management Systems have been specified, large repositories have been deployed both from academia and from private organizations (as IEEE and ACM, for example). Researchers observe that open and widely available educational resources can significantly reduce the time required to prepare lectures; other authors argue that repositories facilitate education, combining different learning style theories with technology preferences. The focus is mainly on learning content. In this paper we give a different perspectives on repositories for education, having as a central point the educational experience. We report on a case study we are completing structuring a repository to collect credible evidence from Italian teachers who create innovation in schools using technology. We describe the technical issues we encountered developing an online repository of hundreds of experiences, carried out in classes of all levels of schooling, where technology was skillfully combined with pedagogical solutions to generate substantial educational benefits.

Impact of RFID, EPC and B2B on traceability management of the pharmaceutical supply chain

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is becoming more and more important for tracing and tracking systems. Furthermore, the application of standards, such as EPCglobal, is contributing substantially to diffusing the important concept of Internet of Things. Although, these elements promise enormous benefits, there remain barriers that are limiting a large-scale deployment of these innovative technologies in supply chain management systems. An analysis of the main effects of the use of these technologies on the main processes of a supply chain is useful. This paper attempts to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) to trace the impacts of the combined use of different standards, such as RFID, EPCglobal, and ebXML, on a pharmaceutical supply chain. The current and possible future visions of the pharmaceutical supply chain are described through the AS-IS and TO-BE models. These models are used to perform a first KPI analysis; even if the reported results are still only partial they sketch out the main guidelines identifying the advantages obtainable by adopting an integrated system with B2B messaging and tracing and tracking capabilities in the pharmaceutical supply chain.

E-Learning, E-Education, and Online Training

Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering 243

Conceptual design of collaborative virtual environments for education using a theater-based metaphor

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are becoming more and more important in many areas because they offer users the opportunity to experiment with novel interaction paradigms in order to perform collaborative work or have engaging experiences ‘being together’. One of the most promising application fields is eLearning, where CVEs give the unique opportunity to explore effective educational formats. Surprisingly, if compared with other more traditional fields as software engineering and database, we note a lack of design approaches. We point out that a well-founded design approach is crucial to develop collaborative experiences that could generate substantial and measurable educational benefits. To meet this challenge, in this paper we present a set of founding concepts that enable pedagogs and teachers designing effective 3D virtual worlds for education. To keep our concepts simply understandable, we based our design method on a widespread metaphor: the theater. We demonstrate through a real case study the promising advantages of our approach: expressiveness to capture collaborative features at a high level of abstraction, semi-formality to facilitate the establishment of a common ground between educational designers and CVEs engineers, and guidance to enable non-experts to cope with all the relevant aspects of a 3D virtual world.

A two-stage approach to bring the postural assessment to masses: The KISS-Health Project

The human body is in a posture every minute of every day: it can be static, such as when resting, or dynamic, such as when walking. It is quite frequent that people assume poor postures during the day and they make their bodies more susceptible to injuries. Considering this, prevention assumes a central role as it can avoid damage and pain in day-to-day life, but it is very poorly practiced in the majority of countries, even in the Western world. Moreover, diagnosis and assessments for postural abnormalities are demanded to few specialized centers, which usually perform anecdotal or subjective evaluations. In this paper, we propose an innovative model to face up to postural abnormalities starting from a two-stage approach that have been conceived and are being implemented by the KISS-Health Project. The idea consists of two units: a) the Mobile Diagnostic System, which is composed of both hardware and software components and it will permit a first assessment of human posture in order to identify people at risk; b) the Laboratory Diagnostic System, which will investigate more accurately the complete postural configuration of the subject going under exam. It is our goal to promote an integrated approach that, based on scientific and economical evidences, will reduce the costs related to postural abnormalities.

MoWeT: A Configurable Framework to Support Ubiquitous Location-Aware Applications

Today, GPS enabled systems are extensively used for geographic navigation in almost all contexts (commercial, personal, etc.). The first limit of these systems is their incapacity to work in covered areas, alley streets and, obviously, inside buildings. Furthermore commercial GPS applications are not enough customizable, only allowing user to add a set of POIs (Points Of Interest) without any capability of adding user defined behaviors. Recently, other kind of technologies, such as RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification) and Bluetooth, are being used to develop location based applications, like context aware services usable in indoor environment. In this paper we present a hybrid system called MoWeT that make use of both GPS and RFID technology and that is fully customizable in regard of contents, events, user interactions. MoWeT allows also, users involved in the same work session, to interact each other through their mobile devices, making use of a central communication server, but also with users connected to the same session, but with a 3D view, with their workstations (mixed reality).In this paper we focus on the usage as enhanced personal tourist guidance with mobile connectivity.

A Framework to Generate 3D Learning Experience

A Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) is a computer-based virtual space that supports collaborative work and social interplay. In a 3D CVE, a ‘hosting’ 3D world is the necessary ingredient: within it users provided with graphical embodiments called avatars that convey their identity (presence, location, movement etc.), can meet and interact with other users, with agents or with virtual objects. Even if graphics hardware and 3D technologies are rapidly evolving and the increased Internet connection speed allows the sharing of amounts of data and information among geographically distributed users, the development of networked three-dimensional applications is still complicated and requires expert knowledge. Although some collaborative 3D Web technologies and applications have already been developed, most of them are particularly concerned with offering a high level realistic representation of the virtual world since increasing the level of detail increases the sense of ‘virtual presence’ in the 3D world. However, these developments have not, at the same time supported a high level, non-expert authoring process and the concepts of programming flexibility and component re-use have rarely been taken into account. In this introduction, we discuss our research experience in the field of Collaborative Virtual Environments. We will outline our approach which has been based on both multi-channel integration and on high performances issues. Moreover, we advocate the need for a drastic simplification of authoring and personalisation phases. We propose this should be enacted through formal description of the sets of interactions, as well as of their behavioural features and rules, that we together call ‘collaborative metaphors’. This should be done in a component oriented fashion to drive collaboration among users according to the designer’s specifications. As result of previous considerations, we present OpenWebTalk (OWT), a declarative 3D component framework based on XML documents describing not only the formal structure of the environment of the virtual world, where the action takes place, but also the complex set of interaction rules that govern interactions between users and world objects used to stimulate certain kinds of collaboration. Such a framework would thus effectively help fast prototyping and an easy building up of collaborative applications. The OWT framework also provides a high 27