Antonio Coronato

Formal specification of wireless and pervasive healthcare applications

Wireless and pervasive healthcare applications typically present critical requirements from the point of view of functional correctness, reliability, availability, security, and safety. In contrast to the case of classic safety critical applications, the behavior of wireless and pervasive applications is affected by the movements and location of users and resources. This article presents a methodology to formally express requirements in safety critical wireless and pervasive healthcare applications in order to achieve a higher degree of dependability. In particular, it will be shown how it is possible to formalize and constrict mobility characteristics by combining, and in some cases extending, several formal methods. The article also describes a rigorous specification process. Finally, it concludes with a case study of a real safety critical pervasive healthcare application that is going to be deployed in a city hospital.

MiPeG : A middleware infrastructure for pervasive grids

Grid computing and pervasive computing have affirmed respectively as the paradigm for high performance computing and the paradigm for user-friendly computing. The conjunction of such paradigms are now generating a new one: the Pervasive Grid Computing. This paper presents a middleware for pervasive grid applications. It consists of a set of basic services that aim to enhance classic grid environments with mechanisms for: (i) integrating mobile devices in a pervasive way; (ii) providing context-awareness; (iii) handling mobile users’ sessions; and, (iv) distributing and executing user tasks on the devices (even mobile) active in the environment. c 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Formal Design of Ambient Intelligence Applications

The design of ambient intelligence applications in critical systems requires rigorous software-engineering-oriented approaches. Drawing on practical experience, the authors propose a set of formal tools and a specification process for AmI design activities and artifacts.

A multimodal semantic location service for intelligent environments: an application for Smart Hospitals

This paper presents semantic models, mechanisms and a service to locate mobile entities in Smart and Intelligent Environments. The key feature of the service is the semantic integration of different positioning systems that not only enables the environment to handle transparently such physical positioning systems, but also to reason on location information coming from different systems and to combine it to obtain higher context information. Indeed, the service relies on the use of ontologies and rules to define a uniform, unambiguous and well-defined model for the location information, independently of the particular positioning system. Moreover, the location service performs logic and reasoning mechanisms to provide both physical and semantic locations of mobile objects and to infer the finest granularity in the case when a mobile object is located by more than one positioning system. Finally, we present an application of the proposed approach to the case of a Smart Hospital.

Formal Specification and Verification of Ubiquitous and Pervasive Systems

This article presents a methodology to formally express requirements in safety-critical ubiquitous and pervasive applications in order to achieve a higher degree of dependability. In particular, it will be shown how it is possible to formalize and constrict mobility characteristics by combining and extending several formal methods. The article also discusses some issues concerning both static and dynamic verification.

Tools for the Rapid Prototyping of Provably Correct Ambient Intelligence Applications

Ambient Intelligence technologies have not yet been widely adopted in safety critical scenarios. This principally has been due to fact that acceptable degrees of dependability have not been reached for the applications that rely on such technologies. However, the new critical application domains, like Ambient Assisted Living and Smart Hospitals, which are currently emerging, are increasing the need for methodologies and tools that can improve the reliability of the final systems. This paper presents a middleware architecture for safety critical Ambient Intelligence applications which provides the developer with services for runtime verification. It is now possible to continuously monitor and check the running system against correctness properties defined at design time. Moreover, a visual tool which allows the formal design of several of the characteristics of an Ambient Intelligence application and the automatic generation of setting up parameters and code for the middleware infrastructure is also presented.

Toward a natural interface to virtual medical imaging environments

Immersive Virtual Reality environments are suitable to support activities related to medicine and medical practice. The immersive visualization of information-rich 3D objects, coming from patient scanned data, provides clinicians with a clear perception of depth and shapes. However, to benefit from immersive visualization in medical imaging, where inspection and manipulation of volumetric data are fundamental tasks, medical experts have to be able to act in the virtual environment by exploiting their real life abilities. In order to reach this goal, it is necessary to take into account user skills and needs so as to design and implement usable and accessible human-computer interaction interfaces. In this paper we present a natural interface for a semi-immersive virtual environment. Such interface is based on an off-the-shelf handheld wireless device and a speech recognition component, and provides clinicians with intuitive interaction modes for inspecting volumetric medical data.

Uranus: A Middleware Architecture for Dependable AAL and Vital Signs Monitoring Applications

The design and realization of health monitoring applications has attracted the interest of large communities both from industry and academia. Several research challenges have been faced and issues tackled in order to realize effective applications for the management and monitoring of people with chronic diseases, people with disabilities, elderly people. However, there is a lack of efficient tools that enable rapid and possibly cheap realization of reliable health monitoring applications. The paper presents Uranus, a service oriented middleware architecture, which provides basic functions for the integration of different kinds of biomedical sensors. Uranus has also distinguishing characteristics like services for the run-time verification of the correctness of running applications and mechanisms for the recovery from failures. The paper concludes with two case studies as proof of concept.

Towards an Implementation of Smart Hospital: A Localization System for Mobile Users and Devices

The advancements of wireless and mobile computing technologies and the diffusion of pervasive healthcare technologies are changing our perception of healthcare. In this paper, we describe how the pervasive computing technologies can be used to build a Smart Hospital. In particular, we propose a concrete implementation of a smart hospital and discuss how e-Health services and applications can be enhanced by location information. As a solution, we present semantic models, mechanisms and a system to locate diverse kinds of mobile entities in Smart Hospitals. The key feature of the system is the semantic integration of different positioning systems that not only enables the hospital to transparently handle such physical positioning systems, but also to reason on location information coming from different systems and to combine them in order to get higher context information or to resolve inconsistencies or conflicts due to sensing errors or limitations of the positioning systems.

An agent based platform for task distribution in virtual environments

This paper focuses on automatic mechanisms for task distribution and execution in virtual and mobile environments. In particular, the goal is the implementation of Utility Computing services that enable users to submit their source code and to have their applications executed without concerning about resource allocation, task distribution, and load-balancing. The proposed solution consists in a distributed agent-based software infrastructure that grants a high level of transparency from the user point of view. As a matter of fact, accordingly with the Utility Computing model, the user has just to submit its tasks and their input parameters; after that, the software infrastructure takes care of (1) encapsulating tasks in mobile agents; (2) distributing them in the virtual environment; (3) launching and controlling execution; (4) picking up results; and (5) handling computing stations. Finally, it is important to note that the infrastructure is able to integrate both fixed and mobile hardware resources to build a community of computing stations for task executions. As a consequence, such an infrastructure can get useful computing power even from stations (mobile devices) that have always been neglected by classic task execution platforms.