António Silva

Decision Support Provided by a Temporally Oriented Health Care Assistant

The automatic interpretation of clinical recommendations is a difficult task, even more so when it involves the processing of complex temporal constraints. In order to address this issue, a web-based system is presented herein. Its underlying model provides a comprehensive representation of temporal constraints in Clinical Practice Guidelines. The expressiveness and range of the model are shown through a case study featuring a Clinical Practice Guideline for the diagnosis and management of colon cancer. The proposed model was sufficient to represent the temporal constraints in the guideline, especially those that defined periodic events and placed temporal constraints on the assessment of patient states. The web-based tool acts as a health care assistant to health care professionals, combining the roles of focusing attention and providing patient-specific advice.

Transforming Medical Advice into Clinical Activities for Patient Follow-Up

The delivery of Computer-Interpretable Guidelines occurs mainly in the form of tools following a Q&A strategy for the interaction with users. Despite the interactivity conferred by this style of communication, currently available tools do not possess control mechanisms to ensure the fulfilment of clinical recommendations. With the CompGuide personal assistant web application for scheduling clinical tasks, besides the normal input of information and the production of recommendations by an execution engine, there is a mapping of these recommendations to an agenda of activities for the health care professional. These activities are also monitored and notifications are produced to ensure their delivery times.

Representing temporal patterns in computer-interpretable clinical Guidelines

Computer-Interpretable Guidelines (CIGs) as machine-readable versions of clinical protocols have to provide appropriate constructs for the representation of different aspects of medical knowledge, namely administrative information, workflows of procedures, clinical constraints and temporal constraints. This work focuses on the latter, by aiming to develop a comprehensive representation of temporal constraints for machine readable formats of clinical protocols and provide a proper execution engine that deals with different time patterns and constraints placed on them. A model for the representation of time is presented for the CompGuide ontology in Ontology Web language (OWL) along with a comparison with the available formalisms in this field.

A Unified System for Clinical Guideline Management and Execution

There are several approaches to Computer-Interpretable Guidelines (CIG) representation and execution that offer the possibility of acquiring, executing and editing CPGs. Many CIG approaches aim to represent Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) by computationally formalising the knowledge that they enclose, in order to be suitable for the integration in Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS). However, the current approaches for this purpose lack in providing a unified workflow for management and execution of CIGs. Besides characterising these limitations and identifying improvements to include in future tools, this work describes the unified architecture for CIG management and execution, a unified approach that allows the CIG acquisition, editing and execution.

Automatic Verification of Design Rules in PCB Manufacturing

Nowadays, electronics can be found in almost every available device. At the core of electronic devices there are Printed Circuit Boards (PCB). To create a suitable PCB there is the need of complying with several constraints, both concerning electrical and layout design. Thus, the design rules related to the PCB manufacturing and assembly are very important since these restrictions are fundamental to ensure the creation of a viable physical PCB. Electrical Computer Aided Design (ECAD) tools are able to automatically verify such rules, but they only consider a subset of the total required rules. The remaining rules are currently manually checked, which may increase the occurrence of errors and, consequently, increase the overall costs in designing and in the manufacturing process of a PCB. Being the design a crucial phase in the manufacturing procedure, a software system that automatically verifies all design rules and produce the corresponding assessment report is fundamental. Such software system is addressed in this paper.

Collaborative Process Mapping to Improve Work Instructions and Standardized Work

Nowadays, companies are searching for models that are able to increase their performance, efficiency and competitiveness. Therefore, it is crucial to identify the current company status and its needs, adopting a suitable model for this. Many times, the success key consists in the adoption of tailor-made models developed by each organization. The company under study has developed a process mapping tool, called Value Stream Design in Indirect Areas (VSDiA) that has been used to map and improve its business processes, in this case, applied to Work Instructions and Standard Work creation. The adoption of this model has allowed the identification of weaknesses, strengths and improvement opportunities in the abovementioned processes, through a collaborative process team work. Furthermore, this tool has provided an overview about the whole process by all involved, as well as, increased transparency and accuracy of the current process and a vision for the future process.

A system for the management of clinical tasks throughout the clinical process with notification features

Computer-Interpretable Guidelines have been associated with a higher integration of standard practices in the daily context of health care institutions. The Clinical Decision Support Systems that deliver these machine-interpretable recommendations usually follow a Q&A style of communication, retrieving information from the user or a clinical repository and performing reasoning upon it, based on the rules from Clinical Practice Guidelines. However, these systems are limited in the reach they are capable of achieving as they were initially conceived for use in very specific moments of the clinical process, namely in physician appointments. The purpose of this work is thus to present a system that, in addition to Q&A reasoning, is equipped with other functionalities such as the scheduling and temporal management of clinical tasks, the mapping of these tasks onto an agenda of activities to allow an easy consultation by health care professionals, and notifications that let health care professionals know of task enactment times and information collection times. In this way, the system ensures the delivery of procedures. The main components of the system, which reflect a different perspective on the delivery of CIG advice that we call guideline as a service, are disclosed, and they include a health care Personal Assistant Web Application, a health care assistant mobile application, and the integration with the private calendar services of the user.

Performance appraisal approaches and methods for IT/IS projects: a review

In increasingly demanding environments, organizations need to manage their human resources effectively, as these are fundamental to their success. Therefore, it is important to improve the performance of these resources by conducting systematic evaluations and by collecting information on their productivity, training needs, and individual and team performance. In the context of Information Technologies/Information Systems (IT/IS) projects, there is not much research work focused on human resources performance evaluation. This paper aims to fill this gap by reviewing approaches and methods for performance appraisal, which can be successfully applied in IT/IS projects. Are presented approaches and methods focused on: personality; behaviors; comparison; and outcomes/results.

A Personal Assistant for Health Care Professionals Based on Clinical Protocols

Current tools to operationalize Computer-Interpretable Guidelines focus mainly on displaying recommendations rather than assisting health care professionals in their daily activities. Furthermore, their underlying models have limitations at the level of temporal representation that hinder the accurate depiction of clinical protocols in a few specific situations. This work identifies such situations and proposes a comprehensive temporal model based on Ontology Web Language (OWL), along with a web-based tool that provides an alternative way to deploy and view clinical protocols. This is evaluated through a case study featuring a clinical protocol for the treatment of colon cancer. It was possible to observe that the model was able to represent the majority of temporal patterns, specially those with periodic events and temporal restrictions about the state of a patient.

Developing an Ambient Intelligent-Based Decision Support System for Production and Control Planning

Scheduling production instructions in a manufacturing facility is key to assure a efficient process that assures the desired product quantities are produced in time, with quality and with the right resources. An efficient production avoids the creation of downstream delays, and early completion which both can be detrimental if storage space is limited and contracted quantities are important. Therefore, the production, planning and control of manufacturing is increasingly more difficult as family products increases. This paper presents an ongoing Ambient Intelligent decision support system development that aims to provide assistance on the creation on standard work procedures that assure production quantity and efficiency by means of ambient intelligence, optimization heuristics and machine learning in the context of a large organization.