Bruno Alves

COMMODITY12: A smart e-health environment for diabetes management

We present the development of COMMODITY12, a Personal Health System PHS to assist in the provision of continuous and personalised health services to diabetic patients, thus empowering their lifestyle regardless of their location. COMMODITY12 consists of ambient, wearable and portable devices, which acquire, monitor and communicate physiological parameters and other health-related context of an individual, such as physical activity and vital body signals. This data is interpreted by intelligent agents that use expert biomedical knowledge to derive important insights about the individuals health status, which are then presented in the form of active feedback to the patient directly from the device, or via health professionals who assist in diagnosis, treatment and life management. The emphasis of the work is on the design of the PHS in terms of its main components, their integration and deployment to address major problems of interest to both diabetic patients and doctors that treat diabetes.

Fairtrace: Applying Semantic Web Tools and Techniques to the Textile Traceability

This paper presents solutions that leverage Semantic Web Technologies (SWT) to allow pragmatic traceability in supply-chains, especially for the textile industry. Objectives are the identification of the supply-chain, order management, tracking and problem reporting (such as dangerous substance detection). It is intended to be a generic platform supporting potentially any kind of industrial supply-chain, to be usable in harsh environments (mobile appliances) without any kind of communications possibility and to be fully usable to non-IT people, including for the modelling of the production processes. The developed solutions also allow the consumer to benefit from the traceability through information pages available by scanning the QR codes available on the finished products (clothes, clocks, etc.). This paper presents: (i) the methodology applied to achieve those functionalities, (ii) the design and implementation choices, and (iii) the test results. The main value of this paper is the usage of the Semantic Web in real-world industrial traceability solutions, which were tested in real supply-chains in Switzerland and India. The commercialization of the developed solutions has started.

An Agile Methodology for IHE-Enabled Deployments

Recent history of healthcare software is littered with failures, mostly attributable to bad design and the inability to capture user community’s needs and workflows[1]. This paper presents a new agile methodology aiming at improving engineering practises in Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE)-based projects in small-to-medium scale hospitals and healthcare organizations. The work described here is a compilation of experiences in the field and is based on the successfull Scrum methodology, centered on IHE specifications that aims at providing value by making IHE developments easier and more predictable.