Dana Al Kukhun

Adaptive Solutions for Access Control within Pervasive Healthcare Systems

In the age of mobile computing and distributed systems, healthcare systems are employing service-oriented computing to provide users with transparent accessibility to reach their distributed resources at anytime, anywhere and anyhow. Meanwhile, these systems tend to strengthen their security shields to ensure the limitation of access to authorized entities. In this paper, we examine mobile querying of distributed XML databases within a pervasive healthcare system. In such contexts, policies - as XACML - are needed to enforce access control. We study the reactivity of this policy in the case of a user demanding access to unauthorized data sources showing that the policy will respond negatively to user demands. Thus, we propose to employ an adaptive mechanism that would provide users with reactive and proactive solutions. Our proposal is accomplished by using the RBAC scheme, the user profile and some predefined semantics in order to provide users with alternative and relevant solutions without affecting the systems integrity.

Ensuring Semantic Annotation and Retrieval within Pervasive E-Learning Systems

In the age of mobility, many times a certain teacher, a student or a document face difficulties to be integrated in different e-learning systems. Focusing on the computer science field, we present a service-oriented solution for annotating and retrieving the documents and persons involved in this domain, enhancing their mobility inside pervasive e-learning systems. The solution is based on the ACM classification system, which is used in order to develop user competence profiles, to annotate materials, and to retrieve them. The ontology-based retrieval mechanism will investigate not only the matches with the concepts involved in a query, but also with their related concepts inside the ACM classification system; the ranking algorithm will consider the documents content as well as the user competence.

ADMAN: An Alarm-Based Mobile Diabetes Management System for Mobile Geriatric Teams

In this article, we introduce ADMAN an alarm-based diabetes management system for the disposal of Mobile Geriatric Teams MGT. The system aims at providing a form of remote monitoring in order to control the diabetes rate for elder patients. The system is multidimensional in a way that it resides at the patient mobile machine from a side, the doctor’s mobile machine from another side and can be connected to any other entity related to the MGT that is handling his case (e.g. dietitian).

Steps Towards Pervasive Software: Does Software Engineering Need Reengineering?

Nowadays, the definition of service is demanding machines to turn into human beings. In order to work efficiently, machines need to analyze current situations, perceive user needs and provide users with intelligent, automatic and proactive adaptation that responds to current contexts. System performance will be guaranteed only if we add new features to its behavior, such as: self-adaptation, self-organization, self-configuring, selfhealing, self-optimizing and self-protecting. These challenging automated processes can produce proactive behavior if software engineers change the engineering logic and use the environment context as a solution instead of thinking about it as an obstacle.