Emmanuel Benoist

Pervasive Computing - The Next Technical Revolution

Pervasive computing systems will provoke a massive transformation of our civilization. Wireless sensor networks will permit to gather information about the world and to act on it at an unprecedentedly detailed level. Wearable or implanted devices will improve our health condition. But also less friendly applications are to be expected, like robot soldiers. They will transform profoundly the way we live as individuals and interact with the society and our environment. This is not an entirely new event. Humanity has already many times crossed a line of no return, and changed, but survived. We can take some lessons from the past. There are many driving forces that make civilizations evolve, the technological development is one of the most important. Even if the events are triggered by a technical innovation, in consequence the whole society is reshaped. We will face novel technical and ethical problems. Evolving, autonomous systems will surprise us. Our symbiosis with internal and external computing systems may change our perception as humans. A brave new world is coming, it is better to be prepared for it.

Collecting Data for the Profiling of Web Users

Internet technology allows web site administrators to monitor users visiting their sites. In the beginning the basic protocol used for the web (http) did not consider the concept of a session. It was impossible to recognise whether two requests came from the same user. Developers then found ways to follow visitors and implemented logins and shopping carts. These solutions included cookie session IDs encoded in the URL, or more recently the creation of a virtual host for each visitor. These mechanisms have also been used for statistical purposes, to study the behaviour of groups of users (group profiling) and to predict the behaviour of a specific user (user profiling). Usually, collecting information is not in itself reprehensible; however, the use of the data is more critical. One can never be sure if it will be used for statistics (on anonymised data), for one-to-one marketing, or be sold to a third party. The W3 Consortium has published a standard called P3P, giving web site administrators the possibility to declare their policy regarding privacy in a machine readable format. Unfortunately, most people are not yet aware of the sensitivity of collected data; there is therefore no wide resistance to the creation of huge interoperable databases.

Internet-voting: opportunity or threat for democracy?

During the last decade, Internet-voting (i-voting) moved from the field of fundamental research to practical application. First, we will see that theoretical research provides satisfying algorithms for some of the challenges raised by i-voting and that some real world experiments have already been developed and performed. Unfortunately, in current i-voting systems, the citizen loses his/her control over the overall electoral process. Indeed, only insiders usually have access to the programming code of the application and to the servers used in i-voting. The confidence in democracy itself could be harmed by this opacity. The European Convention on Human Rights emphasizes that votes should remain secret. This can not be assured for i-voting, since it is not possible to have a booth around each computer for example during the voting process. Family voting cannot be prevented and vote buying could be a major threat for democracy. Moreover, we can not assume that the voters computer contains no viruses or Trojan horses. Therefore, it is optimistic to assume that the ballot transfered to the server is the one chosen by the voter. Finally, we will see that the effect of i-voting on the turnout at polls might remain marginal.

Medical Evaluative Research and Privacy Protection

The problem of data protection in medical research regards various communities, among them: patients, doctors, approval authorities, researchers, technology suppliers, privacy protectors and lawyers. Therefore it can be seen from many perspectives. In particular, it seems to be common to underestimate the inherent difficulty of obtaining the scientific basis for evaluating health technology and taking decisions about its efficient use. It is important to promote the dialog between the aforementioned communities in order to optimize the overall benefit of the patient. This problem ultimately leads to an ethical dilemma and has no simple solution. In this paper, we try to provide a balanced view of the problem, showing the trade-offs and helping to take responsible decisions. As representatives of the information technology, we also propose a technical solution that permits to collect data necessary for research and minimizing the risk of its loss.

Research and Engineering Roadmap for Development and Deployment of Smart Medical Devices

The actual clinical use of smart wireless, software-based, mobile medical devices does not meet the recently raised expectations. First, current low level of interoperability calls for setting and enforcing open standards from the device level to the national/global collaboration structure. Second, heterogeneous and frequently changing devices, operating in various natural, technical and human environments, do not match the classical approval model. In addition to a time-limited set of clinical trials, they need a system of continuous quality monitoring. Third, ad-hoc deployment, without dedicated staff with well defined, novel skill sets is not scalable. A proper organizational structure is necessary. In this paper we present a modular software structure and a framework of a system supporting both the direct health care and the continuous quality evaluation. We expose the location of interfaces crucial for assuring multivendor interoperability. We then define a roadmap giving structure to the necessary development effort. The structure we propose should permit to coordinate the actions of independent teams tackling the immense number of multifaceted and interrelated tasks.

Reusing Dormant Distributed Legacy Data for Evidence Based Medicine

In the current trend towards the evidence based medicine we should not forget previously collected data, neither in hand-written records nor in legacy systems. In this paper we present a process to integrate the data gathered by therapeutic machines of our industrial partner used for treatment of neurological and orthopedic disorders. These devices are deployed in numerous physical therapy clinics worldwide. During a therapy session they collect and store precise measurements of various physical parameters. As they have been used for many years, they hold a large and valuable set of data. One goal of the project was to develop a mechanism for transferring those dispersed data to a central server where they can be analyzed by a team of specialists in medical statistics. Another goal was to develop a software that permits to define flexibly various statistics by those specialists, without a necessity of having IT skills. In addition to the system permitting to collect and analyze the therapy session data, an application has been developed to implement a standardized quality of life questionnaire (EuroQol-5D) that allows to compare the results of the therapy using this machine with other therapy methods. As an incentive to cooperate in the program, the patient receives a personal report about his/her therapy progress, possibly benchmarked against the progress of other patients suffering from the same disease. This report also can be flexibly configured by a software developed in this project. In this way, valuable data, previously dormant on isolated systems worldwide, can be reused to validate and improve the therapy for the benefit of the patients.