Foteini Andriopoulou

A proposed Next Generation Service Delivery Platform (NG-SDP) for eHealth domain

Nowadays, providing healthcare personalized services in users intelligent space is an important issue for improving personal health, supporting predictive care and saving medical costs. In this paper, we propose an architecture for the Next Generation Service Delivery Platform (NG-SDP), suitable for composing and delivering personalized healthcare services. The core component of NG-SDP is a Context Decision Making Enabler (CDME) that assesses user contextual and bio information to yield personalized services. A prototype implementation of the proposed NG-SDP is also demonstrated. Finally a real case study demonstrates the CDME performance.

P2Care: A dynamic self-organized healthcare network for ubiquitous healthcare environment

Nowadays chronic diseases pose new challenges in the healthcare domain. Especially, in case of co-morbidities and multi-morbidities where the self-management affects negatively patients ailment, a dynamic, collaborative and self-organized approach is more suitable. In this paper we demonstrate P2Care, a dynamic and self-organized healthcare network for ubiquitous healthcare environment. P2Care exploits the functionalities of structured P2P networks for delivering personalized services in an efficient, scalable and network-friendly manner. Motivated by real-world social groups, P2Care organizes healthcare professionals, providers and patients in groups according to common characteristics and interests.

u-MCHC: A predictive framework for ubiquitous management of exacerbations in chronic diseases

Exacerbations are crucial events in chronic diseases that require continuous management. Knowledge of the exacerbation risk enhances patients quality of life and enables self-management and self-organizing of unscheduled doctor visits and/or hospitalization. This paper proposes a new framework for ubiquitous management of chronic diseases named u-MCHC. The proposed framework incorporates monitoring, decision-making, notification and management processes in order to deliver personalized therapeutical options and services. The delivery of services is realized by means of Next Generation Service Delivery Platform (NG-SDP). A prototype implementation of u-MCHC and its performance is demonstrated in a real world case for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD).

Enhanced failover mechanisms for tree-based peer-to-peer streaming

Peer-to-peer streaming has emerged as prominent networking approach for the delivery of real-time video content. The dynamic nature of the peers which is characterized by unpredictable arrivals or departures affects connectivity, stability and consequently the perceived video quality. This phenomenon is more evident in tree-based streaming. This work proposes enhanced failover mechanisms for peer-to-peer streaming over multiple multicast trees. Contrary to existing approaches, the proposed mechanisms take into account the order of arrival of peers and the diversity among different trees in order to provide backup links for the retrieval of missing packets during temporary disconnections. The proposed approaches have been evaluated through simulations both in terms of connectivity and video quality.

Ef-Zin: A hybrid framework for ubiquitous management of comorbidity and multimorbidity in chronic diseases

The existence of comorbidity and multimorbidity increases the diagnostic uncertainty and has a variety of negative social and economical impacts. This paper proposes the Ef-Zin framework that aims to manage patients suffering from chronic conditions by means of (a) creating collaborative virtual groups through medical and paramedical professionals and (b) delivering the appropriate therapy to the individual patient. Ef-Zin involves two distinct processing phases for parallel evaluation of patients contextual information. For the evaluation it uses rule-based algorithms and Random Forest (RF) machine learning technique for categorizing patients into groups according to the severity levels, making decisions about the services that will be delivered and notifying the appropriate specialized healthcare professionals for patients current health status. We have carefully drafted an architecture of the proposed Ef-Zin framework and qualitative evaluation has been conducted in a common use case scenario such as Chronic Obstructive Lung Disease (COPD) and a cardiovascular disease (hypertension) that is the most frequent and significant disease that coexists with COPD.

An Integrated Broker Platform for Open eHealth Domain

The adoption of personalized context aware services in healthcare domain has imposed new demands on IT providers and motivates integration and interoperability between heterogeneous healthcare systems. In this paper, we propose an Integrated Broker Platform – IBP that incorporates the benefits of the advanced technologies of Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Service Broker (SB) allowing the efficient provision of secure, interoperable, reliable and cost-efficient message and service delivery by dynamical and intelligent selection of services. IBP provides mediation functionalities that TSB supports but is enhanced with business logic from the SB. An architecture pattern for both TSB and SB is proposed, analyzed and prototyped.

A Novel Hierarchical Group-Based Overlay Healthcare Network

In the healthcare domain, there is a challenge on how to design a scalable, dynamic, robust and secure network for provisioning personalized healthcare services remotely with an efficient and accurate manner. In the present work, motivated by innovations in the networking domain and the benefits of clustering in the peer-to-peer networks as well as the group-based approach of the social networks, we propose a novel hierarchical peer-to-peer overlay healthcare network for communication and collaboration among healthcare professionals, paramedical staff and patients. The proposed network includes two types of hierarchy: the first type is used for regular requests and communication while the second type handles emergency requests. The network architecture is based on multiple and enhanced structured overlays that provide scalability, dynamic features, load-balancing and low response times with guaranteed information retrieval. Moreover, a novel and effective lookup mechanism supports complex queries with significantly lower response time and messaging overhead.

EMYNOS: A next generation emergency communication platform for people with disabilities

During an emergency situation disabled people face many obstacles to access the emergency systems since they fail to support IP-based services and do not take into account their accessibility requirements. This paper describes the key elements of the EMYNOS platform which is a Next Generation emergency platform that aims to provide IP based emergency services and integrate information provided by the social media, users profile and contextual information in order to provide personalized emergency services and real time communication. To achieve this, tactile and pressure feedback from haptic devices as well as real time communication audio-video, text-video and voice-video calls will be initiated through the browser-to-browser web real time communication (WebRTC) technology. In addition, WebRTC technology will be used as a backup platform in case the default infrastructure collapses.

Future SDP through Cloud Architectures

In this paper we propose a new service delivery platform (SDP), named Future SDP that incorporates principles of cloud computing and service oriented architecture (SOA). Future SDP allows resources, services and middleware infrastructure deployed in diverse clouds to be delivered to users through a common cloud Broker. This cloud Broker is enhanced with policy, management, security and mediation functionalities that ensures proper use of development tools, resources and services only to certified participants of the federated clouds. This work focuses on solving interoperability problems both into infrastructure and middleware layer of the conventional SDPs. Finally, the operational attributes of Future SDP are depicted through a delivery scenario of healthcare telemonitoring services.