Ilídio Castro Oliveira

Droid Jacket: Using an Android based smartphone for team monitoring

Professionals such as First Responders are frequently exposed to extreme environmental conditions, which induce stress and fatigue during extensive periods of time. In this scenario, the main issues are the quantification and evaluation of stress and fatigue, since uncontrolled levels have a profound and negative impact on human health and performance. Based on an existing wearable monitoring solution - the Vital Jacket®- we propose an individual and team monitoring mobile solution called DroidJacket. DroidJacket is based on Android mobile devices and provides data aggregation, processing, visualization and optionally relaying services. The DroidJacket design is plugin oriented, integrating analysis modules, namely an online ECG plugin for both real time pulse and arrhythmia detection.

DiseaseCard: A Web-Based Tool for the Collaborative Integration of Genetic and Medical Information

The recent advances on genomics and proteomics research bring up a significant grow on the information that is publicly available. However, navigating through genetic and bioinformatics databases can be a too complex and unproductive task for a primary care physician. Moreover, considering the rare genetic diseases field, we verify that the knowledge about a specific disease is commonly disseminated over a small group of experts. The capture, maintenance and sharing of this knowledge over user-friendly interfaces will introduce new insights in the understanding of some rare genetic diseases. In this paper we present DiseaseCard, a web available collaborative service that aims to integrate and disseminate genetic and medical information on rare genetic diseases.

Demo: wireless IP mesh on android for fire-fighters monitoring

Recently, a few applications appeared that emulate the behaviour of a wireless ad-hoc network at the application layer, or make it accessible through a full programming framework on the Android platform. We show in this demo how to enable mesh networking at the network level, in a transparent manner to applications. We use this network to relay information regarding physiological monitoring of a team of fire-fighters in a fire scenario. The application developed in Android receives the information from a wearable sensor and transmits it to a controller that visualizes the current team progress.

iVital: A Real Time Monitoring System for First Response Teams

Every day, thousands of first responders work to save the lives of others, sometimes without the adequate surveillance of health conditions. The VitalResponder is a project that aims at monitoring and control teams of first responders in emergency scenarios, using mobile technologies to capture and use real-time data to support real-time coordination. In this paper we present a system to capture, process, and display the vital signs of team members, which are made available to a first responders’ team leader, for coordination and monitoring. The system addresses specific requirements of the field action, such as the mobility of actors, combining two of the most recent mobile technologies: the iPad (for the coordination view) and Android OS-based smartphones (for real-time sensor data acquisition).

Stimulating Learning in Engineering Students by Collaborative Entrepreneurship Training

This paper describes the results of an educational project aiming to promote improved learning and entrepreneurial spirit among engineering students by resorting to the simulation of real world business cases in a collaborative digital environment. The approach is based on the combination of the following ingredients: - Creation of student awareness about real world engineering activities, involving engineering professionals and enterprises in selected classroom activities; - Simulation of a business environment in capstone project classes; - Market gaming around a set of business cases where students are organized in teams playing different professional roles (role playing); - Linking the outcome of market gaming and associated business cases with syllabus topics and with practical technological and market issues. The results obtained so far are encouraging and have attracted a major international prize: HP Innovations on Education.

Agents Working on the Integration of Heterogeneous Information Sources in Distributed Healthcare Environments

Hospital information infrastructures integrate today complex mosaics of heterogeneous systems, often dependent on legacy systems. The integration of disparate information sources in healthcare is an essential effort since physicians, and other hospital personnel, use to analyze and combine data provided by different sources distributed along the hospital facilities. Day-after- -day their needs for effective means and tools to support such integration of data increase significantly. In order to fulfill such requirements we designed and developed an extensible multi-agent system that physicians may use to access multiple medical data sources available at the hospital, in a transparent way. This paper presents an overall description of the system giving special attention to its architecture and community of software agents. The agents were specially planned for clinical information gathering, cleaning, integration and presentation in healthcare environments.

Message based integration in Cyber-Physical System: firefighters in the field

We present a Cyber-Physical System for distributed monitoring of first response teams. To cope with different setups, different sensors and computing devices, found in the evolution of the VitalResponder project, we adopted a message brokering pattern to isolate the data aggregation logic from the changing hardware and networking configurations. Sensors publish data to local message brokers (body-area level), that, in turn, publish to higher level messages queues (site-wide level). The brokers use adapters to relay messages over alternative transport protocols, currently available as adapters for messaging standards over TCP (AMQP, MQTT), over UDP (CoAP), and basic sockets (TCP and UDP). The abstraction of messages brokering facilitates the portability to different platforms, and the system has been tested in Android, Raspberry Pi and standard Linux devices, to support a distributed sensor network for firefighter’s missions monitoring.

LIMBus: a lightweight remote monitoring system powered by iOS and BLE

Mobile devices, including off-the-shelf smartphones, are being used as data gateways for nearby sensors in end-to-end integration of monitoring solutions, mostly based in the Android OS. In this paper, we present LIMBus, a lightweight monitoring system supported in iOS mobile devices to perform the role of data collector and gateway. LIMBus uses Bluetooth Low Energy to connect to external sensors and MQTT for mobile to backend streaming. The proposed system has been implemented and is demonstrated for an eHealth monitoring scenario.

Geriatric Helper: An mHealth Application to Support Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment

The Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (CGA) is a multidisciplinary diagnosis approach that considers several dimensions of fragility in older adults to develop an individualized plan to improve their overall health. Despite the evidence of its positive impact, CGA is still applied by a reduced number of professionals in geriatric care in many countries, mostly using a paper-based approach. In this context, we collaborate with clinicians to bring CGA to the attention of more healthcare professionals and to enable its easier application in clinical settings by proposing a mobile application, Geriatric Helper, to act as a pocket guide that is easy to update remotely with up-to-date information, and that acts as a tool for conducting CGA. This approach reduces the time spent on retrieving the scales documentation, the overhead of calculating the results, and works as a source of information for non-specialists. Geriatric Helper is a tool for the health professionals developed considering an iterative, User-Centred Design approach, with extensive contributions from a broad set of users including domain experts, resulting in a highly usable and accepted system. Geriatric Helper is currently being tested in Portuguese healthcare units allowing for any clinician to apply the otherwise experts-limited geriatric assessment.

An Information System for Bus Travelling and Performance Evaluation

A wide vehicular network has a huge potential to collect city-data, specially with respect to city mobility, one of the top concerns of the municipalities. In this work, we propose the use of the mobility data generated by the movement of the connected buses to deliver a new set of tools to support both the bus passengers and bus fleet operator use cases. Considering the bus passengers, it is possible to build smart schedules, which deliver an estimated time of arrival based on the city dynamics along time, and that can be accessed directly in the smartphone. Considering the bus fleet operator, it is possible to characterize the behaviour of buses and bus lines. Using the GPS trace of buses and map-matching algorithm, we are able to discover the line each bus is assigned to. Estimated times of arrival and predictions are implemented recurring to time estimations and predictions, using both data mining and machine learning approaches. Proof-of-concept applications were implemented to demonstrate the real-life applicability, including a mobile app for the citizens, and a web dashboard for the fleet operator.