Isabel Román

Fast Technique for Noninvasive Fetal ECG Extraction

This letter describes a fast and very simple algorithm for estimating the fetal electrocardiogram (FECG). It is based on independent component analysis, but we substitute its computationally demanding calculations for a much simpler procedure. The resulting method consists of two steps: 1) a dimensionality reduction step and 2) a computationally light postprocessing stage used to enhance the FECG signal.

An association rule mining method for estimating the impact of project management policies on software quality, development time and effort

Accurate and early estimations are essential for effective decision making in software project management. Nowadays, classical estimation models are being replaced by data mining models due to their application simplicity and the rapid production of profitable results. In this work, a method for mining association rules that relate project attributes is proposed. It deals with the problem of discretizing continuous data in order to generate a manageable number of high confident association rules. The method was validated by applying it to data from a Software Project Simulator. The association model obtained allows us to estimate the influence of certain management policy factors on various software project attributes simultaneously.

How technology is empowering patients? A literature review.

The term ‘Patient Empowerment’ (PE) is a growing concept – so in popularity as in application – covering situations where citizens are encouraged to take an active role in the management of their own health. This concept is serving as engine power for increasing the quality of health systems, but a question is still unanswered, ‘how PE will be effectively achieved?’ Beyond psychological implications, empowerment of patients in daily practice relies on technology and the way it is used. Unfortunately, the heterogeneity of approaches and technologies makes difficult to have a global vision of how PE is being performed.

The Maternal Abdominal ECG as Input to MICA in the Fetal ECG Extraction Problem

This letter presents a successful system for recovering the fetal electrocardiogram using multidimensional ICA (MICA). MICA requires as many observations as sources. To increase the number of observations, MICA is often applied to data sets that include measurements taken at the mothers thoracic region. However, experiments suggest that the propagation from the maternal heart to the mothers abdomen is not a simple delay, and that approach may fail. Alternatively, our method first estimates the maternal ECG directly from the mothers abdomen. Then, inputs this estimated ECG to MICA. Experiments show superior performance as compared with the traditional approach.

Empowering citizens with access control mechanisms to their personal health resources.

BACKGROUND Advancements in information and communication technologies have allowed the development of new approaches to the management and use of healthcare resources. Nowadays it is possible to address complex issues such as meaningful access to distributed data or communication and understanding among heterogeneous systems. As a consequence, the discussion focuses on the administration of the whole set of resources providing knowledge about a single subject of care (SoC). New trends make the SoC administrator and responsible for all these elements (related to his/her demographic data, health, well-being, social conditions, etc.) and s/he is granted the ability of controlling access to them by third parties. The subject of care exchanges his/her passive role without any decision capacity for an active one allowing to control who accesses what. PURPOSE We study the necessary access control infrastructure to support this approach and develop mechanisms based on semantic tools to assist the subject of care with the specification of access control policies. This infrastructure is a building block of a wider scenario, the Person-Oriented Virtual Organization (POVO), aiming at integrating all the resources related to each citizens health-related data. The POVO covers the wide range and heterogeneity of available healthcare resources (e.g., information sources, monitoring devices, or software simulation tools) and grants each SoC the access control to them. METHODS Several methodological issues are crucial for the design of the targeted infrastructure. The distributed system concept and focus are reviewed from the service oriented architecture (SOA) perspective. The main frameworks for the formalization of distributed system architectures (Reference Model-Open Distributed Processing, RM-ODP; and Model Driven Architecture, MDA) are introduced, as well as how the use of the Unified Modelling Language (UML) is standardized. The specification of access control policies and decision making mechanisms are essential keys for this approach and they are accomplished by using semantic technologies (i.e., ontologies, rule languages, and inference engines). RESULTS The results are mainly focused on the security and access control of the proposed scenario. An ontology has been designed and developed for the POVO covering the terminology of the scenario and easing the automation of administration tasks. Over that ontology, an access control mechanism based on rule languages allows specifying access control policies, and an inference engine performs the decision making process automatically. The usability of solutions to ease administration tasks to the SoC is improved by the Me-As-An-Admin (M3A) application. This guides the SoC through the specification of personal access control policies to his/her distributed resources by using semantic technologies (e.g., metamodeling, model-to-text transformations, etc.). All results are developed as services and included in an architecture in accordance with standards and principles of openness and interoperability. CONCLUSIONS Current technology can bring health, social and well-being care actually centered on citizens, and granting each person the management of his/her health information. However, the application of technology without adopting methodologies or normalized guidelines will reduce the interoperability of solutions developed, failing in the development of advanced services and improved scenarios for health delivery. Standards and reference architectures can be cornerstones for future-proof and powerful developments. Finally, not only technology must follow citizen-centric approaches, but also the gaps needing legislative efforts that support these new paradigms of healthcare delivery must be identified and addressed.

Experiences applying RM-ODP principles and techniques to intelligent transportation system architectures

This paper shows the early experiences transferring architectural knowledge from Academic to Industry within an R+D+I project. This is done through the design and development of an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) Architecture following SOA and RM-ODP principles, to facilitate openness, reusability, scalability and interoperability. Rationale selection of standards, technologies and platforms, considering systems requirements (real time, cost ellipsis) has been done. An iterative agile development process, with incremental stages from design to final prototype, has been used. Early outcomes are centered in two services; multimedia flow management and notification. They have been developed using CORBA and are embedded in systems devices.

Easing the development of healthcare architectures following RM-ODP principles and healthcare standards

RM-ODP has been widely accepted and used in the field of system and software model engineering and of enterprise computing within different environments. One of these specific domains is healthcare, in which the international standard Health Information Services Architecture (HISA) is applied under the directives of RM-ODP. HISA presents a flexible architecture identifying common use cases, actors, information, and services and easing its extension with specific services, systems and information. The HISA standard follows system specification through the RM-ODP viewpoints but it does not consider other features of the reference model, such as the Enterprise language or the UML4ODP specification. In this paper, we introduce the rationale and specification of the three technology-independent viewpoints of an HISA-based architecture conforming to RM-ODP and UML4ODP. Moreover, we evaluate how easy it is to extend this architecture to introduce specific services and elements. As proof of concept we explore security and privacy issues (i.e., requirements, actors, information objects, etc.) and enrich the architecture with suitable objects and services, mainly from access control standardization efforts. In addition, a detailed discussion about the divergences between RM-ODP and HISA is presented. The main contribution of our work is to develop (guided by RM-ODP, HISA, and other standards) a methodology and tools allowing healthcare service developers and designers to build solutions conforming to standards and leveraging the benefits of distribution and interoperability. These tools consist of the specification of three technology-independent viewpoints according to the guidelines of HISA, RM-ODP and UML4ODP for the healthcare domain, and they will be freely available. In parallel, these viewpoints are extended with access control issues, and the adequacy of the HISA extension mechanism is evaluated.

Privilege Management Infrastructure for Virtual Organizations in Healthcare Grids

This paper is focused on the management of virtual organizations (VO) inside healthcare environments where grid technology is used as middleware for a healthcare services-oriented architecture (HSOA). Some of the main tasks considered for the provision of an efficient VO management are management of users, assignation of roles to users, assignation of privileges to roles, and definition of resources access policies. These tasks are extremely close to privilege management infrastructures (PMI), so we face VO management services as part of the PMI supporting access control to healthcare resources inside the HSOA. In order to achieve a completely open and interoperable PMI, we review and apply standards of security and architectural design. Moreover, semantic technologies are introduced in decision points for access control allowing the management of a high degree of descriptors by means of ontologies and infer the decision making through rules and reasoners.

Privilege management infrastructure for virtual organizations in healthcare grids

This paper is focused in the management of virtual organizations (VO) inside healthcare environments where GRID technology is used as middleware for a healthcare services oriented architecture (HSOA). Some of the main tasks considered for the provision of a well established VO management are: management of users, assignation of roles to users, assignation of privileges to roles, definition of resources access policies. These tasks are extremely close to privilege management infrastructures (PMI), so we face VO management services as part of the PMI supporting access control to healthcare resources inside the HSOA.

Personalizing Care: Integration of Hospital and Homecare

Hospital and homecare must be understood as a necessary conjunction to accomplish efficient personalized care. In this sense, the integration of hospital and homecare protocols and technologies should be considered from the moment that they begin to be designed. The proliferation of healthcare units and services complicates this task, as multiple administrative domains can be found, usually spread out in multiple technology domains, difficult to integrate. This hard integration requires a well defined middleware where heterogeneous and autonomous components must be included. The design of this middleware observing well accepted international standards is a cornerstone for the successful deployment. This chapter makes a review of the concept of personalized medicine, the main research trends in hospital and homecare and it finally proposes some approaches to design architectures providing healthcare scenarios and knowledge integration.