Jan Sliwa

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.

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.

A Generalized Framework for Multi-party Data Exchange for IoT Systems

The discussion of data communications in Internet of Things (IoT) often concentrates on technical issues: physical signals, protocols, database architectures, stream processing, cloud storage. On the higher level data interoperability and common semantics are major problems. In this paper we want to discuss the issues related to data interchange between independent, collaborating parties. We will identify typical parties and ask what data do they need to perform their function (operation optimization, quality control, etc.) that have to be extracted from the raw data streams. We will also ask what data do they want to protect from other parties (trade secrets, minor technical problems). Especially if data are related to people a careful anonymization scheme has to implemented. Based on examples, we will propose and discuss a generalized framework for such data exchange.

Ethics between the lines (of code)

All technical systems influence humans, therefore developing and using them has always ethical aspects. This influence may be strong or weak, direct or indirect. Nowadays, especially with the advent of smart medical devices, systems analyzing big data about us and taking decisions related to our lives, or other forms of pervasive computing, this interaction of technical systems with humans is becoming more intensive and more complex. The growing number of such system, lack of experienced developers, limited budgets and the rush to market may cause important, unpredictable risks. This paper discusses the problem of the ethical decisions taken by the developers inadvertently - just by coding - and proposes some measures to contain this problem and to reduce its impact.

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.