Johan Muskens

In practice: UML software architecture and design description

The Unified Modeling Language has attracted many organizations and practitioners. UML is now the de facto modeling language for software development. Several features account for its popularity: its a standardized notation, rich in expressivity; UML 2.0 provides 13 diagram types that enable modeling several different views and abstraction levels. Furthermore, UML supports domain-specific extensions using stereotypes and tagged values. Finally, several case tools integrate UML modeling with other tasks such as generating code and reverse-engineering models from code. Our study focused on UML use and model quality in actual projects rather than on its adequacy as a notation or language.

Continua: The Impact of a Personal Telehealth Ecosystem

The Continua Health Alliance is nearing the first release of its Design Guidelines, an important milestone towards the establishment of a personal telehealth ecosystem. These guidelines address the technical barrier for a personal telehealth ecosystem: interoperability amongst multivendor systems. This paper describes why it is essential to address interoperability, regulatory aspects of multi-vendor systems and reimbursement for establishment of a personal telehealth ecosystem. In addition we elaborate on the impact that Continua has on the development of the personal telehealth domain. First we motivate why the establishment of such an ecosystem is an essential part in addressing the healthcare challenges in society.

Empowering Healthcare Patients with Smart Technology

Continua Health Alliance is developing a set of technical interoperability guidelines for personal telehealth systems that will make it possible to better monitor high-yield microevents over time and thereby enable timely lifestyle adjustments.

Managing Trustworthiness in Component-based Embedded Systems

Component-based systems use software components to achieve their overall high-level functionality which, in turn, may be extended by initiating the download of new components. This action may detrimentally affect the systems overall dependability and security characteristics. We address the problem of the enhancement of dependability and security for component-based embedded systems that run, for example, in consumer and embedded electronics devices. We propose a Trustworthiness Management Framework which, while acting on the behalf of components (Trustors), supervises the systems existing Trustor-Trustee relationships and preserves the overall system level of dependability and security. This is achieved by monitoring quality metrics on the components behaviours, by periodically evaluating their trustworthiness, and (when applicable) by controlling them. This paper focuses on the trustworthiness evaluation process offered by the Trustworthiness Management Framework. Trustworthiness evaluation is seen as a Trustors-parameterisable function. Trustworthiness is expressed with a triple of values: compliance, benignity and stability. The first measures the degree to which a component satisfies the Trustors requirement; the second and third express the expected belief that, resp., the components will continue to be compliant and the components behavioural qualities will remain stable. Trustworthiness is used by the Trustworthiness Manager Framework to make control decisions to regulate the systems overall dependability and security characteristics. Keywords: component-based systems, trustworthiness evaluation, trustworthiness management architecture, dependability and security.

Continua: The reference architecture of a personal telehealth ecosystem

The Continua Health Alliance, which was started in 2006 to enable an interoperable personal telehealth ecosystem, has become a major force in the personal telehealth domain. Within one year after the release of the Version One Design Guidelines over a dozen interoperable products have been officially Continua Certified and many more are coming. In parallel Continua continued its technical developments and has since made great progress on defining interoperability for the LAN and WAN interfaces, and with that now enables end-to-end interoperability. In this paper we motivate why the establishment of such an ecosystem is an essential part in addressing the healthcare challenges in society and why it is essential to address interoperability. The paper introduces the Continua Health Alliance and describes in detail the Continua end-to-end architecture and guidelines, including its security aspects.