José Gonzalez Enríquez

A Strategic Study about Quality Characteristics in e-Health Systems Based on a Systematic Literature Review

e-Health Systems quality management is an expensive and hard process that entails performing several tasks such as analysis, evaluation, and quality control. Furthermore, the development of an e-Health System involves great responsibility since peoples health and quality of life depend on the system and services offered. The focus of the following study is to identify the gap in Quality Characteristics for e-Health Systems, by detecting not only which are the most studied, but also which are the most used Quality Characteristics these Systems include. A strategic study is driven in this paper by a Systematic Literature Review so as to identify Quality Characteristics in e-Health. Such study makes information and communication technology organizations reflect and act strategically to manage quality in e-Health Systems efficiently and effectively. As a result, this paper proposes the bases of a Quality Model and focuses on a set of Quality Characteristics to enable e-Health Systems quality management. Thus, we can conclude that this paper contributes to implementing knowledge with regard to the mission and view of e-Health (Systems) quality management and helps understand how current researches evaluate quality in e-Health Systems.

Towards an MDE-based approach to test entity reconciliation applications

The management of large volumes of data has given rise to significant challenges to the entity reconciliation problem (which refers to combining data from different sources for a unified vision) due to the fact that the data are becoming more unstructured, unclean and incomplete, need to be more linked, etc. Testing the applications that implement the entity reconciliation problem is crucial to ensure both the correctness of the reconciliation process and the quality of the reconciled data. In this paper, we present a first approach, based on MDE, which allows the creation of test models for the integration testing of entity reconciliation applications.

An approach to characterize and evaluate the quality of Product Lifecycle Management Software Systems

Abstract PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) is an information management system that can integrate data, processes, business systems and staff in a company, in general. PLM allows managing efficiently and economically the information that all these elements generate from the initial idea to design, manufacture, maintenance and elimination phases of the product lifecycle. PLM has to include processes and tools to assure the quality of the final products. This way, it is difficult for PLM experts (from aeronautical or automation organizations, among others) to find an environment that suggests which is the best PLM solution that copes with their necessities. A number of PLM solutions are available for this purpose, but experts require a suitable mechanism to select the most appropriate one for the specific context of each organization. For this purpose, this paper presents a quality model, based on QuEF (Quality Evaluation Framework), that aims at helping organizations choose the most useful PLM solution for their particular environments. This model supports both static and dynamic aspects that may be customized for any kind of organization and taken as reference model. Particularly, our approach has been validated in the context of large enterprises in the aeronautical industry within a real R&D project carried out between our research group and Airbus.

Behavior patterns in hormonal treatments using fuzzy logic models

Assisted reproductive technologies are a combination of medical strategies designed to treat infertility patients. Ideal stimulation treatment has to be individualized, but one of the main challenges which clinicians face in the everyday clinic is how to select the best medical protocol for a patient. This work aims to look for behavior patterns in this kind of treatments, using fuzzy logic models with the objective of helping gynecologists and embryologists to make decisions that could improve the process of in vitro fertilization. For this purpose, a real-world dataset composed of one hundred and twenty-three (123) patients and five hundred and fifty-nine (559) treatments applied in relation to such patients provided by an assisted reproduction clinic, has been used to obtain the fuzzy models. As conclusion, this work corroborates some known clinic experiences, provides some new ones and proposes a set of questions to be solved in future experiments.

A Model Oriented Approach for Managing Traceability of Biological Samples and Tests of Patients in Assisted Reproduction Clinics.

Assisted reproduction has become a service that more and more people access. Current problems such as the delay in the age of motherhood, single-parent couples, etc. they have proliferated the options and the different treatments that are put at the service of society. A fundamental part of these processes lies in the work of laboratories, in the samples that are handled in clinical processes and then be implanted in future mothers. The management of the samples is a critical aspect that requires all the opportune mechanisms that guarantee the traceability of said samples, avoiding fatal errors. The correct identification, monitoring and control of them is a fundamental aspect and of special relevance. However, the systems currently offered to clinics present important problems. On the one hand, they offer little security, are very expensive or very independent of a specific provider, so that the traceability system cannot be connected to the hospital central management system, or they are very intrusive control systems in the daily work of the laboratory technicians. In this paper a software solution based on the definition of automatic models and protocols is proposed. It includes the appropriate devices, to manage the traceability of the samples in parallel to the work of the laboratory

An Extension of NDT to Model Entity Reconciliation Problems.

Within the development of software systems, the development of web applications may be one of the most widespread at present due to the great number of advantages they provide such as: multiplatform, speed of access or the not requiring extremely powerful hardware among others. The fact that so many web applications are being developed, makes grotesque the volume of information that it is generated daily. In the management of all this information, it appears the entity reconciliation problem, which is to identify objects referring to the same real-world entity. This paper proposes to give a solution to this problem through a web perspective. To this end, the NDT methodology has been taken as a reference and has been extended adding new activities, artefacts and documents to cover this problem.

A MDE-based framework to improve the process management: The EMPOWER project

Todays world economic situation is ruled by issues such as reducing cost, improving quality, maximizing profit and improving and optimizing production processes at any kind of organization. In this context, BPM (Business Processes Management) can be an essential strategy. However, there are business situations where is necessary to define innovation solutions to apply BPM in a proper way (e.g., needs of interoperability between process modeling languages, mechanisms to generate the executable model of the process maintaining the traceability with the definition model of the process, mechanisms to manage the measurement of processes from early stages, etc.). This paper describes and analysis some of these situations and proposes a framework based on MDE (Model-Driven Engineering) to support these needs. This MDE-based framework is also supported by the EMPOWER platform which has been developed in an innovation project carried out by Servinform Company and our research group (IWT2, University of Seville, Spain). This platform allows applying advanced MDE techniques to improve the application of BPM in business environments.

Detecting Functional Requirements Inconsistencies within Multi-teams Projects Framed into a Model-based Web Methodology

One of the most essential processes within the software project life cycle is the REP (Requirements Engineering Process) because it allows specifying the software product requirements. This specification should be as consistent as possible because it allows estimating in a suitable manner the effort required to obtain the final product. REP is complex in itself, but this complexity is greatly increased in big, distributed and heterogeneous projects with multiple analyst teams and high integration between functional modules. This paper presents an approach for the systematic conciliation of functional requirements in big projects dealing with a web model-based approach and how this approach may be implemented in the context of the NDT (Navigational Development Techniques): a web methodology. This paper also describes the empirical evaluation in the CALIPSOneo project by analyzing the improvements obtained with our approach.