Lucia Ciofi

Design of a RESTful Web Information System for Drug Prescription and Administration

Drug prescription and administration processes strongly impact on the occurrence of risks in medical settings for they can be sources of adverse drug events (ADEs). A properly engineered use of information and communication technologies has proven to be a promising approach to reduce these risks. In this study, we propose PHARMA, a web information system which supports healthcare staff in the secure cooperative execution of drug prescription, transcription and registration tasks. PHARMA allows the easy sharing and management of documents containing drug-related information (i.e., drug prescriptions, medical reports, screening), which is often inconsistent and scattered across different information systems and heterogeneous organization domains (e.g., departments, other hospital facilities). PHARMA enables users to access such information in a consistent and secure way, through the adoption of REST and web-oriented design paradigms and protocols. We describe the implementation of the PHARMA prototype, and we discuss the results of the usability evaluation that we carried out with the staff of a hospital in Florence, Italy.

Telematics integrated system to perform drugs prescription and administration reducing adverse drug events

In this paper we present PHARMA 2.0 a telematics integrated system aimed at reducing Adverse Drug Events (ADEs) in the phases of drug prescription, transcription, distribution and administration. The proposed system is grounded on three sub-systems: a CPOE (Computerized Prescription Order Entry), an RFID-based drug container and dispenser and a middleware system. The visualization and management of prescription and administration data are handled through a web application designed to comply with international usability regulation.

An Overlay Infrastructural Approach for a Web-Wide Trustworthy Identity and Profile Management

Scalability and trust-enabling capabilities in Web-wide Profile Management are two challenges addressed in this paper. An infrastructural theoretical framework is proposed and discussed, based on the InterDataNet (IDN) architecture aimed at supporting seamless data interoperability to facilitate sharing and exploitation of distributed and heterogeneous user profile information. This paper presents the grounding issues of a more detailed analysis in progress on this problem, to highlight the prospected advantages and the technical viability of the proposed approach. It is possible to apply the framework in cross-domains scenarios such as e.g. e-gov and e-health, in which the trusted management of identities and profiles is required. The present study provides a starting-point for further research and development of the IDN as the technological system underlying the e-Profile Management Systems towards a trust-enabling Web-wide service.

InterDataNet: A Scalable Middleware Infrastructure for Smart Data Integration

At the core of the Internet/Web of Things lays the issue of large-scale interoperability of heterogeneous Things/Objects networks. Going beyond limited-scale interoperability, middleware requires dealing with a number of issues targeting, among others, the Web-wide Object addressability and Objects capabilities orchestration for the development of different applications. Such a goal requires not only addressing “internetworking things” at a communication level but also “interdataworking of things” i.e., providing interoperability among Objects smart data. Indeed, the smarter and the most interoperable are the data, the easier will be sharing, linking, and processing between distributed IoT applications. This chapter discusses the architectural requirements of the InterDataNet (IDN) framework. IDN approach provides scalable integration, management, and reuse of large numbers of Objects networks in the Web of Data, thus enabling Web of Things applications. The core of the IDN is provided through three main views: the IDN-Information Model, the IDN-Service Architecture, and the IDN-Applications.

Project for the Cataloguing of the Antique Moulds of the Ginori Factory at Doccia

Using the sophisticated digital technologies that have been recently developed, the project that we are presenting here has the objective of cataloguing a vast and varied collection of moulds acquired by the Ginori factory in Doccia (Sesto Fiorentino, Florence) from the 1740s until the first decades of the 20th century. The moulds can be classified into two main categories: those made in the workshops of the sculptors working in bronze, most of whom were Florentine artists active in the 18th century, and those that were made by modelers in the factory using sculptures from private collections (in particular, antique marbles and bronze statuettes) or models that were specially made in the factory. The project is organized according to two workflows and includes the creation of a system for archiving, managing and retrieving the information which is called the Doccia Digital Archive System (DDA System). The first workflow is used for the sets of moulds for which we have no information concerning the positive (archetype). For the non-invasive exploration of the moulds we used 3D scans of the inside of the mould followed by the virtual reconstruction of the figure. The second workflow deals with groups of moulds that were part of the documentary campaigns conducted in 1960-1968 and in 2009-2010. For both of the workflows, there is an art historical study that completes the description of the sets of moulds being examined. The input into the DDA System of this vast quantity of heterogeneous data gathered during the development of the two workflows will make it possible for users at the Doccia Museum and the factory as well as ceramic restorers and scholars in Italy and other countries to make use of the information and the images.

A distributed approach to Complex Event Processing in RFID-enabled hospitals

In this article we adopt the Complex Event Processing (CEP) approach for the management of information related to patients status in the context of RFID-enabled hospitals. Our main objective is to support clinical risk management by combining data from different RFID-based appliances used to monitor patient identification, patient tracking and drugs administration control. We propose a distributed system that directly embodies essential CEP principles such as event abstraction, event aggregation and event transformation to offer a hierarchical and distributed architecture where CEP capabilities are supplied by processing nodes. Events flowing through the system levels are progressively aggregated and refined in order to produce a global scoped information. In addition, we introduce specific events patterns aimed at identifying possible dangerous patient conditions.

Interdatanet naming system: a scalable architecture for managing URIs of heterogeneous and distributed data with rich semantics

Establishing equivalence links between (semantic) resources, as it is the case in the Linked Data approach, implies permanent search, analysis and alignment of new (semantic) data in a rapidly changing environment. Moreover the distributed management of data brings not negligible requirements as regards their authorship, update, versioning and replica management. Instead of providing solutions for the above issues at the application level, our approach relies on the adoption of a common layered infrastructure: InterDataNet (IDN). The core of the IDN architecture is the Naming System aimed at providing a scalable and open service to support consistent reuse of entities and their identifiers, enabling a global reference and addressing mechanism for convenient retrieval of resources. The IDN architecture also provides basic collaboration-oriented functions for (semantic) data, featuring authorship control, versioning and replica management through its stack layers.