Marco Nalin

A Home Healthcare System in the Cloud--Addressing Security and Privacy Challenges

Cloud computing is an emerging technology that is expected to support Internet scale critical applications which could be essential to the healthcare sector. Its scalability, resilience, adaptability, connectivity, cost reduction, and high performance features have high potential to lift the efficiency and quality of healthcare. However, it is also important to understand specific risks related to security and privacy that this technology brings. This paper focuses on a home healthcare system based on cloud computing. It introduces several use cases and draws an architecture based on the cloud. A comprehensive methodology is used to integrate security and privacy engineering process into the software development lifecycle. In particular, security and privacy challenges are identified in the proposed cloud-based home healthcare system. Moreover, a functional infrastructure plan is provided to demonstrate the integration between the proposed application architecture with the cloud infrastructure. Finally, the paper discusses several mitigation techniques putting the focus on patient-centric control and policy enforcement via cryptographic technologies, and consequently on digital rights management and attribute based encryption technologies.

Children's adaptation in multi-session interaction with a humanoid robot

This work presents preliminary observations from a study of children (N=19, age 5-12) interacting in multiple sessions with a humanoid robot in a scenario involving game activities. The main purpose of the study was to see how their perception of the robot, their engagement, and their enjoyment of the robot as a companion evolve across multiple interactions, separated by one-two weeks. However, an interesting phenomenon was observed during the experiment: most of the children soon adapted to the behaviors of the robot, in terms of speech timing, speed and tone, verbal input formulation, nodding, gestures, etc. We describe the experimental setup and the system, and our observations and preliminary analysis results, which open interesting questions for further research.

The huggable: a platform for research in robotic companions for pediatric care

Robotic companions offer a unique combination of embodiment and computation which open many new interesting opportunities in the field of pediatric care. As these new technologies are developed, we must consider the central research questions of how such systems should be designed and what the appropriate applications for such systems are. In this paper we present the Huggable, a robotic companion in the form factor of a teddy bear and outline a series of studies we are planning to run using the Huggable in a pediatric care unit.

Towards trustworthy health platform cloud

To address today’s major concerns of health service providers regarding security, resilience and data protection when moving on the cloud, we propose an approach to build a trustworthy healthcare platform cloud, based on a trustworthy cloud infrastructure. This paper first highlights the main security and privacy risks of market available commodity clouds, and outlines security and privacy requirements of a trustworthy health platform cloud, on top of which to deploy various health applications, in compliance with EU data protection legislation. Results from the recent EU TClouds project will be described as a possible solution towards trustworthy cloud architecture, based on a federated cloud-of-clouds, while enforcing security, resilience and data protection in various cloud layers for provisioning trustworthy IaaS, PaaS and SaaS healthcare services.

What a robotic companion could do for a diabetic child

Being a child with diabetes is challenging: apart from the emotional difficulties of dealing with the disease, there are multiple physical aspects that need to be dealt with on a daily basis. Furthermore, as the children grow older, it becomes necessary to self-manage their condition without the explicit supervision of parents or carers. This process requires that the children overcome a steep learning curve. Previous work hypothesized that a robot could provide a supporting role in this process. In this paper, we characterise this potential support in greater detail through a structured collection of perspectives from all stakeholders, namely the diabetic children, their siblings and parents, and the healthcare professionals involved in their diabetes education and care. A series of brain-storming sessions were conducted with 22 families with a diabetic child (32 children and 38 adults in total) to explore areas in which they expected that a robot could provide support and/or assistance. These perspectives were then reviewed, validated and extended by healthcare professionals to provide a medical grounding. The results of these analyses suggested a number of specific functions that a companion robot could fulfil to support diabetic children in their daily lives.

Trustworthy middleware services in the cloud

Establishing trust in systems is a difficult problem to tackle. In the Cloud, establishing trust is even more complicated considering its dynamic nature and distributed resources. One of the Clouds potential feature is providing transparent management of resources at Clouds infrastructure. This would hide technical complexities from Clouds customers, which could be provided using middleware services. Establishing trustworthy middleware services would help in moving in the direction of establishing trust in the Cloud. In this paper we mainly focus on identifying the functions for establishing trustworthy middleware services for supporting home healthcare application. Specifically, we focus on the ones that are required to address the security, privacy, and resilience properties of home healthcare application.

Beyond Health Tracking: A Personal Health and Lifestyle Platform

A personal health and lifestyle platform helps individuals maintain a personal health and lifestyle record and obtain personalized, lifestyle-related advice to improve their health by changing their daily habits. The platform leverages the data stored in a typical personal health record, augmenting it with environmental and sensor data and enabling the monitoring and analysis of an individuals habits. Sharing habits and advice with doctors and friends empowers individuals to become wellness coproducers and leads to a personal health and lifestyle record that is much more useful to the individual maintaining it.

Personality Diagnosis for Personalized eHealth Services

In this paper we present two different approaches to personality diagnosis, for the provision of innovative personalized services, as used in a case study where diabetic patients were supported in the improvement of physical activity in their daily life. The first approach presented relies on a static clustering of the population, with a specific motivation strategy designed for each cluster. The second approach relies on a dynamic population clustering, making use of recommendation systems and algorithms, like Collaborative Filtering. We discuss pro and cons of each approach and a possible combination of the two, as the most promising solution for this and other personalization services in eHealth.

Technology-enhanced multi-domain at home continuum of care program with respect to usual care for people with cognitive impairment: the Ability-TelerehABILITation study protocol for a randomized controlled trial.

BackgroundAccording to the World Alzheimer Report (Prince, The Global Impact of Dementia: an Analysis of Prevalence, Incidence, Cost and Trends, 2015), 46.8 million people worldwide are nowadays living with dementia. And this number is estimated to approximate 131.5 million by 2050, with an increasing burden on society and families. The lack of medical treatments able to stop or slow down the course of the disease has moved the focus of interest toward the nonpharmacological approach and psychosocial therapies for people with/at risk of dementia, as in the Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) condition. The purpose of the present study is to test an individualized home-based multidimensional program aimed at enhancing the continuum of care for MCI and outpatients with dementia in early stage using technology.MethodsThe proposed study is a single blind randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving 30 subjects with MCI and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) randomly assigned to the intervention group (Ability group), who will receive the “Ability Program”, or to the active control group (ACG), who will receive “Treatment As Usual” (TAU). The protocol provides for three steps of assessment: at the baseline (T_0), after treatment, (T_1) and at follow-up (T_2) with a multidimensional evaluation battery including cognitive functioning, behavioral, functional, and quality of life measures. The Ability Program lasts 6 weeks, comprises tablet-delivered cognitive (5 days/week) and physical activities (7 days/week) combined with a set of devices for the measurement and monitoring from remote of vital and physical health parameters. The TAU equally lasts 6 weeks and includes paper and pencil cognitive activities (5 days/week), with clinician’s prescription to perform physical exercise every day and to monitor selected vital parameters.DiscussionResults of this study will inform on the efficacy of a technology-enhanced home care service to preserve cognitive and motor levels of functioning in MCI and AD, in order to slow down their loss of autonomy in daily life. The expected outcome is to ensure the continuity of care from clinical practice to the patient’s home, enabling also cost effectiveness and the empowerment of patient and caregiver in the care process, positively impacting on their quality of life.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov ID: NCT02746484 (registration date: 12/apr/2016 – retrospectively registered).

Designing motivational robot: How robots might motivate children to eat fruits and vegetables

This study contribute toward the creation of social robots as personal and public assistants. The ability of the robot to persuade and motivate people to follow a given behavior is of particular relevance in several cases, especially those related to peoples health recover and maintenance (e.g., personal trainer, diet coach, etc.). In this paper, we evaluated the effect of a humanoid robots use of verbal and bodily features and behaviors in motivating 80 children (age: 8-9 years old) in following healthier lifestyles (namely eat more fruit and vegetables). The results confirmed the hypothesis that the use of such motivational cues significantly improves the persuasiveness of the robot. Moreover the results highlighted a higher impact of the verbal cues implementations, which is in contrast with previous studies.