Marius Mikalsen

Healthcare Systems and Other Applications

This paper presents healthcare systems and their applications namely helping people with dementia navigate their day, empowering the elderly and the cognitively disabled, context awareness in residence for elders, RFID-based nutritional assistance, a computer-based library for the blind, an NLP-based tool for assisting people with autism, making smart clothing smarter, PAS: a wireless-enabled personal assistance system for independent living

Distributed context management in a mobility and adaptation enabling middleware (MADAM)

As computing devices are getting smaller, we tend to bring them everywhere. Consequently the operating conditions of the devices are constantly changing (e.g. changing user requirements, change in the system context and environment context). In order to be usable and dependable, applications and services need to self-adapt to changes in context. This work describes a context management approach for reducing the complexity of context aggregation and utilisation. The context manager is a core component in the MADAM (Mobility and ADaptation enAbling Middleware) project.

Experiences from Model-Driven Development of Homecare Services: UML Profiles and Domain Models

Model-driven development approaches such as Model Driven Architecture (MDA) have been proposed as the new paradigm for software development. The adoption of MDA is still low, partly because of the general-purpose modelling language being used. Domain specific modelling languages are being developed for technological and industrial domains to improve the expressiveness and effect of model-driven development techniques. The healthcare domain could benefit from these methodologies. In order to incorporate domain knowledge in a MDA process, information about workflows, artefacts and actors can be formalized in a UML profile and applied by MDA tools for design and development. This paper presents the work done on model-driven development of smart homecare services in the MPOWER project. Following an iterative approach, two UML profiles to support development of Service Oriented Architecture based homecare applications are proposed. Using homecare specific UML profiles indicate an improvement in the process for model-driven development of homecare services.

Putting Context in Context: The Role and Design of Context Management in a Mobility and Adaptation Enabling Middleware

The operating context of mobile applications and services is constantly changing. In order to achieve higher levels of usability, mobile applications and services need to adapt to changes in context. This paper argues the need for adaptation enabling middleware that simplifies the development of context aware adaptive applications, and makes it economically and practically feasible to develop such applications. We claim that the traditional approach of simply providing contextual information to applications and let them handle the adaptation can be ineffective. We suggest a holistic approach where context management is an integral part of a more comprehensive adaptation enabling middleware. This paper describes the role and the design of the context management component in such a middleware architecture. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated in a scenario where proof-of-concept implementations have been developed and evaluated.

The Facets of Sociomateriality: A Systematic Mapping of Emerging Concepts and Definitions

Sociomateriality is gaining momentum and is by now characterized as a research stream in the information system field. Although some definitions emerged, there is still uncertainty about how to conceptually and analytically address sociomateriality. The debate ranges from understanding sociomateriality as just a fancy word for technology to treating it as a de-facto theory of the human-technology relationship. To bring the field forward, a common basic understanding of what sociomateriality entails is needed. In this paper we set out to contribute to such an understanding. We do this by conducting a systematic mapping study of emerging concepts and definitions in the current empirical body of literature on sociomateriality. Our analysis finds three key resulting facets: mutuality (what is a sociomaterial assemblage?), performativity (how does it perform?), and multidimensionality (When and where does it perform?). Our findings outline how sociomaterial studies analytically and methodologically address performativity spanning across time and space.

Infrastructuring as Ambiguous Repair: A Case Study of a Surveillance Infrastructure Project

Health and welfare organisations are under increased scrutiny regarding their ability to make innovations in and increase the productivity of their services by digitising and automating them. Our empirical case study focuses on the implementation of a new health and welfare surveillance infrastructure project in a large Norwegian municipality. The infrastructure project led to significant challenges for various reasons, such as coordinating with vendors and subvendors, balancing governmentally defined purchase and implementation processes with local work practices, tailoring packaged solutions, and the differing concerns of many actors across different municipal departments. moves through ongoing cycles project moves through ongoing cycles of breakdown and repair in order to implement a working infrastructure. Key to our analysis is the way repair plays out as the infrastructure project deals with the ambiguity resulting from uncertainties in relation to both how technology works in practice and how the project will be organised. We empirically analyse three collaborative repair mechanisms: value-network repair, process repair, and participation repair. Our study enriches the understanding of infrastructuring by discussing the collaborative repair mechanisms necessary for mobilising and adapting the practices, systems, and processes that coexist in infrastructure projects. Additionally, the concept of ambiguous repair suggests that tensions cannot be permanently resolved but rather should be considered an ongoing and necessary part of practical infrastructuring.

From Episodes to Continuity of Care: a Study of a Call Center for Supporting Independent Living

Call centers are a central coordination hub for remote health services and telemedicine. Recently, also telecare providers use call centers to support the remote care of seniors living independently. Although we know that the quality of the interaction between caregiver and senior care recipient is important, there is a gap in our knowledge as to how ICT solutions can support this interaction through a call center model. In this paper, we describe a case study of a modern call center designed to provide services for independent living, primarily for seniors. The case study gives us new insight into how service providers envision ICT support for independent living in the future. We discuss our findings from interviews, observations and design workshops in light of relevant literature about independent living and call centers. We conclude with a set of directions for future ICT for call centers to support independent living of seniors. These tools should: 1) support continuity of care instead of episodes of care, 2) support caregiving activities in addition to medical triage activities, 3) support “technical caregiving” i.e. remote use, testing and maintenance of technology at home, and 4) support call center operators in leading ad hoc and emergent coordination in distributed teams.

A Case Study of an Information Infrastructure Supporting Knowledge Work in Oil and Gas Exploration

It is well rehearsed in the fields of CSCW and IS that the relationship between the social and the material is bi-directional and shaped locally. But what happens when knowledge work is stretched across space and time, and the practice of today relies on actions and reflections done elsewhere and at different times? This paper presents an on-going case study of oil and gas exploration that takes steps to shed light on this emerging issue. I argue the relevance of framing the process of generating interpretations in oil and gas exploration in terms of information infrastructures. The case is representative for other cases where practitioners’ reflections cannot immediately be confirmed by empirical observation. Through a discussion on the concepts of coordination and accumulation across the dimensions of space and time, I outline how an able information infrastructure in this domain must balance the dualism of the concepts of naturalisation and historification.

Learning in the Large - An Exploratory Study of Retrospectives in Large-Scale Agile Development

Many see retrospectives as the most important practice of agile software development. Previous studies of retrospectives have focused on pro- cess and outcome at team level. In this article, we study how a large-scale agile development project uses retrospectives through an analysis of retrospective reports identifying a total of 109 issues and 36 action items as a part of a longitudinal case study. We find that most of the issues identified relate to team-level learning and improvement, and discuss these findings in relation to current advice to improve learning outcome in large-scale agile development.

First workshop on convergence and consolidation towards standard AAL platform services

The following document describes the call for papers for a workshop based on identifying which are the potential commonalities that are important for an AAL system, so they can be discussed and proposed for opening an standardization process. Groups of components like context-management, user interaction management or semantic description of services are frequent components and technologies that are part of an AAL system.