Ryan Babbitt

MISS: Medicine Information Support System in the Smart Home Environment

The Smart Home uses different technology to facilitate the lives of the resident and is especially useful for assisting the elderly and persons with special needs. One area where this population would benefit is managing their prescribed medications. This paper presents the Medicine Information Support System (MISS) which integrates the patients information to assist with the prescriptions management. The system checks for conflicting medicines, health conditions and food items. The data generated is used to feed other subsystems in the Smart Home such as the reminder and medicine inventory. A formal model is introduced for conflicts checking. The three main entities: doctor, pharmacy and Smart Home use this model to detect their particular set of conflicts which ensures that conflicts involving the entire context will eventually be detected. The design uses this model as its basis for conflict checking. The prototyped implementation of the entire system is based on Java.

Using Web Services for Medication Management in a Smart Home Environment

The Smart Home is a house equipped with technology to assist especially the elderly and persons with special needs. Smart Homes rely on Service-Oriented technology usually OSGi. Web Services (WS) receives little emphasis on Smart Homes, but they can be very useful for some applications. That is the case of management of medication as this task can become very difficult and involve different, remote parties. Several solutions have been proposed for applications like medications management but their lack of interoperability limits them. This paper presents a solution that integrates current systems and provides interoperability by using WS. The secure transfer of sensitive data among subsystems is achieved by using secure WS for communication purposes as shown by our prototyped implementation.

Towards the Modeling of Personal Privacy in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

Privacy is a known barrier to the acceptance of ubiquitous computing technologies because they require individuals to trade control of their personal information and personal spaces for improved quality of life and assistance with daily activities. Previous work has been done to analyze and protect privacy in ubiquitous computing environments, but such efforts do not include a formal underlying model. We seek to approach the privacy problem from a different perspective. Namely, we seek to propose, verify, and analyze a formal model of privacy for these environments. In this paper, we discuss the beginning stages of our model, namely the resources that need to be protected, the guidelines for constructing the model, and the high-level components of our personal privacy model.

Information Privacy Management in Smart Home Environments: Modeling, Verification, and Implementation

In this paper, we describe our efforts at modeling and verifying information privacy management in smart home environments. By proposing a three-step research plan, this work will help us and others better understand and define the behavior of smart home technology, information privacy, and the relationship between them

A framework for service morphing and heterogeneous service discovery in smart environments

The openness and dynamicity of smart environments makes it a necessity to adopt a flexible software architecture. Service oriented architecture (SOA), and more specifically Open Service Gateway Initiative (OSGi), has emerged to be one of the most suitable choices; however, our experience using OSGi exposes its several shortcomings as an SOA platform: 1. The number of services required to be designed and implemented for each sensor, actuator and external system can be prohibitively high; 2. Cross-architecture interaction with non-OSGi software artifacts is challenging and inelegant; 3. There is a need for a more systematic approach to allow mobile devices remote access to OSGi services and enable opportunistic utilizations of local resources. We propose a framework to address these challenges by introducing a mechanism to support morphing a core service implementation of underlying communication protocols and software libraries to customized services using configuration files and a cross-architecture service directory for both OSGi and web services (WS). Our solution allows mobile devices to discover, access and adjust for local resources and results in more open, less cumbersome, and more integrative interactions among computing, communicative, sensing and actuation elements in smart environments.

Environment Objects: A Novel Approach for Modeling Privacy in Pervasive Computing

Maintaining user privacy is a well-known challenge and obstacle to the acceptance of pervasive computing. Privacy has been researched from various perspectives by social science, legislative, and technological communities resulting in an information-centric approach that regulates of the collection and use of personal information. However, through the actuation of devices and objects in the users physical environment, pervasive computing also introduces other significant challenges to a users physical privacy. Our research introduces an environment-centric approach to modeling user privacy and regulating intrusions to physical privacy. We introduce four principles to guide the construction of physical privacy policies and demonstrate how existing information privacy models can be extended to address these aspects of physical privacy.

PIPER: A Framework for Exploring the Privacy Implications of Pervasive Computing Applications in Their Physical Environments

Pervasive computing presents profound privacy risks for end users because its capabilities to monitor, control, and interact with the physical world. As a first step to support early evaluation of potential privacy violations, we introduce PIPER, a framework for the systematic modeling, analysis, and exploration of Privacy Implications in PERvasive computing systems and their physical environments. UML/OCL is used to model important structures and behaviors of these systems as well as data flow properties and privacy requirements. This framework facilitates consideration and explicit specification of the effects of actions in the physical environment and the tracing of data flow through both cyber and physical components of the system. Using this framework, privacy analysts and software engineers can communicate more objectively about privacy-related issues, identify faults in application logic, and examine the impact that changes to either applications or physical environments have on personal privacy in pervasive systems.