Theodore Kotsilieris

A Mobile Agent Enabled Wireless Sensor Network for River Water Monitoring

Environmental pollution is becoming a very crucial concern of our society. Water is one of the most important natural resources and has been at risk for some years now. Polluted water affects peoples health and the flora - fauna of the ecosystem. Thus, water supplies monitoring, become increasingly essential for public health. The objective of this work is to properly blend systems at the edge of technology (i.e. mobile agents, wireless networks, sensors, intelligent systems) in order to form an adaptive and autonomous system for supporting advanced management services of environmental data and information mining. The proposed architecture is based on MAs (mobile agents) due to their ability to offer reliable, scalable and failover applications. The minimisation of task completion delay is considered as evaluation metric and early experimental results depict that the MA paradigm outperforms compared with classic client / server architecture.

Enhancing the performance of mobile agent based network management applications

Mobile agent technology (MAT) seems to promising approach for achieving flexible and decentralised network management. A system independent mobile agent platform is used in order to control the roaming and downloading of the required management code, in the form of mobile agents, onto the network devices. A management task such as the configuration or monitoring of a specific QoS parameter related to a particular application may require that a mobile agent (MA) or a set of MAs should visit several network nodes. We present an approach for enhancing the performance of a mobile agent based network management system by monitoring and controlling the communication paths between the network management applications and the mobile agents. In particular we show that when a mobile agent should act on a set of nodes, the time required to perform a management task is decreased if for the sequence by which the nodes will be visited we take into account the workload on them, i.e. at any time to try to visit the less loaded ones.

Prolonging the Lifetime of Two-Tiered Wireless Sensor Networks with Mobile Relays

We propose a clustering scheme for wireless sensor nodes in hierarchical wireless sensor networking architectures that employs mobile relay nodes in order to achieve energy conservation and network lifetime prolongation. The key aspects of our scheme are relay node relocation and reclustering when failures are detected. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated via simulations for various topology layouts based on the sensor node population and number of mobile relay nodes employed. The results show significant energy savings in particular for topologies with large numbers of sensors.

The impact of social networks on health care

Our work examines the risks and benefits stemming from the evolution of Social Network Services (SNSs) in the healthcare domain. More specifically, we study the impact of specific health-oriented social networks such as PatientsLikeMe. Social networks evolved to a ubiquitous part of daily life and WEB 2.0 paved the way for the internet to be used as a method of interactive communication and information immersion. Health SNSs have the strength to influence healthcare services delivery and information availability supported by emerging technologies which track, gather and quantify real-time medical data from patients. SNSs support publicly provided information to patients, offering them the power not only to educate themselves but take part in the decision-making process of their health. On the other hand, healthcare stakeholders have gained access to new information which can help to cut costs, progress research, and improve the healthcare system. However, apart from the unambiguous benefits of SNSs, several risks are identified such as patient confidentiality violation. By incorporating the volumes of data collected by websites like PatientsLikeMe and other WEB 2.0 applications, the patient–industry partnership could ensure better products at lesser costs. Web 3.0 is the next step toward a heath care eco-system which will evolve out of micro-contributions creating the most accurate representations of medicine for the stakeholders.

A health care monitoring system that uses ontology agents

The healthcare domain is mission critical and vast research efforts keep being funded in order to improve life quality of people. Health management consists of specific cooperation intensive activities, while medical knowledge and systems are spatially and functionally distributed. Also, medical data flows are inefficient for dynamic data delivery to stakeholders while the manifold of medical care derives from their diversity and autonomy. In such an environment we propose the implementation of vhMentor based on a solid ontological schema. The aim of the proposed system is to suggest an agent-based solution to overcome the automation deficiencies of medical data monitoring. Towards this objective we study the applicability and usefulness of the mobile agent technology in the healthcare domain. Furthermore, we implemented the encapsulation of remote sensing and medical devices signals in an ontology-supported healthcare information system. The resulting system encourages the future implementation of next generation services (e.g. decision making and reasoning) through autonomous - intelligent agents and reasoning engines.

A web tool for an Open and Linked Health Ecosystem

The challenge to provide qualitative and cost effective health care services becomes more necessary than ever. Telemedicine and telehealth can effectively contribute towards this direction. They do not only enrich medical practice with innovative technologies and systems but ensure interoperability, coordination, collaboration and synergy between physicians, citizens and organizations since they are comprise an integrated ecosystem. In this work, we propose an Open and Linked Health Ecosystem (OLHE) which is a smart web tool for collaborative, integrated and participatory health care provision. It embodies on-line care template development capabilities, automatic installation, assessment, collaborative monitoring and healthcare provision by applying an individual care plan through predefined care plan templates. These templates are modeled as hierarchical structured workflows according to an ontological approach and can be stored anywhere. Also, a modeling scheme based on metagraphs describes the components of our ecosystem, depicting the personalized care plan installation procedure through a simplified scenario.

A review of 3D Virtual Worlds in medical and health education

Information and Computer Technologies have produced new generation interaction methods and services to support human activities, offering evolutionary learning procedures. 3D Virtual Worlds are sophisticated platforms supporting a set of human activities, enriching the way we learn, work and socialize. They are platforms that can support a constructivist learning approach of medical students, based on methods at the edge of technology inducing a team spirit and enhanced collaboration experience. In our work, we introduce the concept of e-learning through virtual worlds in medical and healthcare education, providing a literature review on the field. Furthermore, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of virtual worlds in healthcare, we provide a comparison of the most popular platforms, while some open research issues are being considered in the conclusion.

Assessment of Health Information Technology Interventions in Evidence-Based Medicine: A Systematic Review by Adopting a Methodological Evaluation Framework

Background: The application of Health Information Technologies (HITs) can be an effective way to advance medical research and health services provision. The two-fold objective of this work is to: (i) identify and review state-of-the-art HITs that facilitate the aims of evidence-based medicine and (ii) propose a methodology for HIT assessment. Methods: The systematic review was conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. Furthermore, we consolidated existing knowledge in the field and proposed a Synthesis Framework for the Assessment of Health Information Technology (SF/HIT) in order to evaluate the joint use of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) along with HITs in the field of evidence-based medicine. Results: 55 articles met the inclusion criteria and refer to 51 (RCTs) published between 2008 and 2016. Significant improvements in healthcare through the use of HITs were observed in the findings of 31 out of 51 trials—60.8%. We also confirmed that RCTs are valuable tools for assessing the effectiveness, acceptability, safety, privacy, appropriateness, satisfaction, performance, usefulness and adherence. Conclusions: To improve health service delivery, RCTs apply and exhibit formalization by providing measurable outputs. Towards this direction, we propose the SF/HIT as a framework which may help researchers to carry out appropriate evaluations and extend their studies.

vhMentor: An Ontology Supported Mobile Agent System for Pervasive Health Care Monitoring

Healthcare provision is a set of activities that demands the collaboration of several stakeholders (e.g. physicians, nurses, managers, patients etc.) who hold distinct expertise and responsibilities. In addition, medical knowledge is diversely located and often shared under no central coordination and supervision authority, while medical data flows remain mostly passive regarding the way data is delivered to both clinicians and patients. In this paper, we propose the implementation of a virtual health Mentor (vhMentor) which stands as a dedicated ontology schema and FIPA compliant agent system. Agent technology proves to be ideal for developing healthcare applications due to its distributed operation over systems and data sources of high heterogeneity. Agents are able to perform their tasks by acting pro-actively in order to assist individuals to overcome limitations posed during accessing medical data and executing non-automatic error-prone processes. vhMentor further comprises the Jess rules engine in order to implement reasoning logic. Thus, on the one hand vhMentor is a prototype that fills the gap between healthcare systems and the care provision community, while on the other hand allows the blending of next generation distributed services in healthcare domain.

TTCN quality metrics

Testing is a major factor in the successful development of efficient and reliable telecommunication implementations. Time and resources for testing are limited for economic and competitive reasons; therefore improvement in the test specification procedure is of particular interest for the industry. The need for a unified approach in conformance testing, led to the publication of the conformance testing methodology and framework (CTMF) standard ISO/IEC 9646. The tree and tabular combined notation (TTCN), is the standard language used to specify abstract test suites (ATSs). Test Suites written in TTCN are contained in a machine processable (MP) format. It is widely accepted that the observed quality of TTCN test suites published by international committees (ETSI, ITU-T) is often regarded as poor. This is an indication of weaknesses in current quality assessment (QA) practices. In this paper an automatic quality assessment method for abstract test suites is initially defined. Then based on the metrics derived for specific TTCN notation rules, total quality designation of an ATS is proposed.