Tiago Boldt Sousa

Ubiquitous ambient assisted living solution to promote safer independent living in older adults suffering from co-morbidity

This paper describes the development, deployment and trial results from 9 volunteers using the eCAALYX system. The eCAALYX system is an ambient assisted living telemonitoring system aimed at older adults suffering with co-morbidity. Described is a raw account of the challenges that exist and results in bringing a Telemedicine system from laboratory to real-world implementation and results for usability, functionality and reliability.

Isoflavone determination in spontaneous legumes identified by DNA barcodes.

Isoflavones have been associated with several health protective effects. In this work spontaneous legume plants were screened as putative sources of dietary isoflavones. A molecular identification of the collected species was performed throughout DNA barcoding using ITS, rbcL, rpoC1 and matK sequences. The use of a multi-locus barcoding system complemented with basic morphological information allowed the unequivocal identification at the species level of 90% of the samples. The determination of isoflavone content was performed by high-performance liquid chromatography with diode-array detection. Total average contents in the studied species were significantly different, Ononis natrix and Cytisus scoparius possessing the highest total isoflavones content (396 and 273 mg kg(-1), respectively) and Lotus creticus, the lowest (20 mg kg(-1)). The correlation of total isoflavone content with the phylogeny of this set of plants as determined by the rpoC1 sequences was evaluated for the first time.

Scalable Integration of Multiple Health Sensor Data for Observing Medical Patterns

With an aging global population, Ambient Assisted Living (aal) attempts to improve life expectancy and quality of life through the remote monitoring of various health signals using personal and home-based sensors. Possible medical conditions can be early ascertained by observable patterns over the patients’ health data. However, aggregating multiple raw signals and matching against medical protocols can be computational and bandwidth intensive. Moreover, adding new protocols requires non-trivial expertise to define necessary rules. This paper describes a lightweight, scalable, and composable mechanism that captures, processes and infers possible health problems from raw data obtained from multiple sensors.

Engineering Software for the Cloud: Messaging Systems and Logging

Software business continues to expand globally, highly motivated by the reachability of the Internet and possibilities of Cloud Computing. While widely adopted, development for the cloud has some intrinsic properties to it, making it complex to any newcomer. This research is capturing those intricacies using a pattern catalog, with this paper contributing with three of those patterns: Messaging System, a message bus for abstracting service placement in a cluster and orchestrating messages between multiple services; Preemptive Logging, a design principle where services and servers continuously output relevant information to log files, making them available for later debugging failures; and Log Aggregation, a technique to aggregate logs from multiple services and servers in a centralized location, which indexes and provides them in a queryable, user friendly format. These patterns are useful for anyone designing software for the cloud, either to guide or validate their design decisions.

Collaborative Web Platform for UNIX-Based Big Data Processing

UNIX-based operative systems were always empowered by scriptable shell interfaces, with a core set of powerful tools to perform manipulation over files and data streams. However those tools can be difficult to manage at the hands of a non-expert programmer.

Monitor, Control and Process --- An Adaptive Platform for Ubiquitous Computing

Monitor, control and process data on top of distributed networks has been a trending topic in the past few years, with ubiquity being adjective to computing and, gradually, the Internet of Things becoming a reality in home and factory automation or Ambient Assisted Living aal. Still, there is a general lack of knowledge and best practices on how to build systems that integrate devices and services from third-parties which connect dynamically with each other. Recurring problems such as security, clustering, message passing, deployment and other orchestration details also lack a standardized solution. The authors describe a platform that simplifies the bootstrap and maintenance of such complex systems, presenting its application in an aal scenario. Such platform could orchestrate most distributed systems, possibly setting a pattern for distributed ubiquitous computing.

Object-Functional Patterns: Re-thinking Development in a Post-Functional World

Programing paradigms define how to think and design while creating software. Object-Oriented and Functional paradigms are two of the most adopted for synthesizing it. Modern languages, attempting to provide higher abstractions, are increasingly supporting native multi-paradigm programming styles. The Object-functional approach still uses classes for information and high-level structure, but allows algorithms to be implemented functionally. New challenges now exist and there is a general lack of knowledge on best practices for adopting this paradigm. This research proposes the systematic usage of software patterns to capture these new recurring problems and their solutions, though not discarding the identification of new algorithms and designs. We will use Scala as a base language, and will attempt to validate our hypothesis through multiple methodologies, including quasi-experiments and case studies. We expect to provide a basis for improvement for programming languages (through pattern absorption) and for software engineering professionals.

A Collaborative Expandable Framework for Software End-Users and Programmers

The quantity and complexity that end-users are increasingly demanding from their applications and devices makes it impractical for a software developer to “foresee” every possible combination and explore every valid alternative. One solution is to empower end-users with tools that allows them to explore their necessities in a collaborative framework, where novices and experts can co-exist and share. We believe that such a tool could not only reduce the number of “small”, specific-tailored applications, but also foster discovery and experimentation.