Sensor-driven agenda for intelligent home care of the elderly

The exponential increase of home-bound persons who live alone and are in need of continuous monitoring requires new solutions to current problems. Most of these cases present illnesses such as motor or psychological disabilities that deprive of a normal living. Common events such as forgetfulness or falls are quite common and have to be prevented or dealt with. This paper introduces a platform to guide and assist these persons (mostly elderly people) by providing multisensory monitoring and intelligent assistance. The platform operates at three levels. The lower level, denominated ‘‘Data acquisition and processing’’performs the usual tasks of a monitoring system, collecting and processing data from the sensors for the purpose of detecting and tracking humans. The aim is to identify their activities in an intermediate level called ‘‘activity detection’’. The upper level, ‘‘Scheduling and decision-making’’, consists of a scheduler which provides warnings, schedules events in an intelligent manner and serves as an interface to the rest of the platform. The idea is to use mobile and static sensors performing constant monitoring of the user and his/her environment, providing a safe environment and an immediate response to severe problems. A case study on elderly fall detection in a nursery home bedroom demonstrates the usefulness of the proposal.

A Platform to Emulate Ambient Assisted Living Environments

According to the opinion of clinicians, emerging medical conditions can be timely detected by observing changes in the activities of daily living and/or in the physiological signals of a person. To accomplish such purpose, it is necessary to properly monitor both the person’s physiological signals as well as the home environment with sensing technology. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are a promising technology for this support. After receiving the data from the sensor nodes, a computer processes the data and extracts information to detect any abnormality. The computer runs algorithms that should have been previously developed and tested in real homes or in living-labs. However, these installations (and volunteers) may not be easily available. In order to get around that difficulty, this paper suggests the making of a physical model to emulate basic actions of a user at home, thus giving autonomy to researchers wanting to test the performance of their algorithms. This paper also studies some data communication issues in mobile WSNs namely how the orientation of the sensor nodes in the body affects the received signal strength, as well as retransmission aspects of a TDMA-based MAC protocol in the data recovery process.

GUI Inspection from Source Code Analysis

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are critical components of todays software. Given their increased relevance, correctness and usability of GUIs are becoming essential. This paper describes the latest results in the development of our tool to reverse engineer the GUI layer of interactive computing systems. We use static analysis techniques to generate models of the user interface behaviour from source code. Models help in graphical user interface inspection by allowing designers to concentrate on its more important aspects. One particularly type of model that the tool is able to generate is state machines. The paper shows how graph theory can be useful when applied to these models. A number of metrics and algorithms are used in the analysis of aspects of the user interface's quality. The ultimate goal of the tool is to enable analysis of interactive system through GUIs source code inspection.

GUI Behavior from Source Code Analysis

When developing interactive applications, considering the correctness of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) code is essential. GUIs are critical components of today's software, and contemporary software tools do not provide enough support for ensuring GUIs' code quality. GUIsurfer, a GUI reverse engineering tool, enables evaluation of behavioral properties of user interfaces. It performs static analysis of GUI code, generating state machines that can help in the evaluation of interactive applications. This paper describes the design, software architecture, and the use of GUIsurfer through an example. The tool is easily re-targetable, and support is available to Java/Swing, and WxHaskell. The paper sets the ground for a generalization effort to consider rich internet applications. It explores the GWT web applications' user interface programming toolkit.

A Generic Library for GUI Reasoning and Testing

Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) make software easy to use by providing the user with visual controls. Therefore, correctness of GUI's code is essential to the correct execution of the overall software. Models can help in the evaluation of interactive applications by allowing designers to concentrate on its more important aspects. This paper presents a generic model for language-independent reverse engineering of graphical user interface based applications, and we explore the integration of model-based testing techniques in our approach, thus allowing us to perform fault detection. A prototype tool has been constructed, which is already capable of deriving and testing a user interface behavioral model of applications written in Java/Swing.

Models for the Reverse Engineering of Java/Swing Applications

Abstract. Interest in design and development of graphical user interface (GUIs) is growing in the last few years. However, correctness of GUI's code is essential to the correct execution of the overall software. Models can help in the evaluation of interactive applications by allowing designers to concentrate on its more important aspects. This paper describes our approach to reverse engineering abstract GUI models directly from the Java/Swing code.

Criminal Liability of Organizations, Corporations, Legal Persons, and Similar Entities on Law of Portuguese Cybercrime: A Brief Discussion on the Issue of Crimes of “False Information,” the “Damage on Other Programs or Computer Data,” the “Computer-Software Sabotage,” the “Illegitimate Access,” the “Unlawful Interception,” and “Illegitimate Reproduction of the Protected Program”

Abstract: in Portugal, and in much of the legal systems of Europe, «legal persons» are likely to be criminally responsibilities also for cybercrimes. Like for example the following crimes: «false information»; «damage on other programs or computer data»; «computer-software sabotage»; «illegitimate access»; «unlawful interception» and «illegitimate reproduction of protected program». However, in Portugal, have many exceptions. Exceptions to the «question of criminal liability» of «legal persons». Some «legal persons» can not be blamed for cybercrime. The legislature did not leave! These «legal persons» are v.g. the following («public entities»): legal persons under public law, which include the public business entities; entities utilities, regardless of ownership; or other legal persons exercising public powers. In other words, and again as an example, a Portuguese public university or a private concessionaire of a public service in Portugal, can not commit (in Portugal) any one of cybercrime pointed. Fair? Unfair. All laws should provide that all legal persons can commit cybercrimes. PS: resumo do artigo em inglês.

SHACC: a functional prototyper for a component calculus

Over the last decade component-based software development arose as a promising paradigm to deal with the ever increasing complexity in software design, evolution and reuse. SHACC is a prototyping tool for component-based systems in which components are modelled coinductively as generalized Mealy machines. The prototype is built as a HASKELL library endowed with a graphical user interface developed in Swing

Real-time 3D interactive segmentation of echocardiographic data through user-based deformation of B-spline explicit active surfaces

Image segmentation is an ubiquitous task in medical image analysis, which is required to estimate morphological or functional properties of given anatomical targets. While automatic processing is highly desirable, image segmentation remains to date a supervised process in daily clinical practice. Indeed, challenging data often requires user interaction to capture the required level of anatomical detail. To optimize the analysis of 3D images, the user should be able to efficiently interact with the result of any segmentation algorithm to correct any possible disagreement. Building on a previously developed real-time 3D segmentation algorithm, we propose in the present work an extension towards an interactive application where user information can be used online to steer the segmentation result. This enables a synergistic collaboration between the operator and the underlying segmentation algorithm, thus contributing to higher segmentation accuracy, while keeping total analysis time competitive. To this end, we formalize the user interaction paradigm using a geometrical approach, where the user input is mapped to a non-cartesian space while this information is used to drive the boundary towards the position provided by the user. Additionally, we propose a shape regularization term which improves the interaction with the segmented surface, thereby making the interactive segmentation process less cumbersome. The resulting algorithm offers competitive performance both in terms of segmentation accuracy, as well as in terms of total analysis time. This contributes to a more efficient use of the existing segmentation tools in daily clinical practice. Furthermore, it compares favorably to state-of-the-art interactive segmentation software based on a 3D livewire-based algorithm.

Towards a Catalog of Usability Smells

This paper presents a catalog of smells in the context of interactive applications. These so-called usability smells are indicators of poor design on an application’s user interface, with the potential to hinder not only its usability but also its maintenance and evolution. To eliminate such usability smells we discuss a set of program/usability refactorings. In order to validate the presented usability smells catalog, and the associated refactorings, we present a preliminary empirical study with software developers in the context of a real open source hospital management application. Moreover, a tool that computes graphical user interface behavior models, giving the applications’ source code, is used to automatically detect usability smells at the model level.

Robosonic: Randomness-Based Manipulation of Sounds Assisted by Robots

In this text, we intend to explore the possibilities of sound manipulation in a context of augmented reality (AR) through the use of robots. We use the random behaviour of robots in a limited space for the real-time modulation of two sound characteristics: amplitude and frequency. We add the possibility of interaction with these robots, providing the user the opportunity to manipulate the physical interface by placing markers in the action space, which alter the behaviour of the robots and, consequently, the audible result produced. We intend to demonstrate through the agents, programming of random processes and direct manipulation of this application, that it is possible to generate empathy in interaction and obtain specific audible results, which would be difficult to otherwise reproduce due to the infinite loops that the interaction promotes.

Projecto timecloud: software de gestão de tempo laboral numa plataforma cloud

O presente projecto tem como objectivo a disponibilização de uma plataforma de serviços para gestão e contabilização de tempo remunerável, através da marcação de horas de trabalho, férias e faltas (com ou sem justificação). Pretende-se a disponibilização de relatórios com base nesta informação e a possibilidade de análise automática dos dados, como por exemplo excesso de faltas e férias sobrepostas de trabalhadores. A ênfase do projecto está na disponibilização de uma arquitectura que facilite a inclusão destas funcionalidades. O projecto está implementado sobre a plataforma Google App Engine (i.e. GAE), de forma a disponibilizar uma solução sob o paradigma de Software as a Service, com garantia de disponibilidade e replicação de dados. A plataforma foi escolhida a partir da análise das principais plataformas cloud existentes: Google App Engine, Windows Azure e Amazon Web Services. Foram analisadas as características de cada plataforma, nomeadamente os modelos de programação, os modelos de dados disponibilizados, os serviços existentes e respectivos custos. A escolha da plataforma foi realizada com base nas suas características à data de iniciação do presente projecto. A solução está estruturada em camadas, com as seguintes componentes: interface da plataforma, lógica de negócio e lógica de acesso a dados. A interface disponibilizada está concebida com observação dos princípios arquitecturais REST, suportando dados nos formatos JSON e XML. A esta arquitectura base foi acrescentada uma componente de autorização, suportada em Spring-Security, sendo a autenticação delegada para os serviços Google Acounts. De forma a permitir o desacoplamento entre as várias camadas foi utilizado o padrão Dependency Injection. A utilização deste padrão reduz a dependência das tecnologias utilizadas nas diversas camadas. Foi implementado um protótipo, para a demonstração do trabalho realizado, que permite interagir com as funcionalidades do serviço implementadas, via pedidos AJAX. Neste protótipo tirou-se partido de várias bibliotecas javascript e padrões que simplificaram a sua realização, tal como o model-view-viewmodel através de data binding. Para dar suporte ao desenvolvimento do projecto foi adoptada uma abordagem de desenvolvimento ágil, baseada em Scrum, de forma a implementar os requisitos do sistema, expressos em user stories. De forma a garantir a qualidade da implementação do serviço foram realizados testes unitários, sendo também feita previamente a análise da funcionalidade e posteriormente produzida a documentação recorrendo a diagramas UML.