Technical Perspective of Authentication Policy Extension for the Adaptive Social Services and e-Health Care Management

The substantiative study of private information box project of Japanese e-Government proved the effectiveness of the New Authentication Extension Technology to combine different social infrastructures to create new Secure services between Public Sector and Private Sector (Citizen). However, there are still issues to cope with outside of the realm of technology including accountability of each participants and the level of the service, OpenID and SAML are key federated identity protocols. Both SAML and OpenID define mechanisms in support of expressing assurance information on protocol messages, Authentication Context and the Provider Authentication Policy Extension (PAPE), respectively. In deployment scenarios that require proxying from one of the protocols to the other, it becomes necessary to map to and from the corresponding assurance mechanisms. This chapter provides theoretical study of Social and e-Health Data secure exchange methodology on this mapping and related issues.

New Electro-Optic and Display Technology for Visually Disabled People

The aim of the chapter is to review the most recent advances in electro-optical technologies applied to visually disabled people. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that the number of people in the world with some kind of visual impairment is 285 million, with 246 million of these persons in a partially sighted or Low Vision (LV) condition. The top three causes of visual impairment are uncorrected refractive errors, cataracts and glaucoma, followed by age-related macular degeneration. On the other hand, Head Mounted Displays or electro-optical materials used in liquid crystal or electrochromic devices can be used in technical aids for LV. In this chapter, the authors review how disabled people receive real world information using these new technologies, how the recently developed electro-optical technical aids can improve visual perception, and how these LV aids do work, from a technological point of view.

A Conceptual Framework for the Design and Development of AAL Services

A digital environment with a pervasive and unobtrusive intelligence able to proactively support elderly people in their daily lives, enabling them to live independently for longer, and reducing the need for long term care is the fundamental idea of the Ambient Assisted Living (AAL). After considerable research investment, there is a good understanding of the domain problem. However, the need to broaden the scope of problems being addressed is undeniable. Ecological approaches for design and development of AAL services are required in order to reinforce a strong focus on people. The chapter presents a comprehensive model based on the International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health (ICF) to characterize users, theirs contexts, activities, and participation, and to structure a semantic framework for AAL services.

Identifying Requirements for Healthcare Information Systems with Focus Groups

Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) are essential in the healthcare industry since they manipulate vital information. For example, HIS may keep track of the patient’s medical history, avoiding mistakes with medications, dosages, and treatments. However, the traditional methods for identifying HIS requirements focus on specifying functional requirements for the software. Moreover, system scope should be fully understood by stakeholders, such as healthcare workers and hospital managers, something extremely difficult to achieve in practice. As such, many requirements are incomplete, missing, or not needed, leading to expensive and inadequate HIS. The authors identify requirements for Healthcare Information System using Focus Groups. They evaluate this method with experiments, applying a variety of techniques and having encouraging preliminary results. In particular, they verify that stakeholders can reach consensus on high-level requirements by discussing different perspectives about the system scope. The authors conclude that Focus Groups are really effective.

Augmented Reality Framework for the Socialization between Elderly People

The socialization between elderly people assumes a key role on their mind and body well-being while loneliness expects to be one of major problems of our increasing age society. This research aims to study and develop a framework to support elderly people socialization when they are confined to their homes for some reason. It can be also adequate for people following some neurological or physical rehabilitation treatment remotely or monitoring behaviors in order to prevent potential diseases. This work proposes a framework that supports the socialization through Augmented Reality (AR) based on telepresence. The aim is a low cost solution that enables users to communicate and interact remotely, experiencing the benefits of a face-to-face meeting. The authors explore computers graphics, spatial audio, and artificial vision to induce sensations of being physical in the presence of other people and exploit the potential activities that such frameworks enable. TV and phones are elderly common companion devices that should be complementarily used with emergent AR technologies to enhance and create the remote presence feeling, minimizing the loneliness. Inspired by Virtual Reality (VR) studies, one of the authors’ goals is to explore if VR presence measurement instruments are useful in the AR context by reviewing literature on the area.

Independent Living Support for Disabled and Elderly People using Cell Phones

This chapter presents a technological solution to promote and help independent access to work for disabled people using Smart Phones. A deep state of the art about smart phones technologies and about examples of other projects is presented. The aim is to develop a form of technical assistance that supports them in the control of schedules, prevention of dangerous areas in the work place, warnings, and automatic alarm generation. The device chosen to exchange all this information is a Smartphone based on Android Operating System and GPS technology. A set of Android applications have been developed using Java language, and controlling the device via Google-developed Java libraries. All of these are connected to the Server Application through the Communications Module. The server Application Module provides the assistants or psychologists the possibility of supervise all the handicapped people’s activities. The assistants, psychologists, and users have all evaluated the application very positively as it covers disabled people’s needs perfectly.

Emerging ICT Challenges on Provision of Online HIV/AIDS Advisory Services

In order to address the research challenges related to spreading, prevention, and treatment of HIV/AIDS it is necessary to look at it from different angles. Considering a single aspect on established initiatives, such as technological or political concerns that have been adopted in research, leaves a “none complete and integrated picture” on challenges related to the provision of services for combating HIV/AIDS. This chapter addresses this aspect by considering a multi-perspective approach and proposes a set of challenges for each perspective. It also considers the technological perspective of provision of HIV/AIDS advisory services and presents challenges towards designing the proposed system.

Security of ICTs Supporting Healthcare Activities

Healthcare activities and all that are related with it are conducted by people. This single fact has brought up many precautions about patients and about information related with their health. Using information and communication technologies to support this kind of information requires particular attention about what happens, namely about who can use it and for what it can be used. This chapter intends to identify the vulnerabilities that could be explored, using an international security standard to support a proactive attitude in face of potential threats that explore the identified vulnerabilities, damaging organizational information assets. Another intention is the establishment of a basis of references in information security to define a level of risk classification to build a referential to the potential that a given threat has to exploit the vulnerabilities of an asset, preventing damages to personal and organizational property, including information, and also activity continuity.

Community Networks

The authors present a socio-technical design that illustrates how a community network health intervention can mobilize human resources across social boundaries and enhance health and well-being for people on both sides of the boundary. They specifically address how to reduce the barriers to social engagement experienced by autistic individuals who want more supportive life opportunities. The authors focus on the social milieu of an American college town, on traditional town-gown boundaries, and on possibilities for integrating social resources within this context. Their design adopts community networking to not only connect autistic persons living within an existing social milieu (university undergraduates; local autistic children and their families), but also to integrate individuals across milieus. The key design idea is that facilitating cross-milieu interactions can initiate and sustain a virtuous cycle of being helped by helping others.

Design of an ICT Tool for Decision Making in Social and Health Policies

The governance requires technical support regarding the complexity in deciding health policies to assist people who require long-term care. Long-term care policies require the use of ICT simulation tools that can provide policy makers with the option of going into a decision theatre and virtually knowing the consequences of different policies prior to finally determining the real policy to be adopted. In this sense, there is an absence of simulation tools for decision making about long-term care policies. In this chapter, the authors propose the foundations and guidelines of SSIMSOWELL, a new scalable, multiagent simulation tool that increases the prediction capacity of governance in the long term care policies, improving the decision making in short, medium, and large term in different European regions. The simulation tool implements a previously validated Social Sustainability Model (SSM). The main goal of SSIMSOWELL is the prediction of policy impacts and the development of new governance models, since it increases the budgetary efficiency and the sustainability of long term policies. In addition, it improves the capacity of policy makers in modelling, planning, and evaluating social-health policies at different scales, ranges, and times in the European Union.