Towards quality assurance of AAL services.

The Ambient Assisted Living domain is a fast growing area with many new technological artefacts and services developed. Most of the systems developed address end-users' needs. Yet, they have not achieved a large market penetration.

Development and evaluation of SOA-based AAL services in real-life environments: a case study and lessons learned.

Intro: The proper use of ICT services can support seniors in living independently longer. While such services are starting to emerge, current proprietary solutions are often expensive, covering only isolated parts of seniors' needs, and lack support for sharing information between services and between users. For developers, the challenge is that it is complex and time consuming to develop high quality, interoperable services, and new techniques are needed to simplify the development and reduce the development costs.

An investigation of factors influencing healthcare workers' use and acceptance of e-learning in post-school healthcare education.

The objective of the study presented here was to perform an empirical investigation on factors affecting healthcare workers acceptance and utilisation of e-learning in post-school healthcare education. E-learning benefits are realised when key features of e-learning are not only applied, but deemed useful, compatible with the learning process and supportive in order to reach the overall goals of the learning process. We conducted a survey of 14 state-enrolled nurses and skilled-workers within the field of healthcare in Norway.

Interoperability services in the MPOWER Ambient Assisted Living platform.

Ambient Assisted Living systems for the ageing and cognitively disabled do not exist in isolation. What characterizes such systems is the cooperation of several different stakeholders in the care process and the service platforms need to address this. This paper reports on our work in the EU IST MPOWER project where we have designed and implemented interoperability services based on patterns, service-oriented architectures, web services and XSDL transformations.

Reusing models of actors and services in smart homecare to improve sustainability.

Industrial countries are faced with a growing elderly population. Homecare systems with assistive smart house technology enable elderly to live independently at home. Development of such smart home care systems is complex and expensive and there is no common reference model that can facilitate service reuse.

Improving systems interoperability with model-driven software development for healthcare.

An aging population and an increase in chronically ill patients demand teamwork treatment models. To support these with information systems, interoperability is a prerequisite. Model-driven software development (MDSD) with special healthcare extensions can enable reuse of components and improve conformance to international standards.

Linkcare--enabling continuity of care for the chronically ill across levels and profession.

Chronic diseases are increasing rapidly and this phenomenon is becoming a major burden to the health delivery system around the world. A new health care paradigm with focus on chronic treatment and care will actualize the need for interoperable standards based services due to the complexity of care where different health levels and professions are involved. Given the complexity of the domain, we argue the need for a systematic and formal approach to the development of interoperable information systems if there shall be any real support of the cooperating actors.

Evacuation support system for improved medical documentation and information flow in the field.

Purpose: Documentation of medical treatment and observation of patients during evacuation from the point of injury to definitive treatment is important both for optimizing patient treatment and managing the evacuation process. The current practice in military medical field documentation uses paper forms and voice communication. There are many shortcomings associated with this approach, especially with respect to information capture and sharing processes.