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Recently, the US Department of Transportation's Federal Aviation Administration and other international organizations have proposed a set of requirements for small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to operate for nonrecreational purposes. However, existing UAV architectures fulfill only some of the established requirements, and not all in one solution. This article presents an event-driven serviceoriented architecture that allows autonomous UAVs to satisfy all these requirements and to detect critical situations, performing real-time decision making.

In the last few years, telerehabilitation and telecare have become important topics in healthcare since they enable people to remain independent in their own homes by providing person-centered technologies to support the individual. These technologies allows elderly people to be assisted in their home, instead of traveling to a clinic, providing them wellbeing and personalized health care. The literature shows a great number of interesting proposals to address telerehabilitation and telecare scenarios, which may be mainly categorized into two broad groups, namely wearable devices and context-aware systems. However, we believe that these apparently different scenarios may be addressed by a single context-aware approach, concretely a vision-based system that can operate automatically in a non-intrusive way for the elderly, and this is the goal of this paper. We present a general approach based on 3D cameras and neural network algorithms that offers an efficient solution for two different scenarios of telerehabilitation and telecare for elderly people. Our empirical analysis reveals the effectiveness and accuracy of the algorithms presented in our approach and provides more than promising results when the neural network parameters are properly adjusted.

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In recent years it has been shown that the secure exchange of medical information significantly benefits people's life quality, improving their care and treatment. The interoperability of the entire healthcare ecosystem is a constant challenge, and even more, with all the risks posed to the security of healthcare information. Blockchain technology is emerging as one of the main alternatives when it comes to finding a balance in the healthcare ecosystem. However, the constant development of new Blockchain technologies and the evolution of healthcare systems make it difficult to find established proposals. From an architectural point of view, the design of blockchain-based solutions requires trade-offs e.g. security and interoperability. This paper focuses on two main objectives, in the first one, it was carried out a Systematic Literature Review for exploring architectural mechanisms used to support the interoperability and security of Blockchain-based Health Management Systems. Taking into account of results, a series of scenarios were generated where these mechanisms can be used along with their context, issues, and various architectural concerns (interoperability and security). In the second objective, a high-level architecture and its validation were proposed through an experiment for the whole process of developing a Domain Specific Language, using the Model Driven Engineering methodology for specific Smart Contracts.

The dietary habits of people directly impact their health conditions. Especially in elder populations (in 2017, 6.7% of the world’s population was over 65 years of age), these habits could lead to important-nutrient losses that could seriously affect their cognitive and functional state. Recently, a great research effort has been devoted to using different technologies and proposing different techniques for monitoring food-intake. Nevertheless, these techniques are usually generic but make use of the most innovative technologies and methodologies to obtain the best possible monitoring results. However, a large percentage of elderly people live in depopulated rural areas (in Spain, 28.1% of the elderly population lives in this type of area) with a fragile cultural and socioeconomic context. The use of these techniques in these environments is crucial to improving this group’s quality of life (and even reducing their healthcare expenses). At the same time, it is especially challenging since they have very specific and strict requirements regarding the use and application of technology. In this Systematic Literature Review (SLR), we analyze the most important proposed technologies and techniques in order to identify whether they can be applied in this context and if they can be used to improve the quality of life of this fragile collective. In this SLR, we have analyzed 326 papers. From those, 29 proposals have been completely analyzed, taking into account the characteristics and requirements of this population.

The rate of world population aging is increasing. This situation directly affects all countries socially and economically, increasing their compromise and effort to improve the living conditions of this sector of society. In environments with large influxes of elderly people, such as nursing homes, the use of technology has shown promise in improving their quality of life. The use of smart devices allows people to automate everyday tasks and learn from them to predict future actions. Additionally, smartphones capture a wealth of information that allows to adapt to nearby actuators according to people’s preferences and even detects anomalies in their behaviour. Current works are proposing new frameworks to detect these behaviours and act accordingly. However, these works are not focused on managing multidevice environments where sensor and smartphone data are considered to automate environments with elderly people or to learn from them. Also, most of these works require a permanent Internet connection, so the full benefit of smart devices is not completely achieved. In this work, we present an architecture that takes the data from sensors and smartphones in order to adapt the behaviour of the actuators of the environment. In addition, it uses this data to learn from the environment to predict actions or to extrapolate the actions that should be executed according to similar behaviours. The architecture is implemented through a use case based on a nursing home located in a rural area. Thanks to this work, the quality of life of the elderly is improved in a simple, affordable, and transparent way for them.

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