The notion of context-awareness is making its way in the area of mobile-health application designed to assist patients outside a hospital and medical professionals within a hospital. Such ubiquitous computing applications go beyond simple biomedical data-collection so the management of the context becomes more challenging, and the complexity of the context-based decision-algorithms warrants the use of full-blown inference engines. The context is a very volatile notion, so building a context-aware system means more than just creating a context ontology and defining inference rules for that model. This paper proposes mechanisms to dynamically manage the contextual decisions and actions. It devises a model and its properties for the process of taking each individual context-based decision. An architecture centered around this model is defined, integrating an off-the-shelf inference engine that reasons on context-data expressed in the OWL language.The architecture was refined and validated through the implementation of a prototype remote biomonitoring system. The prototype combines context-adaptation and awareness with the ubiquity of 3G network-coverage to allow for more personalized monitoring and better streamlining of information between the various health care players. It can be easily adapted and extended with extra inference-rules, additional actions, and more context items.
In the future, mobile users will find themselves in unfamiliar and "chaotic" environments with multiple providers of electronic devices or services, and competing internetservice providers. Users need to discover what services are available, how to apply them to the task at hand, and how to acquire the appropriate rights to use them successfully. The key contribution of this paper is linking service discovery with the acquisition of role-based credentials for services, and showing how the combination can be exploited easily and effectively by users of ubiquitous-computing environments. Our design facilitates flexible authorisation and access control, requires no special-purpose client devices or software, and enables an open market where all participants have a niche that they perceive as bringing value to them. The design has been refined, implemented, and validated as part of a larger prototype implementation, parts of which are described. Middleware, running in a web proxy, transforms web objects by adding specific software tools for the user to discover and invoke the currently relevant services.
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