We propose a distributed system that enables global and ubiquitous health monitoring of patients. The biomedical data will be collected by wearable health diagnostic devices, which will include various types of sensors and will be transmitted towards the corresponding Health Monitoring Centers. The permanent medical data of patients will be kept in the corresponding Home Data Bases, while the measured biomedical data will be sent to the Visitor Health Monitor Center and Visitor Data Base that serves the area of present location of the patient. By combining the measured biomedical data and the permanent medical data, Health Medical Centers will be able to coordinate the needed actions and help the local medical teams to make quickly the best decisions that could be crucial for the patient health, and that can reduce the cost of health service.

Arjan Durresi

Mimoza Durresi

Arben Merkoci

Leonard Barolli

Networked Biomedical System for Ubiquitous Health Monitoring

Natural and intuitive interaction between users and complex systems is a crucial research topic in human-computer interaction. A major direction is the definition and implementation of systems with natural language understanding capabilities. The interaction in natural language is often performed by means of systems called chatbots. A chatbot is a conversational agent with a proper knowledge base able to interact with users. Chatbots appearance can be very sophisticated with 3D avatars and speech processing modules. However the interaction between the system and the user is only performed through textual areas for inputs and replies. An interaction able to add to natural language also graphical widgets could be more effective. On the other side, a graphical interaction involving also the natural language can increase the comfort of the user instead of using only graphical widgets. In many applications multi-modal communication must be preferred when the user and the system have a tight and complex interaction. Typical examples are cultural heritages applications (intelligent museum guides, picture browsing) or systems providing the user with integrated information taken from different and heterogenous sources as in the case of the iGoogle&#x2122; interface. We propose to mix the two modalities (verbal and graphical) to build systems with a reconfigurable interface, which is able to change with respect to the particular application context. The result of this proposal is the Graphical Artificial Intelligence Markup Language (GAIML) an extension of AIML allowing merging both interaction modalities. In this context a suitable chatbot system called Graphbot is presented to support this language. With this language is possible to define personalized interface patterns that are the most suitable ones in relation to the data types exchanged between the user and the system according to the context of the dialogue.

Roberto Pirrone

Giuseppe Russo

Vincenzo Cannella

Daniele Peri

GAIML: A New Language for Verbal and Graphical Interaction in Chatbots

This article is devoted to tangible interfaces for steering and control of interactive multimedia presentations. Various methods for digital encoding of physical objects are considered and their applicability in surface encoding for tangible interface components is discussed. Experiments with presentation controls, based on direct interaction with digitally encoded printed handouts are reported. An innovative approach for transferring presentation controls from printed handouts to surfaces of real physical objects is introduced. Consequently labels, digitally enhanced with CLUSPI codes are created and presentation control trials involving real products with digitally encoded surfaces are conducted. USB and wireless cameras are employed as CLUSPI readers for implementing surface based interactions and a portable communication device with an embedded camera is considered as a possible truly mobile solution.

Kamen Kanev

Tangible Interfaces for Interactive Multimedia Presentations

A conversational agent, capable to have a &#x22;sense of humor&#x22; is presented. The agent can both generate humorous sentences and recognize humoristic expressions introduced by the user during the dialogue. EHeBby is an entertainment oriented conversational agent implemented using the ALICE framework embedded into an Yahoo! Messenger client. It is characterized by two areas: a rational, rule-based area and an evocative area. The first one is based on well founded techniques of computational humor and a standard AIML KB. The second one is based on a conceptual space, automatically induced by a corpus of funny documents, where KB items and user sentences are mapped. This area emulates an associative/evocative behavior of the conversational agent, making her more attractive. EHeBby includes also an avatar that changes the face expression according to humoristic content of the dialogue.

Giovanni Pilato

Agnese Augello

Giorgio Vassallo

Salvatore Gaglio

EHeBby: An Evocative Humorist Chat-Bot

A sensor, actuator, and device network (SADN) is composed of three types of nodes, which are sensor, actuator, and actuation device nodes. Sensor nodes and actuator nodes are interconnected in wireless networks as discussed in wireless sensor and actuator networks (WSANs). Actuator nodes and device nodes are interconnected in types of networks, i.e. wireless and wired network. Sensor nodes sense an physical event and send sensed values of the event to actuator nodes. An actuator node makes a decision on proper actions on receipt of sensed values and then issue the action requests to the device nodes. A device node really acts to the physical world. For example, moves a robot arms by performing the action on receipt of the action request. Messages may be lost and nodes may be faulty. Especially, messages are lost due to noise and collision in a wireless network. We propose a fully redundant model for an SADN where each of sensor, actuator, and device functions is replicated in multiple nodes and each of sensor-actuator and actuator-device communication is realized in many-to-many type of communication protocols. Even if some number of nodes are faulty, the other nodes can perform requested tasks. Here, each sensor node sends sensed values to multiple actuator nodes and each actuator node receives sensed values from multiple sensor nodes. While multiple actuator nodes communicate with multiple replica nodes of a device. Even if messages are lost and some number of nodes are faulty, device nodes can surely receive action requests required for sensed values and the actions are performed. In this paper, we discuss a type of semi-passive coordination (SPC) protocol of multiple actuator nodes for multiple sensor nodes. We discuss a type of active coordination protocol for multiple actuator nodes and multiple actuation device nodes. We evaluate the SPC protocol for the sensor-actuator coordination in terms of the number of messages exchanged among actuators.

Keiji Ozaki

Tomoya Enokido

Makoto Takizawa

Coordination Protocols for a Reliable Sensor, Actuator, and Device Network (SADN)

Parallel programming effort can be reduced by using high level constructs such as algorithmic skeletons. Within the MAGDA toolset, supporting programming and execution of mobile agent based distributed applications, we provide a skeleton-based parallel programming environment, based on specialization of Algorithmic Skeleton Java interfaces and classes. Their implementation include mobile agent features for execution on heterogeneous systems, such as clusters of WSs and PCs, and support reliability and dynamic workload balancing. The user can thus develop a parallel, mobile agent based application by simply specialising a given set of classes and methods and using a set of added functionalities.

R. Aversa

B. Di Martino

N. Mazzocca

S. Venticinque

A Skeleton Based Programming Paradigm for Mobile Multi-Agents on Distributed Systems and Its Realization within the MAGDA Mobile Agents Platform

Presently, the wireless mobile networks and devices are becoming increasingly popular to provide users the access anytime and anywhere. The mobile systems are based on cellular approach and the area is covered by cells that overlap each other. In mobile cellular systems the handover is a very important process, which refers to a mechanism that transfers an ongoing call from one Base Station (BS) to another. The performance of the handover mechanism is very important to maintain the desired Quality of Service (QoS). Many handover algorithms are proposed in the literature. However, to make a better handover and keep the QoS in wireless networks is very difficult. In this paper, we propose a speed-aware handover system based on fuzzy logic. The proposed system has 3 subsystems. The performance evaluation via simulations shows that proposed system has a good handover decision.

A Speed-Aware Handover System for Wireless Cellular Networks Based on Fuzzy Logic

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Mobile Information Systems publishes original research articles as well as review articles that report the theory and/or application of new ideas and concepts in the field of mobile information systems.

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Chief Editor&nbsp;Dr Alessandro Bazzi&nbsp;is based at the University of Bologna, Italy. His current research is focused on wireless technologies applied to automated and connected vehicles.

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Mobile Information Systems - Table of contents 2008

title

Mobile Information Systems publishes original research articles as well as review articles that report the theory and/or application of new ideas and concepts in the field of mobile information systems.

Mobile Information Systems