Short-Term Scientific Mission
Msury Mahunnah
Tallinn University of Technology
Ehitajate tee 5, 19086, Tallinn
msury.mahunnah@ttu.ee
http://maurus.ttu.ee/sts/
1. Details
Beneficiary: Msury Mahunnah, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia
Host: Prof. Michael Schumacher, University of Applied Science Western Switzerland, Sierre
Period: from 15th May, 2012 to 15th June, 2012
Place: 3960 Sierre, Switzerland
2. Purpose of the visit
The purpose of the visit was to study and analyze possible architectural patterns for Personal
Health Systems (PHS) at the Institute of Business Information Systems in the University of
Applied Science Western Switzerland (HES-SO). The outcome of the visit expected to assist
the STSM applicant to propose a methodology for developing such systems after comparing
with other similar projects.
3. Description of the work
As PHS is a new research era, there is no systematic approach to deciding its architectures.
In proposing a methodology for developing PHS, we are particularly interested in the
distributed architectures of a kind where stakeholders, such as patients and healthcare
professionals, are presented by software agents that perform on behalf of their principles
activities delegated to them [1].
The STSM at HES-SO helped the applicant to comprehensively study and analyze the actual
architectural designs of the following two main projects related to patients with diabetes
mellitus;
(a) Ongoing project for providing continuous monitoring, diagnosis and treatment adjustment
of Gestational Diabetes Mellitus (GDM)
(b) Recently started project for providing COntinuous Multi-parametric and Multi-layered
analysis Of DIabetes TYpe 1 and 2 (COMMODITY 12 Project)
With the assistance from the research group members at the host university, the STSM
applicant explored the following matters related to the project (a) mentioned above;
- Comprehensively studied and analyzed a normal 3 tier client-server architecture where
presentation layer contains a web interface for caregivers as well as a mobile interface for
patients to send their observations and receive notifications from the system. The
application layer contains a well designed multi-agent platform GOLEM [2] attached to it
for the purpose of performing detailed processing of the collected observation(s). GOLEM
implements the agent environment concept and it is built around four main entities:
agents, avatars, objects, and containers.
- Was exposed to interoperability issues experienced by group members when deploying
project (a) at Lausanne Hospital in Switzerland. Three main types of interoperability have
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been identified: technical interoperability, syntactic interoperability, and semantic
interoperability.
Went through programming concepts and testing phase of the whole system including
web interface for caregivers, mobile application for patients, and the application layer
including agents in GOLEM as well as the database for storing information on continuous
monitoring, diagnosis, and treatment of patients with GDM.
Learnt on the actual challenges experienced by the project members especially when
communicating with other healthcare stakeholders such as caregivers and hospital
administrators about the suggested approaches for improving the healthcare delivered to
diabetic patients.
4. Future work
It is categorized into two parts:
- The recently started project (b) is anticipated to be more complex as it involves issues of
personalizing a given treatment according to physiological values, lab test results, diet,
physical examinations, genetic data and contextual data about the patient with diabetes
mellitus type 1 and 2. We have started working on simplifying the analysis and design
models for project in (b) by using a methodology appropriate for designing complex sociotechnical systems [3] proposed in the monograph co-authored by the applicant’s
supervisor at the home university. The methodology is centered on the notion of “agent”
that is used as a modeling abstraction rather than just a technological building block.
- Using the lessons learnt at the Institute of Business Information Systems in HES-SO to
compare with other similar projects for the purpose of proposing a methodology for
developing PHS.
References
[1] Isern, D., Sánchez, D. & Moreno, A., 2010. Agents applied in health care: A review.
International Journal of Medical Informatics, 79(3), pp.145–166.
[2] Bromuri, S. and Stathis, K., 2009. “Distributed Agent Environments in the Ambient Event
Calculus,” in DEBS ’09: Proceedings of the third international conference on Distributed
event-based systems. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2009.
[3] Sterling, L. & Taveter, K., 2009. The art of agent-oriented modeling, MIT Press.