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The metric and qualitative analysis of models of the upper and lower dental arches is an important aspect of orthodontic treatment planning. Currently available eLearning systems for dental education only allow access to digital learning materials, and do not interactively support the learning progress. Moreover, to date no study compared the efficiency of learning methods based on physical or digital study models. For this pilot study, 18 dental students were separated into two groups to investigate whether the learning success in study model analysis with an interactive elearning system is higher based on digital models or on conventional plaster models. The results show that with the digital method less time is needed per model analysis. Moreover, the digital approach leads to higher total scores than that based on plaster models. We conclude that interactive eLearning using digital dental arch models is a promising tool for dental education.
OR-Pad - Entwicklung eines Prototyps zur sterilen Informationsanzeige am OP-Situs : meeting abstract
(2019)
Hintergrund: Oftmals werden Informationen aus der Krankenakte oder von Bildgebungsverfahren nur auf recht weit vom Operationsgebiet entfernten Monitoren, außerhalb der ergonomischen Sichtachse des Operateurs, dargestellt. Dies führt dazu, dass relevante Informationen übersehen werden oder ihr Informationspotenzial nicht ausgeschöpft werden kann. In Papierform mitgenommene Notizen befinden sich während der OP außerhalb des sterilen Bereichs und sind dadurch für den Operateur nicht ohne Weiteres zugänglich. Auch bei intraoperativen Einträgen für die OP Dokumentation ist der Operateur auf die Mithilfe der Assistenz angewiesen. Durch die zusätzlichen Kommunikationswege entstehen dabei ein personeller und zeitlicher Mehraufwand und das Fehlerpotenzial nimmt zu. Das anwendungsorientierte Forschungsprojekt OR-Pad - Nutzung von portablen Informationsanzeigen im Operationssaal - soll dem Operateur zu einem verbesserten Informationsfluss verhelfen. Die Idee entstand aus der klinischen Routine der Anatomie und Urologie des Universitätsklinikums Tübingen und wird nun durch Fördermittel vom Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Forschung und Kunst Baden-Württemberg sowie vom Europäischen Fonds für regionale Entwicklung an der Hochschule Reutlingen zu einem High Fidelity-Prototypen weiterentwickelt.
Ziel: Ziel des OR-Pad Projekts ist es, während einer OP zum aktuellen Zeitpunkt klinisch relevante Informationen in unmittelbarer Nähe zum Operateur darzustellen. Mithilfe des Systems soll der Informationsfluss zwischen dem Eingriff sowie dessen Vor- und Nachbereitung optimiert werden. Der Operateur soll vorab relevante Informationen, wie aktuelle Röntgenbilder oder persönliche Notizen, zur intraoperativen Anzeige auswählen können, die dann am OP-Situs auf einer sterilen Informationsanzeige dargestellt werden. Durch die Positionierung soll eine ergonomische Sichtachse sowie die direkte Interaktion mit dem System ermöglicht werden. Kontextrelevante Informationen sollen basierend auf dem aktuellen OP-Verlauf durch die Entwicklung einer Situationserkennung automatisch bereitgestellt werden. Zur Optimierung des Informationsflusses gehört ebenfalls die Unterstützung der OP-Dokumentation. Für diese sollen während des Eingriffs manuell vom Operateur sowie automatisch vom System Einträge, wie Zeitpunkte oder intraoperative Aufnahmen, erstellt werden. Aus diesen soll nach dem Eingriff die OP-Dokumentation generiert und damit der Prozess qualitativer und zeiteffizienter gestaltet werden.
Methodik: Zur Erreichung des Ziels werden zunächst die klinischen Anforderungen spezifiziert und in ein Lastenheft überführt. Hierfür werden Interviews und Beobachtungen bei mehreren Interventionen durchgeführt. Nach dem User-Centered-Designprozess werden Personas und Nutzungsszenarien entworfen und mit klinischen Projektpartnern in mehreren Iterationen evaluiert. Es gilt eine Informationsarchitektur aufzubauen, die eine Einbettung klinischer Informationssysteme sowie Bild- und Gerätedaten aus dem OP-Netzwerk erlaubt. Eine Situationserkennung, basierend auf Prozessmodellen, soll zur Abschätzung des Operationsfortschritts entwickelt werden. Zur Befestigung der Informationsanzeige sollen geeignete Haltemechanismen eingesetzt werden. Das OR-Pad System soll laufend im Lehr- und Forschungs-OP der Hochschule Reutlingen getestet und im Sinne agiler Produktentwicklung mit den klinischen Projektpartnern abgestimmt werden. Der finale Funktionsprototyp soll abschließend in den Versuchs-OPs der Anatomie Tübingen getestet und evaluiert werden.
Ergebnisse: Über eine erste Datenerhebung mittels Contextual Inquiry konnten erste Anforderungen an das OR-Pad System erfasst werden, woraus ein Low-Fidelity-Prototyp resultierte. Die Evaluation über Experteninterviews führte in die zweite Iteration, in der das Konzept entsprechend der Ergebnisse angepasst wurde. Über Hospitationen am Uniklinikum Tübingen fand eine weitere Datenerhebung zur Erstellung von Szenarien für die intraoperativen Anwendungsfälle statt. Anhand der Anforderungen wurde ein Konzept für die Benutzerschnittstelle entworfen, die im weiteren Verlauf mit den klinischen Projektpartnern evaluiert wird.
Potentials of smart contracts-based disintermediation in additive manufacturing supply chains
(2019)
We investigate which potentials are created by using smart contracts for disintermediation in supply chains for additive manufacturing. Using a qualitative, critical realist research approach, we analyzed three case studies with companies active in additive manufactures. Based on interviews with experts from these companies, we could identify eight key requirements for disintermediation and associate four potentials of smart contracts-based disintermediation.
Artefaktkorrektur und verfeinerte Metriken für ein EEG-basiertes System zur Müdigkeitserkennung
(2019)
Fragestellung: Müdigkeit ist ein oft unterschätztes, aber dennoch großes Problem im Straßenverkehr. Von rund 2,5 Mio. Verkehrsunfällen 2015 in Deutschland, waren 2898 Unfälle, mit insgesamt 59 Toten (~1,7 % der Todesfälle), auf Übermüdung zurückzuführen. Schätzungen gehen von einer Dunkelziffer von bis zu 20 % aus. In einer ersten eigenen Studie wurde überprüft, ob ein mobiles EEG in einem Fahrsimulator Müdigkeitszustände zuverlässig erkennen kann. Die Erkennungsrate lag lediglich bei 61 %. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist, das verwendete Messsystem zu verbessern. Dazu wird die Genauigkeit durch eine Artefaktkorrektur und mit Hilfe von verfeinerten Qualitätsmetriken erhöht. Eine erkannte Übermüdung wird dem Fahrer dann in angemessener Weise angezeigt, so dass er entsprechend reagieren kann.
Patienten und Methoden: Die Independent Component Analysis (ICA) ist ein multivariates Verfahren, um mehrere Zufallsvariablen zu analysieren. Für die Entscheidung, ob ein Fahrer gerade müde oder wach ist, wird der erstellte Merkmalsvektor für jede Sequenz mit ICA klassifiziert. Dafür wird ein trainierter Machine-Learning-Algorithmus eingesetzt, der in der Lage ist, auch unbekannte Datensätze in Klassen einzuteilen. Um die benötigten Frequenzwerte zu erhalten, wurde für jeden EEG-Kanal eine Fourier Transformation durchgeführt. Der erstellte Merkmalsvektor wird im nächsten Schritt durch ein Künstliches Neuronales Netz klassifiziert. Für das Training werden vorab erstellte Merkmalsvektoren mit den Klassen „Wach“ und „Müde“ versehen. Diese Daten werden zufällig gemischt und im Verhältnis 2:1 in eine Trainings- und Testmenge geteilt. Das Experiment wurde mit acht Personen mit jeweils zweimal 45 min Testfahrt durchgeführt.
Ergebnisse: Der komplette Datensatz besteht aus 150.000 Signalwerten, welche zu ca. 7000 Sequenzen zusammengefasst werden. Durch die Anwendung der Qualitätsmetrik bleiben 4370 Sequenzen für das Training übrig. Bei invaliden Sequenzen aufgrund von EEG-Artefakten gibt es deutliche Unterschiede. Im „Wach“ Zustand werden dreimal so viele Sequenzen verworfen als im „Müde“ Zustand. Insgesamt werden bei wachen Probanden im Schnitt ca. 50 % der Sequenzen verworfen, bei Müden lediglich 25 %. Im Durchschnitt erreicht das System eine Erkennungsrate von 73 % für beide Zustände. Vergleicht man nun das Verhältnis von „Wach“ und „Müde“ und lässt „Leichte Müdigkeit“ außen vor, liegen die Ergebnisse bei über 90 %.
Schlussfolgerungen: Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Aufmerksamkeit während des Experiments abnimmt bzw. die Müdigkeit zunimmt. Dies verdeutlichen zum einen subjektive und objektive Beobachtungen von Müdigkeitsanzeichen. Zum anderen lassen sich messbare und klassifizierbare Unterschiede im EEG Signal nachweisen. Die als Merkmale eingesetzten Theta-Wellen zeigten eine niedrigere Amplitude gegen Ende des Experiments. Die Erweiterung der binären Klassifizierung führt zu einer weiteren Stabilisierung der Ergebnisse. Artefaktkorrektur und Qualitätsmetriken steigern die Güte der Daten weiter. Die entwickelte Anwendung zur Müdigkeitserkennung ermittelt messbare Zeichen von Müdigkeit und kann eine gute Entscheidung über die Fahrtauglichkeit treffen.
Among the multitude of software development processes available, hardly any is used by the book. Regardless of company size or industry sector, a majority of project teams and companies use customized processes that combine different development methods— so-called hybrid development methods. Even though such hybrid development methods are highly individualized, a common understanding of how to systematically construct synergetic practices is missing. In this paper, we make a first step towards devising such guidelines. Grounded in 1,467 data points from a large-scale online survey among practitioners, we study the current state of practice in process use to answer the question: What are hybrid development methods made of? Our findings reveal that only eight methods and few practices build the core of modern software development. This small set allows for statistically constructing hybrid development methods. Using an 85% agreement level in the participants’ selections, we provide two examples illustrating how hybrid development methods are characterized by the practices they are made of. Our evidence-based analysis approach lays the foundation for devising hybrid development methods.
Context: Organizations are increasingly challenged by high market dynamics, rapidly evolving technologies and shifting user expectations. In consequence, many organizations are struggling with their ability to provide reliable product roadmaps by applying traditional roadmapping approaches. Currently, many companies are seeking opportunities to improve their product roadmapping practices and strive for new roadmapping approaches. A typical first step towards advancing the roadmapping capabilities of an organization is to assess the current situation. Therefore, the so-called maturity model DEEP for assessing the product roadmapping capabilities of companies operating in dynamic and uncertain environments has been developed and published by the authors.
Objective: The aim of this article is to conduct an initial validation of the DEEP model in order to understand its applicability better and to see if important concepts are missing. In addition, the aim of this article is to evolve the model based on the findings from the initial validation.
Method: The model has been given to practitioners such as product managers with the request to perform a self-assessment of the current product roadmapping practices in their company. Afterwards, interviews with each participant have been conducted in order to gain insights.
Results: The initial validation revealed that some of the stages of the model need to be rearranged and minor usability issues were found. The overall structure of the model was well received. The study resulted in the development of the version 1.1 of the DEEP product roadmap maturity model which is also presented in this article.
Through increasing market dynamics, rapidly evolving technologies and shifting user expectations coupled with the adoption of lean and agile practices, companies are struggling with their ability to provide reliable product roadmaps by applying traditional approaches. Currently, most companies are seeking opportunities to improve their product roadmapping practices. As a first challenge they have to assess their current product roadmapping capabilities in order to better understand how to improve their practices and how to switch to a new approach. The aim of this article is to provide an initial maturity model for product roadmapping practices that is especially suited for assessing the roadmapping capabilities of companies operating in dynamic and uncertain market environments. Based on interviews with 15 experts from 13 various companies the current state of practice regarding product roadmapping was identified. Afterwards, the model development was conducted in the context of expert workshops with the Robert Bosch GmbH and researchers. The study results in the so-called DEEP 1.0 product roadmap maturity model which allows companies to conduct a self assessment of their product roadmapping practice.
Context: Organizations are increasingly challenged by dynamic and technical market environments. Traditional product roadmapping practices such as detailed and fixed long-term planning typically fail in such environments. Therefore, companies are actively seeking ways to improve their product roadmapping approach. Goal: This paper aims at identifying problems and challenges with respect to product roadmapping. In addition, it aims at understanding how companies succeed in improving their roadmapping practices in their respective company contexts. The study focuses on mid-sized and large companies developing software-intensive products in dynamic and technical market environments. Method: We conducted semi structured expert interviews with 15 experts from 13 German companies and conducted a thematic data analysis. Results: The analysis showed that a significant number of companies is still struggling with traditional feature based product-roadmapping and opinion based prioritization of features. The most promising areas for improvement are stating the outcomes a company is trying to achieve and making them part of the roadmap, sharing or co-developing the roadmap with stakeholders, and the establishing discovery activities.
Context: Companies in highly dynamic markets increasingly struggle with their ability to plan product development and to create reliable roadmaps. A main reason is the decreasing lack of predictability of markets, technologies, and customer behaviors. New approaches for product roadmapping seem to be necessary in order to cope with today's highly dynamic conditions. Little research is available with respect to such new approaches. Objective: In order to better understand the state of the art and to identify research gaps, this article presents a review of the scientific literature with respect to product roadmapping. Method: We performed a systematic literature review (SLR) with respect to identify papers in the field of computer science. Results: After filtering, the search resulted in a set of 23 relevant papers. The identified papers focus on different aspects such as roadmap types, processes for creating and updating roadmaps, problems and challenges with roadmapping, approaches to visualize roadmaps, generic frameworks and specific aspects such as the combination of roadmaps with business modeling. Overall, the scientific literature covers many important aspects of roadmapping but does provide only little knowledge on how to create product roadmaps under highly dynamic conditions. Research gaps address, for instance, the inclusion of goals or outcomes into product roadmaps, the alignment of a roadmap with a product vision, and the inclusion of product discovery activities in product roadmaps. In addition, the transformation from traditional roadmapping processes to new ways of roadmapping is not sufficiently addressed in the scientific literature.
Software process improvement (SPI) is around for decades, but it is a critically discussed topic. In several waves, different aspects of SPI have been discussed in the past, e.g., large scale company-level SPI programs, maturity models, success factors, and in-project SPI. It is hard to find new streams or a consensus in the community, but there is a trend coming along with agile and lean software development. Apparently, practitioners reject extensive and prescriptive maturity models and move towards smaller, faster and continuous project-integrated SPI. Based on data from two survey studies conducted in Germany (2012) and Europe (2016), we analyze the process customization for projects and practices for implementing SPI in the participating companies. Our findings indicate that, even in regulated industry sectors, companies increasingly adopt in-project SPI activities, primarily with the goal to continuously optimize specific processes. Therefore, with this paper, we want to stimulate a discussion on how to evolve traditional SPI towards a continuous learning environment.
The emergence of agile methods and practices has not only changed the development processes but might also have affected how companies conduct software process improvement (SPI). Through a set of complementary studies, we aim to understand how SPI has changed in times of agile software development. Specifically, we aim (a) to identify and characterize the set of publications that connect elements of agility to SPI, (b) to explore to which extent agile methods/practices have been used in the context of SPI, and (c) to understand whether the topics addressed in the literature are relevant and useful for industry professionals. To study these questions, we conducted an in-depth analysis of the literature identified in a previous mapping study, an interview study, and an analysis of the responses given by industry professionals to SPI related questions stemming from an independently conducted survey study. Regarding the first question, we identified 55 publications that focus on both SPI and agility of which 48 present and discuss how agile methods/practices are used to steer SPI initiatives. Regarding the second question, we found that the two most frequently mentioned agile methods in the context of SPI are Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP), while the most frequently mentioned agile practices are integrate often, test-first, daily meeting, pair programming, retrospective, on-site customer, and product backlog. Regarding the third question, we found that a majority of the interviewed and surveyed industry professionals see SPI as a continuous activity. They agree with the agile SPI literature that agile methods/practices play an important role in SPI activities but that the importance given to specific agile methods/practices does not always coincide with the frequency with which these methods/practices are mentioned in the literature.
Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wurde eine Software-Architektur entwickelt, mit der sich Interaktionen zwischen autonomen Fahrzeugen und Passanten im Straßenverkehr in einer simulierten Umgebung untersuchen lassen. Hierbei wird das autonome Fahrzeug durch einen externen Fahrsimulator gesteuert. Der Einsatz eines Motion-Capture-Systems ermöglicht dabei die Aufzeichnung und Übertragungen der Bewegungsdaten von Passant und Fahrer in die virtuelle Umgebung. Durch den Einsatz von head-mounted Displays sollen Akteure die virtuelle Umgebung möglichst als real empfinden. Auf Basis der entwickelten Software-Architektur wurde eine Simulationsumgebung realisiert, in der Interaktionen zwischen einem Passant und einem autonomem Fahrzeug untersucht werden können. Das Projekt soll das Potential von Motion-Capture gestützten Simulationsumgebungen für die Konzeption und Entwicklung von autonomen Fahrsystemen aufzeigen.
Über die letzten Jahre nehmen die Verkehrsunfälle zwischen Fahrzeugen und Fahrrädern und Motorrädern immer weiter zu. Die Ursache ist meistens eine unachtsam geöffnete Fahrzeugtür, mit der ein anfahrender Zweiradfahrer kollidiert. Diese Unfälle können verheerende Folgen für alle Beteiligten haben. Aus diesem Grund soll der technologische Fortschritt, welcher sich durch die gesamte Automobilbranche zieht, um eine zusätzliche Komponente erweitert werden. Hierbei handelt es sich um ein System für Zweiradfahrer, welches eine sich öffnende Fahrzeugtür frühzeitig erkennen soll, den Fahrer somit frühzeitig warnen kann und gegebenenfalls Strategien zu Unfallvermeidung einleiten kann. Dieses Konzept soll die Entwicklung des Systems vorgeben und grundlegend erläutern.
Digitalization of products and services commonly causes substantial changes in business models, operations, organization structures and IT infrastructures of enterprises. Motivated by experiences and observations from digitalization projects, the paper investigates the effects of digitalization on enterprise architectures (EA). EA models serve as representation of business, information system and technical aspects of an enterprise to support management and development. By comparing EA models before and after digitalization, the paper analyzes the kinds of changes visible in the EA model. The most important finding is that newly created digitized products and the associated (product)- and enterprise architecture are no longer properly integrated into the overall architecture and even exist in parallel. Thus, the focus of this work is on showing these parallel architectures and proposing derivations for a better integration.
Die Navigation mit dem E-Bike soll eine positive Nutzerfahrung sein. Deshalb wurde im Zuge dieser Arbeit im Rahmen von Bosch E-Bike Systems ein multimodales smart User Interface (MSUI) entwickelt. Das Konzept umfasst visuelle Turn-by-Turn Signale, taktile Vibrationssignale im Lenker und eine auditive Sprachausgabe. Ziel der Arbeit ist ein Prototyp, der sich für die Evaluation von Nutzerbedürfnissen in Bezug auf verschiedene multimodale Rückmeldemöglichkeiten eignet.
Die Simulation menschlichen Gruppenverhaltens kann bei der Kapazitäten-, Risiko- und Evakuierungs Planung von Gebäuden hilfreich sein, bei der Produktion von Filmen für eindrucksvolle Massen-Szenen eingesetzt werden oder virtuelle Schauplätze in Echtzeit-Anwendungen beleben. Die Herausforderungen liegen vor allem in einem realistischen Erscheinungsbild der virtuellen Crowd, glaubwürdigem Verhalten innerhalb eines sozialen Verbundes, realitätsnahen Animationen und der Wahrung der Echtzeitfähigkeit interaktiver Anwendungen. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wird der aktuelle Stand der Technik vorgestellt, Technologien evaluiert und ein Crowd Simulation Prototyp mit der Unity Engine implementiert.
Die Bedeutung und Stellung der Informationstechnologie erlebte in den letzten 60 Jahren einen fortlaufenden Wandel. Der anfänglich rein unterstützende Charakter entwickelte sich immer mehr zu einem wichtigen Bestandteil der Aufbau- und Ablauforganisation im Unternehmen. Ein definiertes IT-Servicemanagement im Unternehmen sieht sich mittlerweile gleichgeordnet mit den restlichen Fachabteilungen, tritt mit seinen Leistungen als Dienstleister auf und betrachtet die Fachabteilungen als „Kunde“. Neue Technologien und Innovationen und die daraus resultierenden Neudefinitionen bestehender Anforderungen sollen im Rahmen der Digitalisierung in Unternehmen positive Effekte zeigen. IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) wird als Framework für IT-Servicemanagement in der Industrie und im öffentlichen Dienst genutzt. Der Ansatz von ITIL unterstützte den Kulturwandel und sensibilisierte das Management und die Mitarbeiter darin, serviceorientiert zu denken. Da dieser Ansatz einen vordefinierten, zyklischen Ablauf hat, könnten schnell eintreffende Kundenanforderungen nicht fristgerecht umgesetzt werden, weshalb agile Methoden wie der DevOps-Ansatz in den Vordergrund rücken. Die Herausforderung besteht darin, den Kulturwandel bei der Einführung von DevOps in bestehenden ITIL-Strukturen in Unternehmen zu fördern.
Eines der gängigsten bildgebenden Verfahren in der Medizin ist die Sonografie. Jedoch ist die Reproduzierbarkeit der Ultraschalldiagnostik bis heute noch immer ein Problem, wodurch Fehldiagnosen gestellt werden. Durch das in diesem Papier vorgestellte prototypische System zur Unterstützung für Medizinstudenten in Ultraschallseminaren sollen Anforderungen zur Reproduzierbarkeit einer Ultraschalluntersuchung definiert werden. Durch Experteninterviews wurden Einblicke in die klinischen Abläufe und den Krankenhaus-Alltag gewonnen, welche Inhalte relevant sind, um die Reproduzierbarkeit von Ultraschalluntersuchungen zu ermöglichen.
Durch das stetige Wachstum an neuen Technologien und Möglichkeiten steht der Verschmelzung von Technologien mit dem Menschen kaum noch etwas im Wege. Die Untersuchung der Implantate und die damit verbundenen Risiken sind ein Teil dieser Arbeit. Von Bedeutung sind hier die Funktionsweise und die IT-Sicherheitsaspekte. Alle in dieser Arbeit dargestellten Implantate benötigen eine Kommunikation nach außen. Diese Kommunikationsmöglichkeit birgt Risiken, die nicht nur auf die Daten der Träger beschränkt sind, sondern auch gesundheitliche Risiken beinhalten.
Segmentierung von Polypen in Koloskopie-Bilddaten : eine Potentialanalyse von Deep-Learning-Methoden
(2018)
Kolorektale Karzinome haben eine hohe Sterblichkeitsrate, wenn sie spät entdeckt werden. Eine frühzeitige Entfernung von bösartigen Polypen im Magen-Darm-Trakt, die deren Vorstufen bilden, bietet jedoch hohe Überlebenschancen. Bei Darmspiegelungen werden gerade kleine Polypen aber recht häufig übersehen. Zuverlässige bildverarbeitende Systeme, die Polypen in einem Koloskopie-Frame nicht nur detektieren, sondern pixelgenau segmentieren, könnten Ärzten bei Darmkrebs-Screenings helfen. Diese Arbeit analysiert den aktuellen Stand der Segmentierung von Polypen im Gastrointestinaltrakt. Weiterführend wird untersucht, inwiefern die in letzter Zeit sehr erfolgreichen Methoden des Deep Learning hier Vorteile bieten.
Enterprises are transforming their strategy, culture, processes, and their information systems to enlarge their digitalization efforts or to approach for digital leadership. The digital transformation profoundly disrupts existing enterprises and economies. In current times, a lot of new business opportunities appeared using the potential of the Internet and related digital technologies: The Internet of Things, services computing, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, big data with analytics, mobile systems, collaboration networks, and cyber physical systems. Digitization fosters the development of IT environments with many rather small and distributed structures, like the Internet of Things, microservices, or other micro-granular elements. Architecting micro-granular structures have a substantial impact on architecting digital services and products. The change from a closed-world modeling perspective to more flexible Open World of living software and system architectures defines the context for flexible and evolutionary software approaches, which are essential to enable the digital transformation. In this paper, we are revealing multiple perspectives of digital enterprise architecture and decisions to effectively support value and service oriented software systems for intelligent digital services and products.
Presently, many companies are transforming their strategy and product base, as well as their culture, processes and information systems to become more digital or to approach for a digital leadership. In the last years new business opportunities appeared using the potential of the Internet and related digital technologies, like Internet of Things, services computing, cloud computing, edge and fog computing, social networks, big data with analytics, mobile systems, collaboration networks, and cyber physical systems. Digitization fosters the development of IT environments with many rather small and distributed structures, like the Internet of Things, Microservices, or other micro-granular elements. This has a strong impact for architecting digital services and products. The change from a closed-world modeling perspective to more flexible open-world composition and evolution of micro-granular system architectures defines the moving context for adaptable systems. We are focusing on a continuous bottom-up integration of micro-granular architectures for a huge amount of dynamically growing systems and services, as part of a new digital enterprise architecture for service dominant digital products.
New business opportunities appeared using the potential of the Internet and related digital technologies, like the Internet of Things, services computing, artificial intelligence, cloud, edge, and fog computing, social networks, big data with analytics, mobile systems, collaboration networks, and cyber-physical systems. Companies are transforming their strategy and product base, as well as their culture, processes and information systems to adopt digital transformation or to approach for digital leadership. Digitalization fosters the development of IT environments with many rather small and distributed structures, like the Internet of Things, Microservices, or other micro-granular elements. Digitalization has a substantial impact for architecting the open and complex world of highly distributed digital servcies and products, as part of a new digital enterprise architecture, which structure and direct service-dominant digital products and services. The present research paper investigates mechanisms for supporting the evolution of digital enterprise architectures with user-friendly methods and instruments of interaction, visualization, and intelligent decision management during the exploration of multiple and interconnected perspectives by an architecture management cockpit.
Enterprise Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) systems are key to managing risks threatening modern enterprises from many different angles. Key constituent to GRC systems is the definition of controls that are implemented on the different layers of an Enterprise Architecture (EA). Controls become part of a “concern” of the EA, which allows to use an EA viewpoint to cover control compliance assessments. In this article we explore this relationship further, derive a metamodel linking control and EA, and elicit how this linkage give rise to a hierarchic understanding of the viewpoint concept for EAs. We complement these considerations with an expository instantiation in a cockpit for control compliance applied in an international enterprise in the insurance industry.
Recognizing human actions is a core challenge for autonomous systems as they directly share the same space with humans. Systems must be able to recognize and assess human actions in real-time. To train the corresponding data-driven algorithms, a significant amount of annotated training data is required. We demonstrate a pipeline to detect humans, estimate their pose, track them over time and recognize their actions in real-time with standard monocular camera sensors. For action recognition, we transform noisy human pose estimates in an image like format we call Encoded Human Pose Image (EHPI). This encoded information can further be classified using standard methods from the computer vision community. With this simple procedure, we achieve competitive state-of-the-art performance in pose based action detection and can ensure real-time performance. In addition, we show a use case in the context of autonomous driving to demonstrate how such a system can be trained to recognize human actions using simulation data.
RoPose-Real: real world dataset acquisition for data-driven industrial robot arm pose estimation
(2019)
It is necessary to employ smart sensory systems in dynamic and mobile workspaces where industrial robots are mounted on mobile platforms. Such systems should be aware of flexible and non-stationary workspaces and able to react autonomously to changing situations. Building upon our previously presented RoPose-system, which employs a convolutional neural network architecture that has been trained on pure synthetic data to estimate the kinematic chain of an industrial robot arm system, we now present RoPose-Real. RoPose-Real extends the prior system with a comfortable and targetless extrinsic calibration tool, to allow for the production of automatically annotated datasets for real robot systems. Furthermore, we use the novel datasets to train the estimation network with real world data. The extracted pose information is used to automatically estimate the observing sensor pose relative to the robot system. Finally we evaluate the performance of the presented subsystems in a real world robotic scenario.
Learning to translate between real world and simulated 3D sensors while transferring task models
(2019)
Learning-based vision tasks are usually specialized on the sensor technology for which data has been labeled. The knowledge of a learned model is simply useless when it comes to data which differs from the data on which the model has been initially trained or if the model should be applied to a totally different imaging or sensor source. New labeled data has to be acquired on which a new model can be trained. Depending on the sensor, this can even get more complicated when the sensor data becomes more abstract and hard to be interpreted and labeled by humans. To enable reuse of models trained for a specific task across different sensors minimizes the data acquisition effort. Therefore, this work focuses on learning sensor models and translating between them, thus aiming for sensor interoperability. We show that even for the complex task of human pose estimation from 3D depth data recorded with different sensors, i.e. a simulated and a Kinect 2TM depth sensor, human pose estimation can greatly improve by translating between sensor models without modifying the original task model. This process especially benefits sensors and applications for which labels and models are difficult if at all possible to retrieve from raw sensor data.
The investigation of stress requires to distinguish between stress caused by physical activity and stress that is caused by psychosocial factors. The behaviour of the heart in response to stress and physical activity is very similar in case the set of monitored parameters is reduced to one. Currently, the differentiation remains difficult and methods which only use the heart rate are not able to differentiate between stress and physical activity, without using additional sensor data input. The approach focusses on methods which generate signals providing characteristics that are useful for detecting stress, physical activity, no activity and relaxation.
Autismus-Spektrum-Störungen (ASD) bei Kindern werden häufig zu spät diagnostiziert und die Begleitung der chronischen Krankheit gestaltet sich schwierig. Der vorgestellte Ansatz erlaubt die Behandlung der Kinder in dem bekannten häuslichen Umfeld und versucht die Beziehungen zwischen Schlaf und Verhalten herauszuarbeiten. Die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse sollen die Lebensqualität der Patienten verbessern und den Eltern Hilfestellung geben. Die notwendige infrastrukturelle Unterstützung wird durch medizinisches Fachpersonal geleistet, das auf einen web-basierten Service zurückgreifen kann, der sämtliche Prozesse (Diagnostik, Datenerfassung, -aufzeichnung und Training etc.) begleitet. Die anonymisierten Daten werden in einem Diagnosesystem zentral abgelegt und können so für zukünftige Behandlungsstrategien nutzbar sein. Die umfassende Lösung setzt auf zentrale Elemente von Smart-Homes und AAL auf.
Fatigue and drowsiness are responsible for a significant percentage of road traffic accidents. There are several approaches to monitor the driver's drowsiness, ranging from the driver's steering behavior to the analysis of the driver, e.g. eye tracking, blinking, yawning, or electrocardiogram (ECG). This paper describes the development of a low-cost ECG sensor to derive heart rate variability (HRV) data for drowsiness detection. The work includes hardware and software design. The hardware was implemented on a printed circuit board (PCB) designed so that the board can be used as an extension shield for an Arduino. The PCB contains a double, inverted ECG channel including low-pass filtering and provides two analog outputs to the Arduino, which combines them and performs the analog-to-digital conversion. The digital ECG signal is transferred to an NVidia embedded PC where the processing takes place, including QRS-complex, heart rate, and HRV detection as well as visualization features. The resulting compact sensor provides good results in the extraction of the main ECG parameters. The sensor is being used in a larger frame, where facial-recognition-based drowsiness detection is combined with ECG-based detection to improve the recognition rate under unfavorable light or occlusion conditions.
Die Erholung unseres Körpers und Gehirns von Müdigkeit ist direkt abhängig von der Qualität des Schlafes, die aus den Ergebnissen einer Schlafstudie ermittelt werden kann. Die Klassifizierung der Schlafstadien ist der erste Schritt dieser Studie und beinhaltet die Messung von Biovitaldaten und deren weitere Verarbeitung. Das non-invasive Schlafanalyse-System basiert auf einem Hardware-Sensornetz aus 24 Drucksensoren, das die Schlafphasenerkennung ermöglicht. Die Drucksensoren sind mit einem energieeffizienten Mikrocontroller über einen systemweiten Bus mit Adressarbitrierung verbunden. Ein wesentlicher Unterschied dieses Systems im Vergleich zu anderen Ansätzen ist die innovative Art, die Sensoren unter der Matratze zu platzieren. Diese Eigenschaft erleichtert die kontinuierliche Nutzung des Systems ohne fühlbaren Einfluss auf das gewohnte Bett. Das System wurde getestet, indem Experimente durchgeführt wurden, die den Schlaf verschiedener gesunder junger Personen aufzeichneten. Die ersten Ergebnisse weisen auf das Potenzial hin, nicht nur Atemfrequenz und Körperbewegung, sondern auch Herzfrequenz zu erfassen.
This document presents an algorithm for a nonobtrusive recognition of Sleep/Wake states using signals derived from ECG, respiration, and body movement captured while lying in a bed. As a core mathematical base of system data analytics, multinomial logistic regression techniques were chosen. Derived parameters of the three signals are used as the input for the proposed method. The overall achieved accuracy rate is 84% for Wake/Sleep stages, with Cohen’s kappa value 0.46. The presented algorithm should support experts in analyzing sleep quality in more detail. The results confirm the potential of this method and disclose several ways for its improvement.
The goal of this paper pretends to show how a bed system with an embedded system with sensor is able to analyze a person’s movement, breathing and recognizing the positions that the subject is lying on the bed during the night without any additional physical contact. The measurements are performed with sensors placed between the mattress and the frame. An Intel Edison board was used as an endpoint that served as a communication node from the mesh network to external service. Two nodes and Intel Edison are attached to the bottom of the bed frame and they are connected to the sensors.
This study is about estimating the reproducibility of finding palpation points of three different anatomical landmarks in the human body (Xiphoid Process and the 2 Hip Crests) to support a navigated ultrasound application. On 6 test subjects with different body mass index the three palpation points were located five times by two examiners. The deviation from the target position was calculated and correlated to the fat thickness above each palpation point. The reproducibility of the measurements had a mean error of ≈13.5 mm +- 4 mm, which seems to be sufficient for the desired application field.
In der Orthopädie werden Robotersysteme bereits seit mehreren Jahren erfolgreich unterstützend eingesetzt. Dieser Ansatz erfordert die vorgelagerte Erstellung eines digitalen Modells auf Basis von medizinischen Bilddatensätzen. Die Erstellung und Überprüfung der Modelle soll in einer browserbasierten Client- Server-Anwendung erfolgen. Hierfür ist die Darstellung von zweidimensionalen und dreidimensionalen Datensätzen erforderlich. Basis dieses Papers ist die Entwicklung eines Ansatzes zur interaktiven, browserbasierten dreidimensionalen Darstellung medizinischer Planungsdaten. Die Anwendung stellt ein Proof of Concept dar, ob die bestehenden Desktopanwendungen zur Darstellung von Planungsdaten ersetzt werden können. Mit Hilfe des Frameworks AMI.js wurde die Anwendung umgesetzt. Sie erfüllt alle definierten Anforderungen und kann somit die aktuellen Desktopanwendungen ersetzen.
Zur Unterstützung des Operateurs wird eine patientennahe Informationsanzeige entwickelt, die kontextrelevante Informationen entsprechend der aktuellen Situation bereitstellen kann. Hierfür soll eine Situationserkennung konzipiert werden, die auf unterschiedliche intraoperative Prozesse übertragen werden kann. Ziel der adaptiven Situationserkennung ist das Erkennen spezifischer Situationen durch intraoperative Informationen unterschiedlicher Datenquellen im Operationssaal. Innerhalb der Datenerhebung und -analyse wurden Anwendungsfälle für die Situationserkennung definiert sowie chirurgische Prozessmodelle erstellt, die intraoperative Ereignisse abbilden. Auf Basis dieser Informationen wurde ein Konzept entworfen, das sich zunächst auf die Erkennung abstrakter generalisierter Phasen, unabhängig vom Eingriff, fokussiert und sich Schritt für Schritt auf granulare Prozessschritte spezifizieren lässt. Diese Flexibilität soll die Übertragbarkeit des Konzepts auf intraoperative Prozesse ermöglichen und den Operateur dadurch gezielt mit kontextrelevanten Informationen unterstützen. Das Konzept wird in zukünftigen Schritten weiterentwickelt.
Mammographie-Geräte werden in der Diagnostik von Mammakarzinomen eingesetzt. Die ursprüngliche Technik wurde in den letzten Jahren von analogen Röntgenfilmen zu digital integrierten Systemen weiterentwickelt. Durch die Tomosynthese, bei der in einem Schnittbildverfahren mehrere Schichten des Organismus untersucht werden können, können auch überlagerte Strukturen sichtbar gemacht werden. Um als adäquate Grundlage zur Diagnostik von malignen Tumoren dienen zu können, müssen einige qualitative Anforderungen erfüllt werden. Bisher gibt es wenig Literatur, die Anforderungen und den Aufbau solcher Geräte systematisch beschreiben. Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit werden auf Basis der Literatur und bestehender Systeme die qualitativen Anforderungen identifiziert. Der prinzipielle Aufbau solcher Systeme wird anhand der einzelnen Systembausteine in der semiformalen Notationssprache SysML gezeigt. Die grundlegende Funktionsweise eines tomosynthesefähigen Mammographie Gerätes wird in dieser Arbeit zusammenfassend und anhand der einzelnen Systembausteine beschrieben. Diese Arbeit dient der Vermittlung eines umfassenden Verständnisses für die digitale Mammographie, um als Grundlage für die Dokumentation von qualitativen Anforderungen dienen zu können.
Telemetrie und Homemonitoring werden bereits in vielen Gesundheitsbereichen erfolgreich genutzt. Moderne Herzschrittmacher ermöglichen durch telemetrische Datenübertragung das Homemonitoring aktueller Gesundheits- und Zustandsdaten durch PatientInnen und ÄrztInnen. Für die Weiterentwicklung existierender Produkte ist ein grundlegendes Verständnis der Anforderungen an und des Aufbaus solcher Systeme notwendig. Bisher existieren
herstellerunabhängige Betrachtungen dieser noch nicht. Durch die Verwendung von SysML als semiformale Notationssprache wird das System Herzschrittmacher und Homemonitoring modelliert. Die Anforderungen an ein solches System lassen sich aus bestehenden Produkten ableiten. Die vorliegende Arbeit beschreibt die Systemarchitektur solcher Systeme, anhand derer die Anbindung an Informationssysteme über das Homemonitoringsystem und die dadurch umgesetzten Funktionen gezeigt werden.
Private equity (PE) firms are investment firms that acquire equity shares in companies. The goal of PE firms is to exit the investment after few years with a substantial increase in value. PE firms often claim to outperform the market, i.e. to create alpha.
The overall aim of this paper is to unravel the mystery of value creation in the PE industry. First, the author presents a conceptual framework for value creation in the PE industry based on a multiple valuation model that breaks down value creation into different elements. Second, the paper evaluates whether PE firms really create value by analysing and combining results from prior empirical studies based on the conceptual framework.
The results show that existing empirical evidence is mixed but that there is indeed a tendency toward a positive evidence that PE firms create economic value in average. However, there are methodological difficulties in measuring the value creation and studies are often subject to bias. Finally, it is pointed out that the question whether PE firms really create value has to be viewed from different perspectives such as the perspective of the PE firm, the investors and the portfolio companies.
Companies are constantly changing their business process models. In team environments, different versions of a process model are created at the same time. These versions of a process model need to be merged from time to time to consolidate changes and create a new common version.
In this short paper, we propose a solution for modifying a merge result. The goal is to create a meaningful merge result by adding connector nodes to the model at specific locations. This increases the amount of possible result models and reduces additional implementation effort.
While several service-based maintainability metrics have been proposed in the scientific literature, reliable approaches to automatically collect these metrics are lacking. Since static analysis is complicated for decentralized and technologically diverse microservice-based systems, we propose a dynamic approach to calculate such metrics from runtime data via distributed tracing. The approach focuses on simplicity, extensibility, and broad applicability. As a first prototype, we implemented a Java application with a Zipkin integrator, 23 different metrics, and five export formats. We demonstrated the feasibility of the approach by analyzing the runtime data of an example microservice based system. During an exploratory study with six participants, 14 of the 18 services were invoked via the system’s web interface. For these services, all metrics were calculated correctly from the generated traces.
Microservices are a topic driven mainly by practitioners and academia is only starting to investigate them. Hence, there is no clear picture of the usage of Microservices in practice. In this paper, we contribute a qualitative study with insights into industry adoption and implementation of Microservices. Contrary to existing quantitative studies, we conducted interviews to gain a more in-depth understanding of the current state of practice. During 17 interviews with software professionals from 10 companies, we analyzed 14 service-based systems. The interviews focused on applied technologies, Microservices characteristics, and the perceived influence on software quality. We found that companies generally rely on well established technologies for service implementation, communication, and deployment. Most systems, however, did not exhibit a high degree of technological diversity as commonly expected with Microservices. Decentralization and product character were different for systems built for external customers. Applied DevOps practices and automation were still on a mediocre level and only very few companies strictly followed the you build it, you run it principle. The impact of Microservices on software quality was mainly rated as positive. While maintainability received the most positive mentions, some major issues were associated with security. We present a description of each case and summarize the most important findings of companies across different domains and sizes. Researchers may build upon our findings and take them into account when designing industry-focused methods.
While the concepts of object-oriented antipatterns and code smells are prevalent in scientific literature and have been popularized by tools like SonarQube, the research field for service-based antipatterns and bad smells is not as cohesive and organized. The description of these antipatterns is distributed across several publications with no holistic schema or taxonomy. Furthermore, there is currently little synergy between documented antipatterns for the architectural styles SOA and Microservices, even though several antipatterns may hold value for both. We therefore conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) that identified 14 primary studies. 36 service-based antipatterns were extracted from these studies and documented with a holistic data model. We also categorized the antipatterns with a taxonomy and implemented relationships between them. Lastly, we developed a web application for convenient browsing and implemented a GitHub-based repository and workflow for the collaborative evolution of the collection. Researchers and practitioners can use the repository as a reference, for training and education, or for quality assurance.
Background: Design patterns are supposed to improve various quality attributes of software systems. However, there is controversial quantitative evidence of this impact. Especially for younger paradigms such as service- and microservice-based systems, there is a lack of empirical studies.
Objective: In this study, we focused on the effect of four service-based patterns - namely process abstraction, service façade, decomposed capability, and event-driven messaging - on the evolvability of a system from the viewpoint of inexperienced developers.
Method: We conducted a controlled experiment with Bachelor students (N = 69). Two functionally equivalent versions of a service-based web shop - one with patterns (treatment group), one without (control group) - had to be changed and extended in three tasks. We measured evolvability by the effectiveness and efficiency of the participants in these tasks. Additionally, we compared both system versions with nine structural maintainability metrics for size, granularity, complexity, cohesion, and coupling.
Results: Both experiment groups were able to complete a similar number of tasks within the allowed 90 min. Median effectiveness was 1/3. Mean efficiency was 12% higher in the treatment group, but this difference was not statistically significant. Only for the third task, we found statistical support for accepting the alternative hypothesis that the pattern version led to higher efficiency. In the metric analysis, the pattern version had worse measurements for size and granularity while simultaneously having slightly better values for coupling metrics. Complexity and cohesion were not impacted.
Interpretation: For the experiment, our analysis suggests that the difference in efficiency is stronger with more experienced participants and increased from task to task. With respect to the metrics, the patterns introduce additional volume in the system, but also seem to decrease coupling in some areas.
Conclusions: Overall, there was no clear evidence for a decisive positive effect of using service-based patterns, neither for the student experiment nor for the metric analysis. This effect might only be visible in an experiment setting with higher initial effort to understand the system or with more experienced developers.
Software evolvability is an important quality attribute, yet one difficult to grasp. A certain base level of it is allegedly provided by service- and microservice-based systems, but many software professionals lack systematic understanding of the reasons and preconditions for this. We address this issue via the proxy of architectural modifiability tactics. By qualitatively mapping principles and patterns of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and microservices onto tactics and analyzing the results, we cannot only generate insights into service-oriented evolution qualities, but can also provide a modifiability comparison of the two popular service-based architectural styles. The results suggest that both SOA and microservices possess several inherent qualities beneficial for software evolution. While both focus strongly on loose coupling and encapsulation, there are also differences in the way they strive for modifiability (e.g. governance vs. evolutionary design). To leverage the insights of this research, however, it is necessary to find practical ways to incorporate the results as guidance into the software development process.
Purpose – Many start-ups are in search of cooperation partners to develop their innovative business models. In response, incumbent firms are introducing increasingly more cooperation systems to engage with startups. However, many of these cooperations end in failure. Although qualitative studies on cooperation models have tried to improve the effectiveness of incumbent start-up strategies, only a few have empirically examined start-up cooperation behavior. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach – Drawing from a series of qualitative and quantitative studies. The scale dimensions are identified on an interview based qualitative study. Following workshops and questionnaire-based studies identify factors and rank them. These ranked factors are then used to build a measurement scale that is integrated in a standardized online questionnaire addressing start-ups. The gathered data are then analyzed using PLS-SEM.
Findings – The research was able to build a multi-item scale for start-ups cooperation behavior. This scale can be used in future research. The paper also provides a causal analysis on the impact of cooperation behavior on start-up performance. The research finds, that the found dimensions are suitable for measuring cooperation behavior. It also shows a minor positive effect on start-up’s performance.
Originality/value – The research fills the gap of lacking empirical research on the cooperation between start-ups and established firms. Also, most past studies focus on organizational structures and their performance when addressing these cooperations. Although past studies identified the start-ups behavior as a relevant factor, no empirical research has been conducted on the topic yet.
A large body of literature is concerned with models of presence— the sensory illusion of being part of a virtual scene— but there is still no general agreement on how to measure it objectively and reliably. For the presented study, we applied contemporary theory to measure presence in virtual reality. Thirty-seven participants explored an existing commercial game in order to complete a collection task. Two startle events were naturally embedded in the game progression to evoke physical reactions and head tracking data was collected in response to these events. Subjective presence was recorded using a post-study questionnaire and real-time assessments. Our novel implementation of behavioral measures lead to insights which could inform future presence research: We propose a measure in which startle reflexes are evoked through specific events in the virtual environment, and head tracking data is compared to the range and speed of baseline interactions.
In recent years, the parallel computing community has shown increasing interest in leveraging cloud resources for executing parallel applications. Clouds exhibit several fundamental features of economic value, like on-demand resource provisioning and a pay-per-use model. Additionally, several cloud providers offer their resources with significant discounts; however, possessing limited availability. Such volatile resources are an auspicious opportunity to reduce the costs arising from computations, thus achieving higher cost efficiency. In this paper, we propose a cost model for quantifying the monetary costs of executing parallel applications in cloud environments, leveraging volatile resources. Using this cost model, one is able to determine a configuration of a cloud-based parallel system that minimizes the total costs of executing an application.
In this paper we describe an interactive web-based visual analysis tool for Formula one races. It first provides an overview about all races on a yearly basis in a calendar-like representation. From this starting point, races can be selected and visually inspected in detail. We support a dynamic race position diagram as well as a more detailed lap times line plot for showing the drivers’ lap times in comparison. Many interaction techniques are supported like selections, filtering, highlighting, color coding, or details-on demand. We illustrate the usefulness of our visualization tool by applying it to a Formula one dataset while we describe the different dynamic visual racing patterns for a number of selected races and drivers.
Data analytics tasks on large datasets are computationally intensive and often demand the compute power of cluster environments. Yet, data cleansing, preparation, dataset characterization and statistics or metrics computation steps are frequent. These are mostly performed ad hoc, in an explorative manner and mandate low response times. But, such steps are I/O intensive and typically very slow due to low data locality, inadequate interfaces and abstractions along the stack. These typically result in prohibitively expensive scans of the full dataset and transformations on interface boundaries.
In this paper, we examine R as analytical tool, managing large persistent datasets in Ceph, a wide-spread cluster file-system. We propose nativeNDP – a framework for Near Data Processing that pushes down primitive R tasks and executes them in-situ, directly within the storage device of a cluster-node. Across a range of data sizes, we show that nativeNDP is more than an order of magnitude faster than other pushdown alternatives.
Ganz gleich, ob im privaten oder beruflichen Alltag, begleiten uns digitale Medien heute nahezu überall. Dabei dienen sie nicht nur zur Unterhaltung, sondern helfen uns, Arbeitsabläufe effizienter und produktiver durchzuführen. Doch die Arbeit des Menschen ist bei Weitem nicht überflüssig geworden. Durch die steigenden Anforderungen ist die Nachfrage nach qualifiziertem Fachpersonal heute höher denn je. Währenddessen müssen Mitarbeiter in der Lage sein, mit der rasanten Entwicklung neuer Produkte und Technologien Schritt zu halten. Dabei ist eine qualitative Aus- und Weiterbildung unumgänglich. Beginnend mit der Bildung von Medienkompetenz in Schulen bis hin zur Fach- und Berufsbildung sowie beruflichen Weiterbildung, muss der Umgang mit digitalen Technologien gelehrt sein. Darüber hinaus bieten diese Technologien neue Potenziale zur Verbesserung von Bildungskonzepten und können zudem dabei helfen, den Lernerfolg zu steigern.
Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Evaluation einer VR-basierten Lernumgebung und untersucht mögliche Auswirkungen auf den Lernerfolg durch die verkörperte Darstellung eines virtuellen Instruktors. Dazu wurde die technische Implementierung einer kollaborativen Lernumgebung vorgenommen, mit welcher anschließend eine Versuchsreihe mit 16 Probanden durchgeführt wurde. Im Hinblick auf eine mögliche Steigerung der Effizienz in der eigenständigen Bewältigung von Montageaufgaben nach unterschiedlichen Instruktionsarten, wurden keine signifikanten Leistungsverbesserungen festgestellt.
Type 1 diabetes is a chronic and a life threatening disease: an adjusted treatment and a proper management of the disease are crucial to prevent or delay the complications of diabetes. Although during the last decade the development of the artificial pancreas has presented great advances in diabetes care, the multiple daily injections therapy still represents the most widely used treatment option for type 1 diabetes. This work presents the proposal and first development stages of an application focused on guiding patients using the continuous glucose monitors and smart pens together with insulin and carbohydrates recommendations. Our proposal aims to develop a platform to integrate a series of innovative machine learning models and tools rigorously tested together with the use of the latest IoT devices to manage type 1 diabetes. The resulting system actually closes the loop, like the artificial pancreas, but in an intermittent way.
Due to the rising need for palliative care in Russia, it is crucial to provide timely and high-quality solutions for patients, relatives, and caregivers. A methodology for remote monitoring of patients in need of palliative care and the requirements will be developed for a hardware-software complex for remote monitoring of patients' health at home.
The potentials and opportunities created by digitized healthcare can be further customized through smart data processing and analysis using accurate patient information. This development and the associated new treatment concepts basing on digital smart sensors can lead to an increase in motivation by applying gamification approaches. This effect can also be used in the field of medical treatment, e.g. with the help of a digital spirometer combined with an app. In one of our exemplary applications, we show how to control an airplane within an app by breathing respectively inhaling and exhaling. Using this biofeedback within a game allows us to increase the motivation and fun for children that need to perform necessary exercises.
This paper investigates the possibility to effectively monitor and control the respiratory action using a very simple and non invasive technique based on a single lightweight reduced-size wireless surface electromyography (sEMG) sensor placed below the sternum. The captured sEMG signal, due to the critical sensor position, is characterized by a low energy level and it is affected by motion artifacts and cardiac noise. In this work we present a preliminary study performed on adults for assessing the correlation of the spirometry signal and the sEMG signal after the removal of the superimposed heart signal. This study and the related findings could be useful in respiratory monitoring of preterm infants.
During two researches the influence of technologies on sleep were analyzed. The first one is about the effect of light on the circadian rhythm and as consequence on sleep quality of persons in a vegetative state. The second one, which is still running, surveys the influence of several technical tools on the sleep of elderly people living in a nursing home.
In summary, we believe that current “sleep monitoring” consumer devices on the market must undergo a more robust validation process before being made available and distributed in the general public. This is especially noteworthy as there have been first reports in the literature that inaccurate feedback of such consumer devices can worry subjects and may even lead to compromised well-being of the user.
The cloud evolved into an attractive execution environment for parallel applications from the High Performance Computing (HPC) domain. Existing research recognized that parallel applications require architectural refactoring to benefit from cloud-specific properties (most importantly elasticity). However, architectural refactoring comes with many challenges and cannot be applied to all applications due to fundamental performance issues. Thus, during the last years, different cloud migration strategies have been considered for different classes of parallel applications. In this paper, we provide a survey on HPC cloud migration research. We investigate on the approaches applied and the parallel applications considered. Based on our findings, we identify and describe three cloud migration strategies.
Parallel applications are the computational backbone of major industry trends and grand challenges in science. Whereas these applications are typically constructed for dedicated High Performance Computing clusters and supercomputers, the cloud emerges as attractive execution environment, which provides on-demand resource provisioning and a pay-per-use model. However, cloud environments require specific application properties that may restrict parallel application design. As a result, design trade-offs are required to simultaneously maximize parallel performance and benefit from cloud-specific characteristics.
In this paper, we present a novel approach to assess the cloud readiness of parallel applications based on the design decisions made. By discovering and understanding the implications of these parallel design decisions on an application’s cloud readiness, our approach supports the migration of parallel applications to the cloud.We introduce an assessment procedure, its underlying meta model, and a corresponding instantiation to structure this multi-dimensional design space. For evaluation purposes, we present an extensive case study comprising three parallel applications and discuss their cloud readiness based on our approach.
In this paper, we deal with optimizing the monetary costs of executing parallel applications in cloud-based environments. Specifically, we investigate on how scalability characteristics of parallel applications impact the total costs of computations. We focus on a specific class of irregularly structured problems, where the scalability typically depends on the input data. Consequently, dynamic optimization methods are required for minimizing the costs of computation. For quantifying the total monetary costs of individual parallel computations, the paper presents a cost model that considers the costs for the parallel infrastructure employed as well as the costs caused by delayed results. We discuss a method for dynamically finding the number of processors for which the total costs based on our cost model are minimal. Our extensive experimental evaluation gives detailed insights into the performance characteristics of our approach.
Assistive environments are entering our homes faster than ever. However, there are still various barriers to be broken. One of the crucial points is a personalization of offered services and integration of assistive technologies in common objects and therefore in a regular daily routine. Recognition of sleep patterns for the preliminary sleep study is one of the Health services that could be performed in an undisturbing way. This article proposes the hardware system for the measurement of bio-vital signals necessary for initial sleep study in a nonobtrusive way. The first results confirm the potential of measurement of breathing and movement signals with the proposed system.
A clinically useful system for individual continuous health data monitoring needs an architecture that takes into account all relevant medical and technical conditions. The requirements for a health app to support such a system are collected, and a vendor independent architecture is designed that allows the collection of vital data from arbitrary wearables using a smartphone. A prototypical implementation for the main scenario shows the feasibility of the approach.
Integrating tools and applications into a clinically useful system for individual continuous health data surveillance requires an architecture considering all relevant medical and technical conditions. Therefore, the requirements of an integrated system including a health app to collect and monitor sensor data to support personalized medicine are analyzed. The structure and behavior of the system are defined regarding the specific health use cases and scenarios. A vendor-independent architecture, which enables the collection of vital data from arbitrary wearables using a smartphone, is presented. The data is centrally managed and processed by attending physicians. The modular architecture allows the system to extend to new scenarios, data formats, etc. A prototypical implementation of the system shows the feasibility of the approach.
Information and communication technologies support telemedicine to lower health access barriers and to provide better health care. While the potential in Active Assisted Living (AAL) is increasing, it is difficult to evaluate its benefits for the user, and it requires coordinated actions to launch it. The European Commission’s action plan 2012–2020 provides a roadmap to patient empowerment and healthcare, to link up devices and technologies, and to invest in research towards the personalized medicine of the future. As a quickly developing area in medicine, telemonitoring is a demanding field in research and development. Telemonitoring is an essential component of personalized medicine, where health providers can obtain precise information on outcare or chronic patients to improve diagnosis and therapy and also help healthy persons with prevention support. Telemonitoring combines mobile and wearable devices with the personal AAL home environment, a private or (partly) supervised home, most often called ’smart home’. The focus of this workshop is on new hardware and software solutions specifically designed to be applicable in AAL environments to empower patients. This workshop presents system-oriented solutions covering wearable and AAL-embedded devices, computer science infrastructure both at the users’ and the medical premises, to handle the data and decision support systems to support diagnose and treatment.
An important shift in software delivery is the definition of a cloud service as an independently deployable unit by following the microservices architectural style. Container virtualization facilitates development and deployment by ensuring independence from the runtime environment. Thus, cloud services are built as container based systems - a set of containers that control the lifecycle of software and middleware components. However, using containers leads to a new paradigm for service development and operation: Self service environments enable software developers to deploy and operate container based systems on their own - you build it, you run it. Following this approach, more and more operational aspects are transferred towards the responsibility of software developers. In this work, we propose a concept for self-adaptive cloud services based on container virtualization in line with the microservices architectural style and present a model-based approach that assists software developers in building these services. Based on operational models specified by developers, the mechanisms required for self-adaptation are automatically generated. As a result, each container automatically adapts itself in a reactive, decentralized manner. We evaluate a prototype which leverages the emerging TOSCA standard to specify operational behavior in a portable manner.
Die Arbeit stellt die Vision des Internet of Things (IoT) vor und betrachtet sowohl Möglichkeiten der Nutzung als auch Gefahrenpotentiale für die Sicherheit der Nutzer. Insbesondere wird hierbei der Anwendungsfall Smart Home näher betrachtet und am Beispiel ZigBee gravierende Schwächen dieser Geräte aufgezeigt.
Durch Industrie 4.0 kann die individuelle Fertigung von kleineren Stückzahlen zu geringen Kosten ermöglicht werden. Dafür müssen alle Anlagen miteinander vernetzt werden, um Daten austauschen und kommunizieren zu können. Durch die Vernetzung können neue Risiken und Gefahren entstehen. In dieser Arbeit wird die ITSicherheit in der Industrie 4.0 anhand möglichen Bedrohungsszenarien, Herausforderungen und Gegenmaßnahmen evaluiert. Dabei wird untersucht, welche Möglichkeiten Industrieunternehmen haben, um Hackerangriffen vorzubeugen und ob bereits etablierte Sicherheitskonzepte für industrielle Anlagen einfach übernommen werden können.
Das Ziel dieser Arbeit ist, die Infrastruktur einer modernen Fahrzeug-zu Fahrzeug-Kommunikation auf ihre Sicherheit zu prüfen. Dazu werden die Sicherheitsstandards für die Funkkommunikation genauer beschrieben und anschließend mit möglichen Angriffsmodellen geprüft. Mit dem erläuterten Wissen der VANET Architektur werden verschiedene Angriffe verständlicher. Dadurch werden die Schwachstellen offengelegt und Gegenmaßnahmen an passenden Punkten in der Architektur verdeutlicht.
Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit dem neuen elektronischen Personalausweis. Zum einen werden in diesem Paper die Sicherheitsziele des Personalausweises und die technische Umsetzung der Architektur und Protokolle erklärt. Es wird der Ablauf einer Online-Identifizierung für einen Nutzer mithilfe des Ausweises aufgezeigt. Risiken und Schwachstellen der Technologie im Software- und Hardwarebereich werden diskutiert und die bereits erfolgten Hack-Angriffe aufgezeigt. Die Arbeit legt Möglichkeiten dar, wie sich der Nutzer vor Angriffen schützen kann. Es werden die Gründe genannt, warum der neue Personalausweis online nur schwar Anklang findet und warum die Aufklärung über die zur Verfügung stehenden Anwendungen, eine Preisreduzierung der Lesegeräte sowie die vom Europa-Parlament und Europarat erlassene eIDAS-Verordnung nicht helfen werden, um die Nutzung voranzutreiben. Ergebnisse hierfür liefert eine Nutzerstudie. Zum anderen werden Ideen genannt, wie die Nutzung der elektronischen Funktionen des Ausweises stattdessen zu fördern ist.
Im Rahmen der wissenschaftlichen Vertiefung soll auf Basis der vorhandenen Ansätze das IT-Risikomanagement evaluiert werden. Hierbei soll die Frage, inwiefern das IT-Risikomanagement dem Unternehmen eine Hilfestellung bieten kann, geklärt und anschließend anhand von zwei Fallbeispielen dargestellt werden.
Database Management Systems (DBMS) need to handle large updatable datasets in on-line transaction processing (OLTP) workloads. Most modern DBMS provide snapshots of data in multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) transaction management scheme. Each transaction operates on a snapshot of the database, which is calculated from a set of tuple versions. High parallelism and resource-efficient append-only data placement on secondary storage is enabled. One major issue in indexing tuple versions on modern hardware technologies is the high write amplification for tree-indexes.
Partitioned B-Trees (PBT) [5] is based on the structure of the ubiquitous B+ Tree [8]. They achieve a near optimal write amplification and beneficial sequential writes on secondary storage. Yet they have not been implemented in a MVCC enabled DBMS to date.
In this paper we present the implementation of PBTs in PostgreSQL extended with SIAS. Compared to PostgreSQL’s B+–Trees PBTs have 50% better transaction throughput under TPC-C and a 30% improvement to standard PostgreSQL with Heap-Only Tuples.
With the capability of employing virtually unlimited compute resources, the cloud evolved into an attractive execution environment for applications from the High Performance Computing (HPC) domain. By means of elastic scaling, compute resources can be provisioned and decommissioned at runtime. This gives rise to a new concept in HPC: Elasticity of parallel computations. However, it is still an open research question to which extent HPC applications can benefit from elastic scaling and how to leverage elasticity of parallel computations. In this paper, we discuss how to address these challenges for HPC applications with dynamic task parallelism and present TASKWORK, a cloud-aware runtime system based on our findings. TASKWORK enables the implementation of elastic HPC applications by means of higher level development frameworks and solves corresponding coordination problems based on Apache ZooKeeper. For evaluation purposes, we discuss a development framework for parallel branch-and-bound based on TASKWORK, show how to implement an elastic HPC application, and report on measurements with respect to parallel efficiency and elastic scaling.
Due to frequently changing requirements, the internal structure of cloud services is highly dynamic. To ensure flexibility, adaptability, and maintainability for dynamically evolving services, modular software development has become the dominating paradigm. By following this approach, services can be rapidly constructed by composing existing, newly developed and publicly available third-party modules. However, newly added modules might be unstable, resource-intensive, or untrustworthy. Thus, satisfying non-functional requirements such as reliability, efficiency, and security while ensuring rapid release cycles is a challenging task. In this paper, we discuss how to tackle these issues by employing container virtualization to isolate modules from each other according to a specification of isolation constraints. We satisfy non-functional requirements for cloud services by automatically transforming the modules comprised into a container-based system. To deal with the increased overhead that is caused by isolating modules from each other, we calculate the minimum set of containers required to satisfy the isolation constraints specified. Moreover, we present and report on a prototypical transformation pipeline that automatically transforms cloud services developed based on the Java Platform Module System into container-based systems.
Mittlerweile ist der Einsatz von technischen Hilfsmitteln zu Analysezwecken im Sport fester Bestandteil im Trainingsalltag von Trainern und Athleten. In nahezu jeder Sportart werden Videoaufzeichnungen genutzt, um die Bewegungsausführung zu dokumentieren und zu analysieren. Allerdings reichen Aufnahmen von einem statischen Standort oftmals nicht mehr aus. An dieser Stelle kann Virtual Reality (VR) eine Lösung dieses Problems bieten. Durch VR kann der aufgezeichneten Szene eine weitere Ebene hinzugefügt und die Bewegungsabläufe neu und detaillierter bewertet werden. Um Bewegungen in einer virtuellen Umgebung abzubilden, müssen diese mittels Motion Capturing (MoCap) aufgezeichnet werden. Ziel dieser Arbeit ist es, herauszufinden, ob das MoCap System Perception Neuron in der Lage ist, Bewegungen in hoher Geschwindigkeit zu erfassen.
In den letzten Jahren beschäftigten sich Forscher und Automobilhersteller mit den Voraussetzungen für die Einführung von autonomem Fahren. Für Innovationen und Geschäftsmodelle im Bereich der intelligenten Mobilität, aber auch innerhalb der digitalen Wertschöpfungskette, spielen generell Zuverlässigkeit und Qualität der digitalen Datenübertragung eine entscheidende Rolle. Bevor das autonome Fahren vollständig eingeführt wird, muss man feststellen, welche Anforderungen an die digitale Infrastruktur beachtet werden müssen, gleichzeitig muss die Bedrohungslandschaft für autonomes Fahren analysiert werden.
Die folgende Arbeit beschäftigt sich damit, die Anforderungen und Gefahren zu analysieren und allgemeine Handlungsempfehlungen vorzuschlagen.
Ein stark erforschtes Gebiet der Computer Vision ist die Detektion von markanten Punkten des Gesichtszuges (englisch: facial feature detection), wie der Mundwinkel oder des Kinns. Daher lassen sich eine Vielzahl von veröffentlichten Verfahren finden, die sich jedoch teils deutlich hinsichtlich der Detektionsgenauigkeit, Robustheit und Geschwindigkeit unterscheiden. So sind viele Verfahren nur bedingt echtzeitfähig oder liefern nur mit hochaufgelösten Bildquellen ein zufriedenstellendes Ergebnis. In den letzten Jahren wurden daher Verfahren entwickelt, die versuchen, diese Problematiken zu lösen. In dieser Arbeit erfolgt eine Betrachtung dreier dieser State-of-the-Art Verfahren: Constrained Local Neural Fields (CLNF), Discriminative Response Map Fitting (DRMF) und Structured Output SVM (SO SVM), sowie deren Implementierungen. Dazu erfolgt ein empirischer Vergleich hinsichtlich der Detektionsgenauigkeit.
Informatics Inside : Connect(IT) : Informatik-Konferenz an der Hochschule Reutlingen, 9. Mai 2018
(2018)
Mit der Informatics Inside 2018 findet diese Veranstaltungsform bereits zum 10. Mal statt und wir freuen uns besonders auf dieses Jubiläum. Die diesjährige Konferenz steht unter dem Motto "connect(IT)" und zeigt damit einmal mehr die zentrale Bedeutung der Informatik im Zusammenhang mit Vernetzungen und dies auf allen Ebenen. Es geht nicht nur um die technische Vernetzung von Maschinen und Services, sondern auch um die Vernetzung von Menschen untereinander und die Zusammenarbeit zwischen Mensch und Maschine. Gerade die letzten beiden Punkte spiegeln einen der Schwerpunkte des Masterstudiengangs Human-Centered Computing sehr schön wieder. Sie finden in dem vorliegenden Tagungsband Fachbeiträge aus dem medizinischen Umfeld ebenso wie vielfältige Anwendungen aus dem Fahrzeugsektor. Selbstverständlich spielt das Thema Sicherheit in vernetzten Umgebungen eine wichtige Rolle und auch dazu finden Sie einen spannenden Beitrag. Der Kulturwandel im Bereich der Softwareentwicklung ist ebenso ein Thema wie Simulationen in verschiedenen Zusammenhängen.
Die Informatics Inside ist eine wissenschaftliche Konferenz des Masterstudiengangs Human-Centered Computing und wird von den Studierenden organisiert und durchgeführt. Sie erhalten während ihres Masterstudiums die Gelegenheit, sich in einem Fachgebiet ihrer Wahl zu vertiefen. Dies kann an der Hochschule, in einem Unternehmen, einem Forschungsinstitut oder im Ausland durchgeführt werden. Gerade diese flexible Ausgestaltung der Lehrveranstaltung "Wissenschaftliche Vertiefung" führt zu vielfältigen Themenfeldern, die von den Studierenden bearbeitet werden. Neben der eigentlichen fachlichen Vertiefung spielt auch die Präsentation von wissenschaftlichen Ergebnissen eine wichtige Rolle und dies nicht nur während des Studiums. Ein gewähltes Fachgebiet so allgemeinverständlich aufzubereiten und zu vermitteln, dass es auch für Nicht-Spezialisten verständlich wird, stellt immer wieder eine besondere Herausforderung dar.
In the present tutorial we perform a cross-cut analysis of database storage management from the perspective of modern storage technologies. We argue that neither the design of modern DBMS, nor the architecture of modern storage technologies are aligned with each other. Moreover, the majority of the systems rely on a complex multi-layer and compatibility oriented storage stack. The result is needlessly suboptimal DBMS performance, inefficient utilization, or significant write amplification due to outdated abstractions and interfaces. In the present tutorial we focus on the concept of native storage, which is storage operated without intermediate abstraction layers over an open native storage interface and is directly controlled by the DBMS.
With on-demand access to compute resources, pay-per-use, and elasticity, the cloud evolved into an attractive execution environment for High Performance Computing (HPC). Whereas elasticity, which is often referred to as the most beneficial cloud-specific property, has been heavily used in the context of interactive (multi-tier) applications, elasticity-related research in the HPC domain is still in its infancy. Existing parallel computing theory as well as traditional metrics to analytically evaluate parallel systems do not comprehensively consider elasticity, i.e., the ability to control the number of processing units at runtime. To address these issues, we introduce a conceptual framework to understand elasticity in the context of parallel systems, define the term elastic parallel system, and discuss novel metrics for both elasticity control at runtime as well as the ex post performance evaluation of elastic parallel systems. Based on the conceptual framework, we provide an in depth analysis of existing research in the field to describe the state-of-the art and compile our findings into a research agenda for future research on elastic parallel systems.
Early reduction of risks in a startup or an innovation project is highly important. Appropriate means for risk reduction, such as testing business models with different kinds of experiments exist. However, deciding what to test and how to select the right test, is challenging for many startups and innovation projects. This article presents the so-called Business Experiments Navigator (BEN), a toolkit to assist startup and innovation processes. It compliments other tools such as the Business Model Canvas or the Lean Startup process. The main contribution of BEN is to bridge the gap between the riskiest assumptions of a business model and the multitude of available testing techniques by providing assumption templates. The Business Experiments Navigator has been validated in several workshops. Results show that it creates awareness among the workshop participants that a business model is based on assumptions which impose risks and need to be validated. Further, users of BEN were able to identify relevant assumptions and map different kinds of assumptions to appropriate testing techniques. The process applied in the workshops, as well as the assumption templates, helped the participants understand the main concepts and transfer their learnings, to their own business ideas.
A transaction is a demarcated sequence of application operations, for which the following properties are guaranteed by the underlying transaction processing system (TPS): atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID). Transactions are therefore a general abstraction, provided by TPS that simplifies application development by relieving transactional applications from the burden of concurrency and failure handling. Apart from the ACID properties, a TPS must guarantee high and robust performance (high transactional throughput and low response times), high reliability (no data loss, ability to recover last consistent state, fault tolerance), and high availability (infrequent outages, short recovery times).
The architectures and workhorse algorithms of a high-performance TPS are built around the properties of the underlying hardware. The introduction of nonvolatile memories (NVM) as novel storage technology opens an entire new problem space, with the need to revise aspects such as the virtual memory hierarchy, storage management and data placement, access paths, and indexing. NVM are also referred to as storage-class memory (SCM).
Active storage
(2018)
In brief, Active Storage refers to an architectural hardware and software paradigm, based on collocation storage and compute units. Ideally, it will allow to execute application-defined data ... within the physical data storage. Thus Active Storage seeks to minimize expensive data movement, improving performance, scalability, and resource efficiency. The effective use of Active Storage mandates new architectures, algorithms, interfaces, and development toolchains.
Blockchains yield to new workloads in database management systems and K/V-stores. Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a technique for managing transactions in ’trustless’ distributed systems. Yet, clients of nodes in blockchain networks are backed by ’trustworthy’ K/V-Stores, like LevelDB or RocksDB in Ethereum, which are based on Log-Structured Merge Trees (LSM Trees). However, LSM-Trees do not fully match the properties of blockchains and enterprise workloads.
In this paper, we claim that Partitioned B-Trees (PBT) fit the properties of this DLT: uniformly distributed hash keys, immutability, consensus, invalid blocks, unspent and off-chain transactions, reorganization and data state / version ordering in a distributed log-structure. PBT can locate records of newly inserted key-value pairs, as well as data of unspent transactions, in separate partitions in main memory. Once several blocks acquire consensus, PBTs evict a whole partition, which becomes immutable, to secondary storage. This behavior minimizes write amplification and enables a beneficial sequential write pattern on modern hardware. Furthermore, DLT implicate some type of log-based versioning. PBTs can serve as MV-store for data storage of logical blocks and indexing in multi-version concurrency control (MVCC) transaction processing.
Modern persistent Key/Value stores are designed to meet the demand for high transactional throughput and high data ingestion rates. Still, they rely on backwards-compatible storage stack and abstractions to ease space management, foster seamless proliferation and system integration. Their dependence on the traditional I/O stack has negative impact on performance, causes unacceptably high write-amplification, and limits the storage longevity.
In the present paper we present NoFTL KV, an approach that results in a lean I/O stack, integrating physical storage management natively in the Key/Value store. NoFTL-KV eliminates backwards compatibility, allowing the Key/Value store to directly consume the characteristics of modern storage technologies. NoFTLKV is implemented under RocksDB. The performance evaluation under LinkBench shows that NoFTL-KV improves transactional throughput by 33%, while response times improve up to 2.3x. Furthermore, NoFTL KV reduces write-amplification 19x and improves storage longevity by imately the same factor.
Background: Internationally, teledermatology has proven to be a viable alternative to conventional physical referrals. Travel cost and referral times are reduced while patient safety is preserved. Especially patients from rural areas benefit from this healthcare innovation. Despite these established facts and positive experiences from EU neighboring countries like the Netherlands or the United Kingdom, Germany has not yet implemented store-and-forward teledermatology in routine care.
Methods: The TeleDerm study will implement and evaluate store-and-forward teledermatology in 50 general practitioner (GP) practices as an alternative to conventional referrals. TeleDerm aims to confirm that the possibility of store-and-forward teledermatology in GP practices is going to lead to a 15% (n = 260) reduction in referrals in the intervention arm. The study uses a cluster-randomized controlled trial design. Randomization is planned for the cluster “county”. The main observational unit is the GP practice. Poisson distribution of referrals is assumed. The evaluation of secondary outcomes like acceptance, enablers and barriers uses a mixed methods design with questionnaires and interviews.
Discussion: Due to the heterogeneity of GP practice organization, patient management software, information technology service providers, GP personal technical affinity and training, we expect several challenges in implementing teledermatology in German GP routine care. Therefore, we plan to recruit 30% more GPs than required by the power calculation. The implementation design and accompanying evaluation is expected to deliver vital insights into the specifics of implementing telemedicine in German routine care.
We present an approach for segmenting individual cells and lamellipodia in epithelial cell clusters using fully convolutional neural networks. The method will set the basis for measuring cell cluster dynamics and expansion to improve the investigation of collective cell migration phenomena. The fully learning-based front-end avoids classical feature engineering, yet the network architecture needs to be designed carefully. Our network predicts how likely each pixel belongs to one of the classes and, thus, is able to segment the image. Besides characterizing segmentation performance, we discuss how the network will be further employed.
This work is a report on practical experiences with the issue of interoperability in German practice management systems (PMSs) from an ongoing clinical trial on teledermatology, the TeleDerm project. A proprietary and established web-platform for store-and-forward telemedicine is integrated with the IT in the GPs’ offices for automatic exchange of basic patient data. Most of the 19 different PMSs included in the study sample lack support of modern health data exchange standards, therefore the relatively old but widely available German health data exchange interface “Gerätedatentransfer” (GDT) is used. Due to the lack of enforcement and regulation of the GDT standard, several obstacles to interoperability are encountered. As a partial, but reusable working solution to cope with these issues, we present a custom middleware which is used in conjunction with GDT. We describe the design, technical implementation and observed hindrances with the existing infrastructure. A discussion on health care interfacing standards and the current state of interoperability in German PMS software is given.
Lots of movies are produced every year, too many to watch all of them and in particular, to get an overview about the evolution of typical movie genres and actors playing in them. Moreover, it is a challenging problem to detect correlations among the movies and the actors in those movies, in particular, if we are interested in time-varying data patterns like trends, countertrends, or anomalies and outliers. Those correlations are specifically interesting if they can be inspected on different levels of granularity, e.g., temporal, but also hierarchical in form of country- or continent-based correlations. In this paper we describe the IMDb Explorer, a webbased visualization tool that consists of two major views denoted by the movie cosmos and the career lines. Both views are linked and interactively manipulable while a list of user-defined metrics are explorable. We illustrate the usefulness of the visualization tool by applying it to the entire movie database provided by IMDb.
Workshops and tutorials
(2018)
The 19th International Conference on Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES 2018) hosted two workshops and three tutorials. The workshops and tutorials complemented and enhanced the main conference program, offering a wider knowledge perspective around the conference topics. The topics of the two workshops were Hybrid Development Approaches in Software Systems Development (HELENA) and Managing Quality in Agile & Rapid Software Development Processes (QUaSD). The topics of the tutorials were The human factor in agile transitions – using the personas concept in agile oaching, Process Management 4.0 – Best Practices, and Domain-specific languages for specification, development, and testing of autonomous systems.
Being able to monitor the heart activity of patients during their daily life in a reliable, comfortable and affordable way is one main goal of the personalized medicine. Current wearable solutions lack either on the wearing comfort, the quality and type of the data provided or the price of the device. This paper shows the development of a Textile Sensor Platform (TSP) in the form of an electrocardiogram (ECG)-measuring T-shirt that is able to transmit the ECG signal to a smartphone. The development process includes the selection of the materials, the design of the textile electrodes taking into consideration their electrical characteristics and ergonomy, the integration of the electrodes on the garment and their connection with the embedded electronic part. The TSP is able to transmit a real-time streaming of the ECG-signal to an Android smartphone through Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Initial results show a good electrical quality in the textile electrodes and promising results in the capture and transmission of the ECG signal. This is still a working- progress and it is the result of an interdisciplinary master project between the School of Informatics and the School of Textiles & Design of the Reutlingen University.
The increasing heterogenecity of students at German Universities of Applied Sciences and the growing importance of digitization call for a rethinking of teaching and learning within higher education. In the next years, changing the learning ecosystem by developing and reflecting upon new teaching and learning techniques using methods of digitalization will be both - most relevant and very challenging. The following article introduces two different learning scenarios, which exemplify the implementation of new educational models that allow discontinuity of time and place, technology and process in teaching and learning. Within a blended learning apporach, the first learning scenario aims at adapting and individualizing the knowledge transfer in the course Foundations of Computer Science by providing knowledge individually and situation-specifically. The second learning scenario proposes a web-based tool to facilitate digital learning environments and thus digital learning communities and the possibility of computer-supported learning. The overall aim of both learning scenarios is to enhance learning for diverse groups by providing a different smart learning ecosystem in stepping away from a teacher-based to a student-centered approach. Both learning scenarios exemplarily represent the educational vision of Reutlingen University - its development into an interactive university.
In this presentation the audience will be: (a) introduced to the aims and objectives of the DBTechNet initiative, (b) briefed on the DBTech EXT virtual laboratory workshops (VLW), i.e. the educational and training (E&T) content which is freely available over the internet and includes vendor-neutral hands-on laboratory training sessions on key database technology topics, and (c) informed on some of the practical problems encountered and the way they have been addressed. Last but not least, the audience will be invited to consider incorporating some or all of the DBTech EXT VLW content into their higher education (HE), vocational education and training (VET), and/or lifelong learning/training type course curricula. This will come at no cost and no commitment on behalf of the teacher/trainer; the latter is only expected to provide his/her feedback on the pedagogical value and the quality of the E&T content received/used.
Die Segmentierung und das Tracking von minimal-invasiven robotergeführten Instrumenten ist ein wesentlicher Bestandteil für verschiedene computer assistierte Eingriffe. Allerdings treten in der minimal-invasiven Chirurgie, die das Anwendungsfeld für den hier beschriebenen Ansatz darstellt, häufig Schwierigkeiten durch Reflexionen, Schatten oder visuelle Verdeckungen durch Rauch und Organe auf und erschweren die Segmentierung und das Tracking der Instrumente.
Dieser Beitrag stellt einen Deep Learning Ansatz für ein markerloses Tracking von minimal-invasiven Instrumenten vor und wird sowohl auf simulierten als auch realen Daten getestet. Es wird ein simulierter als auch realer Datensatz mit Ground Truth Kennzeichnung für die binäre Segmentierung von Instrument und Hintergrund erstellt. Für den simulierten Datensatz werden Bilder aus einem simulierten Instrument und realem Hintergrund zusammengesetzt. Im Falle des realen Datensatzes spricht man von der Zusammensetzung der Bilder aus einem realen Instrument und Hintergrund. Insgesamt wird auf den simulierten Daten eine Pixelgenauigkeit von 94.70 Prozent und auf den realen Daten eine Pixelgenauigkeit von 87.30 Prozent erreicht.
Die minimal-invasive Chirurgie (MIC) entwickelt sich durch den Einsatz von medizinischen Robotern wie dem da Vinci System von Intuitive Surgical stetig weiter. Hierdurch kann eine bessere oder gleichwertige Operation bei deutlich geringerer körperlicher Belastung des Operateurs erreicht werden. Dabei entstehen jedoch neue Problemstellungen wie beispielsweise Kollision zwischen Roboterarmen und die benötigte Zeit zum Einrichten einer geeigneten Roboterkonfiguration. Daher ist eine effiziente Vorbereitung und Planung der Interventionen erforderlich. Diese Arbeit präsentiert einen Ansatz für eine verbesserte Planung mit Augmented Reality (AR) und einer Robotik Simulationssoftware (RS). Die Robotik Simulation dient zur Berechnung einer Roboterkonfiguration unter Vorgabe der Port-Positionen. Augmented Reality wird verwendet, um die berechneten Pose in der realen Umgebung zu visualisieren und somit leichter in den Operationssaal zu übertragen.
The focus of the developed maturity model was set on processes. The concept of the widespread CMM and its practices has been transferred to the perioperative domain and the concept of the new maturity model. Additional optimization goals and technological as well as networking-specific aspects enable a process- and object-focused view of the maturity model in order to ensure broad coverage of different subareas. The evaluation showed that the model is applicable to the perioperative field. Adjustments and extensions of the maturity model are future steps to improve the rating and classification of the new maturity model.
Modern web-based applications are often built as multi-tier architecture using persistence middleware. Middleware technology providers recommend the use of Optimistic Concurrency Control (OCC) mechanism to avoid the risk of blocked resources. However, most vendors of relational database management systems implement only locking schemes for concurrency control. As consequence a kind of OCC has to be implemented at client or middleware side.
A simple Row Version Verification (RVV) mechanism has been proposed to implement an OCC at client side. For performance reasons the middleware uses buffers (cache) of its own to avoid network traffic and possible disk I/O. This caching however complicates the use of RVV because the data in the middleware cache may be stale (outdated). We investigate various data access technologies, including the new Java Persistence API (JPA) and Microsoft’s LINQ technologies for their ability to use the RVV programming discipline.
The use of persistence middleware that tries to relieve the programmer from the low level transaction programming turns out to even complicate the situation in some cases.Programmed examples show how to use SQL data access patterns to solve the problem.