Narrow Results

Software composition for timely and affordable software development and evolution is one of the oldest pursuits of software engineering. In current software composition techniques, Component-Based Software Development (CBSD) and Aspect-Oriented Software Development (AOSD) have attracted academic and industrial attention. Black box composition used in CBSD provides simple and safe modularization for its strong information hiding, which is, however, the main obstacle for a black box composite to evolve later. This implies that an application developed through black box composition cannot take advantage of Aspect-Oriented Programming (AOP) used in AOSD. On the contrary, AOP enhances maintainability and comprehensibility by modularizing concerns crosscutting multiple components but lacks the support for the hierarchical and external composition of aspects themselves and compromises the important software engineering principles such as encapsulation, which is almost perfectly supported in black box composition. The role and role model have been recognized to have many similarities with CBSD and AOP but have significant differences with those composition techniques as well. Although each composition paradigm has its own advantages and disadvantages, there is no substantial support to realize the synergy of these composition paradigms; the black box composition, AOP, and role model. In this paper, a new composition technique based on representational abstraction of the relationship between component instances is introduced. The model supports the simple, elegant, and dynamic composition of components with its declarative form and provides the hooks through which an aspect can evolve and a parallel developed aspect can be merged at the instance level.

In this paper, an agent-based open and adaptive system development process has been proposed which continuously change and evolve to meet new requirements. The proposed methodology is based on a model-based technique that provides a specific model for the type of information to be gathered and uses this model to drive the domain specific analysis process. The focus is on a clear separtion between the requirement gathering and analysis phases. The analysis methodology further splits the analysis phase into the user_centric analysis and the system_centric analysis phases. Optimization of the system performance has also been proposed by exploiting the relationships and dependencies among roles and mapping criteria between roles to agents. The Gaia and ROADMAP models have been used as a basis to the proposed agent-based modeling method.

Background: Occupational health physiotherapy has been practiced in the UK over several decades. In the past decade, the role of occupational health physiotherapy has gained recognition as a profession that can be embedded within occupational health departments; however, limited information is known about the role of physiotherapists from professional groups outside the allied health domain in this context.

Objective: The aim of this study is to explore the experiences of occupational health doctors and nurses about the role of physiotherapy in occupational health rehabilitation.

Methods: This study is a qualitative investigation underpinned by an interpretative construct. Thirteen semi-structured interviews were conducted. Two occupational health doctors and 12 nurses were purposively recruited from two National Health Service (NHS) hospitals. Data were analyzed using thematic content analysis, coded manually and verified by member checking.

Results: The benefits of occupational health physiotherapists were rapid access intervention, advanced knowledge and clinical reasoning, evidence-based practice, and providing an additional perspective. The emerging themes of the challenges that occupational health physiotherapists may face include dealing with occupational health challenges, managing role conflicts, personal qualities and attributes, and role substitution.

Conclusion: Participants described numerous roles of occupational health physiotherapists ranging from clinical to organizational components. On-going research is needed to support the role development of physiotherapists providing occupational health rehabilitation and to further advocate for its relevance in this setting.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and discuss challenges and opportunities related to the development of innovative firms' networks. The paper utilises four case studies based on interviews with representatives of young innovative firms and their present and previous network partners. The findings show that while early network partners often play several roles simultaneously, the roles of both the innovative firm and its network partners become increasingly distinct as the innovative firm develops. Such clarification of roles highlights competition between parties. For the innovative firm, the early phases are marked by innovativeness and problems related to growth and financial issues; later phases may include challenges of dependence, competition, exclusion of actors, decreased innovativeness and less innovative freedom.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss and classify the roles of customers in innovations. In literature on innovations, customers have been increasingly emphasised as a source for innovations and also in how they help develop ideas in their early phases. This paper exemplifies various customer roles in innovations through three case studies. These describe the customer as initiator, as co-producer and as inspiration for business development. Through using role theory to discuss customers in innovations, it becomes explicit how customers may play their traditional roles, add roles or transfer to new roles beyond the scope of being a customer. Furthermore, the paper shows that customer roles change during the innovation process from added or transferred towards more traditional ones.

MARVS is a theory for the representation of verbal semantics. This paper examines two types of modules and two sets of attributes, namely, role modules, event modules, role-internal attributes, and event-internal attributes, to account for the eventive and semantic factors of verbal polysemy. This study focuses on the polysemous verb chī. Based on MARVS, chī is divided into six senses. These senses are derived metonymically or metaphorically from the prototypical sense.

Medical 4.0 is now emerging as the fourth medical revolution. It represents the applications of electronically supported Information Technology, microsystem, high level of automation, personalized therapy, and Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabled intelligent devices enabled through the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). In the current scenario, the COVID-19 pandemic has a significant effect on global healthcare, and this impact is also observed in associated fields. There is a requirement for proper telehealth management and remote monitoring systems in healthcare. Medical 4.0, if implemented, can adequately handle the ongoing situation in the medical field as it will provide applications of advanced technologies to take care of the challenges of the COVID-19 outbreak. This paper studies Medical 4.0 exclusively and also in the context of COVID-19. The paper provides a brief of the significant medical revolution that has happened so far and identifies the significant supporting technologies of Medical 4.0. It also discusses the primary capabilities of Medical 4.0 for healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. The roles of Medical 4.0 in healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic are studied, and finally, this paper identifies 10 significant applications of Medical 4.0 in healthcare during COVID-19-type pandemics. We observe that the contemporary phase of development and mass-level production of intelligent medical devices has not happened in the same way as it has happened for smart electronic devices and application devices. Engineers will have a prominent role in taking up the healthcare challenges that can reach the common man.