Open Access

Objective The study’s objective was to assess factors contributing to the use of smart devices by general practitioners (GPs) and patients in the health domain, while specifically addressing the situation in Germany, and to determine whether, and if so, how both groups differ in their perceptions of these technologies. Methods GPs and patients of resident practices in the Hannover region, Germany, were surveyed between April and June 2014. A total of 412 GPs in this region were invited by email to participate via an electronic survey, with 50 GPs actually doing so (response rate 12.1%). For surveying the patients, eight regional resident practices were visited by study personnel (once each). Every second patient arriving there (inclusion criteria: of age, fluent in German) was asked to take part (paper-based questionnaire). One hundred and seventy patients participated; 15 patients who did not give consent were excluded. Results The majority of the participating patients (68.2%, 116/170) and GPs (76%, 38/50) owned mobile devices. Of the patients, 49.9% (57/116) already made health-related use of mobile devices; 95% (36/38) of the participating GPs used them in a professional context. For patients, age (P < 0.001) and education (P < 0.001) were significant factors, but not gender (P > 0.99). For doctors, neither age (P = 0.73), professional experience (P > 0.99) nor gender (P = 0.19) influenced usage rates. For patients, the primary use case was obtaining health (service)-related information. For GPs, interprofessional communication and retrieving information were in the foreground. There was little app-related interaction between both groups. Conclusions GPs and patients use smart mobile devices to serve their specific interests. However, the full potentials of mobile technologies for health purposes are not yet being taken advantage of. Doctors as well as other care providers and the patients should work together on exploring and realising the potential benefits of the technology.

In diesem Artikel wird die strategische Vorausschau als eine Methode der Zukunftsforschung vorgestellt. Die entwickelten Szenarien können Entscheidern helfen, besser auf zukünftige Entwicklungen vorbereitet zu sein. Die GIL könnte eine Plattform sein, um Trends in der Landwirtschaft und Agrarinformatik zu identifizieren.

Der zukünftig steigende Bedarf an Bereitstellung von Regelenergie aus regenerativen Kraftwerken sowie sinkende EEG-Tarifstrukturen im Bereich Biogas führen zur Notwendigkeit einer Entwicklung alternativer Betriebs- und Vergütungsmodelle. Der vorliegende Beitrag skizziert ein wirtschaftliches Ausgleichssystem für virtuelle Biogas-Verbundkraftwerke. Es beschreibt, welche Kosten und Erlöse in virtuellen Biogas-Verbünden generiert werden, sofern diese teilautomatisiert und auf die regionale Netzstabilität fokussiert betrieben werden. Das wirtschaftliche Ausgleichssystem ist ein Teil des im Forschungsvorhaben VKV Netz zu entwickelnden Steuerungssystems für virtuelle Biogas-Verbundkraftwerke (http://vkvnetz.de).

Für die Studiengang-Auswahl existiert eine Reihe i. d. R. Fragebogen-gestützter Online-Studiengangfinder. Eine Analyse zeigte Optimierungspotenziale: Studienangebote sind meist auf ein Bundesland oder eine Hochschule beschränkt oder, allgemein beschrieben, die individuelle Studiengang-Auswahl ist nur mit Unschärfen möglich. Letzteres wirkt sich z. B. bei Bindestrich-Studiengängen (z. B. Wirtschaftsingenieurwesen) aus, die je nach Hochschule inhaltlich variieren können. Hier setzt das Portal an. Ziele sind: Bereitstellung der in der Sprachwelt Studieninteressierter gehaltenen Fragebögen, Möglichkeit für Hochschulen/Einrichtungen, Studiengänge bereitzustellen.

In this article, we present the software architecture of a new generation of advisory systems using Intelligent Agent and Semantic Web technologies. Multi-agent systems provide a well-suited paradigm to implement negotiation processes in a consultancy situation. Software agents act as clients and advisors, using their knowledge to assist human users. In the presented architecture, the domain knowledge is modeled semantically by means of XML-based ontology languages such as OWL. Using an inference engine, the agents reason, based on their knowledge to make decisions or proposals. The agent knowledge consists of different types of data: on the one hand, private data, which has to be protected against unauthorized access; and on the other hand, publicly accessible knowledge spread over different Web sites. As in a real consultancy, an agent only reveals sensitive private data, if they are indispensable for finding a solution. In addition, depending on the actual consultancy situation, each agent dynamically expands its knowledge base by accessing OWL knowledge sources from the Internet. Due to the standardization of OWL, knowledge models easily can be shared and accessed via the Internet. The usefulness of our approach is proved by the implementation of an advisory system in the Semantic E-learning Agent (SEA) project, whose objective is to develop virtual student advisers that render support to university students in order to successfully organize and perform their studies.

In this paper, we consider the route coordination problem in emergency evacuation of large smart buildings. The building evacuation time is crucial in saving lives in emergency situations caused by imminent natural or man-made threats and disasters. Conventional approaches to evacuation route coordination are static and predefined. They rely on evacuation plans present only at a limited number of building locations and possibly a trained evacuation personnel to resolve unexpected contingencies. Smart buildings today are equipped with sensory infrastructure that can be used for an autonomous situation-aware evacuation guidance optimized in real time. A system providing such a guidance can help in avoiding additional evacuation casualties due to the flaws of the conventional evacuation approaches. Such a system should be robust and scalable to dynamically adapt to the number of evacuees and the size and safety conditions of a building. In this respect, we propose a distributed route recommender architecture for situation-aware evacuation guidance in smart buildings and describe its key modules in detail. We give an example of its functioning dynamics on a use case.

Eine Unternehmensgründung ist ein komplexes Vorhaben, dessen Risiken soweit wie möglich vermieden bzw. minimiert werden sollten. Dabei hilft eine sorgfältige Planung und Vorbereitung. Der Gründungsprozess lässt sich — von der Prüfung der Grundvoraussetzungen über den Business Plan, die Vorbereitung der Gründung sowie deren Realisierung bis zur Stabilisierung des Unternehmens — in fünf Phasen einteilen.

The main purpose of this paper was to find a simple solution for load balancing and fault tolerance in OSGi. The challenge was to implement a highly available web application such as a shopping cart system with load balancing and fault tolerance, without having to change the core of OSGi.

This article discusses event monitoring options for heterogeneous event sources as they are given in nowadays heterogeneous distributed information systems. It follows the central assumption, that a fully generic event monitoring solution cannot provide complete support for event monitoring; instead, event source specific semantics such as certain event types or support for certain event monitoring techniques have to be taken into account. Following from this, the core result of the work presented here is the extension of a configurable event monitoring (Web) service for a variety of event sources. A service approach allows us to trade genericity for the exploitation of source specific characteristics. It thus delivers results for the areas of SOA, Web services, CEP and EDA.

Enterprise apps on mobile devices typically need to communicate with other system components by consuming web services. Since most of the current mobile device platforms (such as Android) do not provide built-in features for consuming SOAP services, extensions have to be designed. Additionally in order to accommodate the typical enhanced security requirements of enterprise apps, it is important to be able to deal with SOAP web service security extensions on client side. In this article we show that neither the built-in SOAP capabilities for Android web service clients are sufficient for enterprise apps nor are the necessary security features supported by the platform as is. After discussing different existing extensions making Android devices SOAP capable we explain why none of them is really satisfactory in an enterprise context. Then we present our own solution which accommodates not only SOAP but also the WS-Security features on top of SOAP. Our solution heavily relies on code generation in order to keep the flexibility benefits of SOAP on one hand while still keeping the development effort manageable for software development. Our approach provides a good foundation for the implementation of other SOAP extensions apart from security on the Android platform as well. In addition our solution based on the gSOAP framework may be used for other mobile platforms in a similar manner.