The November/December Issue of IEEE Software, voted unanimously as best software magazine ever, is chock full of healthy goodness after a cheerful, yet gluttonous, holiday! This issue features numerous articles on building smart, context-aware healthcare systems. Along with articles on healthcare, this issue also features articles on other hot software topics including requirements engineering, agile development, and blockchain-based systems. Special in this issue is an article providing highlights from ICSE 2017.
As I mentioned, the feature topic of this issue of IEEE Software is smart and context-aware systems, with a focus on healthcare systems. This issue features the following articles on this topic:
As I mentioned, the feature topic of this issue of IEEE Software is smart and context-aware systems, with a focus on healthcare systems. This issue features the following articles on this topic:
- "The Elusiveness of Smart Healthcare" by Diomidis Spinellis
- "Recent Advances in Healthcare Software: Toward Context-Aware and Smart Solutions" by Agusti Solanas, Jens H. Weber, Ayse Basar Bener, Frank van der Linden, and Rafael Capilla
- "Healthy Routes in the Smart City: A Context-Aware Mobile Recommender" by Fran Casino, Constantinos Patsakis, Edgar Batista, Frederic Borràs, and Antoni Martínez-Ballesté
- "In the Pursuit of Hygge Software" by Henrique Damasceno Vianna, Jorge Luis Victória Barbosa, and Fábio Pittoli
- "Crowd-Based Ambient Assisted Living to Monitor the Elderly’s Health Outdoors" by Ana Cristina Bicharra Garcia, Adriana Santarosa Vivacqua, Nayat Sánchez-Pi, Luis Martí, and José M. Molina
- "Modeling and Managing Context-Aware Systems’ Variability" by Kim Mens, Rafael Capilla, Herman Hartmann, and Thomas Kropf
- "Dynamically Adaptable Software Is All about Modeling Contextual Variability and Avoiding Failures" by Ismayle de Sousa Santos, Magno Luã de Jesus Souza, Michelle Larissa Luciano Carvalho, Thalisson Alves Oliveira, Eduardo Santana de Almeida, and Rossana Maria de Castro Andrade
- "Group-Based Behavior Adaptation Mechanisms in Object-Oriented Systems" by Patrick Rein, Stefan Ramson, Jens Lincke, Tim Felgentreff, and Robert Hirschfeld
- "Context-Aware Software Variability through Adaptable Interpreters" by Walter Cazzola and Albert Shaqiri
In "The Elusiveness of Smart Healthcare," IEEE Software Editor in Chief Diomidis Spinellis speaks on his experiences with healthcare technology. Based on his experiences, he outlines challenges that lie ahead and should be considered when building smart healthcare systems. Potential challenges aside, a subset of article related to the feature topic showcase recent advances in building smart, context-aware healthcare software solutions.
The authors of "In the Pursuit of Hygge Software" discuss how we can, and should, improve hygge in pervasive technologies, such as the ones often used in healthcare. For those who don't know (like me), hygge is a Danish and Norwegian word that essentially means feeling connected to others. The authors suggest that we can improve hygge by helping people find other people, places, and information that could help through their situation and propose a hygge-enabled software architecture. Similarly, in "Crowd-Based Ambient Assisted Living to Monitor the Elderly's Health Outdoors," the authors discuss how we can build healthcare systems that can help monitor the elderly's health when they're outdoors. Unlike existing technologies, however, their SafeNeighborhood approach uses crowdsourced information to improve inferences made by contextual and sensor data.
Some articles focused on the general idea of building context-aware systems, particularly on handling variability in context-aware systems.
Common amongst these articles is the idea of modeling context-variability and using these models to identify and deal with problems at run-time, without human intervention.
If you have any interest in understanding or improving smart healthcare systems, this issue is especially for you!
IEEE Software Blog
As usual, one feature item on the IEEE Software Blog is a summary of the IEEE Software September/October issue. If you're behind, make sure you check it out!
The past couple of months haven't seen too many new blog posts, but featured a mix of articles showcasing small and large scale research efforts. One article discusses an initiative called Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering (NaPiRE). This initiative came together to conduct a global study on requirements engineering in industry with the goal of building a holistic theory on industry practices, trends, and problems.
The other articles in this issue discuss technical research. If you're conducting or interested in research related to StackOverflow, there's an article on asking good technical questions that might catch your attention. Also of interest to those who take interest in eye tracking studies (which are becoming more frequent in the SE research community), one article explores using eye tracking to automate traceability link recovery.
SE Radio
Same hosts, new (hot) topics.
Got a secret you need to keep? Want to learn how to manage your secret? There's an episode for that.
There are also episodes that can help with understanding and managing people, more specifically how IT architectures transform and adapt and how to hire and retain DevOps engineers.
Other episodes focused on understanding various aspects of the software we build. IEEE Software editor in chief Diomidis Spinellis step in to talk tools, practices and other topics relevant to performance optimization. Other topics discussed included how we as software engineers can improve our "security stature" and how Internet of Things (IoT) applications are built and used.
