Ackermann E, Bromley D, DeMaso DR, Gibson S, Gonzalez-Heydrich J, Marks J, Shen C, Umaschi M.
Experience Journals: Using Computers to Share Personal Stories about Illness and Medical Intervention. Proceedings of MedInfo '98: 9th World Congress on Medical Informatics. 1998 :1325-1329.
AbstractMedical advances make it increasingly possible for children with previously fatal illness to live and thrive. However, a significant number still experience repeated operations, hospitalizations, and invasive procedures, or need special care at home. Many do so with little or no intervention to help them and their families cope with the emotional stresses involved. One significant source of emotional and cognitive support is the community of patients and families who have experienced similar medical procedures. However, in spite of a general willingness to share experiences, communication among patients and families is usually limited. To facilitate this process, we are investigating the use of computer technology to record, organize, and display stories about the experiences of families with children who have been treated for cardiac and neurological illness at Children’s Hospital, Boston. We are asking children and their families to record text and multimedia vignettes describing some aspect of their illness, coping strategies, or care that might be useful to others. These contributions will be available for browsing at a secure World-Wide-Web site. However, economic realities preclude reliance on a professional site administrator to organize and monitor what we hope to be a rapidly growing Web site with a large, distributed authorship. The need to make the Web site fully accessible to users who have varying familiarity with computers and Web browsing imposes further constraints. We are therefore developing software to automate the process of managing and organizing an easily accessed Web site that contains an “Experience Journal.” We describe this software, the rationale for its development, and our plans for its use in the coming year.
experience_journals_using_computers_to_share_personal_stories.pdf Ramamritham K, Shen C, Gonzalez O, Sen S, Shirgurkar SB.
Using Windows NT for Real-Time Applications: Experimental Observations and Recommendations. Proceedings of IEEE Real-Time Technology and Applications Symposium. 1998.
AbstractWindows NT was not designed as a real-time operating system, but market forces and the acceptance of NT in industrial applications have generated a need for achieving real-time functionality with NT. As its use for real-time applications proliferates, based on an experimental evaluation of NT, we quantitatively characterize the obstacles placed by NT. As a result of these observations, we provide a set of recommendations for users to consider while building real-time applications on NT. These are validated by the use of NT for a prototype application involving real-time control that includes multimedia information processing. The results of the above study should provide system designers with guidelines, as well as insight, into the design of an architecture based on NT for supporting applications with components having real-time constraints.
usingwindows_nt_for_real-time_applications.pdf Shen C, Gonzalez O.
Real-Time Communicating Tasks on COTS-Based Distributed Platforms: Task Models and End-to-End Scheduling. Proceedings of the 19th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium. 1998.
AbstractThis paper describes our current work on scheduling communicating real-time tasks in a distributed environment. Unique challenges are presented when one tries to build distributed realtime applications using standard off-the-shelf systems which are in common use but are not necessarily designed for real-time systems. In particular, one must deal with (1) mapping application real-time requirements into system schedulable entities, (2) end-to-end scheduling in the face of possible priority inversion, (3) limited real-time scheduling support and limited number of priorities, and (4) integrating real-time and non-real-time tasks in the same platform. Due to space limitations, this paper focuses on solving the first two challenges. The complete solution will be presented in a forthcoming paper. We have implemented these solutions in our network middleware MidART running on PCs with Windows NT operating system over Ethernet LANs.
real-time_communicating_tasks_on_cots-based_distributed_platforms.pdf