This paper presents the Faculty Module of ReProTool Version 3.0 (www.reprotool.com), a software tool that is used for (re)designing and enhancing university programmes using the Bologna Process directives to achieve ECTS Label certification. The tool is the result of an eighteen months project (February 2012 - July 2013), co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund and the Republic of Cyprus through the Research Promotion Foundation. The project entails the development and pilot use of ReProTool, a software tool that supports the design and development of university academic programmes using Learning Outcomes and the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) of the Bologna Process. The paper presents the results of an online questionnaire that was distributed to faculty members aiming at extracting the user requirements of the system. Based on these results and the results from interviews with experts and literature review, the faculty module of ReProTool Version 2.0 was redesigned. Various screenshots of the system are used in the paper to exemplify the functionality of the specific module.

This paper introduces a novel, open architecture cloud oriented framework named Intensive Care Cloud, ICCloud. ICCloud main objective is to provide a) a common repository to store anonymized vital sign parameters retrieved from intensive care bedside medical devices and b) exploit massive computational resources to analyze vital sign parameters. ICCloud uses a simplified data model (cloud tables) to reduce the complexity of the deployment and the cost of usage of the infrastructure. These cloud tables are accessed only within the cloud infrastructure (cloud jobs) using only inbound network traffic. Pre-allocated working nodes (virtual machines used only for processing) are used to execute jobs implementing scoring functions or data analysis algorithms.

This paper introduces a novel, open-source middleware framework for communication with medical devices and an application using the middleware named intensive care window (ICW). The middleware enables communication with intensive care unit bedside-installed medical devices over standard and proprietary communication protocol stacks. The ICW application facilitates the acquisition of vital signs and physiological parameters exported from patient-attached medical devices and sensors. Moreover, ICW provides runtime and post-analysis procedures for data annotation, data visualization, data query, and analysis. The ICW application can be deployed as a stand-alone solution or in conjunction with existing clinical information systems providing a holistic solution to inpatient medical condition monitoring, early diagnosis, and prognosis.

GridStat is a QoS-managed middleware framework designed to replace the power grid's aging, inflexible, and slow data communications system. GridStat is a specialization of the publish-subscribe paradigm that takes advantage of the semantics of periodic updates of cached sensor data to provide data delivery with a per-subscriber rate, latency, and redundant paths. While GridStat is well-suited for delivery of sensor data over a wide-area network, its baseline one-way mechanisms are not suitable for round-trip invocations such as setting an actuator or calling between control centers. In this paper we present the design, implementation and experimental evaluation of Ratatoskr, a tunable remote procedure call mechanism that builds on the QoS semantics of GridStat and supports three kinds of redundancy. Additionally, user-defined pre- and post-condition predicates over GridStat status variables are built into the call semantics.

Intensive Care Units are widely considered as the most technologically advanced environments within a hospital. In such environments, physicians are confronted with multiple medical devices that monitor the inpatients. The capability to collect, store, process, and share inpatient monitoring data along with the remarks of the treating physicians can bring tremendous benefits to all aspects of Intensive Care Medicine (practice, research, education). The IC-Window makes it feasible for physicians to extract, view, store, and replay Clinically Interesting Episodes through simple, intuitive user interfaces.