Computing: pervasive

Mark Weiser, a leading light at the Xerox PARC computer science laboratory, hrst dehned the concept of ubiquitous or pervasive computing. In an article published in Scientific American in 1991 [12], he wrote The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it. ... 

Some of those computers will be the thousands we access in the course of browsing the Internet. Others will be embedded in walls, chairs, light switches, cars, and even the human body. In short, pervasive computing is the antithesis of virtual reality. Instead of creating an artificial world inside the computer, it invisibly enhances the world that already exists. 

Pervasive computing has numerous applications, but it offers particular potential to the pharmaceutical and health care industries by facilitating the transmission and collection of biological data on a real-time basis outside a clinical setting. That, in turn, means it can be used to monitor patients and manage their health to test new drugs in totally different ways and to deliver health care anywhere, anytime [13]. 

In addition to such direct advantages, pervasive computing has a big social contribution to make. It can be used, for example, to enable patients and their relatives to keep in touch, and to help people with cognitive disabilities function on a daily basis. One illness that lends itself to such treatment is senile dementia, which is likely to be a growing trend in the graying populations of the Western World. 

However, pervasive computing will ultimately do much more it will change the very way in which new drugs are tested. At present, all drugs go through three clinical phases, but the process is both very costly and very inefficient. Clinical trials cannot detect rare side effects and drug interactions, or sometimes even fairly common reactions. In fact, one recent study conducted by Harvard Medical School and Public Citizen, the US consumer advocacy... 

But the power of pervasive computing is not simply its ability to monitor the health of individual patients and trigger remedial action it will also... 

Although, as stated at the beginning of this chapter, novel IT strategies cannot transform the pharmaceutical industry the discovery, development, and delivery to the patient of innovative new medicines meeting a variety of unmet medical needs is entirely dependent on the successful implementation and integration of powerful, predictive, and pervasive computing. 

Davies N, Henderson S. Drngs, devices and the promise of pervasive computing. Curr Drug Discov 2003 October 25-28. 

Stanford V. Using pervasive compnting to deliver elder care. IEEE Pervasive Comput Mobile Ubiquitous Syst 2002 1 10-13. 

The traditional computing model where data are exchanged across the network becomes inefficient and inadequate when vast amounts of data are involved or when the data need to be protected for compliance to privacy laws. The traditional computing model where software is kept stationary on a designated system becomes not only inefficient but inadequate for pervasive computing environment. 

Secondly, globalized production cannot work unless aU elements of the company s global operations fit together without error. Thus, new production systems based on pervasive computer-mediated design and manufacturing can assemble parts from up and down the supply chain without first-time errors of fit. Modern civil and military aircraft production give prime examples of this freedom from physical error. In a customer-oriented system, any over-cost or delayed delivery is an error with the same effects on company performance as a defective product. The implication for test and inspection is that we must be able to measure these customer needs and convert them into measurable precursors of error states. 

Liu, J.J., Xu, W., Huang, M.-C., Alshurafa, N., Sarrafzadeh, M., Raut, N., Yadegar, B., 2013b. A dense pressure sensitive bedsheet design for imobtrusive sleep posture monitoring. In 2013 IEEE Intemational Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications (PerCom), San Diego. 

Paradiso JA, Starner T (2005) Energy scavenging for mobile and wireless electronics. IEEE Pervasive Comput 4(1) 18-27... 

Bellavista P, Kupper A, Helal S (2008) Location-based services back to the future. Pervasive Comput IEEE 7(2) 85-89... 

Weis, S.A., Sarma, S.E., Rivest, R.L., Engels, D.W. (2004). Security and privacy aspects of low-cost radio frequency identification systems. InProceedings ofSecurity in Pervasive Computing 2003. 

D. H. Wilson and C. Atkeson, Simultaneous tracking and activity recognition (STAR) using many anonymous, binary sensors, in Pervasive Computing Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 3468, pp. 62-79,2005. 

J.P. Walters, Z. Liang, W. Shi, V. Chaudhary, Wireless sensor network security a survey, in Y. Xiao (Ed.), Security in Distributed, Grid, Mobile and Pervasive Computing, Auerbach PubUcations, CRC Press, 2007. 

Jayaraman, S., 2014. A note on smart textiles. IEEE Pervasive Computing 2, 5—6. 

T. Stiefmeier, D. Roggen, G. Troster, G. Ogris, P. Lukowicz, Wearable activity tracking in car manufacturing. Pervasive Comput. IEEE 7 (2) (April—June 2008) 42—50. 

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