Domestic healthcare is becoming more and more important as the population is growing older. The last technological progresses enable numerous possibilities for monitoring and helping users in their everyday lives. Robotics and smart home are two distinct examples. They both provide great features and possibilities, but also limits. This work addresses the combination of robots and smart home. In this paper, we present a robotic framework that relies on the smart environments strengths. We tackled numerous challenges encountered by the robot for perceiving, reasoning and acting at home and that are critical for healthcare applications. Consequently, multiple solutions are presented and evaluated through both simulation and physical tests.

With the emergence of XML as the de facto standard to exchange and disseminate information, the problem of regulating access to XML documents has attracted a considerable attention in recent years. Existing models attach authorizations to nodes of an XML document but disregard relationships between them. However, ancestor and sibling relationships may reveal information as sensitive as the one carried out by the nodes themselves (e.g., classifications, correlations). This paper advocates the integration of relationships as first class citizen in the access control models for XML and makes the following contributions. First, it characterizes three essential classes of relationship authorizations and identifies the mechanisms required to translate them accurately in an authorized view of a source document. Second, it introduces a rule-based formulation for expressing these classes of relationship authorizations and defines an associated conflict resolution strategy. Third, it proposes tractable algorithms to support relationship authorizations. Rather than being yet-another XML access control model, the proposed approach allows a seamless integration of relationship authorizations in existing XML access control model.

From beginning of 1994 to the end of 1996, the IRO-DB ESPRIT project has developed tools for accessing in an integrated way relational and object-oriented databases, nnd for designing and maintaining integrated applications on large federations of heterogeneous databases. IRO-DB is based on the ODMG pivot object model and gives OQUOML C++ interface to users on a federation of relational and object-oriented databases.This paper summarizes the main problems and choices done during the system design, describes the IRO-DB architecture and components, presents the project achievements, and gives a synthesis of the lessons learned during the project development. It also introduces future plans for the system.

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Regulating access to electronic health records has become a major social and technical challenge. Unfortunately, existing access control models fail in translating accurately basic law principles related to the safeguard of personal information (e.g., medical folder). This paper identifies the problem and proposes a solution in the EHR context.