Technical Enablers Research Articles

How to establish digital health ecosystems from the perspective of health service-organizations: A taxonomy developed based on expert interviews conducted as modified Delphi approach.

Digital health ecosystems may be the next revolution in improving citizens' well-being, health delivery, data management, and health system processes, but solutions have not yet been broadly established. Reasons could be that health service-organizations have misaligned interests or lack capabilities. This study investigates reasons from a multi-health-service-organization perspective, differentiating between payers, insurers, healthcare providers, and innovators, detailing the expected value-adds, preferred participation roles, and required capabilities including a rating assessment. Findings are based on a taxonomy development methodology, which combines a literature review with semi-structured qualitative expert interviews, conducted using a modified Delphi approach. Interviews were thematically analysed. In total, 21 experts across the four health service-organization groups were interviewed. The capability taxonomy includes a total of 16 capabilities, categorized in three themes: 'Health market', 'organizational', and 'technology and informatic'. Providers expect a value-add from strengthening their health process economics through efficiency gains but reveal the largest capability gaps, especially in 'interoperability' and 'platform'. Innovators' 'technology and informatic' capabilities complement well with those of payers for the 'health market'. We present a health service-organization-specific three-stage approach for establishing digital health ecosystems. Payers and insurers should address their 'technology and informatic' capability gaps, using technical enablers or forming new entities to reduce dependencies from legacy information technology systems. Innovators should clarify their monetization models and create positive awareness for their services, possibly entering the market directly. Providers must address interoperability issues and may require incentives to encourage their participation. Findings suggest governmental policymakers to prioritize three health policy initiatives.

Envisioning 6G Outlook and Technical Enablers

6G research has been extensively conducted by individual organizations as well as pre-competitive joint research initiatives. One of the joint initiatives is the Hexa-X European 6G flagship project. This paper shares the up-to-date deliverables through which Hexa-X is envisioning the 6G era. The Hexa-X deliverables presented in this paper encompas the overall 6G vision, use cases and technical enablers. The latest deliverables on tenets of 6G architectural design and central pillars of technical enablers are presented. In conclusion, the authors encourage joint research and PoC collaboration with Japanese industry, academia and research initiatives for the potential technical enablers presented in this paper, aimed at global harmonization towards 6G standards.

How Attachment Influences Users' Decisions in Mobile Social Commerce Context From a Socio-Technical Systems Perspective

Drivers of social commerce usage have been the focus of scholars, but mobile social commerce is currently a sparsely researched area and therefore worth considering. Drawing on the socio-technical systems perspective and attachment theory, this article aims to examine the effect of social and technical enablers on user attachment and whether attachment influences users' shopping and sharing intentions. Results of an empirical study (N=305 active Pinduoduo users) indicate that emotional attachment directly impacts users' intentions, while functional attachment does so indirectly through emotional attachment. Besides, social and technical factors impact emotional and functional attachment, respectively. The study provides further insights about the impact of social and technical factors on attachment and attachment on MSC intention, and contributes to MSC research and practice by developing and validating the role of MSC platforms attributes in forming users' s-commerce behavioral outcomes.

A hybrid approach for latency and battery lifetime optimization in IoT devices through offloading and CNN learning

Offloading assists in overcoming the resource constraints of specific elements, making it one of the primary technical enablers of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT devices with low battery capacities can use the edge to offload some of the operations, which can significantly reduce latency and lengthen battery lifetime. Due to their restricted battery capacity, deep learning (DL) techniques are more energy-intensive to utilize in IoT devices. Because many IoT devices lack such modules, numerous research employed energy harvester modules that are not available to IoT devices in real-world circumstances. Using the Markov Decision Process (MDP), we describe the offloading problem in this study. Next, to facilitate partial offloading in IoT devices, we develop a Deep Reinforcement learning (DRL) method that can efficiently learn the policy by adjusting to network dynamics. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is then offered and implemented on Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) devices to expedite learning. These two techniques operate together to offer the proper offloading approach throughout the length of the system's operation. Moreover, transfer learning was employed to initialize the Q-table values, which increased the system's effectiveness. The simulation in this article, which employed Cooja and TensorFlow, revealed that the strategy outperformed five benchmarks in terms of latency by 4.1%, IoT device efficiency by 2.9%, energy utilization by 3.6%, and job failure rate by 2.6% on average.

55‐1: Invited Paper: Apple Liquid Retina XDR Displays with Mini‐LEDs

Apple has developed the Liquid Retina XDR Displays with >8k mini‐LEDs, featuring extreme dynamic range with 1,000‐nit full‐screen‐sustaining luminance capability, 1,600‐nit peak luminance, and a 1,000,000:1 contrast ratio, with an ultra‐thin profile, suitable for portable system integration. Key technical enablers, including mini‐LED design, optimum LED zone layout, optical system design, and mini‐LED driving scheme will be reviewed.

The Hexa-X Project Vision on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning-Driven Communication and Computation Co-Design for 6G

We provide an overview of the most recent advancements and outcomes of the European 6G flagship project Hexa-X, on the topic of in-network Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). We first provide a general introduction to the project and its ambitions in terms of use cases (UCs), key performance indicators (KPIs), and key value indicators (KVIs). Then, we identify the key specific challenges to realize, implement, and enable the native integration of AI and ML in 6G, both as a means for designing flexible, low-complexity, and reconfigurable networks ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">learning to communicate</i> ), and as an intrinsic in-network intelligence feature ( <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">communicating to learn</i> or, 6G as an efficient AI/ML platform). We present a high level description of down selected technical enablers and their implications on the Hexa-X identified UCs, KPIs and KVIs. Our solutions cover lower layer aspects, including channel estimation, transceiver design, power amplifier and distributed MIMO related challenges, and higher layer aspects, including AI/ML workload management and orchestration, as well as distributed AI. The latter entails Federated Learning (FL) and explainability as means for privacy preserving and trustworthy AI. To bridge the gap between the technical enablers and the 6G targets, some representative numerical results accompany the high level description. Finally, a brief discussion of the ongoing regulation activities related to AI, is presented, to close our vision towards an AI and ML-driven communication and computation co-design for 6G.

Evaluation of emerging technological opportunities for improving risk awareness and resilience of vulnerable people in disasters

The main contribution of this research is the evaluation of emerging technological opportunities for improving risk awareness and resilience of vulnerable people in disasters. The evaluation considered a survey, end-user evaluation, and co-creative workshops on technologies and was targeted to estimate the innovation potential, usefulness, importance, applicability, risks for vulnerable people, and ethical acceptability.The capabilities of the Mobile Positioning Data tool (1) to increase risk awareness in rescue planning and emergency management in cyber-hazard situations and (2) to help in locating and evacuating tourists and other vulnerable people in disasters was evaluated. The capabilities of the Trasim tool to help in crisis communications training for improving preparedness and tackling mis/disinformation through simulated responses was evaluated. The evaluation indicated that there are a lot of innovation potential and useful technical enablers for improving disaster risk awareness and resilience, but there are also ethical challenges, and risks for misuse.The digital divide between people in the unequal distribution of skills and access to technological means and tools remains an essential future challenge, especially with vulnerable people in a crisis. Issues of fairness and inclusivity need great attention in the application of these technologies in crises or disasters in order not to overlook such vulnerable people. The failure in critical infrastructures (e.g., energy and communications) seems to increase risks and exacerbate the situation of vulnerable people in crises. However, the potential of technological opportunities for improving operation in disasters is so essential that significant investment in research and development is recommended.

Melding Fog Computing and IoT for Deploying Secure, Response-Capable Healthcare Services in 5G and Beyond

The fifth generation (5G) of mobile networks is designed to mark the beginning of the hyper-connected society through a broad set of novel features and disruptive characteristics, delivering massive connectivity, coverage and availability paired with unprecedented speed, throughput and capacity. Such a highly capable networking paradigm, facilitated by its integrated segments and available subsystems, will propel numerous cutting-edge, innovative and versatile services, spanning every possible business vertical. Augmented, response-capable healthcare services have already been identified as one of the prime objectives of both vendors and customers; therefore, addressing controversies and shortcomings related to the specific field is considered a priority for all stakeholders. The scope of this paper is to present the architectural elements of 5G which enable efficient, remote healthcare services along with emergency health monitoring and response capability. In addition, we propose a holistic scheme based on technical enablers such as Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Fog Computing, for mitigating common issues and current limitations which may compromise the proclaimed service delivery.

The nexus between e-commerce adoption in a health pandemic and firm performance: The role of pandemic response strategies

This paper takes the initial step in exploring how pandemic response strategies interact with other enablers of e-commerce adoption in the logistics sector and also determines their effect on firm performance. Drawing on a rich data pool from selected Nigerian logistics firms in the global logistics value chains, the interrelationships between the pandemic response strategies and other e-commerce adoption enablers were obtained using an intuitionistic-based decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (IF- DEMATEL). A robust ranking of these was determined using multi-objective optimization based on ratio analysis plus full multiplicative form (MULTIMOORA). Then, the effect of the e-commerce adoption enablers on firm performance and the mediating role of pandemic response strategies on this relationship were determined using simple additive weighting (SAW). The results indicate that technical related enablers are the highest ranked followed by pandemic response strategies and suggest that e-commerce adoption in a health pandemic is strongly linked with financial and operational benefits. Specifically, the technical enablers have the highest effect on delivery time while pandemic response strategies have the highest effect on profit and customer satisfaction. Moreover, pandemic response strategies partially mediate the relationship between other e-commerce adoption enablers and firm performance. Hence, this study provides significant constructs that enrich the literature on IT adoption in a health pandemic for the increased competitiveness of global value chains.

Series Editorial: Vehicular Networking and 6G Data Taxonomy

The representation of vehicular transportation in fifth generation (5G) networks requires complete projection of virtual reality that surrounds any of the vehicles at a specific location. The challenge obviously appears when trying to identify what type of data is to be captured and how such data would be processed. In reality, there would be multiple sensors that monitor and sense the physical domain with multi-service management entities for each category of these sensors. The 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) provides technical specification for such data modeling in TS 22.261 to handle multi-model virtual reality (VR) applications. This standard shows the management of multi-modality outputs, data transfer over separated links, and the multi-service processors per data type. Obviously, the success of such a system is very dependent on synchronizing the data transfers across a large network to multiple destinations and the retrieval of outputs to build the VR at the central unit of the transportation system. Although this seems to be a little similar to multi-slice services that 5G supports, this modeling is very much dependent on achieving time alignment between data transactions. The technical enablers for such a system will range from cross-service analytics capture to cross-domain orchestrators. Considering the strict key performance indicators (KPls) for transport VR and dynamic adaptation in cloud-based networks, it is most likely that such a system will not be deployed until the next mobile generation. By then, vendors and operators will have evolved the current network topology and data filtering techniques to be able to support such multi-modality platforms with high user experience.

How to retain customers: Understanding the role of trust in live streaming commerce with a socio-technical perspective

Live streaming commerce has been the mainstream of e-commerce in recent years. Although live streaming research has gained interest, a holistic model explaining why customers are willing to continuously use such a new sale format remains absent. Drawing on socio-technical system theory, we propose a theoretical model to explore the impact of social and technical enablers on trust and how trust affects users' continuance intention in the live streaming commerce scenario. Empirical results (N = 446) reveal that trust can be enhanced through live interactivity (active control, two-way communication, synchronicity) and technical enablers (visibility, personalization), consequently affects continuance intention. In addition, live streaming genres moderate the impact of different types of trust on continuance intention. Research findings indicate that how trust is formed to generate optimal consequences in live streaming commerce.

5G for the Support of Public Safety Services

Next-generation mobile technologies are the enablers for meeting the variable specific requirements of the public safety (PS) community. In particular, due to the development of commercially deployed 5G networks, PS providers look for ways to implement related solutions upon such infrastructures, potentially in a shared use with existing commercial networks. In particular, LTE and 5G NR networks are rapidly gaining recognition as an all-inclusive critical communications platform for the delivery of both mission and business critical applications. Within this scope, we take into account the innovative architectural approach that has been proposed by the 5G ESSENCE project, addressing the paradigms of edge computing and small cell as-a-service that has been realised via a cloud-enabled small cell infrastructure leveraging multi-access technologies in 5G, where we propose a dedicated PS use case, able to offer a mission critical push-to-talk service as well as a Chat and Localisation service. Each one of these services is associated to a dedicated network slice within the scope of the corresponding fundamental 5G ESSENCE architecture and both services are provided via suitable VNFs, thus offering great flexibility to serve PS needs together. We further discuss the overall scenario deployment with the related technical enablers and the proposed functionalities, per case. The corresponding end-to-end slicing makes possible to allocate both radio and cloud resources to the involved critical actors, in an automated and elastic way.

Traffic, training, and turnover: Experiences of research personnel in collecting road safety data in Hyderabad, India.

We describe the experiences of research personnel in collecting road safety data, using a range of quantitative and qualitative methods to collect primary and secondary data, in the course of monitoring and evaluating the impact of road safety interventions under the Bloomberg Philanthropies Global Road Safety Program, in Hyderabad, India. We detail environmental, administrative, and operational barriers encountered, and individual, systemic, and technical enablers pertaining to the conduct of road safety research in Hyderabad, India, but bearing relevance to broader public health research and practice and the implementation and evaluation of projects. From our experiences of the challenges and the solutions developed to address them, we set out recommendations for research teams and for administrators in road safety as well as in various other streams of public health research and practice. We propose actionable strategies to enhance data-collectors' safety; build effective partnerships with various stakeholders, including research collaborators, administrators, and communities; and strengthen data quality and streamlining systems, particularly in similar geo-political settings.

6G Vision, Value, Use Cases and Technologies From European 6G Flagship Project Hexa-X

While 5G is being deployed and the economy and society begin to reap the associated benefits, the research and development community starts to focus on the next, 6th Generation (6G) of wireless communications. Although there are papers available in the literature on visions, requirements and technical enablers for 6G from various academic perspectives, there is a lack of joint industry and academic work towards 6G. In this paper a consolidated view on vision, values, use cases and key enabling technologies from leading industry stakeholders and academia is presented. The authors represent the mobile communications ecosystem with competences spanning hardware, link layer and networking aspects, as well as standardization and regulation. The second contribution of the paper is revisiting and analyzing the key concurrent initiatives on 6G. A third contribution of the paper is the identification and justification of six key 6G research challenges: (i) “connecting”, in the sense of empowering, exploiting and governing, intelligence; (ii) realizing a network of networks, i.e., leveraging on existing networks and investments, while reinventing roles and protocols where needed; (iii) delivering extreme experiences, when/where needed; (iv) (environmental, economic, social) sustainability to address the major challenges of current societies; (v) trustworthiness as an ingrained fundamental design principle; (vi) supporting cost-effective global service coverage. A fourth contribution is a comprehensive specification of a concrete first-set of industry and academia jointly defined use cases for 6G, e.g., massive twinning, cooperative robots, immersive telepresence, and others. Finally, the anticipated evolutions in the radio, network and management/orchestration domains are discussed.

A Review and Classification of Integrated Project Delivery Implementation Enablers

In the current competitive and complex business environment, innovation in the construction industry is vital. In this sense, integrated project delivery is an emerging delivery system for construction projects; however, implementing this system requires some enablers to enhance its implementation. Until now, no study has been conducted to identify what enablers can lead to proper integrated project delivery implementation. Therefore, this study aims to identify and to classify integrated project delivery implementation enablers. In this study, a comprehensive list of integrated project delivery implementation enablers has been developed using an in-depth literature review. Besides, integrated project delivery project managers, employers, consultants, contractors and engineers participated in a survey. The obtained results were analysed using exploratory factor analysis method. Thus, the study findings illustrated that organisational enablers are considered essential enablers, followed by environmental, contractual and technical enablers. The significance of this research is the identification and classification of integrated project delivery implementation enablers, which will provide valuable information to develop integrated project delivery implementation strategies. Additionally, the results of this study can be a proper roadmap to support developing countries to adopt the integrated project delivery approach for project developments.

Pricing games of NFV infrastructure providers

Future online services will be provisioned over the federation of infrastructure providers for economic reasons: for effective usage of resources and for a wide geographic reach of customers. The technical enablers of this setup, envisioned also for 5G services, are the virtualization techniques applied in data centers, and in access and core networks. Business aspects around the provisioning of these services however pose still unresolved questions. In this heterogeneous setup those who want to deploy an online service face the problem of selecting the compute and network resource set that fulfills the technical requirements of the service deployment and that is preferable also from an economic point of view. Infrastructure providers compete among themselves for these customers, and shape their business offerings with profit maximization in mind. We model this resource market with the tool set of graph and game theory in order to study its characteristics. We show that customers need to tackle a hard problem if they want to meet both their technical and business needs, let alone minimizing costs. Furthermore, we derive the best pricing strategies that the providers should follow given their expectation about customers’ demand. Interestingly, we show that equilibrium prices and the attainable income strongly depend on the provider’s location within the network.

Demonstrating Immersive Media Delivery on 5G Broadcast and Multicast Testing Networks

This work presents eight demonstrators and one showcase developed within the 5G-Xcast project. They experimentally demonstrate and validate key technical enablers for the future of media delivery, associated with multicast and broadcast communication capabilities in 5th Generation (5G). In 5G-Xcast, three existing testbeds: IRT in Munich (Germany), 5GIC in Surrey (UK), and TUAS in Turku (Finland), have been developed into 5G broadcast and multicast testing networks, which enables us to demonstrate our vision of a converged 5G infrastructure with fixed and mobile accesses and terrestrial broadcast, delivering immersive audio-visual media content. Built upon the improved testing networks, the demonstrators and showcase developed in 5G-Xcast show the impact of the technology developed in the project. Our demonstrations predominantly cover use cases belonging to two verticals: Media & Entertainment and Public Warning, which are future 5G scenarios relevant to multicast and broadcast delivery. In this paper, we present the development of these demonstrators, the showcase, and the testbeds. We also provide key findings from the experiments and demonstrations, which not only validate the technical solutions developed in the project, but also illustrate the potential technical impact of these solutions for broadcasters, content providers, operators, and other industries interested in the future immersive media delivery.

Technical enablers of human errors and violations in construction

The performance of public sector projects in developing countries such as South Africa is an on-going concern in a region where injuries and fatalities are almost a daily occurrence in the industry. This reported study assessed the human errors and violations consistently encountered on public sector projects. The feedback from the survey research reinforced the notion that technical matters such as poor planning or the lack of it significantly erode safety system capacities on construction sites. The technical problems are aided by latent conditions such as design errors and negligence. The issues highlighted imply that public sector projects tend to fail to achieve the required conditions of satisfaction by clients. In other words, the reduction of human errors and violations as safety concerns should look beyond the set-up of construction site operations and people in the front line of construction.

Wireless Network Intelligence at the Edge

Fueled by the availability of more data and computing power, recent breakthroughs in cloud-based machine learning (ML) have transformed every aspect of our lives from face recognition and medical diagnosis to natural language processing. However, classical ML exerts severe demands in terms of energy, memory, and computing resources, limiting their adoption for resource-constrained edge devices. The new breed of intelligent devices and high-stake applications (drones, augmented/virtual reality, autonomous systems, and so on) requires a novel paradigm change calling for distributed, low-latency and reliable ML at the wireless network edge (referred to as edge ML). In edge ML, training data are unevenly distributed over a large number of edge nodes, which have access to a tiny fraction of the data. Moreover, training and inference are carried out collectively over wireless links, where edge devices communicate and exchange their learned models (not their private data). In a first of its kind, this article explores the key building blocks of edge ML, different neural network architectural splits and their inherent tradeoffs, as well as theoretical and technical enablers stemming from a wide range of mathematical disciplines. Finally, several case studies pertaining to various high-stake applications are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of edge ML in unlocking the full potential of 5G and beyond.

Research and Finding Technical Enablers using Ism for Industry 4.0 in Indian Agricultural Industries

At the present scenario, agriculture industries are working hard to produce farmer satisfied products at affordable cost. The globalization and heavy worldwide competition stress them to precise and sustain in the market. The existing system are to be modified for smart manufacturing to cop up international benchmarking. The modifications consist of modern machine tools, automation system, machine learning technologies and systematic approach. The existing system and path for every individual industry are unique. Here the skill needed is to fit suitable enablers to the factors. The enactment of Industry 4.0 appropriately to industry is a task, because different industries lie at different sectors. In this context a study is carried to identify the important technological enablers for the enactment of Industry 4.0 in Indian agricultural industries. Various enablers essential for implementing Industry 4.0 has been identified from literature review. The Interpretive structural modelling(ISM) is employed for finding the mutual relationship among the enablers. Data collected to rank the enablers in the agricultural field. The technological enablers are further being classified as dependent and driving factors. Thus a hypothetical model is created based on literature review. A proper acknowledgement of interactions among enablers will help organization to rank the factors and manage these factors with more efficiency to produce advantages of implementing Industry 4.0. This paper is aiming to identify the various enablers to implement Industry4.0 in Indian industries.