Recently, the US Department of Transportations Federal Aviation Administration and other international organizations have proposed a set of requirements for small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to operate for nonrecreational purposes. However, existing UAV architectures fulfill only some of the established requirements, and not all in one solution. This article presents an event-driven service-oriented architecture that allows autonomous UAVs to satisfy all these requirements and to detect critical situations, performing real-time decision making.

In the last few years, telerehabilitation and telecare have become important topics in healthcare since they enable people to remain independent in their own homes by providing person-centered technologies to support the individual. These technologies allows elderly people to be assisted in their home, instead of traveling to a clinic, providing them wellbeing and personalized health care. The literature shows a great number of interesting proposals to address telerehabilitation and telecare scenarios, which may be mainly categorized into two broad groups, namely wearable devices and context-aware systems. However, we believe that these apparently different scenarios may be addressed by a single context-aware approach, concretely a vision-based system that can operate automatically in a non-intrusive way for the elderly, and this is the goal of this paper. We present a general approach based on 3D cameras and neural network algorithms that offers an efficient solution for two different scenarios of telerehabilitation and telecare for elderly people. Our empirical analysis reveals the effectiveness and accuracy of the algorithms presented in our approach and provides more than promising results when the neural network parameters are properly adjusted.

Web service technologies offer a successful way for interoperability among applications. Now it is important to face how to model systems based on service functionality and also how to add extra-functional properties to them. This is the reason why we propose first of all a versatile and simple UML profile based on the service component architecture specification for modeling services and, secondly, a new UML profile is proposed in order to model and reuse extra-functional properties in the named models. Besides, the property profile provides enough information to enable property code and description generation at a later stage

Being one of the most promising current technologies, Web services are at the crossing of distributed computing and loosely coupled systems. Although vendors provide multiple platforms for service implementation, service integrators, developers and providers demand approaches for managing service-oriented applications at all stages of development. In this sense, approaches such as model-driven development (MDD) and service component architecture (SCA) can be used jointly for modeling and integrating services regardless of the underlying platform technology. Besides, WS-policy provides a standard description for extra-functional properties, which remains independent of both the final implementation and the binding to the service in question. In this paper we show a case study in which the aforementioned MDD, SCA and WS-policy are assembled in order to develop Web services and their extra-functional properties from a platform independent model, which is later transformed into platform specific ones and then into code.