Multilingual Framework for Risk Assessment and Symptom Tracking (MRAST).

The importance and value of real-world data in healthcare cannot be overstated because it offers a valuable source of insights into patient experiences. Traditional patient-reported experience and outcomes measures (PREMs/PROMs) often fall short in addressing the complexities of these experiences due to subjectivity and their inability to precisely target the questions asked. In contrast, diary recordings offer a promising solution. They can provide a comprehensive picture of psychological well-being, encompassing both psychological and physiological symptoms. This study explores how using advanced digital technologies, i.e., automatic speech recognition and natural language processing, can efficiently capture patient insights in oncology settings. We introduce the MRAST framework, a simplified way to collect, structure, and understand patient data using questionnaires and diary recordings. The framework was validated in a prospective study with 81 colorectal and 85 breast cancer survivors, of whom 37 were male and 129 were female. Overall, the patients evaluated the solution as well made; they found it easy to use and integrate into their daily routine. The majority (75.3%) of the cancer survivors participating in the study were willing to engage in health monitoring activities using digital wearable devices daily for an extended period. Throughout the study, there was a noticeable increase in the number of participants who perceived the system as having excellent usability. Despite some negative feedback, 44.44% of patients still rated the app's usability as above satisfactory (i.e., 7.9 on 1-10 scale) and the experience with diary recording as above satisfactory (i.e., 7.0 on 1-10 scale). Overall, these findings also underscore the significance of user testing and continuous improvement in enhancing the usability and user acceptance of solutions like the MRAST framework. Overall, the automated extraction of information from diaries represents a pivotal step toward a more patient-centered approach, where healthcare decisions are based on real-world experiences and tailored to individual needs. The potential usefulness of such data is enormous, as it enables better measurement of everyday experiences and opens new avenues for patient-centered care.

PALANTIR: An NFV-Based Security-as-a-Service Approach for Automating Threat Mitigation.

Small and medium enterprises are significantly hampered by cyber-threats as they have inherently limited skills and financial capacities to anticipate, prevent, and handle security incidents. The EU-funded PALANTIR project aims at facilitating the outsourcing of the security supervision to external providers to relieve SMEs/MEs from this burden. However, good practices for the operation of SME/ME assets involve avoiding their exposure to external parties, which requires a tightly defined and timely enforced security policy when resources span across the cloud continuum and need interactions. This paper proposes an innovative architecture extending Network Function Virtualisation to externalise and automate threat mitigation and remediation in cloud, edge, and on-premises environments. Our contributions include an ontology for the decision-making process, a Fault-and-Breach-Management-based remediation policy model, a framework conducting remediation actions, and a set of deployment models adapted to the constraints of cloud, edge, and on-premises environment(s). Finally, we also detail an implementation prototype of the framework serving as evaluation material.