Adaptive Feedback-loop Control System for Inter-reality Management

Times, they say, they are a-changing, and they bring with them both grand new opportunities and new challenging societal problems. One such problem is costeffective healthcare. The traditional approaches, though effective, are often too expensive, hence novel mechanisms are currently being sought. One such family of mechanisms is the one that makes use of interreality coupling physical-reality objects and properties with virtual-life entities such as avatars and their attributes. This introduces a number of technical challenges for optimal management of issues such as performance, real-timeliness, and dependability. One such challenge is the creation of an effective synchronous communication link between (1) information originating in the physical reality and produced by wireless sensors, RFIDs and BANs and (2) information produced in a virtual reality environment such as a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game. Inter-reality means basically the ability to reflect and refract events occurring in one domain into the other one. Doing so effectively means providing the designer with an effective expressive model that masks all unnecessary technicalities and reifies all meaningful entities, both physical and virtual, into a common management environment. We have designed the basic building blocks for such an inter-reality management system. Key ingredients of such system are reflective and refractive variables, i.e. dynamic objects that reflect the status of inter-reality entities and refract actions onto inter-reality actuators. This paper describes how we are going to use them to set up adaptive feedback-loop control systems to manage inter-reality healthcare services.