SCTA supported portable measures for identification and authentication of health care providers via smart cards and public key cryptography, encrypted health care communications, role-based access to distributed health care information services, and remote access to patient vital signs. We developed smart-card applications3 to authenticate health care providers and to provide a portable emergency medical record for patients4, with links to the patient’s online electronic medical records. We developed three categories of telemedicine applications.

Home Care has been an active field for the application of telemedicine. The search for low cost approaches has led to our using handy vital sign monitors and POTS in a pilot project, featuring secure access to patient records over the Internet.

We have developed a layered, component-based Secure Collaborative Telemedicine Architecture (SCTA) and its applications to three representative scenarios, which are being deployed in rural West Virginia. Our approach emphasizes maximum utilization of low-cost "off-the-shelf" technologies (lean technologies) and the use of "Smartcards" as a primary means for authenticating the providers and patients.

Background The Concurrent Engineering Research Center (CERC) at West Virginia University is developing and deploying applications for secure collaborative telemedicine in rural hospitals, clinics, and homes in West Virginia to evaluate its impact on the delivery of healthcare. These applications illustrate the utility of collaborative telemedicine technologies to improve the delivery of healthcare to patients by intensive care, mid-level and home care providers. This research project is sponsored by the National Library of Medicine.

Health-care is a collaborative endeavor involving a number of individuals and organizations with diverse perspectives. Computer-supported collaboration technologies have great potential to enable health-care providers to improve the quality of care provided to their patients. Such technologies have the potential to overcome barriers to quality health-care in the small, scattered populations of rural areas. Rapid changes in technology are making it more and more possible for collaborative telemedicine to be a part of the practice of medicine. The World Wide Web has amply demonstrated that the globe has shrunk and information from afar is a mere mouse click away. However, the ease with which information is accessed along with the potential disclosure and misuse of personal information has raised serious concerns about the ability to restrict such information to legitimate accesses by duly authorized health-care providers. The authors present their experience in developing a health-care collaboration facility, ARTEMIS, which enabled Web-based access to electronic medical records, and provide a vision of their experiment to provide secure telemedicine for rural health-care practitioners.

Healthcare applications based on computer-supported collaboration technologies have the potential to improve the quality of care delivered to patients. Such applications can help overcome barriers to quality healthcare in the small, scattered populations of rural areas enabling telemedicine to be a part of the practice of medicine. However the growing concern about the potential for abuse through disclosure of personal health information to unauthorized parties has restricted the deployment and adoption of these potentially valuable tools. The authors, who built ARTEMIS--an Intranet healthcare collaboration facility, now describe their approach to develop secure telemedicine applications for rural healthcare practitioners.

In order to make the traditional product structure tree representation amenable to concurrent engineering relationships likeperspective-of anddependent-on have to be added to the essentialpart-of relationship. Complex data can be held in proprietary formats, while simple data will be in a common representation for direct access by diverse disciplines. Coordination among team members in a project can be carried out using such a model. Besides, a virtually unified view of all the data is possible, though they may lie in distributed and heterogeneous data bases. A very necessary characteristic of such a model is that its time evolution should be easy to represent in order to reflect the dynamic nature of product development, where the model itself, and not merely the data values change. Managing versions is also facilitated by the comprehensive structure of the Unified Product Data Model (UPDM).

Describes an attempt at specifying a generic and reusable set of services for computer-supported collaboration among teams engaged in any collaborative process within a distributed organization or group of organizations. The services are cataloged under the headings: information management, group communications, group management, process management, and infrastructure support.<>

Abstract This paper follows up the suggestion made in an earlier note that the disposal of products at the end of their useful life, and of by-products of their use, should be considered at the time of product design. Practical suggestions are made on how to incorporate the disposal perspective in a concurrent engineering team. Doing this will reduce the life-cycle cost, and incidentally encourage an approach to design that promotes full recoverability of materials and a safe environment. Taken together these recommendations will be instrumental in avoiding the privation and scarcity that will surely result from neglecting the far downstream perspectives of product development. The ideal of 100% recoverability of materials is held out as possible, provided solar power becomes viable soon. In the final section an initial set of disposability guidelines for designers is presented. They deserve to be deepened. Efforts to standardize recycling processes are essential to reduce the enormous variety existing today.

The Third Workshop on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises was held from 17-19 April 1994 in Morgantown, West Virginia, hosted by the Concurrent Engineering Research Center at West Virginia University. This report summarizes this year's workshop and outlines the philosophy behind this annual event.

This paper first discusses the motivation for the concept of a Virtual Team and outlines its essential features. The merits of implementing such a concept on the computer network to support Concurrent Engineering between distributed team members are then highlighted. In the second part of the paper the efforts in the DICE (DARPA Initiative in Concurrent Engineering) project to realize virtual teams through a set of generic software services are reviewed.

Each has its place and relevance, depending on the needs and how sophisticated an information sys- tem pervades the organization. Our present focus is on the high road which we consider as a com- puter-based information management system for a group of users. We propose here a characteriza- tion of CE along the high road as a contemporary computer-based system for product development which facilitates certain types of transactions among the team of product developers. One attribute of a transaction is the level of associated difficulty (and therefore the degree of computer support re- quired) for the user who conducts it. The achievement of a CE environment may be seen as contin- uous progress toward making possible all the transactions needed in the course of product devel- opment, and carrying them off with the greatest of ease. Such an operational definition of com- puter-aided CE makes it possible to assess an environment for CE to determine how well it sup- ports the requirements of product developers. Approaches to Concurrent Engineering The new approaches toward organizational competitiveness have spawned a vocabulary of their own. Cost, time to market, and quality are the goals; but the emphases are distinct, and arise from the difference in approaches to remedying the weaknesses of the older methods of product devel- opment. Different concepts are being applied to different pressure points. However, the introduc- tion of all-encompassing terms, such as Concurrent Engineering, tends to obscure the differences. As a result the practitioner of any approach to reducing cost, improving quality or hastening the time to market can now claim adherence to the new creed of Concurrent Engineering. Hall (Hall, 1990), not wishing to make too fine a point of these distinctions, observed that there is a low road to CE, a middle road, and a high road. The low road is to form inter-disciplinary teams for a product development project, put the members in close proximity, empower them to take de- cisions and acquire resources, provide enthusiastic leaders, and then let it all be worked out within the team. The argument goes that the development time will be reduced because the communication from one team member to another has no barrier of distance or hierarchical access protocols to im- pede information flow and work requests. The product quality stands to gain also because the tra- ditionally upstream designers are collocated with the traditionally downstream and neglected manu- facturing or maintenance engineers. Thereby the downstream is kept aware of the design as it un-

GDS is a software package for problem resolution, discussion, and tradeoff negotiation. GDS provides a graphical interface for developing a discussion in the public view of the participants. A problem announced by a discussion leader is the starting point; it must have one or more customer criteria. Starting from there, participants propose various solutions. Solutions may be buttressed by supporting arguments or rebutted by contra arguments. Evidence can be adduced for any argument. Problem, solution, argument, and evidence nodes can have multimedia attachments, including sound and graphics. Finally a voting procedure enables the group to arrive at the best solution, based on the measure of satisfaction of the customer criteria set forth at the beginning of the discussion.

PACT is a software package that extends Microsoft Project by endowing it with extensive features needed to coordinate projects among distributed participants and manage their inter-dependencies. Significant features include: support for multiple users; comprehensive RDBMS to store project history and maintain strict access control; common visibility of the project network to all team members, no matter where they are on a network; direct involvement by participants in the coordination of the project; practical metrics to assess projects, at the planning phase itself, using the most recent project data; worklist queues to notify members of the project when changes occur; attachment of the results of tasks to the tasks themselves for others to instantly obtain all the technical information needed to perform subsequent tasks; paperless working is thus made possible