The project has been divided into three phases representing development cycles and within each cycle the developers will seek knowledge from the users. This makes the agile approach well suited to research projects where all system requirements are not known in advance. The MDA approach is beneficial to M•POWER as it facilitates integration by separating business and application logic from underlying technology. The platform independent models of applications can be realized through the MDA on several platforms, including Web Services, .NET, CORBA and J2EE. Building on agile development methods, and model driven architectures, the M-Power technical approach is based on these main technical elements:

M•POWER Framework for Service Development

• This framework will provide knowledge and guidelines in the form of service lifecycle models. The framework will produce a handbook that identifies and characterises the different phases in provision of secure services for cognitive disabled and elderly.
• Utilising MDA together with Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) as an approach to technology to unify an otherwise fragmented field.
• The framework will be built on and contribute to existing and emerging standards from HL7 and OMG , standard modelling languages (such as the Unified Modeling Language from OMG) and security/safety standards.
• In collaboration with other eInclusion projects, the project will suggest an eInclusion Reference Architecture.

• Service platform facilitating integration and standardisation by providing distributed middleware APIs for service description, service lookup and communication. The service platform will build on standard technologies. (D1.3, D2.3, D3.3, D3.4, D4.3, D4.3)
• Reuse and tailor dedicated safety and security components based on state-of-the-art security mechanisms for secure communication, storage, and authentication. (D5.2)
• Interoperability middleware components towards legacy systems and SMART house and sensor technology. (D2.3, D4.3).
• Security middleware for secure communication, storage, verification and authentication. (D5.3

*1 Object Management Group (OMG) and Health Level Seven (HL7) have announced a strategic collaboration to develop software standards in the healthcare industry focused on patient record interoperability.

M•POWER Proof-of-Concept Applications

• Two Proof-of-Concept (PoC) applications will be built, and will be tested in accordance with the user organisations in the project (CMUJ and PIV/NCDR) (D6.3.1, D6.3.2)
• The applications will utilize the power and flexibility of the M•POWER framework and M-ower platform. The development of these applications will drive the project in order to properly demonstrate and validate the M•POWER approach and services.
  

• Evaluation of the technology developed within the project will be on two levels. At both levels knowledge is gained in each project iteration. This knowledge will be used for improvement in the next iteration:
  - Framework and platform evaluation
  - Proof-of-concept evaluation
  
• The framework and platform evaluation will be based on (D6.5)
  - Post Mortem analyses after every phase in the project. PM analyses will be used to improve the next version of technology.
  - Structured interviews of involved software developers
  
• The Proof-of-Concept evaluation will be built up with a set of methods including:
  - Site Acceptance Tests (SAT) with focus on fulfilling the requirements (D6.4)
  - Usability tests for identifying usability shortcomings and to identify possible biases in relation to end user evaluation (D7.6)
  - The end user evaluation will be based on questionnaires and structured interviews of the different stakeholders (D7.6)