Performance assessment of an architecture with adaptative interfaces for people with special needs

People in industrial societies carry more and more portable electronic devices (e. g., smartphone or console) with some kind of wireless connectivity support. Interaction with auto-discovered target devices present in the environment (e. g., the air conditioning of a hotel) is not so easy since devices may provide inaccessible user interfaces (e. g., in a foreign language that the user cannot understand). Scalability for multiple concurrent users and response times are still problems in this domain. In this paper, we assess an interoperable architecture, which enables interaction between people with some kind of special need and their environment. The assessment, based on performance patterns and antipatterns, tries to detect performance issues and also tries to enhance the architecture design for improving system performance. As a result of the assessment, the initial design changed substantially. We refactorized the design according to the Fast Path pattern and The Ramp antipattern. Moreover, resources were correctly allocated. Finally, the required response time was fulfilled in all system scenarios. For a specific scenario, response time was reduced from 60 seconds to less than 6 seconds.