463 research outputs found

    An Electronic Health Application for Disaster Recovery

    Get PDF
    Natural disasters often destroy the fixed wired communications infrastructure. Therefore relying on such infrastructure after a catastrophe can be risky. Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) can provide wireless network coverage without relying on a wired backbone infrastructure or dedicated access points. In this paper, we focus on using WMNs in disaster recovery areas in order to disseminate information from patient to doctors. We investigate whether we can deploy an electronic-health application on top of an ad hoc peer to peer network. The initial prototype shows that it is feasible. However the application quality varies depending on the number of multi-hops and the applications concurrently running on top of the WMN networks

    Systematic review of smartphone-based passive sensing for health and wellbeing

    Get PDF
    OBJECTIVE: To review published empirical literature on the use of smartphone-based passive sensing for health and wellbeing. MATERIAL AND METHODS: A systematic review of the English language literature was performed following PRISMA guidelines. Papers indexed in computing, technology, and medical databases were included if they were empirical, focused on health and/or wellbeing, involved the collection of data via smartphones, and described the utilized technology as passive or requiring minimal user interaction. RESULTS: Thirty-five papers were included in the review. Studies were performed around the world, with samples of up to 171 (median n = 15) representing individuals with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, depression, older adults, and the general population. The majority of studies used the Android operating system and an array of smartphone sensors, most frequently capturing accelerometry, location, audio, and usage data. Captured data were usually sent to a remote server for processing but were shared with participants in only 40% of studies. Reported benefits of passive sensing included accurately detecting changes in status, behavior change through feedback, and increased accountability in participants. Studies reported facing technical, methodological, and privacy challenges. DISCUSSION: Studies in the nascent area of smartphone-based passive sensing for health and wellbeing demonstrate promise and invite continued research and investment. Existing studies suffer from weaknesses in research design, lack of feedback and clinical integration, and inadequate attention to privacy issues. Key recommendations relate to developing passive sensing strategies matching the problem at hand, using personalized interventions, and addressing methodological and privacy challenges. CONCLUSION: As evolving passive sensing technology presents new possibilities for health and wellbeing, additional research must address methodological, clinical integration, and privacy issues. Doing so depends on interdisciplinary collaboration between informatics and clinical experts

    NotiMind: responses to smartphone notifications as affective sensors

    Get PDF
    Today's mobile phone users are faced with large numbers of notifications on social media, ranging from new followers on Twitter and emails to messages received from WhatsApp and Facebook. These digital alerts continuously disrupt activities through instant calls for attention. This paper examines closely the way everyday users interact with notifications and their impact on users’ emotion. Fifty users were recruited to download our application NotiMind and use it over a five-week period. Users’ phones collected thousands of social and system notifications along with affect data collected via self-reported PANAS tests three times a day. Results showed a noticeable correlation between positive affective measures and keyboard activities. When large numbers of Post and Remove notifications occur, a corresponding increase in negative affective measures is detected. Our predictive model has achieved a good accuracy level using three different classifiers "in the wild" (F-measure 74-78% within-subject model, 72-76% global model). Our findings show that it is possible to automatically predict when people are experiencing positive, neutral or negative affective states based on interactions with notifications. We also show how our findings open the door to a wide range of applications in relation to emotion awareness on social and mobile communication

    From persuasion to negotiation in health promoting technology

    Get PDF
    Over recent years, designing technologies to promote health-related behavioural change has been an area of growing interest in HCI. Given the prevalence of self-monitoring and social facilitation in emerging designs, the assumption appears to be that increasing an individual’s awareness of his or her behaviour and the behaviour of others will promote behavioural change. This thesis argues that while this is true to some extent, this represents a somewhat naive view of how individuals come to make decisions regarding their health-related behaviours. Three qualitative studies within distinct health domains illustrate the complex nature of health-related behavioural change. Weight Management was an inherently social activity, albeit subject to selective disclosure and incremental participation. Individuals were generally motivated by appearance rather than health, implementing change based on exposure and orientation to alternative strategies. In Families at Risk, caregivers were highly motivated by a desire to safeguard the health of their children but were restricted by a lack of financial and strategic resources. Lack of trust and a transient community contributed to social isolation, thus inhibiting opportunities for collaboration. In Cardiac Rehabilitation, behavioural change efforts were prompted by an acute health crisis and guided by health professionals. However, behavioural change efforts were sometimes restricted by a desire to return to normal, tensions arising when what was considered normal was composed of risk behaviours. Family involvement varied greatly, ranging from disregard to facilitating change, and a desire for independence and ownership of the rehabilitation sometimes restricted the active involvement of peers. Informed by the findings of these studies this thesis highlights the strengths and limitations of current technological approaches to promoting behavioural change, provides implications for design, and supported by the sociomedical literature, identifies alternative avenues of technological innovation. The thesis reflects on technology’s role in health-related behavioural change and considers associated ethical implications. Overall, the main contribution of this thesis is a reframing of the problem of promoting health-related behavioural change as more than a matter of behavioural awareness and personal motivation. While it is understandable that technologists would look to the clinical domain to inform initial investigations in this area, this thesis argues that technologists should be cautious about blindly adopting its prescriptive paradigm. As an alternative to persuasion, this thesis offers negotiation as a potential model for future innovations in this area

    Integrating Wireless Sensor Networks and Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks for enhanced value-added services

    Get PDF
    In some situations where the standard telecommunication infrastructure is not available, Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) can be deployed to provide the required communication. These networks are established "on the fly" without a need for prior communication organization and are composed of autonomous mobile devices, such as cell phones, PDAs or laptops. In similar conditions, such as in emergency response operations, integrating MANETs and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) can notably enhance the MANET participant's end-user experience. WSNs sense and aggregate ambient information, such as physiological, environmental or physical data related to a nearby phenomenon. The integration, which provides end-user availability to WSN required information, is feasible via gateways. However, when the ambient information collected by WSNs is intended for applications residing in MANETs, centralized and fixed gateways are not practicably feasible. This is mainly due to ad-hoc nature, lack of centralized control and constraints on the end-user devices that are used in MANETs. These devices are usually limited in power and capacity and cannot host centralized gateways. In this thesis we exploit the integration of WSN and MANET in order to provide novel value-added services which enhance the end-user experience of MANET participants. Motivating scenarios are introduced, background information is presented, requirements are derived and the state of the art regarding the integration of WSN with existing networks, including MANETs, is evaluated. Based on the evaluation, none of the existing solutions satisfies all of our derived requirements. Therefore, we propose an overall two-level overlay architecture to integrate WSNs (with mobile sinks) and MANETs. This architecture is based on the distributed gateway and applications which form the P2P overlays. Overlays are application-layer networks which are created on top of the exiting MANET. To interconnect gateway and application overlays we derive corresponding requirements and evaluate the existing approaches. Since none of these approaches fulfills all of our requirements, we propose protocols, mechanisms and design corresponding modules for the interconnection of overlays. Finally we refine our overall architecture based on the interconnection aspects. As a proof of concept, we implement a prototype for the inter-overlay information exchange. This implementation is based on SIP extensions and uses two existing P2P middlewares. We also simulate our prototype using Oversim simulation tool and collect experimental results. Based on these results, we can see that our architecture is a valid and promising approach for interconnecting different P2P overlays and can be deployed to provide the overall solution for WSN and MANET integrated system

    Network and service monitoring in heterogeneous home networks

    Get PDF
    Home networks are becoming dynamic and technologically heterogeneous. They consist of an increasing number of devices which offer several functionalities and can be used for many different services. In the home, these devices are interconnected using a mixture of networking technologies (for example, Ethernet, Wifi, coaxial cable, or power-line). However, interconnecting these devices is often not easy. The increasing heterogeneity has led to significant device- and service-management complexity. In addition, home networks provide a critical "last meters" access to the public telecom and Internet infrastructure and have a dramatic impact on to the end-to-end reliability and performance of services from these networks. This challenges service providers not only to maintain a satisfactory quality of service level in such heterogeneous home networks, but also to remotely monitor and troubleshoot them. The present thesis work contributes research and several solutions in the field of network and service monitoring in home networks, mainly in three areas: (1) providing automatic device- and service-discovery and configuration, (2) remote management, and (3) providing quality of service (QoS). With regard to the first area, current service discovery technology is designed to relieve the increasing human role in network and service administration. However, the relevant Service Discovery Protocols (SDPs) are lacking crucial features namely: (1) they are not platform- and network-independent, and (2) they do not provide sufficient mechanisms for (device) resource reservation. Consequently, devices implementing different SDPs cannot communicate with each other and share their functionalities and resources in a managed way, especially when they use different network technologies. As a solution to the first problem, we propose a new proxy server architecture that enables IP-based devices and services to be discovered on non-IP based network and vice versa. We implemented the proxy architecture using UPnP respectively Bluetooth SDP as IP- and non-IP-based SDPs. The proxy allows Bluetooth devices and UPnP control points to discover, access, and utilize services located on the other network. Validation experiments with the proxy prototype showed that seamless inter-working can be achieved keeping all proxy functionalities on a single device, thus not requiring modification of currently existing UPnP and Bluetooth end devices. Although the proxy itself taxes the end-to-end performance of the service, it is shown to be still acceptable for an end user. For mitigating resource conflicts in SDPs, we propose a generic resource reservation scheme with properties derived from common SDP operation. Performance studies with a prototype showed that this reservation scheme significantly improves the scalability and sustainability of service access in SDPs, at a minor computational cost. With regard to the second area, it is known that the end-to-end quality of Internet services depends crucially on the performance of the home network. Consequently, service providers require the ability to monitor and configure devices in the home network, behind the home gateway (HG). However, they can only put limited requirements to these off-the-shelf devices, as the consumer electronics market is largely outside their span of control. Therefore they have to make intelligent use of the given device control and management protocols. In this work, we propose an architecture for remote discovery and management of devices in a highly heterogeneous home network. A proof-of-concept is developed for the remote management of UPnP devices in the home with a TR-069/UPnP proxy on the HG. Although this architecture is protocol specific, it can be easily adapted to other web-services based protocols. Service providers are also asking for diagnostic tools with which they can remotely troubleshoot the home networks. One of these tools should be able to gather information about the topology of the home network. Although topology discovery protocols already exist, nothing is known yet about their performance. In this work we propose a set of key performance indicators for home network topology discovery architectures, and how they should be measured. We applied them to the Link-Layer Topology Discovery (LLTD) protocol and the Link-Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP). Our performance measurement results show that these protocols do not fulfill all the requirements as formulated by the service providers. With regard to the third area, current QoS solutions are mostly based on traffic classification. Because they need to be supported by all devices in the network, they are relatively expensive for home networks. Furthermore, they are not interoperable between different networking technologies. Alternative QoS provision techniques have been proposed in the literature. These techniques require end-user services to pragmatically adapt their properties to the actual condition of the network. For this, the condition of the home network in terms of its available bandwidth, delay, jitter, etc., needs to be known in real time. Appropriate tools for determining the available home network resources do not yet exist. In this work we propose a new method to probe the path capacity and available bandwidth between a server and a client in a home network. The main features of this method are: (a) it does not require adaptation of existing end devices, (b) it does not require pre-knowledge of the link-layer network topology, and (c) it is accurate enough to make reliable QoS predictions for the most relevant home applications. To use these predictions for effective service- or content-adaptation or admission control, one should also know how the state of the home network is expected to change immediately after the current state has been probed. However, not much is known about the stochastic properties of traffic in home networks. Based on a relatively small set of traffic observations in several home networks in the Netherlands, we were able to build a preliminary model for home network traffic dynamics

    Leadership for Learning Improvement in Urban Schools

    Get PDF
    Examines urban school leaders' efforts to improve the quality of teaching and learning by supporting progress for diverse students, sharing leadership work, and aligning resources. Analyzes school environments and coordination of various leadership roles

    A Web-Based Collaborative Multimedia Presentation Document System

    Get PDF
    With the distributed and rapidly increasing volume of data and expeditious development of modern web browsers, web browsers have become a possible legitimate vehicle for remote interactive multimedia presentation and collaboration, especially for geographically dispersed teams. To our knowledge, although there are a large number of applications developed for these purposes, there are some drawbacks in prior work including the lack of interactive controls of presentation flows, general-purpose collaboration support on multimedia, and efficient and precise replay of presentations. To fill the research gaps in prior work, in this dissertation, we propose a web-based multimedia collaborative presentation document system, which models a presentation as media resources together with a stream of media events, attached to associated media objects. It represents presentation flows and collaboration actions in events, implements temporal and spatial scheduling on multimedia objects, and supports real-time interactive control of the predefined schedules. As all events are represented by simple messages with an object-prioritized approach, our platform can also support fine-grained precise replay of presentations. Hundreds of kilobytes could be enough to store the events in a collaborative presentation session for accurate replays, compared with hundreds of megabytes in screen recording tools with a pixel-based replay mechanism

    Cybersecurity and the Digital Health: An Investigation on the State of the Art and the Position of the Actors

    Get PDF
    Cybercrime is increasingly exposing the health domain to growing risk. The push towards a strong connection of citizens to health services, through digitalization, has undisputed advantages. Digital health allows remote care, the use of medical devices with a high mechatronic and IT content with strong automation, and a large interconnection of hospital networks with an increasingly effective exchange of data. However, all this requires a great cybersecurity commitment—a commitment that must start with scholars in research and then reach the stakeholders. New devices and technological solutions are increasingly breaking into healthcare, and are able to change the processes of interaction in the health domain. This requires cybersecurity to become a vital part of patient safety through changes in human behaviour, technology, and processes, as part of a complete solution. All professionals involved in cybersecurity in the health domain were invited to contribute with their experiences. This book contains contributions from various experts and different fields. Aspects of cybersecurity in healthcare relating to technological advance and emerging risks were addressed. The new boundaries of this field and the impact of COVID-19 on some sectors, such as mhealth, have also been addressed. We dedicate the book to all those with different roles involved in cybersecurity in the health domain

    Video-based Estimation of Activity Level for Assisted Living

    Get PDF
    The continual increase in the population of older adults in the next 50 years envisages an increase of dependants on the family and the Government. Assisted Living technologies are information and communication technologies to assist, improve and monitor the daily living of the old and vulnerable population by promoting greater independence and providing a safe and secure environment at a reduced cost. Most of the assisted living technologies are passive sensor-based solutions where a number of embedded or body-worn sensors are employed or connected over a network to recognize activities. Often the sensors are obtrusive and are extremely sensitive to the performance of the sensors. Visual data is contextually richer than sensor triggered firings. Visual data along with being contextual is also extremely sensitive. Since visual data is intrusive, a qualitative study among older adults within the community was carried out to get a context of the privacy concerns of having a camera within an assisted living environment. Building on the outcomes of the focus group discussions, a novel monitoring framework is proposed. Following the framework, Activity Level, as an effective metric to measure the amount of activity undertaken by an individual is proposed. Activity Level is estimated by extracting and classifying pixel-based and phase-based motion features. Experiments reveal that phase-based features perform better than pixel-based features. Experiments are carried out using the novel Sheffield Activities of Daily Living Dataset, which has been developed and made available for further computer vision research for assisted living
    • …
    corecore