InShopnito: an advanced yet privacy-friendly mobile shopping application

Mobile Shopping Applications (MSAs) are rapidly gaining popularity. They enhance the shopping experience, by offering customized recommendations or incorporating customer loyalty programs. Although MSAs are quite effective at attracting new customers and binding existing ones to a retailer's services, existing MSAs have several shortcomings. The data collection practices involved in MSAs and the lack of transparency thereof are important concerns for many customers. This paper presents inShopnito, a privacy-preserving mobile shopping application. All transactions made in inShopnito are unlinkable and anonymous. However, the system still offers the expected features from a modern MSA. Customers can take part in loyalty programs and earn or spend loyalty points and electronic vouchers. Furthermore, the MSA can suggest personalized recommendations even though the retailer cannot construct rich customer profiles. These profiles are managed on the smartphone and can be partially disclosed in order to get better, customized recommendations. Finally, we present an implementation called inShopnito, of which the security and performance is analyzed. In doing so, we show that it is possible to have a privacy-preserving MSA without having to sacrifice practicality

Analyzing recommender systems for health promotion using a multidisciplinary taxonomy: A scoping review

Background: Recommender systems are information retrieval systems that provide users with relevant items (e.g., through messages). Despite their extensive use in the e-commerce and leisure domains, their application in healthcare is still in its infancy. These systems may be used to create tailored health interventions, thus reducing the cost of healthcare and fostering a healthier lifestyle in the population. Objective: This paper identifies, categorizes, and analyzes the existing knowledge in terms of the literature published over the past 10 years on the use of health recommender systems for patient interventions. The aim of this study is to understand the scientific evidence generated about health recommender systems, to identify any gaps in this field to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG3) (namely, “Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”), and to suggest possible reasons for these gaps as well as to propose some solutions. Methods: We conducted a scoping review, which consisted of a keyword search of the literature related to health recommender systems for patients in the following databases: ScienceDirect, PsycInfo, Association for Computing Machinery, IEEExplore, and Pubmed. Further, we limited our search to consider only English-lan-guage journal articles published in the last 10 years. The reviewing process comprised three researchers who filtered the results simultaneously. The quantitative synthesis was conducted in parallel by two researchers, who classified each paper in terms of four aspects—the domain, the methodological and procedural aspects, the health promotion theoretical factors and behavior change theories, and the technical aspects—using a new multidisciplinary taxonomy. Results: Nineteen papers met the inclusion criteria and were included in the data analysis, for which thirty-three features were assessed. The nine features associated with the health promotion theoretical factors and behavior change theories were not observed in any of the selected studies, did not use principles of tailoring, and did not assess (cost)-effectiveness. Discussion: Health recommender systems may be further improved by using relevant behavior change strategies and by implementing essential characteristics of tailored interventions. In addition, many of the features required to assess each of the domain aspects, the methodological and procedural aspects, and technical aspects were not reported in the studies. Conclusions: The studies analyzed presented few evidence in support of the positive effects of using health recommender systems in terms of cost-effectiveness and patient health outcomes. This is why future studies should ensure that all the proposed features are covered in our multidisciplinary taxonomy, including integration with electronic health records and the incorporation of health promotion theoretical factors and behavior change theories. This will render those studies more useful for policymakers since they will cover all aspects needed to determine their impact toward meeting SDG3.European Union's Horizon 2020 No 68112

Recommendation System for News Reader

Recommendation Systems help users to find information and make decisions where they lack the required knowledge to judge a particular product. Also, the information dataset available can be huge and recommendation systems help in filtering this data according to users‟ needs. Recommendation systems can be used in various different ways to facilitate its users with effective information sorting. For a person who loves reading, this paper presents the research and implementation of a Recommendation System for a NewsReader Application using Android Platform. The NewsReader Application proactively recommends news articles as per the reading habits of the user, recorded over a period of time and also recommends the currently trending articles. Recommendation systems and their implementations using various algorithms is the primary area of study for this project. This research paper compares and details popular recommendation algorithms viz. Content based recommendation systems, Collaborative recommendation systems etc. Moreover, it also presents a more efficient Hybrid approach that absorbs the best aspects from both the algorithms mentioned above, while trying to eliminate all the potential drawbacks observed

Towards NFC payments using a lightweight architecture for the Web of Things

The Web (and Internet) of Things has seen the rapid emergence of new protocols and standards, which provide for innovative models of interaction for applications. One such model fostered by the Web of Things (WoT) ecosystem is that of contactless interaction between devices. Near Field Communication (NFC) technology is one such enabler of contactless interactions. Contactless technology for the WoT requires all parties to agree one common definition and implementation and, in this paper, we propose a new lightweight architecture for the WoT, based on RESTful approaches. We show how the proposed architecture supports the concept of a mobile wallet, enabling users to make secure payments employing NFC technology with their mobile devices. In so doing, we argue that the vision of the WoT is brought a step closer to fruition

Effect of Values and Technology Use on Exercise: Implications for Personalized Behavior Change Interventions

Technology has recently been recruited in the war against the ongoing obesity crisis; however, the adoption of Health & Fitness applications for regular exercise is a struggle. In this study, we present a unique demographically representative dataset of 15k US residents that combines technology use logs with surveys on moral views, human values, and emotional contagion. Combining these data, we provide a holistic view of individuals to model their physical exercise behavior. First, we show which values determine the adoption of Health & Fitness mobile applications, finding that users who prioritize the value of purity and de-emphasize values of conformity, hedonism, and security are more likely to use such apps. Further, we achieve a weighted AUROC of .673 in predicting whether individual exercises, and we also show that the application usage data allows for substantially better classification performance (.608) compared to using basic demographics (.513) or internet browsing data (.546). We also find a strong link of exercise to respondent socioeconomic status, as well as the value of happiness. Using these insights, we propose actionable design guidelines for persuasive technologies targeting health behavior modification

The simplicity project: easing the burden of using complex and heterogeneous ICT devices and services

As of today, to exploit the variety of different "services", users need to configure each of their devices by using different procedures and need to explicitly select among heterogeneous access technologies and protocols. In addition to that, users are authenticated and charged by different means. The lack of implicit human computer interaction, context-awareness and standardisation places an enormous burden of complexity on the shoulders of the final users. The IST-Simplicity project aims at leveraging such problems by: i) automatically creating and customizing a user communication space; ii) adapting services to user terminal characteristics and to users preferences; iii) orchestrating network capabilities. The aim of this paper is to present the technical framework of the IST-Simplicity project. This paper is a thorough analysis and qualitative evaluation of the different technologies, standards and works presented in the literature related to the Simplicity system to be developed