Characterising food environment exposure at home, at work, and along commuting journeys using data on adults in the UK.

BACKGROUND: Socio-ecological models of behaviour suggest that dietary behaviours are potentially shaped by exposure to the food environment ('foodscape'). Research on associations between the foodscape and diet and health has largely focussed on foodscapes around the home, despite recognition that non-home environments are likely to be important in a more complete assessment of foodscape exposure. This paper characterises and describes foodscape exposure of different types, at home, at work, and along commuting routes for a sample of working adults in Cambridgeshire, UK. METHODS: Home and work locations, and transport habits for 2,696 adults aged 29-60 were drawn from the Fenland Study, UK. Food outlet locations were obtained from local councils and classified by type - we focus on convenience stores, restaurants, supermarkets and takeaway food outlets. Density of and proximity to food outlets was characterised at home and work. Commuting routes were modelled based on the shortest street network distance between home and work, with exposure (counts of food outlets) that accounted for travel mode and frequency. We describe these three domains of food environment exposure using descriptive and inferential statistics. RESULTS: For all types of food outlet, we found very different foodscapes around homes and workplaces (with overall outlet exposure at work 125% higher), as well as a potentially substantial exposure contribution from commuting routes. On average, work and commuting environments each contributed to foodscape exposure at least equally to residential neighbourhoods, which only accounted for roughly 30% of total exposure. Furthermore, for participants with highest overall exposure to takeaway food outlets, workplaces accounted for most of the exposure. Levels of relative exposure between home, work and commuting environments were poorly correlated. CONCLUSIONS: Relying solely on residential neighbourhood characterisation greatly underestimated total foodscape exposure in this sample, with levels of home exposure unrelated to levels of away from home exposure. Such mis-estimation is likely to be expressed in analyses as attenuated parameter estimates, suggesting a minimal 'environmental' contribution to outcomes of interest. Future work should aim to assess exposure more completely through characterising environments beyond the residential neighbourhood, where behaviours related to food consumption are likely to occur.RIGHTS : This article is licensed under the BioMed Central licence at http://www.biomedcentral.com/about/license which is similar to the 'Creative Commons Attribution Licence'. In brief you may : copy, distribute, and display the work; make derivative works; or make commercial use of the work - under the following conditions: the original author must be given credit; for any reuse or distribution, it must be made clear to others what the license terms of this work are

Factors Affecting Demand for Plug-in Charging Infrastructure: An Analysis of Plug-in Electric Vehicle Commuters

The public sector and the private sector, which includes automakers and charging network companies, are increasingly investing in building charging infrastructure to encourage the adoption and use of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) and to ensure that current facilities are not congested. However, building infrastructure is costly and, as with road congestion, when there is significant uptake of PEVs, we may not be able to “build out of congestion.” We modelled the choice of charging location that more than 3000 PEV drivers make when given the options of home, work, and public locations. Our study focused on understanding the importance of factors driving demand such as: the cost of charging, driver characteristics, access to charging infrastructure, and vehicle characteristics. We found that differences in the cost of charging play an important role in the demand for charging location. PEV drivers tend to substitute workplace charging for home charging when they pay a higher electricity rate at home, more so when the former is free. Additionally, socio-demographic factors like dwelling type and gender, as well as vehicle technology factors like electric range, influence the choice of charging location

Encrypted Network Traffic Classification and Resource Allocation with Deep Learning in Software Defined Network

The climate has changed absolutely in every area in just a few years as digitized, making high-speed internet service a significant need in the future. Future Internet is supposed to face exponential growth in traffic, and highly complicated infrastructure, threatening to make conventional NTC approaches unreliable and even counterproductive. In recent days, AI Stimulated state-of-the-art breakthroughs with the ability to tackle extensive and multifarious challenges, and the network community is initiated by considering the NTC prototype from legacy rule-based towards a novel AI-based. Design and execution are applied to interdisciplinary become more essential. A smart home network supports various applications and smart devices within the proposed work, including e-health devices, regular computing devices, and home automation devices. Many devices accessible through the Internet by Home GateWay for Congestion (HGC) in a smart home. Throughout this paper, a Software-Defined Network Home GateWay for Congestion (SDNHGC) architecture for improved management of remote smart home networks and protection of the significant networks SDN controller. It enables effective network capacity regulation, focused on real-time traffic analysis and core network resource allocation. It cannot control the Network in dispersed smart homes. Our innovative SDNHGC expands power across the connectivity network, a smart home network enabling improved end-to-end monitoring of networks. The planned SDNHGC directly will gain centralized device identification by classifying traffic through a smart home network. Several of the current traffic classifications approach, checking deep packets, cannot have this real-time device knowledge for encrypted data to solve this issue

Network and service monitoring in heterogeneous home networks

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

A Network of One’s Own: Struggles to Domesticate the Internet

This thesis is a design research practice-led inquiry into the domesticated Internet. It first seeks to complicate simplistic corporate and academic visions by naming some of the struggles it encounters – not least to assert a private home and network of one's own. It is argued that a century of domestic technologies has emphasised invisibility, ubiquity, and automation in ways that obscure a network of exploited people and finite resources. Furthermore, these technological ambitions are met through machine surveillance, in ways newly enabled by the domesticated Internet, that threaten the privacy of the home. In response, this thesis seeks some practical ways to design alternatives that assert a network of one's own and makes the work it implicates visible. The methodological approach is broadly Research Through Design supplemented by a practice described as designerly hacking through which hidden technical potential is revealed and given meaning. Two empirical studies are described that together make an account of the technical possibility and social reality of the networked home: an autobiographical technical exploration of the author's home and network with the making of hacks and Research Products privately and in public; and a cultural probe engagement with six rented households surfacing contemporary accounts of the domesticated Internet and in particular the challenges and opportunities of wireless networking. Together this yields a series of technical and social insights for design and two forms are offered to communicate these: a framework for understanding change in the networked home (The Stuff of Home) and a set of 30 design patterns for a network of one's own; each invites different analyses. The conclusion then draws together the multiple threads developed through this thesis and offers some reflection on the complexity of doing contemporary technical design work

FM and Web Based Solution: A Novel Approach to Monitor and Control Home Appliances using Mobile Phone

The capacity of controlling various electrical and electronics devices in a wireless and remote fashion has provided a great convenience to many people in life. Through a wireless distant control system, people can do remote operation without directly accessing the host of home appliances like fan, lamp, TV, washing machines and others. Pocket switch is one of these types of system which we can use to control home appliances smartly from anywhere. The main objective of this work is to make such a system which controls the home appliances remotely using Web service and FM technology from a mobile phone. This paper discusses two methods of controlling home appliances. The first one is web service based where server will generate a command to the controller computer and the second one is FM network based where server will synthesize the SMS in to speech

A Security Framework for IOT Based Smart Home Automation System

The Internet of Things (IOT) is a new platform for our technology. Though of IOT, we can control our daily life work such as home application, control and communication systems, easy communication systems, improve our digital services etc. The Internet of Things (IOT) is joining our daily contents information wisely to the internet to make communication between objects and people and among themselves. In this paper, we show an improved home automation by the help of IOT. For calculating response time of IOT, we need fog computing platform. Fog computing also known as fogging or edge computing which is built by Cisco and it is extended the version of cloud computing through a network. In our proposed system, we use motion sensor, SBC-PT which is a network access component and daily life component in home. We can monitor and control that equipment by the approach of IOT based system. The home automation system uses the portable devices as a user interface. They can connect with home automation network through an internet approach. The user will move straightly with the system via control interface whereas home apparatus are remotely controlled through sensor and server. The home automation system has an additional property that enhances the facet of defense from unauthorized accidents. The communication with the server consents the user to pick out the receivable device. This design proposed an efficient control of home automation system

The design of a smart home controller based on ADALINE

This paper proposes a prototype of an improved smart home controller that implements a neural network-based algorithm for enabling the controller to make decisions and act based on the current condition. Unlike previous approaches, this design also utilizes the use of IoT (internet of thing) technology and neural network based-algorithm for developing the controller. Since a smart home is equipped with various sensors, actuators, smart appliances, and mobile terminals, all of these devices need to be connected to the Internet to be able to communicate and provide services for its occupants. The construction of the proposed controller is carried out through several procedures, i.e. the implementation of the ADALINE (adaptive linear) as the neural network method, the design of the smart home controller prototype, and the validation process using mean average percentage error (MAPE) calculation. This prototype integrates functionalities of several household appliances into one application controlled by a smartphone. ADALINE is applied as an algorithm to predict output when the controller is in automatic mode. Although the obtained accuracy value is still not satisfactory, the value is bound to change when testing on more data. The work published in this paper may encourage the implementation of smart technology in more households in Indonesia.