Exploring digital teaching tools, including the use of social media, to support teaching; perspectives of M.Pharm. students

Background: The School of Pharmacy and Medical Sciences, University of Bradford, is keen to evaluate the potential benefits of digital tools to enhance the teaching and learning of all M.Pharm. students. Students are increasingly using digital technology for both educational and social purposes (Cheston et al., 2013). This project explored the views of pharmacy students about digital technology, including social media, for teaching in the M.Pharm. programme. Method: Convenience sampling was employed to recruit M.Pharm. students for focus groups. Each focus group, facilitated by student researchers with topic guide, was audio-recorded and analysed for themes. Ethics approval was obtained from the University. Results: Year 2 and 3 students from two focus groups (n1=8 (6 male), n2=10 (8 male)) identified three main digital teaching tools used in the current programme: Blackboard, response clickers, and iSTAN. Blackboard, a virtual learning environment, was seen as a hub for holding all required learning materials. However, its use depended on internet access and some felt they would benefit from offline use and improved compatibility with different devices. Audience response systems and a human patient stimulator were well received by students. However, participants strongly felt that they were underutilised. The main benefit of using social media for learning was instant feedback and the encouragement of informal discussions. Participants were not always comfortable posting within the current digital tools used in the programme (e.g. Blackboard) as they felt ‘monitored’. However, participants acknowledged that information obtained through social media might not be as reliable as information from digital tools moderated by academics. Interestingly, participants reported a lack of engagement with programme specific social media pages (e.g. Facebook page). They felt that the information provided was aimed at qualified pharmacists, rather than current students. Conclusion: Participants valued accessibility, flexibility and availability of instant feedback when using digital tools to support their learning. They felt positive about the digital tools used within the programme but emphasised the need of greater integration. References Cheston, C.C., Flickinger, T.E. & Chisom, M.S. (2013). Social media use in medical education: a systematic review. Academic Medicine, 88(6), 893-90

A privacy-preserving framework for smart context-aware healthcare applications

Smart connected devices are widely used in healthcare to achieve improved well-being, quality of life, and security of citizens. While improving quality of healthcare, such devices generate data containing sensitive patient information where unauthorized access constitutes breach of privacy leading to catastrophic outcomes for an individual as well as financial loss to the governing body via regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation. Furthermore, while mobility afforded by smart devices enables ease of monitoring, portability, and pervasive processing, it introduces challenges with respect to scalability, reliability, and context awareness. This paper is focused on privacy preservation within smart context-aware healthcare emphasizing privacy assurance challenges within Electronic Transfer of Prescription. We present a case for a comprehensive, coherent, and dynamic privacy-preserving system for smart healthcare to protect sensitive user data. Based on a thorough analysis of existing privacy preservation models, we propose an enhancement to the widely used Salford model to achieve privacy preservation against masquerading and impersonation threats. The proposed model therefore improves privacy assurance for smart healthcare while addressing unique challenges with respect to context-aware mobility of such applications. © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

A privacy‐preserving framework for smart context‐aware healthcare applications

Internet of things (IoT) is a disruptive paradigm with wide ranging applications including healthcare, manufacturing, transportation and retail. Within healthcare, smart connected wearable devices are widely used to achieve improved wellbeing, quality of life and security of citizens. Such connected devices generate significant amount of data containing sensitive information about patient requiring adequate protection and privacy assurance. Unauthorized access to an individual’s private data constitutes a breach of privacy leading to catastrophic outcomes for an individuals personal and professional life. Furthermore, breach of privacy may also lead to financial loss to the governing body such as those proposed as part of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe. Furthermore, while mobility afforded by smart devices enables ease of monitoring, portability and pervasive processing, it also introduces challenges with respect to scalability, reliability and context-awareness for its applications. This paper is focused on privacy preservation within smart context-aware healthcare with a special emphasis on privacy assurance challenges within the Electronic Transfer of Prescription (ETP). To this extent, we present a case for a comprehensive, coherent, and dynamic privacypreserving system for smart healthcare to protect sensitive user data. Based on a thorough analysis of existing privacy preservation models we propose an enhancement for the widely used Salford model to achieve privacy preservation against masquerading and impersonation threats. The proposed model therefore improves privacy assurance for cutting edge IoT applications such as smart healthcare whilst addressing unique challenges with respect to context-aware mobility of such applications

Branding strategies for service firms- a study on the selected Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Bangladesh

Research work has been done on how to create a brand supporting behaviour but most of the time the existing insights have generally stemmed from research with management, brand practitioner’s and even consumers’ perspectives. Very little has been done to research the employees’ perception towards internal branding and to compare the view of the management and employees’ on internal communication. The existing researches are also done on mostly in the context of the businesses in industrialize countries whereas this research would be an intent to find the internal branding practice in a service firm in a country of developing economy. This would able to identify the gap in the practice of internal branding in different socio-economical context. This research is dedicated to find out both back end and front end skilled employees’ view towards internal communication in a service firm and based on the findings attempt would be done to see whether the staffs perceive their role differently towards the brand. For conducting the research qualitative data were gathered from the qualitative survey by questioning different employee and management about the internal brand communication and the analysis was done on that. With the respondents view on the internal marketing process, the management do not have fully structured plan to implement a sound internal branding strategy. With a given economical constraint it is not always possible to practice all the aspect of management science, but from the study of the company we can see that service firms such as ISP (internet service provider) companies in weaker economical countries could increase the internal communication practice by just altering the existing inter-departmental communication monitored by innovative senior management, co-ordination of HRM and Marketing with input from engineers. &nbsp

Intrusion damage assessment for multi-stage attacks for clouds

Clouds represent a major paradigm shift from contemporary systems, inspiring the contemporary approach to computing. They present fascinating opportunities to address dynamic user requirements with the provision of flexible computing infrastructures that are available on demand. Clouds, however, introducing novel challenges particularly with respect to security that require dedicated efforts to address them. This study is focused at one such challenge, that is, determining the extent of damage caused by an intrusion for a victim virtual machine. It has significant implications especially with respect to effective response to the intrusion. This study presents the efforts to address this challenge for Clouds in the form of a novel scheme for intrusion damage assessment for Clouds. In addition to its context-aware operation, the scheme facilitates protection against multi-stage attacks. The study also includes the formal specification and evaluation of the scheme, which successfully demonstrate its effectiveness to achieve rigorous damage assessment for Clouds

Pervasive blood pressure monitoring using Photoplethysmogram (PPG) Sensor

Preventive healthcare requires continuous monitoring of the blood pressure (BP) of patients, which is not feasible using conventional methods. Photoplethysmogram (PPG) signals can be effectively used for this purpose as there is a physiological relation between the pulse width and BP and can be easily acquired using a wearable PPG sensor. However, developing real-time algorithms for wearable technology is a significant challenge due to various conflicting requirements such as high accuracy, computationally constrained devices, and limited power supply. In this paper, we propose a novel feature set for continuous, real-time identification of abnormal BP. This feature set is obtained by identifying the peaks and valleys in a PPG signal (using a peak detection algorithm), followed by the calculation of rising time, falling time and peak-to-peak distance. The histograms of these times are calculated to form a feature set that can be used for classification of PPG signals into one of the two classes: normal or abnormal BP. No public dataset is available for such study and therefore a prototype is developed to collect PPG signals alongside BP measurements. The proposed feature set shows very good performance with an overall accuracy of approximately 95\%. Although the proposed feature set is effective, the significance of individual features varies greatly (validated using significance testing) which led us to perform weighted voting of features for classification by performing autoregressive modeling. Our experiments show that the simplest linear classifiers produce very good results indicating the strength of the proposed feature set. The weighted voting improves the results significantly, producing an overall accuracy of about 98%. Conclusively, the PPG signals can be effectively used to identify BP, and the proposed feature set is efficient and computationally feasible for implementation on standalone devices.N/

Branding strategies for service firms- a study on the selected Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in Bangladesh

Research work has been done on how to create a brand supporting behaviour but most of the time the existing insights have generally stemmed from research with management, brand practitioner’s and even consumers’ perspectives. Very little has been done to research the employees’ perception towards internal branding and to compare the view of the management and employees’ on internal communication. The existing researches are also done on mostly in the context of the businesses in industrialize countries whereas this research would be an intent to find the internal branding practice in a service firm in a country of developing economy. This would able to identify the gap in the practice of internal branding in different socio-economical context. This research is dedicated to find out both back end and front end skilled employees’ view towards internal communication in a service firm and based on the findings attempt would be done to see whether the staffs perceive their role differently towards the brand. For conducting the research qualitative data were gathered from the qualitative survey by questioning different employee and management about the internal brand communication and the analysis was done on that. With the respondents view on the internal marketing process, the management do not have fully structured plan to implement a sound internal branding strategy. With a given economical constraint it is not always possible to practice all the aspect of management science, but from the study of the company we can see that service firms such as ISP (internet service provider) companies in weaker economical countries could increase the internal communication practice by just altering the existing inter-departmental communication monitored by innovative senior management, co-ordination of HRM and Marketing with input from engineers

Performance analysis of content discovery for ad-hoc tactile networks

Tactile Internet evolves communications to encompass sensory information such as smell and haptic sensations combining ultra-low latency with extremely high availability, reliability, and security. Tactile Internet is realized through underpinning technologies such as Multi-access Edge and Fog computing which facilitate decentralized infrastructures and machine to machine (M2M) communications. Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) form the foundation layer of such infrastructures, enabling direct communication between autonomous and decentralized devices such as sensors and vehicles. Among other applications, autonomous ad hoc vehicular networks (VANETs) and vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communications require efficient content discovery and quality of data transfer. The mobility patterns of vehicles within this communication model could effect the quality of data exchanged between devices in a tactile network. Several mobility models exist describing mobility patterns of mobile users in MANETs. In this paper, we present a first performance study to evaluate the impact of different mobility models on content discovery techniques for tactile Internet comprising of fast-moving vehicles and devices. This study combines direct and derived mobility metrics evaluating impact on content discovery and content dissemination using NS-3. Our simulation results indicate that unstructured techniques may not scale well within a tactile network of fast moving vehicles while maintaining low latency and could suffer from performance degradation in a saturated environment. Furthermore, simulation results also demonstrate the resilience of the unstructured content discovery protocol in mobility scenarios with proactive routing and diverse behavior

Global variation in diabetes diagnosis and prevalence based on fasting glucose and hemoglobin A1c

Fasting plasma glucose (FPG) and hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) are both used to diagnose diabetes, but these measurements can identify different people as having diabetes. We used data from 117 population-based studies and quantified, in different world regions, the prevalence of diagnosed diabetes, and whether those who were previously undiagnosed and detected as having diabetes in survey screening, had elevated FPG, HbA1c or both. We developed prediction equations for estimating the probability that a person without previously diagnosed diabetes, and at a specific level of FPG, had elevated HbA1c, and vice versa. The age-standardized proportion of diabetes that was previously undiagnosed and detected in survey screening ranged from 30% in the high-income western region to 66% in south Asia. Among those with screen-detected diabetes with either test, the age-standardized proportion who had elevated levels of both FPG and HbA1c was 29-39% across regions; the remainder had discordant elevation of FPG or HbA1c. In most low- and middle-income regions, isolated elevated HbA1c was more common than isolated elevated FPG. In these regions, the use of FPG alone may delay diabetes diagnosis and underestimate diabetes prevalence. Our prediction equations help allocate finite resources for measuring HbA1c to reduce the global shortfall in diabetes diagnosis and surveillance