Design and Evaluation of a Button Sensor Antenna for On-Body Monitoring Activity in Healthcare Applications

A button sensor antenna for on-body monitoring in wireless body area network (WBAN) systems is presented. Due to the close coupling between the sensor antenna and the human body, it is highly challenging to design sensor antenna devices. In this paper, a mechanically robust system is proposed that integrates a dual-band button antenna with a wireless sensor module designed on a printed circuit board (PCB). The system features a small footprint and has good radiation characteristics and efficiency. This was fabricated, and the measured and simulated results are in good agreement. The design offers a wide range of omnidirectional radiation patterns in free space, with a reflection coefficient (S11) of −29.30 (−30.97) dB, a maximum gain of 1.75 (5.65) dBi, and radiation efficiency of 71.91 (92.51)% in the lower and upper bands, respectively. S11 reaches −23.07 (−27.07) dB and −30.76 (−31.12) dB, respectively, with a gain of 2.09 (6.70) dBi and 2.16 (5.67) dBi, and radiation efficiency of 65.12 (81.63)% and 75.00 (85.00)%, when located on the body for the lower and upper bands, respectively. The performance is minimally affected by bending, movement, and fabrication tolerances. The specific absorption rate (SAR) values are below the regulatory limitations for the spatial average over 1 g (1.6 W/Kg) and 10 g of tissues (2.0 W/Kg). For both indoor and outdoor conditions, experimental results of the range tests confirm the coverage of up to 40 m

CAVVPM: Challenge-Based Authentication and Verification of Vehicle Platooning at Motorway

As a result of vehicle platooning, advantages including decreased traffic congestion and improved fuel economy are expected. Vehicles in a platoon move in a single line, closely spaced, and at a constant speed. Vehicle-to-vehicle communications and sensor data help keep the platoon formation in place, and the CACC system is responsible for maintaining it. In reality, V2V transmissions are essential for reducing platooning distances while still ensuring their safety and security. It is far more difficult to confirm the veracity of a V2V message’s content than it is to verify its integrity and source authentication. Only platoon members can send and receive V2V communications by implementing a practical access control mechanism. The goal is to link a prospective platoon member’s digital identification to their actual location inside the unit. A physical challenge–response interaction is used in the CAVVPM process to verify that a prospective platoon member respects the rules. The applicant is asked to perform a series of random longitudinal movements, thus, the protocol’s name. Remote attackers cannot join the platoon or send bogus CACC communications because CAVVPM blocks them. CAVVPM is more resistant to pre-recording assaults than previous work, and it can validate that the candidate is precisely behind the verifier in the same lane compared to previous studies

Practices of Motivators in Adopting Agile Software Development at Large Scale Development Team from Management Perspective

Agile software development methodologies have become the most popular software development methods in the last few years. These methodologies facilitate rapid development. The low cost and prioritized user satisfaction make these methodologies more attractive. These methodologies were also intended for small scale developmental teams. Therefore, challenges were encountered when these methodologies were used in large-scale development teams. This study was based on the identification of factors which were discovered in our previous study. Some of the factors included “leadership strong commitment and team autonomy”, “cooperative organizational culture”, and “team competency—agile development expertise”. A total of 147 practices were identified in this study via a systematic literature review. These practices will help practitioners and project managers to adopt agile software methodologies and encourage them to the enhance them

Disaster Management System Aided by Named Data Network of Things: Architecture, Design, and Analysis

Disasters are the uncertain calamities which within no time can change the situation quite drastically. They not only affect the system’s infrastructure but can also put an adverse effect on human life. A large chunk of the IP-based Internet of Things (IoT) schemes tackle disasters such as fire, earthquake, and flood. Moreover, recently proposed Named Data Networking (NDN) architecture exhibited promising results for IoT as compare to IP-based approaches. Therefore to tackle disaster management system (DMS), it is needed to explore it through NDN architecture and this is the main motivation behind this work. In this research, a NDN based IoT-DMS (fire disaster) architecture is proposed, named as NDN-DISCA. In NDN-DISCA, NDN producer pushes emergency content towards nearby consumers. To provide push support, Beacon Alert Message (BAM) is created using fixed sequence number. NDN-DISCA is simulated in ndnSIM considering the disaster scenario of IoT-based smart campus (SC). From results, it is found that NDN-DISCA exhibits minimal delay and improved throughput when compared to the legacy NDN and existing PUSH schemes

SS-Drop: A Novel Message Drop Policy to Enhance Buffer Management in Delay Tolerant Networks

A challenged network is one where traditional hypotheses such as reduced data transfer error rates, end-to-end connectivity, or short transmissions have not gained much significance. A wide range of application scenarios are associated with such networks. Delay tolerant networking (DTN) is an approach that pursues to report the problems which reduce communication in disrupted networks. DTN works on store-carry and forward mechanism in such a way that a message may be stored by a node for a comparatively large amount of time and carry it until a proper forwarding opportunity appears. To store a message for long delays, a proper buffer management scheme is required to select a message for dropping upon buffer overflow. Every time dropping messages lead towards the wastage of valuable resources which the message has already consumed. The proposed solution is a size-based policy which determines an inception size for the selection of message for deletion as buffer becomes overflow. The basic theme behind this scheme is that by determining the exact buffer space requirement, one can easily select a message of an appropriate size to be discarded. By doing so, it can overcome unnecessary message drop and ignores biasness just before selection of specific sized message. The proposed scheme Spontaneous Size Drop (SS-Drop) implies a simple but intelligent mechanism to determine the inception size to drop a message upon overflow of the buffer. After simulation in ONE (Opportunistic Network Environment) simulator, the SS-Drop outperforms the opponent drop policies in terms of high delivery ratio by giving 66.3% delivery probability value and minimizes the overhead ratio up to 41.25%. SS-Drop also showed a prominent reduction in dropping of messages and buffer time average

Smart delivery and retrieval of swab collection kit for COVID-19 test using autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Drones, also known as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), are one of the highly emerging technologies of the modern day. Due to their small size, flying capabilities, and complex machinery, drones can be deployed in diverse fields, including agriculture, sports, entertainment, parcel delivery, disaster management, search and rescue, emergency medicine, and healthcare. In case of medical emergency, timely delivery of the required emergency kit is very important. This is often not possible in many underdeveloped countries due to lack of resources, traffic jams, congestion or challenging routes. Also, in times like today’s when the world is hit with COVID-19 pandemic, the movement is very limited due to lockdowns and emergency. In such case, drones can be deployed to deliver the emergency kits and collect samples for tests. This may save someones life as well as time and financial resources. In third world countries, the COVID-19 has spread chaos because of very limited hospitals, resources and staff. Therefore, it is difficult for the government and health officials to accommodate every patient or give him/her the care that he/she needs. Amidst the fear of pandemic, everyone is trying to undergo tests for COVID-19 which is difficult to handle In our research, we have proposed a solution that comprises smartphone application with the help of a patient sending a call to a healthcare centre for delivering emergency kit. The kit contains equipment with the help of which a person can collect swab. The drone takes the swab samples back to the healthcare centre for tests. We have introduced an optimization factor as a baseline for future studies of this kind. We have further conducted field experiments to test our proposed scheme. The results have shown that drones can be quite efficient in collecting samples and delivering emergency kits

From Digital Divide to Information Availability: A Wi-Fi-Based Novel Solution for Information Dissemination

Digital divide means unequal access to the people for information and communication technology (ICT) facilities. The developed countries are comparatively less digitally divided as compared to developing countries. This study focuses on District Chitral considering its geographical conditions and high mountainous topography which plays a significant role in its isolation. Aside from the digital divide, the situation in Chitral is even more severe in terms of the absence of basic ICT infrastructure and electricity in the schools. To address this issue, especially in female secondary and higher secondary schools, we designed a project to bridge the digital divide via Wireless Local Area Network on Raspberry Pi3 for balancing the ICT facilities in the targeted area. The Wi-Fi-Based Content Distributors (Wi-Fi-BCDs) were provided to bridge the digital divide in rural area schools of Chitral. The Wi-Fi-BCD is a solar-based system that is used to deliver quality educational contents directly to classroom, library, or other learning environments without electricity connection and Internet wire as these facilities are available by default in it. The close-ended questionnaire was adopted to collect data from the students, teachers, and headmistresses of girl secondary and higher secondary schools in Chitral. The procedure of validity, reliability, regression, correlation, and exploratory factor analysis was used to analyze the obtained data. The technology acceptance model (TAM) was modified and adopted to examine the effects of Wi-Fi-BCD for bridging the digital divide. The relationship of the modified TAM model was examined through regression and correlation to verify the model fitness according to the data obtained. The result analysis of this study shows that the relationship of the modified TAM model with its variables is positively significant, while the analysis of path relationship between model variables and outcomes from the questionnaire shows that it motivates learners to use Wi-Fi-BCD