A framework for development of android mobile electronic prescription transfer applications in compliance with security requirements mandated by the Australian healthcare industry

This thesis investigates mobile electronic transfer of prescription (ETP) in compliance with the security requirements mandated by the Australian healthcare industry and proposes a framework for the development of an Android mobile electronic prescription transfer application. Furthermore, and based upon the findings and knowledge from constructing this framework, another framework is also derived for assessing Android mobile ETP applications for their security compliance. The centralised exchange model-based ETP solution currently used in the Australian healthcare industry is an expensive solution for on-going use. With challenges such as an aging population and the rising burden of chronic disease, the cost of the current ETP solution’s operational infrastructure is certain to rise in the future. In an environment where it is increasingly beneficial for patients to engage in and manage their own information and subsequent care, this current solution fails to offer the patient direct access to their electronic prescription information. The current system also fails to incorporate certain features that would dramatically improve the quality of the patient’s care and safety, i.e. alerts for the patient’s drug allergies, harmful dosage and script expiration. Over a decade old, the current ETP solution was essentially designed and built to meet legislation and regulatory requirements, with change-averting its highest priority. With little, if any, provision for future growth and innovation, it was not designed to cater to the needs of the ETP process. This research identifies the gap within the current ETP implementation (i.e. dependency on infrastructure, significant on-going cost and limited availability of the patient’s medication history) and proposes a framework for building a secure mobile ETP solution on the Android mobile operating system platform which will address the identified gap. The literature review part of this thesis examined the significance of ETP for the nation’s larger initiative to provide an improved and better maintainable healthcare system. The literature review also revealed the stance of each jurisdiction, from legislative and regulatory perspectives, in transitioning to the use of a fully electronic ETP solution. It identified the regulatory mandates of each jurisdiction for ETP as well as the security standards by which the current ETP implementation is iii governed so as to conform to those regulatory mandates. The literature review part of the thesis essentially identified and established how the Australian healthcare industry’s various prescription-related legislations and regulations are constructed, and the complexity of this construction for eTP. The jurisdictional regulatory mandates identified in the literature review translate into a set of security requirements. These requirements establish the basis of the guiding framework for the development of a security-compliant Android mobile ETP application. A number of experimentations were conducted focusing on the native security features of the Android operating system, as well as wireless communication technologies such as NFC and Bluetooth, in order to propose an alternative mobile ETP solution with security assurance comparable to the current ETP implementation. The employment of a proof-of-concept prototype such as this alongside / coupled with a series of iterative experimentations strengthens the validity and practicality of the proposed framework. The first experiment successfully proved that the Android operating system has sufficient encryption capabilities, in compliance with the security mandates, to secure the electronic prescription information from the data at rest perspective. The second experiment indicated that the use of NFC technology to implement the alternative transfer mechanism for exchanging electronic prescription information between ETP participating devices is not practical. The next iteration of the experimentation using Bluetooth technology proved that it can be utilised as an alternative electronic prescription transfer mechanism to the current approach using the Internet. These experiment outcomes concluded the partial but sufficient proofof- concept prototype for this research. Extensive document analysis and iterative experimentations showed that the framework constructed by this research can guide the development of an alternative mobile ETP solution with both comparable security assurance to and better access to the patient’s medication history than the current solution. This alternative solution would present no operational dependence upon infrastructure and its associated, ongoing cost to the nation’s healthcare expenditure. In addition, use of this mobile ETP alternative has the potential to change the public’s perception (i.e. acceptance from regulatory and security perspectives) of mobile healthcare solutions, thereby paving the way for further innovation and future enhancements in eHealth

Efficient Labelling of Pedestrian Supervisions

Object detection is a fundamental goal to achieve intelligent visual perception by computers due to the fact that objects are the basic building blocks to achieve higher level image understanding. Among the numerous categories of objects in the real-world, pedestrians are among the most important due to several potential benefits brought about by successful pedestrian detection. Often, pedestrian detectors are trained in state-of-the-art systems using supervised machine learning algorithms which necessitates costly and often tedious manual annotation of pedestrians in the form of precise bounding boxes. In this paper, a novel weakly supervised learning algorithm is proposed to train a pedestrian detector that requires, instead of bounding boxes, only annotations of estimated centres of pedestrians. The algorithm makes use of a pedestrian prior learnt in an unsupervised way from the video and this prior is fused with the given weak supervision information in a systematic manner. By evaluating on publicly available datasets, we demonstrate that our weakly supervised algorithm reduces the cost of manual annotation of pedestrians by more than four times while achieving similar performance to a pedestrian detector trained with standard bounding box annotations

The half-lives of biological activity of some pesticides in water

In the absence of analytical methods, the half-lives of biological activity of pesticides can be estimated by bioassays. To determine the half-lives of biological acivity of pesticides to fish, static bioassays were conducted in the laboratory with ten different formulations of pesticides using Labeo rohita as a bio-indicator. The half-lives of biological activity for ten different pesticides in soft water at pH 7.5 and 27°C, ranged from 4.6 days to 11.8 days. The half-life of biological activity of Sumithion 50% EC was only 4.6 days. In contrast, Dimecron 50% EC degraded very slowly and its half-life of biological activity on L. rohita was about 11.8 days. Sumithion 50% EC, Padan 50% SP, EPN 45% EC, Diazinon 40% EC and Diazinon 10 G degraded in less than five to seven days indicating that these pesticides are desirable for rice-fish culture. Contamination by pesticides with long-term residual toxicity in waters may eventually cause high levels of fish mortality

Rainfall forecasting models using focused time-delay neural networks

Rainfall forecasting is vital for making important decisions and performing strategic planning in agriculture-dependent countries. Despite its importance, statistical rainfall forecasting, especially for long-term, has been proven to be a great challenge due to the dynamic nature of climate phenomena and random fluctuations involved in the process. Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have recently become very popular and they are one of the most widely used forecasting models that have enjoyed fruitful applications for forecasting purposes in many domains of engineering and computer science. The main contribution of this research is in the design, implementation and comparison of rainfall forecasting models using Focused Time-Delay Neural Networks (FTDNN). The optimal parameters of the neural network architectures were obtained from experiments while networks were trained to perform one-step-ahead predictions. The daily rainfall dataset, obtained from Malaysia Meteorological Department (MMD), was converted to monthly, biannually, quarterly and monthly datasets. Training and testing were performed on each of the datasets and corresponding accuracies of the forecasts were measured using Mean Absolute Percent Error. For testing data, results indicate that yearly rainfall dataset gives the most accurate forecasts (94.25%). As future work, more parameters such as temperature, humidity and sunshine data can be incorporated into the neural network for superior forecasting performance

Optimization techniques for decoding logic design in digital-to-analog converters

High resolution and high speed digital-to-analog Converters are important building blocks in many telecommunications and digital signal processing circuits. To achieve high accuracy, thermometer-coded structures are almost always used either as a whole or part of a segmented architecture. However, the design of a binary-to-thermometer decoder at high resolutions to achieve high decoding speed is non-trivial and is often the bottleneck in the system. The advantages of having more thermometer-coded bits in the architecture are high linearity performance, relaxed matching requirements and higher yield. However, large binary-to-thermometer decoder usually takes a lot of area and suffers in decoding speed. Some practical ways to reduce both the time delay and the digital logic involve with the large decoders are discussed. A 10-bit digital-to-analog converter was designed and fabricated using multi-segmented linear-step decoding logic and experimental results are presented

Fahrtbericht FS "Poseidon" Fahrt Nr. 82 [POS82]: Westliche Ostsee und Kriegers Flach vom 29.1.1982 bis 4.2.1982

Die Forschungsfahrt diente der Durchführung des Forschungsvertrages "Ein integriertes akustisches Fernmeßsystem (IAFM) zur Typisierung von Schichtfolgen im Meeresboden und ihrer Raumlage". Dazu sollten den bis jetzt verfügbaren Komponenten des IAFM Systems. zusammen mit dem -nach Prototyp- gebauten Echostärkenmeßgerät-2 in einigen durch frühere Fahrten gut bekannten Gebieten erprobt werden. Gezielt entnommene Kerne sollten die Interpretation der Sedimentschiebtfolge ergänzen. Da das Gerät Einzelheiten über die Reflexionseigenschaften der oberen Sedimentschichten von 50 cm (5 Abschnitte je 10 cm Mächtigkeit), 1 m, 2 m und 4 m und die unteren Schichten von 50 cm bis 1 m, 1 m bis 2 m, 2 m bis 4 m und 4 m bis 8 m erfassen kann, sollten Profilabschnitte für nachträgliche Signalverarbeitung im Labor auf Analogband eingespeichert werden. Außerdem sollte der Einfluß der Schiffsgeschwindigkeit auf die einzelnen Echostärken untersucht werden. Da die Fahrt durch Motorenschaden am Schiff gekürzt werden mußte, wurden die Unter-suchungen auf folgende Gebiete eingeschränkt: a) Vejsnäs Flach und Rinne - Fehmarn Belt b) Mecklenburger und Neustädter /Lübecker Bucht c) Kriegers Flac