GreenCrowd: Toward a Holistic Algorithmic Crowd Charging Framework

Crowd charging represents an alternative peer-to-peer energy replenishment option for mobile users to align with the circular economy paradigm. Following this option, users bound by finite resource capacity utilize the energy from external to the crowd wireless or wired energy sources (such as shared chargers), and internal to the crowd energy sources (such as mobile devices, via wireless power transfer). If designed carefully, such utilization can boost the energy availability of users and provide energy ubiquitously to their devices for making them functional for longer. This article proposes the GreenCrowd framework, introducing a privacy-by-design in the digital domain crowd charging process, the architecture of which incorporates multiple crowd-* components, such as online social information exploitation, algorithmic battery aging mitigation, user reward mechanisms, and advanced decision making. The primary aim of article is to present the technological and applicative requirements and constraints of GreenCrowd, and provide practical evidence on its feasibility

A Joint Evaluation Methodology for Service Quality and User Privacy in Location Based Systems

Pervasive and ubiquitous applications provide novel and exciting services leveraging on a multitude of data obtained from people's devices, adapting the computation to the context in which the user currently is. This improves the service quality of these applications, which can provide a more tailored configuration of the application itself depending on the user context and needs. In these scenarios privacy is of paramount importance, since users must be also be protected against the misuse of their personal data. Analyzing ubiquitous systems in terms of service quality and privacy issues is however a challenging task, due to the heterogeneity of the possible attacks, which makes it difficult to compare two applications. In this paper we propose a novel methodology to jointly evaluate the service quality and the privacy issues in ubiquitous applications in an extensible and comparable way, building on the data available in each part of the system to be analyzed, and defining service qualities and privacy issues so that they can be easily re-used in other analyses. Our evaluation on a candidate application highlights the benefits of our proposal, showing the dependency between privacy levels and service quality, and paving the way for a novel methodology for the definition of these scenarios

Towards User Behavior Forecasting in Mobile Crowdsensing Applications

Mobile crowdsensing has rapidly become an interesting and useful methodology to collect data in modern smart cities, thanks to the pervasiveness of users mobile devices. Although there are many different proposals, opportunistic and participatory mobile crowdsensing are the most popular ones. They share a common goal, but require a different effort from the user, which often results in increased costs for the service provider. In this work we forecast user participation in mobile crowdsensing by leveraging a large dataset obtained from a real world application, which is key to understand whether there are areas in a city which need additional data obtained through raised incentives for participants or by other means. We then build a custom regressor trained on the dataset we have, which spans across several years in different cities in Italy, to predict the amount of reports in a given area at a given time. This allows service providers to preventively issue participatory tasks for workers in areas which do not meet a minimum number of measurements. Our results indicate that our model is able to predict the number of reports in an area with an average mean error depending on the precision needed, in the order of 10% for areas with a low number of reports

Paediatric non-alcoholic fatty liver disease: impact on patients and mothers' quality of life

Background: Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is one of the causes of fatty liver in adults and is currently the primary form of chronic liver disease in children and adolescents. However, the psychological outcome (i.e. the behavioural problems that can in turn be related to psychiatric conditions, like anxiety and mood disorders, or lower quality of life) in children and adolescents suffering of NAFLD has not been extensively explored in the literature. Objectives: The present study aims at evaluating the emotional and behavioural profile in children suffering from NAFLD and the quality of life in their mothers. Patients and Methods: A total of 57 children (18 females/39 males) with NAFLD were compared to 39 age-matched control children (25 females/14 males). All participants were submitted to the following psychological tools to assess behavior, mood, and anxiety: the Multidimensional Anxiety Scale for Children (MASC), the Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL), and the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI). Moreover, the mothers of 40 NAFLD and 39 control children completed the World Health Organization Quality of Life-BREF (WHOQOL-BREF) questionnaire. Results: NAFLD children scored significantly higher as compared to control children in MASC (P = 0.001) and CDI total (P < 0.001) scales. The CBCL also revealed significantly higher scores for NAFLD children in total problems (P = 0.046), internalizing symptoms (P = 0.000) and somatic complaints (P < 0.001). The WHOQOL-BREF revealed significantly lower scores for the mothers of NAFLD children in the overall perception of the quality of life (P < 0.001), and in the "relationships" domain (P = 0.023). Conclusions: Increased emotional and behavioural problems were detected in children with NAFLD as compared to healthy control children, together with an overall decrease in their mothers' quality of life. These results support the idea that these patients may benefit from a psychological intervention, ideally involving both children and parents, whose quality of life is likely negatively affected by this disease

Automotive Communications in LTE: A Simulation-Based Performance Study

2017 IEEE 86th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC-Fall)The integration of automotive communications in 5G systems must build on a clear understanding of the performance of services for connected vehicles in today's LTE deployments. In this paper, we carry out a simulation-based performance evaluation of automotive communications in LTE, with particular attention to realism: to that end, we investigate the impact of different road traffic models, employ a state-of-the-art commercial LTE tool, and study a practical service use case. Our results demonstrate that unrealistic road traffic datasets can bias network simulations in urban vehicular environments, and provide insights on the limitations of the current radio access architecture, when confronted to connected vehicles.This research has received funding from the People Pro-gramme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Unions Sev-enth Framework Programme (FP7/2007- 2013) under REA grant agreement n.630211, ReFleX. Also, this work has been performed in the framework of the H2020-ICT-2014-2 project 5G NORMA

Comparison of bioelectrical impedance analysis and dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry for the assessment of appendicular body composition in anorexic women

Objective: To establish the accuracy of bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) for the assessment of appendicular body composition in anorexic women. Design: Cross-sectional study. Setting: Outpatient University Clinic. Subjects: A total of 39 anorexic and 25 control women with a mean (s.d.) age of 21 (3) y. Methods: Total, arm and leg fat-free mass (FFM) were measured by dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry and predicted from total and segmental BIA at 50 kHz. The predictor variable was the resistance index (Rl), that is, the ratio of height 2 to body resistance for the whole body and the ratio of length2/limb resistance for the arm and leg. Results: Predictive equations developed on controls overestimated total, arm and leg FFM in anorexics (Po0.0001). Populationspecific equations gave a satisfactory estimate of total and appendicular FFM in anorexics (P\ubcNS) but had higher percent root mean square errors (RMSEs%) as compared to those developed on controls (8% vs 5% for whole body, 12% vs 10% for arm and 10% vs 8% for leg). The accuracy of the estimate of total and leg FFM in anorexics was improved by adding body weight (Wt) as a predictor with Rl (RMSE%\ubc5% vs 8% and 7% vs 10%, respectively). However, the same accuracy was obtained using Wt alone, suggesting that in anorexics, BIA at 50 kHz is not superior to Wt for assessing total and leg FFM. Conclusion: BIA shows some potential for the assessment of appendicular body composition in anorexic women. However, Wt is preferable to BIA at 50 kHz on practical grounds. Further studies should consider whether frequencies 450 kHz give better estimates of appendicular composition in anorexics as compared to Wt

Dynamic Adaptive Video Streaming on Heterogeneous TVWS and Wi-Fi Networks

Nowadays, people usually connect to the Internet through a multitude of different devices. Video streaming takes the lion's share of the bandwidth, and represents the real challenge for the service providers and for the research community. At the same time, most of the connections come from indoor, where Wi-Fi already experiences congestion and coverage holes, directly translating into a poor experience for the user. A possible relief comes from the TV white space (TVWS) networks, which can enhance the communication range thanks to sub-GHz frequencies and favorable propagation characteristics, but offer slower datarates compared with other 802.11 protocols. In this paper, we show the benefits that TVWS networks can bring to the end user, and we present CABA, a connection aware balancing algorithm able to exploit multiple radio connections in the favor of a better user experience. Our experimental results indicate that the TVWS network can effectively provide a wider communication range, but a load balancing middleware between the available connections on the device must be used to achieve better performance. We conclude this paper by presenting real data coming from field trials in which we streamed an MPEG dynamic adaptive streaming over HTTP video over TVWS and Wi-Fi. Practical quantitative results on the achievable quality of experience for the end user are then reported. Our results show that balancing the load between Wi-Fi and TVWS can provide a higher playback quality (up to 15% of average quality index) in scenarios in which the Wi-Fi is received at a low strength