The influence of age and gender in the interaction with touch screens

Touch screens are nowadays one of the major interfaces in the interaction between humans and technology, mostly due to the significant growth in the use of smartphones and tablets in the last years. This broad use, that reaches people from all strata of society, makes touch screens a relevant tool to study the mechanisms that influence the way we interact with electronic devices. In this paper we collect data regarding the interaction patterns of different users with mobile devices. We present a way to formalize these interaction patterns and analyze how aspects such as age and gender influence them. The results of this research may be relevant for developing mobile applications that identify and adapt to the users or their characteristics, including impairments in fine motor skills or in cognitive function.Fundos Europeus Estruturais e de Investimento (FEEI) through Programa Operacional Regional Norte, in the scope of project NORTE01-0145-FEDER-02357

An empirical investigation of performance overhead in cross-platform mobile development frameworks

The heterogeneity of the leading mobile platforms in terms of user interfaces, user experience, programming language, and ecosystem have made cross-platform development frameworks popular. These aid the creation of mobile applications – apps – that can be executed across the target platforms (typically Android and iOS) with minimal to no platform-specific code. Due to the cost- and time-saving possibilities introduced through adopting such a framework, researchers and practitioners alike have taken an interest in the underlying technologies. Examining the body of knowledge, we, nonetheless, frequently encounter discussions on the drawbacks of these frameworks, especially with regard to the performance of the apps they generate. Motivated by the ongoing discourse and a lack of empirical evidence, we scrutinised the essential piece of the cross-platform frameworks: the bridge enabling cross-platform code to communicate with the underlying operating system and device hardware APIs. The study we present in the article benchmarks and measures the performance of this bridge to reveal its associated overhead in Android apps. The development of the artifacts for this experiment was conducted using five cross-platform development frameworks to generate Android apps, in addition to a baseline native Android app implementation. Our results indicate that – for Android apps – the use of cross-platform frameworks for the development of mobile apps may lead to decreased performance compared to the native development approach. Nevertheless, certain cross-platform frameworks can perform equally well or even better than native on certain metrics which highlights the importance of well-defined technical requirements and specifications for deliberate selection of a cross-platform framework or overall development approach

A multivariant secure framework for smart mobile health application

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Wiley in Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies, available online: https://doi.org/10.1002/ett.3684 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.Wireless sensor network enables remote connectivity of technological devices such as smart mobile with the internet. Due to its low cost as well as easy availability of data sharing and accessing devices, the Internet of Things (IoT) has grown exponentially during the past few years. The availability of these devices plays a remarkable role in the new era of mHealth. In mHealth, the sensors generate enormous amounts of data and the context-aware computing has proven to collect and manage the data. The context aware computing is a new domain to be aware of context of involved devices. The context-aware computing is playing a very significant part in the development of smart mobile health applications to monitor the health of patients more efficiently. Security is one of the key challenges in IoT-based mHealth application development. The wireless nature of IoT devices motivates attackers to attack on application; these vulnerable attacks can be denial of service attack, sinkhole attack, and select forwarding attack. These attacks lead intruders to disrupt the application's functionality, data packet drops to malicious end and changes the route of data and forwards the data packet to other location. There is a need to timely detect and prevent these threats in mobile health applications. Existing work includes many security frameworks to secure the mobile health applications but all have some drawbacks. This paper presents existing frameworks, the impact of threats on applications, on information, and different security levels. From this line of research, we propose a security framework with two algorithms, ie, (i) patient priority autonomous call and (ii) location distance based switch, for mobile health applications and make a comparative analysis of the proposed framework with the existing ones.Published onlin

ClimbTheWorld: Real-time stairstep counting to increase physical activity

The increasing number of people that are overweight due to a sedentary life requires persuasive strategies to convince people to change their behaviors. In this paper, we present a machine learning based technique to recognize and count stairsteps when a person climbs or descends stairs. This technique has been used as part of ClimbTheWorld, a realtime smartphone application that aims at persuading people to use stairs instead of elevators or escalators, since an engaging activity has more chance to change people's life habits. We perform a fine-grained analysis by exploiting smartphone sensors to recognize single stairsteps. Datadependent sliding windows are used facilitating the learning process and reducing the computational cost. Finally, energy consumption is widely investigated to optimize the trade-off between classification precision and battery usage, to avoid exhausting smartphone battery

StepByWatch: A smartwatch-based enhanced navigation system for visually impaired users

The worldwide diffusion of mobile technology has opened the door to a new era of distributed sensing. Indeed, mobile sensing and wireless technology can be exploited to create new information and services that have the potential to improve our lives in many ways. This becomes even more interesting if the benefits could reach the whole community, even people with disadvantages that are often left out by the digital divide. To this aim, we have developed a system able to offer an enhanced route navigation system, while at the same time gathering quality data through smartwatches. Even more interesting, we have endowed our system with an interaction paradigm based on vibration patterns so as to guide the user without the need for looking at the device. Our proposal avoids user distraction and field trials demonstrate its effectiveness when employed by visually impaired people

Using gamification to discover cultural heritage locations from geo-tagged photos

Many enchanting cultural heritage locations are hidden from tourists, especially when considering countries full of historic attractions. Tourists tend to consider only mainstream monuments and towns, neglecting wonderful little jewels along their travel itinerary. However, this is generally not their fault, as travelers cannot be aware of all the surrounding beauties when visiting a new region. To this aim, we discuss and analyze here PhotoTrip, an interactive tool able to autonomously recommend charming, even if not mainstream, cultural heritage locations along travel itineraries. PhotoTrip is able to identify these points of interest by gathering pictures and related information from Flickr and Wikipedia and then provide the user with suggestions and recommendations. An important technical challenge for this kind of services is the ability to provide only the most relevant pictures among the many available for any considered itinerary. To this aim, we have exploited social networks, crowdsourcing and gamification to involve users in the process of improving the response quality of our system

Membrane contactor process to reduce ethanol in wine. Volatile compounds and stable isotope ratios changes

The reduction of ethanol level in wine is nowadays a notable topic in wine production. There are many different reasons: climate change, health and social matters, wine quality. Many different techniques are available in wine industry to reduce high ethanol content in wine. Among theme contactor membranes, are certainly more efficient and common. We have studied the effect of this practice on the wine quality, aromas compounds and stable isotopes composition. A pilot and industrial plant equipped with the membrane contactor system were used in the study of several white and red wines dealcoholisation. In both scale experiments we have observed changes for several classes of aroma compounds, even if these changes are not in perfect correlation with sensorial evaluation carried out. In addition is observed a variability in aromas variations for each aroma compound and wine variety. We have in particularly studied the modifications on isotopes ratios. We have tested the process using waters with different !18O ratios, or wines, in different osmotic conditions for both compartments. Modifications of up to 1\u2030 for 2 %v/v and of up to 4\u2030 for 8 %v/v ethanol removal were encountered. It is very important to note that the !18O ratio changes are not only due by a water osmotic transfer through the membrane. The !18O decrease, is even depending by the !18O value of the extracting water solution. These variations must be taken into account when these parameters are evaluated to considered dealcoholised wine traceability