Security in Pervasive Computing: Current Status and Open Issues

Million of wireless device users are ever on the move, becoming more dependent on their PDAs, smart phones, and other handheld devices. With the advancement of pervasive computing, new and unique capabilities are available to aid mobile societies. The wireless nature of these devices has fostered a new era of mobility. Thousands of pervasive devices are able to arbitrarily join and leave a network, creating a nomadic environment known as a pervasive ad hoc network. However, mobile devices have vulnerabilities, and some are proving to be challenging. Security in pervasive computing is the most critical challenge. Security is needed to ensure exact and accurate confidentiality, integrity, authentication, and access control, to name a few. Security for mobile devices, though still in its infancy, has drawn the attention of various researchers. As pervasive devices become incorporated in our day-to-day lives, security will increasingly becoming a common concern for all users - - though for most it will be an afterthought, like many other computing functions. The usability and expansion of pervasive computing applications depends greatly on the security and reliability provided by the applications. At this critical juncture, security research is growing. This paper examines the recent trends and forward thinking investigation in several fields of security, along with a brief history of previous accomplishments in the corresponding areas. Some open issues have been discussed for further investigation

MOBILE BASED SYMPTOM MANAGEMENT FOR PALLIATIVE CARE

The goal of palliative care is to improve the quality of life of terminally ill patients through the management of pain and other symptoms. Though the term `palliative care\u27 is well known in the developed world, it is relatively a new term in the developing world. According to WHO, each year 4.8 million people suffering from severe pain caused by cancer, fail to receive treatment due to lack of resources and other barriers. In this thesis we have elaborated on the challenges faced by the rural breast cancer (BC) patients of Bangladesh and a solution for their palliative care treatment. Although breast cancer is commonly thought of as a disease of the developed world, the WHO statistics show that 69% of all BC deaths occur in developing countries. Unlike western countries where 89% of the women have a survival rate of more than 5 years, most BC patients in Bangladesh die because the majority of cases are diagnosed in late stages. These patients need palliative care which is almost absent in rural Bangladesh. These issues show the desperate need of a low cost palliative care system solution for the terminally ill patients of the developing world. Based on detailed field studies, we have developed and deployed a mobile based remote symptom monitoring and management system named e-ESAS. Design of e-ESAS has evolved through continuous feedback from both the patients and doctors. e-ESAS is being used by 10 breast cancer patients to submit symptom values from their home for the last 10 months (Nov\u2711- Sep \u2712). Our results show how e-ESAS with motivational videos not only helped the patients to have a `dignified\u27 life but also helped the doctors to achieve the goals of palliative care. Also the analyzed results are shown in 4 categories to appropriately measure the contribution of e-ESAS in improving the QoL. This thesis also focuses on developing a mobile based pain intensity detection tool which is a first step in replacing the manual paper based scale for measuring pain. The tool also might play a big role in assessing the pain level of verbally impaired patients

An Impregnable Lightweight Device Discovery (ILDD) Model for the Pervasive Computing Environment of Enterprise Applications

The worldwide use of handheld devices (personal digital assistants, cell phones, etc.) with wireless connectivity will reach 2.6 billion units this year and 4 billion by 2010. More specifically, these handheld devices have become an integral part of industrial applications. These devices form pervasive ad hoc wireless networks that aide in industry applications. However, pervasive computing is susceptible and vulnerable to malicious active and passive snoopers. This is due to the unavoidable interdevice dependency, as well as a common shared medium, very transitory connectivity, and the absence of a fixed trust infrastructure. In order to ensure security and privacy in the pervasive environment, we need a mechanism to maintain a list of valid devices that will help to prevent malicious devices from participating in any task. In this paper, we will show the feasibility of using a modified human- computer authentication protocol in order to prevent the malicious attacks of ad hoc networks in industrial applications. We will also present two separate models for both large and small networks, as well as several possible attack scenarios for each network

Evaluation of Multiple-Valued Packet Multiplexing Scheme for Network-on-Chip Architecture

科研費報告書収録論文(課題番号:17300009/研究代表者:亀山充隆/システムインテグレーション理論に基づく高安全知能自動車用VLSIの最適設計

Applying Machine Learning Techniques for Type2 Diabetes Readmission Prediction Based on Retrospective Data

Roughly 9.3% of US population suffer from diabetes and the 30 day readmission rate for diabetes patients range between 14.4 to 22.7%. Hence identifying the risk of readmission is a crucial information for the service providers to not only reduce the healthcare cost but also improve the quality of patient care. This paper models machine learning algorithms to compute probability of 30-day hospital readmission for type2 diabetes patients. Along with novel pre-processing techniques to identify the challenges of noisy and non-homogenized medical data, we used methods to downsize the feature vector size without sacrificing prediction accuracy. Our method has been implemented on a publicly available dataset from University of California Irvine at https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/diabetes+130-us+hospitals+for+years+1999-2008 which summarizes data from 130 US hospitals within span of 10 years with roughly 100,000 patients

SmartHeLP: Smartphone-based Hemoglobin Level Prediction Using an Artificial Neural Network

Blood hemoglobin level (Hgb) measurement has a vital role in the diagnosis, evaluation, and management of numerous diseases. We describe the use of smartphone video imaging and an artificial neural network (ANN) system to estimate Hgb levels non-invasively. We recorded 10 second-300 frame fingertip videos using a smartphone in 75 adults. Red, green, and blue pixel intensities were estimated for each of 100 area blocks in each frame and the patterns across the 300 frames were described. ANN was then used to develop a model using the extracted video features to predict hemoglobin levels. In our study sample, with patients 20-56 years of age, and gold standard hemoglobin levels of 7.6 to 13.5 g/dL., we observed a 0.93 rank order of correlation between model and gold standard hemoglobin levels. Moreover, we identified specific regions of interest in the video images which reduced the required feature space

e-ESAS: Evolution of a Participatory Design-based Solution for Breast Cancer (BC) Patients in Rural Bangladesh

Healthcare facility is scarce for rural women in the developing world. The situation is worse for patients who are suffering from diseases that require long-term feedback-oriented monitoring such as breast cancer. Lack of motivation to go to the health centers on patients’ side due to sociocultural barriers, financial restrictions and transportation hazards results in inadequate data for proper assessment. Fortunately, mobile phones have penetrated the masses even in rural communities of the developing countries. In this scenario, a mobile phone-based remote symptom monitoring system (RSMS) with inspirational videos can serve the purpose of both patients and doctors. Here, we present the findings of our field study conducted on 39 breast cancer patients in rural Bangladesh. Based on the results of extensive field studies, we have categorized the challenges faced by patients in different phases of the treatment process. As a solution, we have designed, developed and deployed e-ESAS—the first mobile-based RSMS in rural context. Along with the detail need assessment of such a system, we describe the evolution of e-ESAS and the deployment results. We have included the unique and useful design lessons that we learned as e-ESAS evolved through participatory design process. The findings show how e-ESAS addresses several challenges faced by patients and doctors and positively impact their lives

Mother’s dietary diversity and association with stunting among children <2 years old in a low socio‐economic environment: A case–control study in an urban care setting in Dhaka, Bangladesh

Mothers are often responsible for preparing nutritious foods in their households. However, the quality of mother’s diets is often neglected, which may affect both mother’s and child’s nutrition. Because no single food contains all necessary nutrients, diversity in dietary sources is needed to ensure a quality diet. We aimed to study the association between mother’s dietary diversity and stunting in children <2 years attending Dhaka Hospital of icddr,b, a diarrhoeal disease hospital in Dhaka, Bangladesh. A case–control study (n = 296) was conducted from November 2016 to February 2017. Data were collected from mothers of stunted children <2 years (length‐for‐age z score [LAZ] < −2) as “cases” and nonstunted (LAZ ≥ −1) children <2 years as “controls.” Mothers were asked to recall consumption of 10 defined food groups 24 hr prior to the interview as per Guidelines for Minimum Dietary Diversity for Women. Among the mothers of cases, 58% consumed <5 food groups during the last 24 hr, compared with 45% in control mothers (P = 0.03). Children whose mothers consumed <5 food groups were 1.7 times more likely to be stunted than children whose mothers consumed ≥5 food groups (P = 0.04). Intake of food groups such as pulses, dairy, eggs, and vitamin A rich fruit was higher in control mothers. Proportion of mother’s illiteracy, short stature, monthly family income <BDT 11,480, absence of bank account, and poor sanitation was also found to be higher in stunted group. Further study particularly intervention or longitudinal study to see the causality of mother’s dietary diversity with child stunting is recommended.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148421/1/mcn12665.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/148421/2/mcn12665_am.pd

Self-healing for Autonomic Pervasive Computing

ABSTRACT Self-healing is one of the main challenges to growing autonomic pervasive computing. Fault detection and recovery are the main steps of self-healing. Due to the characteristics of pervasive computing the self-healing becomes difficult. In this paper, the challenges of self-healing have been addressed and an approach to develop a self-healing service for autonomic pervasive computing is presented. The self-healing service has been developed and integrated into the middleware named MARKS+ (Middleware Adaptability for Resource discovery, Knowledge usability, and Self-healing). The self-healing approach is being evaluated on a test bed of PDAs. An application is being developed by using the proposed service

16S rRNA Gene-targeted TTGE in Determining Diversity of Gut Microbiota during Acute Diarrhoea and Convalescence

The human gut microbiota play a vital role in health and nutrition but are greatly modified during severe diarrhoea due to purging and pathogenic colonization. To understand the extent of loss during and after diarrhoea, faecal samples collected from children (n=21) suffering from acute diarrhoea and from their healthy siblings (n=9) were analyzed by 16S rRNA gene-targeted universal primer polymerase chain reaction (PCR), followed by temporal temperature gradient gel electrophoresis (TTGE). The gut microbiota decreased significantly as indicated by the number of TTGE bands at day 0 of acute diarrhoea [patients vs healthy siblings: 11\ub10.9 vs 21.8\ub11.1 (mean\ub1standard error), p&lt;0.01]. The number of bands showed a steady increase from day 1 to day 7; however, it remained significantly less than that in healthy siblings (15\ub10.9, p&lt;0.01). These results suggest that appropriate therapeutic and post-diarrhoeal nutritional intervention might be beneficial for the early microbial restoration and recovery