Review of sensors for remote patient monitoring

Remote patient monitoring (RPM) of physiological measurements can provide an efficient method and high quality care to patients. The physiological signals measurement is the initial and the most important factor in RPM. This paper discusses the characteristics of the most popular sensors, which are used to obtain vital clinical signals in prevalent RPM systems. The sensors discussed in this paper are used to measure ECG, heart sound, pulse rate, oxygen saturation, blood pressure and respiration rate, which are treated as the most important vital data in patient monitoring and medical examination

Coach Travel Safety Analysis Matrix (CTSAM): A tool for analysing safety of children travelling by coaches in the UK

Coach based school transportation is a less investigated area in the continent of United Kingdom. Though they are considered the safest mode of transport for children, coaches have a significantly high number of fatalities per accident. There are a limited number of studies which have implemented qualitative interviews to analyse the safety of children travelling in coaches but no standard methods were followed to prepare the questions for the interviews. There are no standard methods available to analyse the safety of children travelling in coaches in the UK. To rectify this issue, an interview guide called Coach Travel Safety Analysis Matrix is proposed in this paper. It is based on the Haddon Matrix which is used as a standard tool to analyze bus and coach accidents. The proposed matrix can be utilised to frame questions for the qualitative interviews to systematically analyse the safety of children travelling in the coaches in the UK. As this matrix is generic, it can also be used in continents other than the UK

Interactive Illustration of Collage for Children with Folktale E-book

It is always challenging to teach children foreign languages, due to the difficulty of learning and their short attention span. To address the challenge and take advantage of the popularity of touchable tablets and smartphones, we propose an educational folktale e-book (EFE-Book) application with an interactive illustratable tool. EFE-Book is developed to teach preschool children to learn foreign languages by telling folktales with illustrations. To encourage effective learning, EFE-Book provides an interactive collage tool that enables users to create collage-based illustrations by hand. We propose a Voronoi diagram based approach to model paper tiles for the development of EFE-Book. With EFE-Book, the user can create colored paper tiles and attach them to the predesigned sketch through touch interface, such as Apple iPad

A Decision Process Model to Support Migration to Cloud Computing

Migration to cloud computing is a strategic organisational decision that can affect performance, productivity, growth, as well as increase competitiveness. The decision to migrate is usually complicated and dynamic due to the immaturity and the still evolving nature of the cloud environment. Although there have been many proposed methods for supporting the migration, no systematic decision process exists that clearly identifies the main steps and explicitly describes the tasks to be performed within each step. In this paper, a decision-making process model, based on a two-stage survey, is proposed. The model guides decision makers through a step-by-step approach, aiding them with their decisions for cloud migration. It offers a preliminary structure for developing a cloud knowledge-based decision support system. The model was evaluated by a group of cloud practitioners. The analysis demonstrates a high level of acceptance with regard to the structure, tasks involved and issues addressed by it

Migration to Cloud Computing: A Decision Process Model

This paper proposes a model that provides a structure to aid the decision making process for the migration of organisations’ IT resources to cloud-based services. It includes consideration of business intelligence as well as design phases which have been neglected by existing decision support systems. Six main steps and the tasks within the model are identified, and their interaction with a proposed knowledge base is discussed. These provide a structure that systematically guides decision makers through the cloud migration process. Finally further research is discussed, including the development of a knowledge-based decision support system which will be undertaken by the authors

A Review of the Current Level of Support to Aid Decisions for Migrating to Cloud Computing

© 2016 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Cloud computing provides an innovative delivery model that enables enterprises to reduce operational costs and improve flexibility and scalability. Organisations wishing to migrate their legacy systems to the cloud often need to go through a difficult and complicated decision-making process. This can be due to multiple factors including restructuring IT resources, the still evolving nature of the cloud environment, and the continuous expansion of the services offered. These have increased the requirement for tools and techniques to help the decision-making process for migration. Although significant contributions have been made in this area, there are still many aspects which require further support. This paper evaluates the existing level of support to aid the decision-making process. It examines the complexity of decisions, evaluates the current state of Decision Support Systems in respect of migrating to the cloud, and analyses three models that proposed support for the migration processes. This paper identifies the need for a coherent approach for supporting the whole decision-making process. Further, it explores possible new approaches for addressing the complex issues involved in decision-making for migrating to the cloud

The Effect of Culture on User Interface Design of Social Media - A Case Study on Preferences of Saudi Arabians on the Arabic User Interface of Facebook.

Social media continues to grow, and user interfaces may become more appealing if cultural characteristics are incorporated into their design. Facebook was designed in the west, and the original language was English. Subsequently, the words in the user interface were translated to other languages, including Arabic. Arabic words are written from right to left, and English is written from left to right. The translated version may misrepresent the original design and users’ preferences may be influenced by their culture, which should be considered in the user interface design. Previous research indicates that users are more comfortable when interacting with a user interface, which relates to their own culture. Therefore, this paper, using a survey, investigates the preferences of Saudi Arabians on the Arabic version of the user interface of Facebook

Interoperability in the Heterogeneous Cloud Environment: A Survey of Recent User-centric Approaches

© 2016 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Cloud computing provides users the ability to access shared, online computing resources. However, providers often offer their own proprietary applications, interfaces, APIs and infrastructures, resulting in a heterogeneous cloud environment. This heterogeneous environment makes it difficult for users to change cloud service providers; exploring capabilities to support the automated migration from one provider to another is an active, open research area. Many standards bodies (IEEE, NIST, DMTF and SNIA), industry (middleware) and academia have been pursuing approaches to reduce the impact of vendor lock-in by investigating the cloud migration problem at the level of the VM. However, the migration downtime, decoupling VM from underlying systems and security of live channels remain open issues. This paper focuses on analysing recently proposed live, cloud migration approaches for VMs at the infrastructure level in the cloud architecture. The analysis reveals issues with flexibility, performance, and security of the approaches, including additional loads to the CPU and disk I/O drivers of the physical machine where the VM initially resides. The next steps of this research are to develop and evaluate a new approach LibZam (Libya Zamzem) that will work towards addressing the identified limitations

Implications of Integration and Interoperability for Enterprise Cloud-based Applications

Enterprise’s adoption of cloud-based solutions is often hindered by problems associated with the integration of the cloud environment with on-premise systems. Currently, each cloud provider creates its proprietary application programing interfaces (APIs), which will complicate integration efforts for companies as they struggle to understand and manage these unique application interfaces in an interoperable way. This paper aims to address this challenge by providing recommendations to enterprises. The presented work is based on a quantitative study of 114 companies, which discuss current issues and future trends of integration and interoperability requirements for enterprise cloud application adoption and migration. The outcome of the discussion provides a guideline applicable to support decision makers, software architects and developers when considering to design and develop interoperable applications in order to avoid lock-in and integrate seamlessly into other cloud and on-premise systems

An Intelligent Recommendation Model for Coach Operators

In recent years, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have grown rapidly by solving problems in the transport industry through state of the art solutions. Coach Operators’ non-compliance is an issue in the UK, which require attention. Last year alone, 137 coach operator licenses have been revoked without public enquiry, equating to invalidating 11 licenses on average every week. The main reasons for this problem is the coach operators’ negligence and failing to respond to safety issues associated with their fleet. An Intelligent Recommendation Model for Coach Operators is proposed. The model by analysing the track record of Operator’s Compliance Risk Score (OCRS), provides recommendations to improve safety. An initial evaluation shows that the model has achieved its intended purpose and provided accurate and suitable recommendations to the two operators to improve safety of their fleets