Absence Of Internet Connectivity Research Articles

A Trust Establishment and Key Management Architecture for Hospital-at-Home

The landscape of healthcare is experiencing a digitalization shift, transferring many medical activities to the patients’ homes, a phenomenon commonly referred to as Hospital-at-Home. While Internet of Things (IoT) devices facilitate the building of such systems, there is a need for powerful middleware that encapsulates device-to-device communication, and enables the construction of user-friendly, secure, and robust Hospital-at-Home systems. A key challenge for such middleware is to build a trustworthy and lightweight key management system allowing different devices in the system to exchange messages securely. In this paper we present a simple, easily manageable and scalable such architecture which, in addition, supports long term data protection using post-quantum cryptographic primitives. Our proposed solution utilizes a Merkle tree to enable the IoT devices to establish trust between each other automatically, even in the absence of Internet connection. We have implemented the architecture and present performance figures as well as a security analysis of our approach.

Unlocking digital growth: overcoming barriers to digital transformation for Indian food SMEs

This paper aims to study how firms must be agile to overcome risks and manage cost repercussions. Specifically, it focuses on promoting digitalization in Indian food SMEs for greater competitiveness. The main purpose is to design a model for implementing robust interventions in a rational manner. To achieve this, a mixed approach, including a literature review and the Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) method, was chosen. This approach is recommended for addressing barriers to digital transformation in SMEs. The results suggest that the absence of internet connectivity and problems related to organization impede the efficiency of operations in small and medium-sized Indian food businesses. By overcoming these obstacles and allocating resources to enhance their digital capacities, stakeholders can effectively shape their future business operations. In addition, it is imperative for the stakeholders to actively adopt and utilize a range of digital tools such as blockchain, IoT, Big Data, and cloud computing. To implement and sustain digital transformation effectively, three foundational elements are crucial: internet availability, financial resources, and employee training. This research offers an innovative approach to the practiceners and mangers to adopt digital transformation of Indian food SMEs.

Air Quality Monitoring with Speech Announcements

Abstract: In this project, we design and develop an advanced weather station system using an ESP32 microcontroller, temperature sensor, humidity sensor, and air quality sensor. The primary objectives of this project are data collection, visualization, and auditory feedback. The ESP32 microcontroller acts as the central processing unit and connects to the internet via Wi-Fi to transmit real-time sensor data to an IoT platform. This platform stores and manages the data, making it accessible from anywhere with an internet connection. Users can monitor temperature, humidity, and air quality remotely through a userfriendly web interface Additionally, the project incorporates a display screen that provides local, real-time weather information for on-site users. This display enhances the accessibility of weather data, even in the absence of internet connectivity. To ensure inclusivity and accessibility, the system employs a speech-to-text algorithm implemented in Python. At predefined intervals, the system announces the sensor data via a speaker using text-to-speech (TTS) technology. This feature aids visually impaired individuals in accessing weather information in an auditory format. The combination of sensor integration, IoT connectivity, data visualization, and text-to-speech capabilities creates a comprehensive and user-friendly weather monitoring system suitable for both personal and public use. This project demonstrates the potential of IoT technologies to improve data accessibility and inclusivity in weather monitoring applications. IQ test continue to be one of most reliable tools to measure intelligence skills of the human. The Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests and the corresponding psychometric explanations dominate both the scientific and popular views about human intelligence. Though the IQ tests have been in currency for long, there exists a gap in what they are believed to measure and what they do. While the IQ tests index the quality of cognitive functioning in selected domains of mental repertoire, the applied settings often inflate their predictive value leading to an interpretive gap.

Preception of fourth year MBBS students regarding online learning during Covid-19 pandemic

Aim: To assess the perception of fourth year MBBS students regarding online learning during Covid 19 pandemic. Study Design: Cross sectional survey. Setting: Department of Community Medicine, Lahore Medical and Dental College, Lahore. Duration of study: Four months, from April to July, 2022. Study population: All students registered in fourth year MBBS. Methodology: A structured questionnaire was used to collect data from 154 study participants. It consisting of two sections. The first part consisted of background information of study participants. The second portion assessed the perception of students regarding online education during Covid 19.The data was recorded and analyzed using SPSS version 21. Data were described in the form of frequencies and percentages and presented as tables. Results: Study participants included 51% females, 57%-day scholars and 83% who had done FSc. Around 62% did not find online learning effective, 73% had communication difficulties, 75% liked self-directed approach of online learning but 74% thought that it was difficult to collaborate with each other, 71% found time management easy, though it was difficult to ask questions and receiving answers (59%). Around 78% of students perceived lack of satisfaction compared with class room learning, 66% preferred face to face learning and 73% found online education less comprehensible than class room activities. Among students, 53% recognised online learning as enjoyable and 34% wanted it to be done regularly, as 32%students never experienced any difficulty during online sessions. The main issues faced in online activities were absence of internet connection (85%), poor computer skills (73%), electricity breakdown (85%) and lack of concentration (80%). Practical implication: The present study highlighted that majority of fourth year MBBS students preferred classroom learning in comparison with online sessions. In light of pandemic, online education has proven valuable in managing sudden crisis, which is why it was important to understand the student perception regarding online education during covid-19 at Lahore Medical and Dental College, Lahore. Conclusion: Compared with males, higher number of females complained of lack of internet access and having poor computer skills. Seminars and regular training must be undertaken by medical colleges for their staff and students to inculcate interest and highlight the importance of online education as one of the tools for learning. Online education must be made more interactive and student cantered to create interest and improve student concentration. Keywords: Perceptions, online learning, MBBS students, Covid-19 pandemic, face to face education, communication barriers,

Exploring EFL Teachers’ First Experience with Online Assessment at Mohamed Lamine Debaghine Setif-2 University

The current study aims to explore teachers’ experience with online assessment. It seeks to investigate EFL teachers’ perceptions, practices and challenges of online assessment at Mohammed Lamine Debaghine University- Setif2. To achieve the purpose of this study, an exploratory design is followed. For data collection, a semi-structured adapted questionnaire is administered to 34 EFL teachers who are selected based on a convenience sampling technique. The data are analyzed quantitatively using SPSS.22 and qualitatively via thematic analysis. The results reveal that teachers have positive perceptions of using online assessment to evaluate students’ progress. However, the findings indicate that online assessment practices are not well implemented; and teachers tend to focus on-open ended practices with written assignments and research projects as the major strategy for their online assessment practice. Another finding reveals that teachers are facing a number of challenges when implementing online assessment among which are: the potential risk of students cheating, the poor or absence of internet connection, the difficulty of assessing students online in listening or speaking classes and teachers’ unfamiliarity with ICT’s. Accordingly, a number of pedagogical implications is offered.

Improved Model and Software of the Digital Information Service of the Municipal Health Care Institutions

Today, state and municipal services are being actively digitized in Ukraine. In particular, the Kropyvnytskyi city authorities initiated the creation of several information systems (IS) necessary for the development of various spheres of activity based on public needs for municipal services. Among these are IS of medical services provided by the city's health care institutions. Thus, the scientific and technical task of implementing the software for the municipal medical services information system in the city of Kropyvnytskyi is relevant. The work aims to implement access to information about medical services of health care institutions in the city of Kropyvnytskyi by creating municipal information systems with iOS-client. The scientific novelty of the obtained results is to improve the model of municipal information systems of medical services through the implementation of the offline mode of system operation, which in contrast to existing models of similar municipal systems provides access to IP data in the absence of Internet connection. The practical value of the results of scientific work is determined by the developed algorithms of the system, non-creation, work with the map and collection center of analytical, mobile iOS-application of the municipal medical services information system for the city of Kropyvnytskyi, published in the "App Store".

Emergency Distance Education in the Conditions of COVID-19 Pandemic: Experience of Ukrainian Universities

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought significant changes in education worldwide throughout 2020. In Ukraine, the preparedness for this process was different. There were various technical problems such as the absence of Internet connection, computers, or educational materials on the network, and most importantly, the unpreparedness of teachers to perform distance learning. From 28 April to 8 May 2020 at the Oles Honchar Dnipro National University (Dnipro, Ukraine), students were surveyed on the quality of distance learning organized during the quarantine period. A total of 1224 students from almost all faculties and centers took part in the survey and answered 19 questions in an online form developed in Office 365 (Microsoft Corporation, Redmond, WA, USA). The survey algorithm is based on the principle of cross-validation. According to the survey, the most important opportunities of distance (digital) learning are as follows: the opportunity to study in a convenient place, in a comfortable and familiar environment—28.57%; the opportunity to combine work with study—16.97%; the development of self-control skills and motivation to self-educate—16.43%; and the technical level of the learning process (use of information technologies)—13.83%. The aspects that negatively affect the organization of full-scale distance learning are as follows: the large volume of tasks—16.80%; the rapid fatigue due to prolonged work in front of a computer—16.35%; the absence of necessary equipment and/or constant (stable) access to the Internet—15.33%. In conclusion, ways to overcome the difficulties of distance learning, both by universities and by the government, are suggested.

Design and Implementation of Real Time Embedded Tele-Health Monitoring System

The technology is growing rapidly, developments are occurring in every areas including the health care industry. The number of health care centres and super speciality hospitals, etc.. are increasing. People are becoming more conscious about their health. The paper presents a health monitoring system for the acquisition of the physiological parameters such as temperature, ECG, Heart rate and pressure using the Atmega328p microcontroller. The values are displayed on the LCD 16x2 screen and as well as on the webpage created with the help of NodeMCU ESP8266 module. The data can be accessed from anywhere irrespective of the gadget used, only by knowing the IP address. We are using here a GSM module to send alert message to the doctor. The usage of GSM module in the system overcome the lack of obtaining the data in the webpage in the absence of internet connectivity in a particular area, by providing alert message about the present health condition.

The Covering-Assignment Problem for Swarm-Powered Ad Hoc Clouds: A Distributed 3-D Mapping Usecase

The popularity of drones is rapidly increasing across the different sectors of the economy. Aerial capabilities and relatively low costs make drones the perfect solution to improve the efficiency of those operations that are typically carried out by humans (e.g., building inspection, photo collection). The potential of drone applications can be pushed even further when they are operated in fleets and in a fully autonomous manner, acting de facto as a drone swarm. Besides automating field operations, a drone swarm can serve as an ad-hoc cloud infrastructure built on top of computing and storage resources available across the swarm members and other connected elements. Even in the absence of Internet connectivity, this cloud can serve the workloads generated by the swarm members themselves, as well as by the field agents operating within the area of interest. By considering the practical example of a swarm-powered 3D reconstruction application, we present a new optimization problem for the efficient generation and execution, on top of swarm-powered ad-hoc cloud infrastructure, of multi-node computing workloads subject to data geolocation and clustering constraints. The objective is the minimization of the overall computing times, including both networking delays caused by the inter-drone data transmission and computation delays. We prove that the problem is NP-hard and present two combinatorial formulations to model it. Computational results on the solution of the formulations show that one of them can be used to solve, within the configured time-limit, more than 50% of the considered real-world instances involving up to two hundred images and six drones.

Impact assessment of engineered nanotitanium dioxide seed priming on oxidoreductase enzyme activities in seedlings of Kidney bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.)

A web and hybrid application Decision Support System, namely Farm Machinery Decision Support System (FarMeD) for estimation of overall farm machinery costs was developed. The application can calculate the break-even units, custom hiring charges, net profit, and payback period in addition to the fixed and variable costs. The application is free with a user-friendly interface and can be accessed online from any computer or mobile phone with an internet connection. The application can also be deployed by using standalone packages for offline use on Windows-based PCs or as a standalone app on any Android device to work in the absence of internet connectivity. The user can make subsequent calculations by varying the various input parameters and compare the results to make decisions regarding whether to purchase a machine or to go for custom hiring and also to determine custom hiring rates in case he intends to offer his machine for custom hiring.

A peer-to-peer communication based content distribution protocol for incentive-aware delay tolerant networks

In the absence of Internet connectivity, a content-centric opportunistic network can be established by mobile human-held devices. However, to save battery, buffer, and bandwidth resources, device carriers may selfishly disable their delay-tolerant networking (DTN) application when communication is not desired. Consequently, the network performance will degrade as the majority of the data forwarding protocols for the DTNs are designed assuming cooperative relaying by nodes. To inculcate cooperation among the otherwise selfish communicating nodes, we propose an incentive-aware pricing game for interest-based social-aware forwarding in the DTNs. We formulate the pricing game between nodes as the Rubinstein Bargain model to enhance content distribution in DTNs. The communicating nodes decide the pricing and the cooperation level based on the following three parameters: (1) remaining battery level, (2) their social strength, and (3) message worth. Moreover, to enhance content distribution of large size messages in such networks, the proposed algorithm enables nodes to share information in a peer-to-peer fashion. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed algorithm effectively increases the distribution ratio of complete files, reduces their data delivery delays, and mitigates the selfish behavior of nodes.

Can You Engage in Political Activity Without Internet Access? The Social Effects of Internet Deprivation

To what extent can you engage in political activity in the modern age without Internet access? The growing dependence on Internet access to fulfill basic civil functions is threatened by increasing personal and societal cyber vulnerability. In this article, we explore the extent to which citizens are able, or unable, to engage in specific political activities in the absence of Internet connectivity. To concretize the subject, we test how Internet deprivation affects the ability to realize three basic elements of political participation: political expression, civic association, and access to information. To measure this, we develop a new experimental methodology that tests people’s ability to complete tasks related to each function under simulated treatments of Internet access or deprivation. This empirical methodology offers a new framework through which to quantify the realization of social tasks under experimental conditions. Early results suggest that the absence of Internet access significantly reduces task completion for activities related to political expression and political association and conditionally reduces task completion for practices associated with freedom of information. Having substantiated this empirical framework, we encourage its application to additional forms of political activity.

Cloud based sensor network for environmental monitoring

This paper describes a complete infrastructure for environmental monitoring, which is based on a cloud architecture. The proposed system employs small button-like battery-operated sensors, which connect through a wireless link to small receivers capable of routing data to the cloud system. Cloud data can be accessed in real time through smart-phones and downloaded for further analyses. Each button-like sensor is capable of measuring temperature and humidity for more than one year without attendance. All data are sent to the receiver and in addition stored inside the button memory so that the system can work also in the absence of power and Internet connection. The architecture takes advantage of the μPanel environment, which is conceived to work also with unreliable and slow Internet connections and permits to implement a cloud-based infrastructure with the capability to control the sensors locally and in absence of Internet connectivity. The proposed architecture is currently used in different museums to monitor the local environment inside the display rooms, but the system can be easily extended to open environments without additional costs.

A Practical Design and Implementation of a Low Cost Platform for Remote Monitoring of Lower Limb Health of Amputees in the Developing World

In many areas of the world accessing professional physicians “when needed/as needed” might not be always possible for a variety of reasons. Therefore, in such cases, a targeted e-Health solution to safeguard patient long-term health could be a meaningful approach. Today’s modern healthcare technologies, often built around electronic and computer-based equipment, require an access to a reliable electricity supply. Many healthcare technologies and products also presume access to the high speed internet is available, making them unsuitable for use in areas where there is no fixed-line internet connectivity, access is slow, unreliable, and expensive, yet where the most benefit to patients may be gained. In this paper, a full mobile sensor platform is presented, based around readily-purchased consumer components, to facilitate a low cost and efficient means of monitoring the health of patients with prosthetic lower limbs. This platform is designed such that it can also be operated in a standalone mode, i.e., in the absence of internet connectivity, thereby making it suitable to the developing world. Also, to counter the challenge of power supply issues in e-Health monitoring, a self-contained rechargeable solution to the platform is proposed and demonstrated. The platform works with an Android mobile device, in order to allow for the capture of data from a wireless sensor unit, and to give the clinician access to results from the sensors. The results from the analysis, carried out within the platform’s Raspberry Pi Zero, are demonstrated to be of use for remote monitoring. This is specifically targeted for monitoring the tissue health of lower limb amputees. The monitoring of residual limb temperature and gait can be a useful indicator of tissue viability in lower limb amputees especially those suffering from diabetes. We describe a route wherein non-invasive monitoring of tissue health is achievable using the Gaussian process technique. This knowledge will be useful in establishing biomarkers related to a possible deterioration in a patient’s health or for assessing the impact of clinical interventions.

Constraints to the use of government documents in Nigeria University Libraries: The experience from Nnamdi Azikiwe Library University of Nigeria

The aim of this study was to identify the types of collections in Nnamdi Azikiwe Library that are referred to as government documents; expose some of the major factors that impinge on users. access to government publications in the library, and make recommendations. The design of the study was survey. Questionnaires, interviews and observations were the instruments for data collection. The population of the study was 81 and comprised 11 staff in the Special Collections Division and 70 users of the documents section. Due to the size of the population, the author had to sample all the subjects, and the sample for the study was eighty-one. Ninety sets of 33-item questionnaire was designed and administered to all the subjects in the population and their responses was used for analysis and results. The study found that there were abundant volumes of none current government publications in analogue format in the library. The restraining factors for accessing these resources include absence of Internet connectivity due to the analogue nature of the materials; there was no online public access catalogue. There was inadequate ICT infrastructure and low human capital. Subject indexing, digitization of government publications, and periodic update of the finding aids, are some of the improvement strategies.