Android Mobile App Research Articles

One Drop | Mobile: An Evaluation of Hemoglobin A1c Improvement Linked to App Engagement.

BackgroundThree recent reviews evaluated 19 studies testing the hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) benefit of 16 diabetes apps, including 5 publicly available apps. Most studies relied on small samples and did not link app engagement with outcomes.ObjectiveThis study assessed both HbA1c change in a large sample of people using the One Drop | Mobile app and associations between app engagement and changes in HbA1c.MethodsThe One Drop | Mobile app for iOS and Android is designed to manually and passively (via Apple HealthKit, Google Fit, and the One Drop | Chrome blood glucose meter) store, track, and share data. Users can schedule medication reminders, view statistics, set goals, track health outcomes, and get data-driven insights. In June 2017, we queried data on people with diabetes using the app who had entered at least 2 HbA1c values in the app >60 and ≤365 days apart. Multiple imputation corrected for missing data. Unadjusted and adjusted mixed effects repeated measures models tested mean HbA1c change by time, diabetes type, and their interaction. Multiple regression models assessed relationships between using the app to track food, activity, blood glucose, and medications and HbA1c change.ResultsThe sample (N=1288) included people with type 1 diabetes (T1D) (n=367) or type 2 diabetes (T2D) (n=921) who were 35% female, diagnosed with diabetes for a mean 9.4 (SD 9.9) years, and tracked an average 1646.1 (SD 3621.9) self-care activities in One Drop | Mobile between their first (mean 8.14% [SD 2.06%]) and second HbA1c entry (mean 6.98% [SD 1.1%]). HbA1c values were significantly associated with user-entered average blood glucose 90 days before the second HbA1c entry (rho=.73 to .75, P<.001). HbA1c decreased by an absolute 1.07% (unadjusted and adjusted F=292.03, P<.001) from first to second HbA1c entry. There was a significant interaction between diabetes type and HbA1c. Both groups significantly improved, but users with T2D had a greater HbA1c decrease over time than users with T1D (F=10.54, P<.001). For users with T2D (n=921), HbA1c decreased by an absolute 1.27% (F=364.50, P<.001) from first to second HbA1c entry. Finally, using One Drop | Mobile to record food was associated with greater HbA1c reductions even after adjusting for covariates and after also adjusting for insulin use for users with T2D (all P<.05).ConclusionsPeople with T1D and T2D reported a 1.07% to 1.27% absolute reduction in HbA1c during a median 4 months of using the One Drop | Mobile app. Using the app to track self-care was associated with improved HbA1c. More research is needed on the health benefits of publicly available diabetes apps, particularly studies associating app engagement with short- and long-term effects.

Interactive educational game, an android mobile app for children learning alphabets

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to develop and evaluate a mobile educational application that supports fun learning for children. This paper describes an educational game application “Laut ABC”, which is an Android-based app that aims to be a learning tool with an attractive design that would help children learn alphabets. The results show that educational game app “Laut ABC” is a effective learning tool and can be used as an alternative for learning alphabets using an interesting and fun-learning concept.Design/methodology/approachResearch methods include methods of data collection, design and implementation. Data collection was done through research literature, interviews and questionnaires and analyzing some similar applications. Designing game application using storyboard and implementation was the done using the waterfall model for the software development life cycle.FindingsMost respondents stated that the introduction of alphabets is important for young children. They chose uppercase or capital letters to be used in the game. A majority of the respondents answered that the order of writing alphabets is important. These respondents agreed that educational games are a means for children to learn alphabets, as well as learn to write and pronounce alphabets. The application can also provide writing exercises to train childrens’ memory. The usual difficulties parents’ stated were that the children feel tired and are not in the mood to learn, have poor concentration, have difficulty in responding and seem to be disinclined to learn. Most of the parents mentioned that the critical points in children’s applications were the design of the educational application and completeness as a whole.Originality/valueThe paper reports the development of game’s design —- display, navigation, instruction and feedback. It can be said that the users had no difficulty in playing the game.

A general framework for comparing automatic testing techniques of Android mobile apps

Abstract As an increasing number of new techniques are developed for quality assurance of Android applications (apps), there is a need to evaluate and empirically compare them. Researchers as well as practitioners will be able to use the results of such comparative studies to answer questions such as, “What technique should I use to test my app?” Unfortunately, there is a severe lack of rigorous empirical studies on this subject. In this paper, for the first time, we present an empirical study comparing all existing fully automatic “online” testing techniques developed for the Android platform. We do so by first reformulating each technique within the context of a general framework. We recognize the commonalities between the techniques to develop the framework. We then use the salient features of each technique to develop parameters of the framework. The result is a general recasting of all existing approaches in a plug-in based formulation, allowing us to vary the parameters to create instances of each technique, and empirically evaluate them on a common set of subjects. Our results show that (1) the proposed general framework abstracts all the common characteristics of online testing techniques proposed in the literature, (2) it can be exploited to design experiments aimed at performing objective comparisons among different online testing approaches and (3) some parameters that we have identified influence the performance of the testing techniques.

MOBILE LEARNING: A CASE STUDY IN PHYSICAL CHEMISTRY LABORATORY

The use of mobile devices is increasing every day and they are quickly becoming an indispensable tool for everyone. In today's environment, mobile devices have the potential to give valuable contribution in different areas, and one of them is learning and teaching. The purpose of this article is to study the support that mobile devices can give especially during laboratory works. In order to study and prove the usefulness of these devices in such environment, we have implemented an application that integrates a mobile android app and a web application, to support students and also teachers during and after the experiments. We tested the application during a Physical Chemistry laboratory work and asked students and teachers through a questionnaire about their opinion in regard of the usefulness of the tested application and the potential to use it with all laboratory works and even in other learning and teaching fields. At the end, we present and study the results of this questionnaire. Article visualizations:

Формування інноваційного UX концепту мобільного додатку для Android OS

You can read our UX ideas for a music player app. This mobile concept provides new solutions and strategies for the Android mobile app development. The concept should make your life a little bit easier. It has an innovative interaction logic.We describe some wireframing rapid prototyping, documentation and specification software tools aimed at mobile applications. We select a several powerful and popular tools: UXPin, Axure, Balsamiq. UXPin is used by the best designers on the planet and it has the main focus attention. Also, you can check our Android app UX flow map.We provide some basic information and recommendations about Google Play. Google Play a digital distribution platform operated by Google. It serves as the official app store for the Android operating system, allowing users to browse and download applications developed with the Android SDK and published through Google.

GESMO- MOtion GESture based Mobile Application

has been number of android mobile apps available for clients to solve their daily problems. This paper presents a Motion Gesture based mobile (GESMO) app in Android which allows user to draw gestures in the air resulting opening of a desired app assigned to corresponding gesture. This gesture may be the first letter of an app name which is to be launched. In order to start the motion, user must press and hold any point on the screen until the motion is completed. Once motion completes, it is released. For sensing the motion, we used two built-in sensors from mobile devices: accelerometer and gyroscope. The paper proposes a two-stage approach for spotting and recognition of generated stroke gesture. The spotting stage uses a Support Vector Machine (SVM) to identify data fragments containing one stroke gesture. The recognition stage uses Hidden Markov Models (HMM) to generate the text representation from the motion sensor data. With this technique, you can successfully receive 70-80% accuracy in detecting an air gesture for mobile devices.

Android mobile VoIP apps: a survey and examination of their security and privacy

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) has become increasingly popular among individuals and business organisations, with millions of users communicating using VoIP applications (apps) on their smart mobile devices. Since Android is one of the most popular mobile platforms, this research focuses on Android devices. In this paper we survey the research that examines the security and privacy of mVoIP published in English from January 2009 to January 2014. We also examine the ten most popular free mVoIP apps for Android devices, and analyse the communications to determine whether the voice and text communications using these mVoIP apps are encrypted. The results indicate that most of the apps encrypt text communications, but voice communications may not have been encrypted in Fring, ICQ, Tango, Viber, Vonage, WeChat and Yahoo. The findings described in this paper contribute to an in-depth understanding of the potential privacy risks inherent in the communications using these apps, a previously understudied app category. Six potential research topics are also outlined.

A Mobile Health Application to Predict Postpartum Depression Based on Machine Learning.

Postpartum depression (PPD) is a disorder that often goes undiagnosed. The development of a screening program requires considerable and careful effort, where evidence-based decisions have to be taken in order to obtain an effective test with a high level of sensitivity and an acceptable specificity that is quick to perform, easy to interpret, culturally sensitive, and cost-effective. The purpose of this article is twofold: first, to develop classification models for detecting the risk of PPD during the first week after childbirth, thus enabling early intervention; and second, to develop a mobile health (m-health) application (app) for the Android(®) (Google, Mountain View, CA) platform based on the model with best performance for both mothers who have just given birth and clinicians who want to monitor their patient's test. A set of predictive models for estimating the risk of PPD was trained using machine learning techniques and data about postpartum women collected from seven Spanish hospitals. An internal evaluation was carried out using a hold-out strategy. An easy flowchart and architecture for designing the graphical user interface of the m-health app was followed. Naive Bayes showed the best balance between sensitivity and specificity as a predictive model for PPD during the first week after delivery. It was integrated into the clinical decision support system for Android mobile apps. This approach can enable the early prediction and detection of PPD because it fulfills the conditions of an effective screening test with a high level of sensitivity and specificity that is quick to perform, easy to interpret, culturally sensitive, and cost-effective.

Design of a smart-device and FPGA based wireless capsule endoscopic system

The paper presents a modular and programmable design of a next generation wireless capsule endoscopic system (WCES). The system is developed on a single, low-power, 65-nm field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) chip that interfaces directly with Android based smart-devices (smartphone or tablet) and consumes 12.42mW of power. As a result, image data from an endoscopic capsule can be saved (or viewed) directly on smart-device, tablet, laptop, workstation or secured server connected to a hospital's or residential Wi-Fi network. This eliminates the need to carry a bulky data logger and enables medical doctors to analyze data and perform diagnosis in real time from a remote place. The system supports full-duplex data communication between the endoscopic capsule and smart-device which further allows doctors to control many features of the capsule in real-time. Due to the flexible and reprogrammable nature of the system, various image processing and compression algorithms can be employed without any change in hardware. The system supports multi-spectral imaging including white light imaging (WLI) and narrow band imaging (NBI). A variable-length, low-complexity image compression algorithm is used that is based on a novel color-space followed by an optimized Golomb-rice coding. The entire system is prototyped using circular PCBs with a size of 16mm×36mm. An Android mobile app is designed with many features to control the operation of the capsule as well as display the captured images. Both in vivo and ex vivo trials using live pig have been conducted to validate the advantage of the proposed system.

Impact of Ad Libraries on Ratings of Android Mobile Apps

One of the most popular ways to monetize a free app is by including advertisements in the app. Several advertising (ad) companies provide these ads to app developers through ad libraries that need to be integrated in the app. However, the demand for ads far exceeds the supply. This obstacle may lead app developers to integrate several ad libraries from different ad companies in their app to ensure they receive an ad with each request. However, no study has explored how many ad libraries are commonly integrated into apps. Additionally, no research to date has examined whether integrating many different ad libraries impacts an app's ratings. This article examines these two issues by empirically examining thousands of Android apps. The authors find that there are apps with as many as 28 ad libraries, but they find no evidence that the number of ad libraries in an app is related to its possible rating in the app store. However, integrating certain ad libraries can negatively impact an app's rating.

Do Free Mobile Apps Harm Consumers?

Google distributes proprietary applications for its open-source Android mobile operating system (OS) free of charge. Some of those applications (apps) are offered together as a suite of apps known as Google Mobile Services (GMS). Manufacturers of mobile devices can agree, pursuant to Google’s Mobile Application Distribution Agreement (MADA), to install the suite of apps on their devices at a price of zero. Some theorize that Google’s policy of offering some applications together as a suite of apps harms competitors or menaces consumer welfare. In April 2015, the European Commission expressed such concerns when it initiated a formal antitrust investigation that will scrutinize Google’s licensing practice with respect to Android, mobile apps, and mobile services. In April 2014, an antitrust class-action complaint filed against Google by individual mobile device owners in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California presented similar allegations. However, the theory that the MADA’s requirements have anticompetitive effects is wrong. As a matter of economics, Google’s practice of distributing free mobile apps in the GMS suite benefits consumers (as well as manufacturers, mobile carriers, app developers, and advertisers) by stimulating demand, by reducing the risk of fragmentation of the Android OS, and by preventing Google’s competitors from free riding on its investment to make the Android OS and mobile apps a viable open-source competitor to closed and proprietary — “walled garden” — platforms for mobile devices. As a matter of antitrust law, Google’s distribution of apps as part of a larger whole — GMS — is lawful under the Supreme Court’s four-part test for such arrangements. Google does not force consumers to pay for apps they do not want, and the MADA’s requirements enhance competition overall. The same conclusion holds with even greater certainty under the rule-of-reason analysis for software integration that the D.C. Circuit adopted in its historic Microsoft decision. Although European competition law differs in some respects from American antitrust law, the pertinent economic analysis does not vary by jurisdiction. Google’s licensing practice has invigorated competition among mobile platforms and mobile devices. Google’s distribution of free mobile apps in GMS has produced a market success, not a market failure, and should not be considered anticompetitive.

RCSB PDB Mobile: iOS and Android mobile apps to provide data access and visualization to the RCSB Protein Data Bank.

Summary: The Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics Protein Data Bank (RCSB PDB) resource provides tools for query, analysis and visualization of the 3D structures in the PDB archive. As the mobile Web is starting to surpass desktop and laptop usage, scientists and educators are beginning to integrate mobile devices into their research and teaching. In response, we have developed the RCSB PDB Mobile app for the iOS and Android mobile platforms to enable fast and convenient access to RCSB PDB data and services. Using the app, users from the general public to expert researchers can quickly search and visualize biomolecules, and add personal annotations via the RCSB PDB’s integrated MyPDB service.Availability and implementation: RCSB PDB Mobile is freely available from the Apple App Store and Google Play (http://www.rcsb.org).Contact: pwrose@ucsd.edu

Editorial: New Systems Introduced for the Betterment of Our Journal

We must solve several ongoing problems that our journal Cancer Research and Treatment, the official journal of the Korean Cancer Association, the Korean Association for Clinical Oncology, and the Korean Association for the Study of Lung Cancer has faced since our journal was indexed by SCI(E) on September 2012. The current IF is 1.962. The number of submitted articles has rapidly increased; consequently an increasing backload of articles has accumulated to be published after final acceptance. We already increased the number of articles in each issue from ten to thirteen. The publication date will be moved up from the last day of March, June, September, and December to the 15th day of January, April, July, and October starting with volume 46. In addition, we plan to establish Epub ahead of print, mobile App for Android and iPad, QR code for the journal and each articles, Cross Mark, and FundRef in the near future. These initiatives have common objectives of reducing time between acceptance and publication and disseminating insights and new ideas included in the articles as promptly as possible. We express our continuing gratitude to our society members and contributing authors. We affirm that their commitment to our journal is indispensable, and more important than the aforementioned changes for the sustained progress of Cancer Research and Treatment in quality and influence. We must always bear in mind that the future of our journal depends entirely upon support from our members and authors.

Management System of Transmission Line Passage Protection Based on Web Map Service

To improve the management level of latent troubles that perhaps happened in transmission line passage, a transmission line passage protection system (TLPPS) based on web map service is developed in this paper. In this system whose structure is selected as B/S, Baidu Maps API is creatively used to construct the Web GIS platform and its network database is built by Microsoft SQL Server 2005. Android mobile APP by Java is designed to exchange latent troubles information with network database. The system can achieve latent troubles information real-time uploaded, displayed on map, queried and other management of the entire process.

The Steacie Library Dungeon Hackfest: Hackers in the Library Coding, Collaborating and Creating

The Steacie Science and Engineering Library at York University hosted its first annual Steacie Library Dungeon Hackfest in February 2013. The purpose of a hackfest is to spend a day (or longer) using computer programming skills to collaborate on a particular software project and, hopefully, bring the project to reality. The project may be an app, widget, or website. It is evident that hackfests, as a form of engaged learning, help to reinforce the relevance of the library since it has implications for information literacy, open access, faculty liaison, and the changing perception of library as place. Twenty-five participants that included students, faculty, and staff hacked on Open York Data: York University’s openly accessible records and data such as course codes, lab stats of computers available in various libraries, subject headings, and research interests of faculty. The Hackfest produced several innovative ideas including a “Class Optimizer” program to help students generate a course schedule, and a mobile android app “YU Labs” that informs students of the computers available in a specific library. Library instruction was informally imparted during the Hackfest. There were discussions about open source, developing a research idea, and recommended tools to help students complete their projects. This article encapsulates the inspiration behind the Hackfest, discusses the library as the host, the resources used, the theme, achievements, and assessment. To summarize, the library Hackfest provided a space for literacy, life-long learning, and support of the open source pedagogy.

An end stage kidney disease predictor based on an artificial neural networks ensemble

IgA Nephropathy (IgAN) is a worldwide disease that affects kidneys in human beings and leads to end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) thus requiring renal replacement therapy with dialysis or kidney transplantation. The need for new tools able to help clinicians in predicting ESKD risk for IgAN patients is highly recognized in the medical field. In this paper we present a software tool that exploits the power of artificial neural networks to classify patients’ health status potentially leading to ESKD. The classifier leverages the results returned by an ensemble of 10 networks trained by using data collected in a period of 38years at University of Bari. The developed tool has been made available both as an online Web application and as an Android mobile app. Noteworthy to its clinical usefulness is that its development is based on the largest available cohort worldwide.

Nina integrates speech recognition and voice biometrics

Nuance Communications has introduced Nina, a speech-based virtual assistant for mobile customer service apps. With Nina, companies can add speech-based virtual assistant capabilities to their iOS and Android mobile apps.

Tech to Ease IEP Pain

Tech to Ease IEP Pain