Multimedia Messaging Service Research Articles

Introduction to special issue on secure multimedia services

With the rapid development of communication technology, it becomes a reality to hear or watch anything, anywhere. Multimedia (image, video, audio, etc.) enriches human’s daily life, and various multimedia services attract more and more users, such as multimedia message services, color rings, mobile TV, IPTV, User Generated Content (UGC), p2p sharing, etc. However, its prosperity also attracts malicious attackers and abusers with different motivations, such as political reasons, illegal financial benefits, or simply to win a prestige reputation in the hacker community. The typical example is piracy, i.e., the original multimedia content is stolen and then redistributed to unauthorized users illegally, which causes great profit-losses to content producers or service providers. Solutions are needed to protect multimedia service systems. During the last decade, various techniques have been proposed to improve multimedia service systems’ security. For example, multimedia encryption is used for confidentiality protection of multimedia content, multimedia authentication for integrity detection, digital watermarking for ownership authentication or copy tracing, Conditional Access (CA) for access control, and Digital Rights Management (DRM) for copyright management, etc. In addition, in different networks, such as the Internet, 3G wireless, DVB-H and sensor network, different secure protocols and algorithms are required to provide system security. All these topics are in active development.

A Multi-Facet Analysis of Factors Affecting the Adoption of Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS)

Mobile applications such as multimedia messaging service (MMS) promises a new way to share rich content of information that enhances its users’ personal connectivity experiences as well as productivity. However,the adoption of MMS seems to be unexpectedly slow (Bonte, 2008). As mobile phones become ever smarter (or complex) in functions, understanding the adoption behaviors of complex mobile services such as MMS becomes utterly important to both practitioners and academic. This paper introduces a multi-facet model for MMS adoption by integrating the well-known behavioral models such as TAM and TPB with other factors including intrinsic motivation, personal innovativeness and critical mass. An internet survey of 213 subjects with prior experience in MMS usage found strong support for the proposed model. The results show that the adopter’s attitude toward MMS is the most dominating factor in shaping his/her intention to use MMS, followed by subjective norm and perceived behavioral control. Moreover, the results further suggest adopter’s intrinsic motivation is the most important motivating factor for attitude toward using MMS. Implications of these findings are discussed for researchers and practitioners.

Telemedicine in Emergency Neurological Service Provision in Singapore: Using Technology to Overcome Limitations

Medical emergencies form a significant proportion of neurological and neurosurgical practice. The highly specialized nature of neurology and neurosurgery limits expertise to a small number of highly specialized centers; hence, many neurological emergencies will be managed in regional hospitals without comprehensive support. The common theme in neurological emergencies lies with prompt diagnosis, rapid access to scans, accurate scan interpretation, and quick institution of appropriate treatment. Failure in any one of these can result in devastating and permanent neurological deficits or death. The judicious use of information and communication technology can overcome some of the limitations imposed by scarce resources. Multimedia messaging service can be used to transmit important scan images to experienced staff to faciliate accurate and prompt diagnosis and commence optimal treatment. Telestroke based on the remote evaluation of acute ishemic stroke model can also be utilized so that selected stroke patients can be given intravenous tissue plasminogen activator in the emergency department of a regional hospital with the supervision of a stroke neurologist. We describe our experience with these technological initiatives to improve clinical care and outcome in our patients.

Cell Phone–Based Multimedia Messaging Service in Reconstructive Microsurgery: A Novel Telemedicine Application

Cell Phone–Based Multimedia Messaging Service in Reconstructive Microsurgery: A Novel Telemedicine Application

The Design of Digital Television Multimedia Message Service System

This dissertation studies the Multimedia Message Services that based on the digital television system, and it is called TVMMS for short. The author discusses the TVMMS architecture, and specifies the address number distributed for every entity and addressing scheme. The TVMMS can perform the following functions: point to point communication between STB, communication between STB (Set Top Box) and VASP (Value Added Services Provider), communication between STB and mobile telephone, communication between STB and TV station. So, TVMMS will greatly enrich the application of digital television.

Exploiting visual and text features for direct marketing learning in time and space constrained domains

Traditionally, direct marketing companies have relied on pre-testing to select the best offers to send to their audiences. Companies systematically dispatch the offers under consideration to a limited sample of potential buyers, rank them with respect to their performance and, based on this ranking, decide which offers to send to the wider population. Though this pre-testing process is simple and widely used, recently the direct marketing industry has been under increased pressure to further optimize learning, in particular when facing severe time and space constraints. Taking into account the multimedia nature of offers, which typically comprise both a visual and text component, we propose a two-phase learning strategy based on a cascade of regression methods. This proposed approach takes advantage of visual and text features to improve and accelerate the learning process. Experiments in the domain of a commercial multimedia messaging service show the effectiveness of the proposed methods that improve on classical learning techniques. The main contribution of the present work is to demonstrate that direct marketing firms can exploit the information on visual content to optimize the learning phase. The proposed methods can be used in any multimedia direct marketing domains in which offers are composed by image and text.

A Text Message–Based Intervention for Weight Loss: Randomized Controlled Trial

BackgroundTo our knowledge, no studies have evaluated whether weight loss can be promoted in overweight adults through the use of an intervention that is largely based on daily SMS (Short Message Service: text) and MMS (Multimedia Message Service: small picture) messages transmitted via mobile phones.Objective This paper describes the development and evaluation of a text message–based intervention designed to help individuals lose or maintain weight over 4 months.Methods The study was a randomized controlled trial, with participants being exposed to one of the following two conditions, lasting 16 weeks: (1) receipt of monthly printed materials about weight control; (2) an intervention that included personalized SMS and MMS messages sent two to five times daily, printed materials, and brief monthly phone calls from a health counselor. The primary outcome was weight at the end of the intervention. A mixed-model repeated-measures analysis compared the effect of the intervention group to the comparison group on weight status over the 4-month intervention period. Analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) models examined weight change between baseline and 4 months after adjusting for baseline weight, sex, and age.Results A total of 75 overweight men and women were randomized into one of the two groups, and 65 signed the consent form, completed the baseline questionnaire, and were included in the analysis. At the end of 4 months, the intervention group (n = 33) lost more weight than the comparison group (−1.97 kg difference, 95% CI −0.34 to −3.60 kg, P = .02) after adjusting for sex and age. Intervention participants’ adjusted average weight loss was 2.88 kg (3.16%). At the end of the study, 22 of 24 (92%) intervention participants stated that they would recommend the intervention for weight control to friends and family.Conclusions Text messages might prove to be a productive channel of communication to promote behaviors that support weight loss in overweight adults.Trial Registration Clinicaltrials.gov NCT00415870; http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00415870 (Archived by WebCite at http://www.webcitation.org/5dnolbkFt)

Asymmetric pricing and change in delivery to increase multimedia messaging service revenue

The current take-up of the multimedia messaging service (MMS) is far below that predicted when it was initially conceived. There are potentially a number of reasons, but most research has identified the high price. Factors such as asymmetric utility between sender and receiver, and uncertainty in the delivery of the MMS have not been considered. Based on real data from an Indian telecom operator we develop a model to derive the subscription and usage elasticity and show that a trade-off between sending and receiving prices, and subsidised handsets can increase MMS subscription by 200% whilst simultaneously improving revenue by 50%.

Mobile cell-phones (M-phones) in telemicroscopy: increasing connectivity of isolated laboratories

BackgroundThe development of modern information telecommunication (ITC) technology and its use in telemedicine plays an increasingly important role in facilitating access to some diagnostic services even to people living in the most remote areas. However, physical and economical constraints in the access to broad band data-transmission network, still represent a considerable obstacle to the transmission of images for the purpose of tele-pathology.MethodsIndifferently using m-phones of different brands, and a variety of microscopic preparations, images were taken without the use of any adaptor simply approaching the lens of the mobile cell phone camera to the ocular of common optical microscopes, and subsequently sent via Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS) to distant reference centres for tele-diagnosis. Access to MMS service was reviewed with specific reference to the African information communication technology (ICT) market.ResultsImages of any pathologic preparation could be captured and sent over the mobile phone with an MMS, without being limited by appropriate access to the internet for transmission (i.e. access to broad-band services). The quality of the image was not influenced by the brand or model of the mobile-phone used, but only by its digital resolution, with any resolution above 0.8 megapixel resulting in images sufficient for diagnosis.Access to MMS services is increasingly reaching remote disadvantaged areas. Current penetration of the service in Africa was mapped appearing already available in almost every country, with penetration index varying from 1.5% to 92.2%.ConclusionThe use of otherwise already widely available technologies, without any need for adaptors or otherwise additional technology, could significantly increase opportunities and quality diagnostics while lowering costs and considerably increasing connectivity between most isolated laboratories and distant reference center.

Using visual and text features for direct marketing on multimedia messaging services domain

Traditionally, direct marketing companies have relied on pre-testing to select the best offers to send to their audience. Companies systematically dispatch the offers under consideration to a limited sample of potential buyers, rank them with respect to their performance and, based on this ranking, decide which offers to send to the wider population. Though this pre-testing process is simple and widely used, recently the industry has been under increased pressure to further optimize learning, in particular when facing severe time and learning space constraints. The main contribution of the present work is to demonstrate that direct marketing firms can exploit the information on visual content to optimize the learning phase. This paper proposes a two-phase learning strategy based on a cascade of regression methods that takes advantage of the visual and text features to improve and accelerate the learning process. Experiments in the domain of a commercial Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) show the effectiveness of the proposed methods and a significant improvement over traditional learning techniques. The proposed approach can be used in any multimedia direct marketing domain in which offers comprise both a visual and text component.

Effectiveness of Mobile Advertising: The Indian Scenario

In the current scenario, mobile internet applications enable consumers to access a variety of services: Web information search, SMS (short message service), MMS (multimedia message service), banking, payment, gaming, e-mailing, chat, weather forecast, GPS (global positioning service), and so forth. Collectively, we denominate this wide array of services as “mcommerce.” These digital media are considered to potentially improve the possibilities to reach consumers by allowing personalization of the content and context of the message. Combining customer's user profile and the context situation, advertising companies can provide the target customers exactly the advertisement information they desire, not just “spam” them with irrelevant advertisements. Drawing from Nysveen, Pedersen, and Thorbjornsen's (2005) grid of mobile internet services classification, this study attempts to critically analyse “person interactive” (goal-oriented) information and “person interactive” (experiential) messaging, targeting both utilitarian and hedonic benefits from the consumers' perspective. It analyses the effectiveness of mobile advertising in its current format (as prevalent in India). ‘Effectiveness’ for the purpose of this study has been concretized in terms of impact of mobile advertising on the purchase decision of the consumer. However, results of binary logistic regression indicate that mobile advertising in its current format does not have a significant impact on the purchase decision of a consumer, and that there might be other significant factors like a firm's marketing efforts (marketing mix), a consumers' socio-cultural environment (family, informal sources, non-commercial sources, social class, culture and sub-culture), and an individual's psychological field (motivation, perception, learning, personality, and attitudes) that affect his purchase decision. Mobile advertising in its current format is very generic in its approach, as substantiated by factor analysis performed on the data — marketing communication through mobiles primarily lacked in contextualization and perceived usefulness (for the target customers), and were disruptive in nature. Although mobiles are a powerful mode of marketing communication, the important issues at stake here are— what to say, how to say it, to whom, and how often. Communications get more and more difficult, as a large number of companies clamour for getting the consumers' increasingly divided attention through various means. Hence the challenge lies in customizing the marketing communication to suit individual needs (Customerization), i.e., reaching the right target market with the right message at the right time. Also, variations in consumer responsiveness towards mobile advertising have been examined using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Finally, some features enhancing the utilitarian and hedonic benefits drawn (or expected) from mobile advertising are prioritized. This enhancement of benefits can be implemented by incorporating Intelligent Software Agents, which make customerization of marketing messages a reality—delivering all the desired benefits (utilitarian⁄hedonic) to the consumers. Software Agents are programmes which fulfill a task independently on behalf of the user and can be adapted to the individual preferences and parameters of its instructor; software agents operate without intervention of the user at a specific problem definition.

Gsm Networks: A Review Of Security Threats And Mitigation Measures

The Global System for Mobile communication network, popularly called GSM, is a worldwide standard for mobile communication offering varied services like voice calls, short and multimedia messaging (text) services (SMS and MMS) and Global Packet Radio Service (GPRS) which allows internet connectivity. Some of these services have possible security vulnerabilities. This paper investigates the security measures used in GSM networks which include Authentication, Encryption, Equipment Identification and Subscriber Identity Confidentiality, as well as the manifestation of network vulnerabilities including SIM, SMS attacks, encryption and signaling attacks. Suggestions on mitigative measness are also discussed. The Information Manager Vol. 6 (1&2) 2006: pp. 16-24

Implementation and Integration of Prehospital ECGs Into Systems of Care for Acute Coronary Syndrome

Clinical case: A 58-year-old woman called 9-1-1 with acute onset of chest pain that had persisted for 30 minutes. She had a history of hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and type 2 diabetes mellitus but no previous history of myocardial infarction or heart failure. Her medications included aspirin, atorvastatin, lisinopril, and metoprolol. Paramedics were dispatched, and a prehospital ECG demonstrated 3- to 4-mm ST-segment elevation in leads I, aVL, and V2 through V6 (Figure 1). Her examination revealed a regular pulse of 90 bpm, a blood pressure of 100/60 mm Hg, clear lungs, and normal heart sounds with no murmurs. Paramedics interpreted the prehospital ECG and activated the catheterization laboratory en route to the hospital. On hospital arrival, the patient was transported directly to the catheterization laboratory. Coronary angiography demonstrated an occluded proximal left anterior descending artery, which was successfully treated with balloon angioplasty and a stent. The pertinent time intervals were as follows: paramedic dispatch to balloon time, 56 minutes; paramedic arrival at the scene to balloon time, 46 minutes; hospital door to balloon time, 23 minutes. Her biomarkers revealed a peak troponin T of 2.42 ng/mL and a peak creatine kinase muscle-brain isoenzyme of 26.8 ng/mL. An echocardiogram demonstrated normal left ventricular ejection fraction of 55%, with mild anterior hypokinesis, and the patient was discharged on hospital day 3. Figure 1. Prehospital ECG. American Heart Association national guidelines,1–3 as well as other consensus and scientific statements,4–11 recommend that emergency medical services (EMS) acquire and use prehospital ECGs to evaluate patients with suspected acute coronary syndrome. Despite these recommendations, prehospital ECGs are used in fewer than 10% of patients with ST-segment–elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI),12,13 and this rate has not substantially changed since the mid-1990s. Furthermore, even when a prehospital ECG is acquired, the information is often not …

GSM mobile SMS/MMS using public key infrastructure: m-PKI

Presently, mobile handheld device has successfully replaced traditional telephone to become the most popular wireless communication tools. Mobile Short Message Service (SMS) and Multimedia Message Service (MMS) fulfill almost all the user requirements as an effective communication and information delivering service. Since SMS/MMS become so popular on daily communication, there is a demand to communicate or exchange confidential information in a secure environment. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is a proven solution, which using pairing of key, for secure communication encryption. In this paper, m-PKI is introduced to provide PKI encryption to the mobile SMS and MMS. This new approach allows the end-user to send private and classified message via SMS. The key pair generation and distribution are performed by the Certificate Authority (CA). The size of the key pair are studied and decided by the tradeoff between performance and security.

Pandora: An SMS-oriented m-informational system for educational realms

e-Informational systems based on the Internet infrastructure and services like e-mail, WWW, etc., are a de-facto option for various educational realms, in order to enhance the quality and diversity of services offered to their educators and students. On the other hand, despite the fact that pure mobile services like short message service (SMS) or multimedia message service (MMS) have managed to highly penetrate the wireless market to a great degree and gain users’ wide acceptance, are rarely employed to support or offer informational services in the context of education. In this paper, we describe in detail a fully functional SMS-oriented mobile-informational (m-informational) system named Pandora that was designed and developed from the onset to specifically support a plethora of services obtainable mainly by the students of our university. The analysis and our contribution are two-fold starting from the theoretical background and continuing to the technical part of the Pandora system. We present and discuss several issues, including the different services that Pandora supports, system architecture, Pandora's box, core, Web services, security, etc. We demonstrate that the proposed system is practical to implement, flexible, effective, secure, affordable and above all scalable and potentially extensible.

Introduction: New media: Mobile advertising and marketing

For many consumers worldwide, cell phones, iPods, PDAs, and instant messaging have become indispensable, yet marketers are still learning how to use these media. As ownership of hand-held devices and other new technologies becomes increasingly widespread, it is important to examine advertising and marketing via the use of short message service (SMS) text messages, multimedia message service, WiFi, hotspots, and additional new applications such as Bluetooth. Notably, the growth of these technologies has not been confined to any one part of the world. In fact, the use of SMS took off most quickly in East Asian countries such as South Korea and Japan, as well as parts of Europe and, more recently, the United States. The papers in this special issue are designed to provide insight into consumer adoption and use of mobile media, as well as into marketers’ use of mobile media. Notably, a high number of submissions were received from many parts of the world, and the papers represented validate such variety. The table of contents in this issue reveals an eclectic set of papers from all parts of the globe where mobile commerce has made substantial inroads. This is most fortunate in terms of examining whether patterns of use and adoption can be generalized, and also in helping to determine which research findings apply cross-culturally. In the first article, Okazaki examines the factors associated with effectively generating SMS “word of mouth” communication through advertising. The commitment-value paradigm is used to develop a model that examines individual psychological characteristics and the influence they may have in perceiving value in a campaign and subsequently participating in it. The methodology for testing the model involved sending a text message to a group of young Japanese

Communicating textual health information to the mobile phones of visually-impaired users

We investigated how short messages communicating health information would best be distributed to people with vision difficulties using mobile phones. Twelve visually-impaired persons who were unable to read short message service (SMS) messages directly compared three methods of presenting text messages as speech: (1) ordinary SMS messages were sent to the users and converted into speech by the mobile phone; (2) multimedia messages were sent to the users with prerecorded speech-synthesized information; and (3) mobile phone calls were placed to the users and prerecorded speech-synthesized messages were streamed to them. The latter two approaches used server-generated sound files. Over a three-month trial period, we sent a total of 88 SMS messages to the subjects, 111 multimedia messaging service (MMS) messages and 104 telephone calls. All of the SMS messages, 88% of the MMS messages and 69% of the telephone calls were received. In subsequent interviews, we asked the users which presentation method they preferred. SMS scored significantly better than both MMS (P = 0.033) and telephones (P = 0.006). All three methods had serious drawbacks. However, the study suggests that it might be possible to develop suitable technology for communicating with people with vision difficulties by mobile phone.

Commwarrior worm propagation model for smart phone networks

Commwarrior worm is capable of spreading through both Bluetooth and multimedia messaging service (MMS) in smart phone networks. According to the propagation characteristics of Bluetooth and MMS, we built the susceptible- exposed-infected-recovered-dormancy (SEIRD) model for the Bluetooth and MMS hybrid spread mode and performed the stability analysis. The simulation results show good correlation with our theoretical analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of this dynamic propagation model. On the basis of the SEIRD model, we further discuss at length the influence of the propagation parameters such as user gather density in groups, moving velocity of smart phone, the time for worm to replicate itself, and other interrelated parameters on the propagation of the virus. On the basis of these analytical and simulation results, some feasible control strategies will be proposed to restrain the spread of mobile worm such as commwarrior on smart phone network.

Extending the technology acceptance model to mobile telecommunication innovation: The existence of network externalities

Abstract Consumer acceptance of technological innovations is crucial to marketing new products. According to the most influential model in this area, the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), perceived usefulness (PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU) determine users' behavioural intentions to use or purchase a system or product. In the specific context of network externalities, a sense of utility that arises from the number of users (NOU) is considered as important as technology‐specific valuation. This study conducted an empirical survey to examine the effects of TAM and network externalities on the acceptance of Multimedia Messaging Services (MMS), an innovation in the field of mobile telecommunications. The results confirm the effectiveness of the TAM and find that network externalities effect affects users' acceptance to this mobile innovations. Accordingly, the TAM can be applied to predict consumer's acceptance to the mobile telecommunication innovations in the presence of network externalities. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Teleconferencing Using Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) for Long-Range Consultation of Patients With Neurosurgical Problems in an Acute Situation

: We present our initial experience using a simple and relatively cost effective system using existing mobile phone network services and conventional handphones with built in cameras to capture carefully selected images from hard copies of scan images and transferring these images from a hospital without neurosurgical services to a university hospital with tertiary neurosurgical service for consultation and management plan. : A total of 14 patients with acute neurosurgical problems admitted to a general hospital in a 6 months period had their images photographed and transferred in JPEG format to a university neurosurgical unit. This was accompanied by a phone conference to discuss the scan and the patients' condition between the neurosurgeon and the referring physician. All images were also reviewed by a second independent neurosurgeon on a separate occasion to asses the agreement on the diagnosis and the management plan. : There were nine patients with acute head injury and five patients with acute nontraumatic neurosurgical problems. In all cases both neurosurgeons were in agreement that a diagnosis could be made on the basis of the images that were transferred. With respect to the management advice there were differences in opinion on three of the patients but these were considered to be minor. : Accurate diagnosis can be made on images of acute neurosurgical problems transferred using a conventional camera phone and meaningful decisions can be made on these images. This method of consultation also proved to be highly convenient and cost effective.