Ubiquitous Applications Research Articles

Quality characteristics and measures for human–computer interaction evaluation in ubiquitous systems

The advent of ubiquitous systems places even more focus on users, since these systems must support their daily activities in such a transparent way that does not disturb them. Thus, much more attention should be provided to human---computer interaction (HCI) and, as a consequence, to its quality. Dealing with quality issues implies first the identification of the quality characteristics that should be achieved and, then, which software measures should be used to evaluate them in a target system. Therefore, this work aims to identify what quality characteristics and measures have been used for the HCI evaluation of ubiquitous systems. In order to achieve our goal, we performed a large literature review, using a systematic mapping study, and we present our results in this paper. We identified 41 pertinent papers that were deeply analyzed to extract quality characteristics and software measures. We found 186 quality characteristics, but since there were divergences on their definitions and duplicated characteristics, an analysis of synonyms by peer review based on the equivalence of definitions was also done. This analysis allowed us to define a final suitable set composed of 27 quality characteristics, where 21 are generic to any system but are particularized for ubiquitous applications and 6 are specific for this domain. We also found 218 citations of measures associated with the characteristics, although the majority of them are simple definitions with no detail about their measurement functions. Our results provide not only an overview of this area to guide researchers in directing their efforts but also it can help practitioners in evaluating ubiquitous systems using these measures.

Cloud computing for ubiquitous computing on M2M and IoT environment mobile application

The ubiquitous cloud infrastructure different access methods are analyses to understand new message protocols that are used ubiquitous IoT mobile application environment that presented the cloud computing platform for mobile application. It supports a combined architecture of ubiquitous and cloud computing which provides a powerful framework for mobile application that requires high performance. The cloud infrastructure for ubiquitous computing environment mobile application (CI-UCEMA), which consist of three layers it cloud service layer (CSL), M2M service layer (MSL) and ubiquitous service layer (USL). The M2M consists of IoT services layer (MSL) will involve a decrease in complexity of both the improvement and controlling of IoT systems. This can be distinguished by improved interoperability and, carefully related, the improvement and use of normal. Security will also remain a grassroots regard as device management and provisioning are accomplished. The MSL is responsible for shielding the user from the underlying complexity and variability through self-tuning environment by mobility and adaptation which are points in CDPS and CIMS. The MSL components has human to object communication (HOC), human to human communication (HHC), object remote information device (OID) and micro M2M data access (M3DA). HOC has something concerned communications with PC, TV, PDA, Wearable PC, mobile phone and LTE black box. HHC supports services concerned with making same human to human communications environment in the everywhere. The UML (called uMain) is responsible for shielding the user from the underlying complexity and variability through self-tuning environment by mobility and adaptation which are points in cloud distributed parallel data processing service (CDPS) and cloud infrastructure management (CIMS). We have presented a system which gives a context-aware infrastructure that supports the gathering of context information from various simulations and the delivery of appropriate context information to mobile applications. Relevant simulations and experiments are given to evaluate the performance of the proposed system demand model. The CI-UCEMA is that have presented a ubiquitous computing environment on cloud computing platform for mobile application. This supports a combined architecture of ubiquitous and cloud computing this is a powerful framework for mobile applications along with high performance result.

Advances in Front-end Enabling Technologies for Thermal Infrared ‘THz Torch’ Wireless Communications

The thermal (emitted) infrared frequency bands (typically 20–40 and 60–100 THz) are best known for remote sensing applications that include temperature measurement (e.g. non-contacting thermometers and thermography), night vision and surveillance (e.g. ubiquitous motion sensing and target acquisition). This unregulated part of the electromagnetic spectrum also offers commercial opportunities for the development of short-range secure communications. The ‘THz Torch’ concept, which fundamentally exploits engineered blackbody radiation by partitioning thermally generated spectral radiance into pre-defined frequency channels, was recently demonstrated by the authors. The thermal radiation within each channel can be independently pulse-modulated, transmitted and detected, to create a robust form of short-range secure communications within the thermal infrared. In this paper, recent progress in the front-end enabling technologies associated with the THz Torch concept is reported. Fundamental limitations of this technology are discussed; possible engineering solutions for further improving the performance of such thermal-based wireless links are proposed and verified either experimentally or through numerical simulations. By exploring a raft of enabling technologies, significant enhancements to both data rate and transmission range can be expected. With good engineering solutions, the THz Torch concept can exploit nineteenth century physics with twentieth century multiplexing schemes for low-cost twenty-first century ubiquitous applications in security and defence.

ChemInform Abstract: Recent Advances in Copper‐Catalyzed C—H Bond Amidation

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Unencapsulated Air-stable Organic Field Effect Transistor by All Solution Processes for Low Power Vapor Sensing.

With its excellent mechanical flexibility, low-cost and low-temperature processing, the solution processed organic field-effect transistor (OFET) is a promising platform technology for developing ubiquitous sensor applications in digital health, environment monitoring and Internet of Things. However, a contradiction between achieving low voltage operation and having stable performance severely hinder the technology to become commercially viable. This work shows that, by reducing the sub-gap density of states (DOS) at the channel for low operation voltage and using a proper low-k non-polar polymer dielectric layer, such an issue can be addressed. Stable electrical properties after either being placed for weeks or continuously prolonged bias stressing for hours in ambient air are achieved for all solution processed unencapsulated OFETs with the channel being exposed to the ambient air for analyte detection. The fabricated device presents a steep subthreshold swing less than 100 mV/decade, and an ON/OFF ratio of 106 at a voltage swing of 3 V. The low voltage and stable operation allows the sensor made of the OFET to be incorporated into a battery-powered electronic system for continuously reliable sensing of ammonia vapor in ambient air with very small power consumption of about 50 nW.

Investigation into the cause of mortality in 49 cases of idiopathic inflammatory myopathy: A single center study.

Idiopathic inflammatory myopathy (IIM) is an autoimmune disease characterized by chronic muscle weakness and myositis with unknown etiology. IIM may affect the function of multiple organs and has a poor prognosis. In the present study, the causes of mortality in patients with IIM admitted to the Xiangya Hospital during the last 14 years were investigated. The investigation included an analysis of frequent causes of IIM, and of infections and associated complications. A cohort study was conducted on 676 patients with IIM that were admitted to Xiangya Hospital from January, 2001 to January, 2015. There were 49 patient mortalities (7.2% of the total cases), of which 34 mortalities were infection-associated and 15 were not infection-associated. The proportion of infection-associated IIM mortalities had increased since 2001. Of the 34 infection-associated mortalities, 31 cases (63.3%) were of fungal and bacterial infections, most frequently infecting the lungs and the blood. Klebsiella pneumoniae and Acinetobacter baumannii were the most commonly isolated pathogens, and co-infection with the two pathogens was observed in the majority of cases. In the IIM mortalities not associated with infection, there were 2 acute myocardial infarction cases, 2 acute interstitial lung disease cases, 4 malignancies and 1 case of each of the following: Arrhythmia, pneumothorax, ventilator weakness, pulmonary artery hypertension, gastrointestinal bleeding, liver failure and renal failure. Three mortalities were secondary to viral hepatitis in the present study. Pathogenic infection was the most frequent cause of mortality in patients with IIM. The remaining causes of mortality included secondary to heart failure, lung dysfunction and malignancy. Following the ubiquitous application of glucocorticoids and immunosuppressants, the proportion of infection-associated mortalities increased in patients with IIM. Thus, in addition to focusing on the primary disease, infection should receive increased attention during clinical practice.

Microfluidic processing of concentrated surfactant mixtures: online SAXS, microscopy and rheology.

We investigate the effect of microfluidic flow on the microstructure and dynamics of a model surfactant mixture, combining synchrotron Small Angle X-ray Scattering (SAXS), microscopy and rheology. A system comprising a single-chain cationic surfactant, hexadecyl trimethyl ammonium chloride (C16TAC), a short-chain alcohol (1-pentanol) and water was selected for the study due to its flow responsiveness and industrial relevance. Model flow fields, including sequential contraction-expansion (extensional) and rotational flows, were investigated and the fluid response in terms of the lamellar d-spacing, orientation and birefringence was monitored in situ, as well as the recovery processes after cessation of flow. Extensional flows are found to result in considerable d-spacing increase (from approx 59 Å to 65 Å). However, under continuous flow, swelling decreases with increasing flow velocity, eventually approaching the equilibrium values at velocities ≃2 cm s(-1). Through individual constrictions we observe the alignment of lamellae along the flow velocity, accompanied by increasing birefringence, followed by an orientation flip whereby lamellae exit perpendicularly to the flow direction. The resulting microstructures are mapped quantitatively onto the flow field in 2D with 200 μm spatial resolution. Rotational flows alone do not result in appreciable changes in lamellar spacing and flow type and magnitude evidently impact the fluid microstructure under flow, as well as upon relaxation. The findings are correlated with rheological properties measured ex situ to provide a mechanistic understanding of the effect of flow imposed by tubular processing units in the phase behavior and performance of a model surfactant system with ubiquitous applications in personal care and coating industries.

Pervasive and Ubiquitous Mobile-health application for pregnancy’s mother on android smart phone (Non-Stress Test application)

The emerging m-Health concept represents the evolution of e-health systems for healthcare using Smartphone applications with self-monitoring and sensing capabilities can help in disease prevention and health interventions. Disease risk conditions can be mapped to data collected via phone sensors and self-reports, providing users and doctor’s access to rich health data or broadcasting alerts to caregivers. Non-Stress Test is a most important for the pregnant mothers with abortion risk. It is frequently carried on when they are faced with the abortion risk over 28 weeks of gestation. In this paper, we present a mobile healthcare application for pregnant mother as Non-Stress Test without relying on the Internet connection.

Low-power smart passive REU for industrial IoT applications

Energy management at passive terminal nodes is a critical design goal in the industrial internet of things (IoT) network. This article introduces a programmable low power remote execution unit (REU) based on an 8051 instruction set architecture (ISA) for passive radio frequency identification (RFID) applications in industrial IoT. The REU acts as a passive device processor requiring the interrogator to transmit instructions to be executed over a wireless link. This paper investigates the proposed asynchronous REU implementation with respect to the power consumption, area and speed and also provides a performance comparison to an existing clocked REU implementation. Based on the post-layout simulation results, the proposed asynchronous REU has lower power consumption when compared to the clocked REU operating at higher frequencies. Such a low power REU in the context of passive processing has a significant impact on IoT, a ubiquitous industrial application of RFID technology.

Robot and Neuroscience Technology: Computational and Engineering Approaches in Medicine

Robot and neuroscience technology based on computational and engineering approaches, which has been successfully applied to a wide variety of fields such as medicine, provides giant opportunities for the advancement of human-computer interface's application to promote the medical research, improve the quality of life, and enhance the patient's safety. Academia generally takes it for granted that the findings in robot and neuroscience have greatly promoted the development of artificial intelligence and consequently developed robotic technology. The research which focuses on interdisciplinary fields includes various areas like artificial intelligence, models, and computational theories of human cognition, perception, and motivation and brain models, artificial neural nets, and neural computing. Thus, more and more attention has been paid to the research progress on computational intelligence and neuroscience and their potential applications in robotics. The scope of this issue has been restricted to items that are relevant to building theoretical and practical systems including contributions in the area of applicable neural networks theory, supervised and unsupervised learning methods, algorithms, architectures, performance measures, applied statistics, software simulations, hardware implementations, benchmarks, system engineering and integration, and innovative applications. There were a total of 15 manuscripts received, six of which were accepted for publication. The adopted articles embrace a scope that is the representative of computational intelligence and neuroscience technologies, namely, rhythmic oscillations with synaptic learning, human-computer interface for communication, interactive astronaut-robot system, novel abrupt change detection framework, ubiquitous robotic technology's application, and object tracking in robot vision system. The six papers offer many ideas in robot and neuroscience technology. This special issue sheds light on bridging the gap between neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and engineering. Editors truly hope this special issue celebrates the communal efforts in this field and becomes the academic citation reference for the researchers of robot and neuroscience technology and of the beneficiaries.

Optimal Network QoS over the Internet of Vehicles for E-Health Applications

Wireless technologies are pervasive to support ubiquitous healthcare applications. However, a critical issue of using wireless communications under a healthcare scenario is the electromagnetic interference (EMI) caused by RF transmission, and a high level of EMI may lead to a critical malfunction of medical sensors. In consideration of EMI on medical sensors, we study the optimization of quality of service (QoS) within the whole Internet of vehicles for E-health and propose a novel model to optimize the QoS by allocating the transmit power of each user. Our results show that the optimal power control policy depends on the objective of optimization problems: a greedy policy is optimal to maximize the summation of QoS of each user, whereas a fair policy is optimal to maximize the product of QoS of each user. Algorithms are taken to derive the optimal policies, and numerical results of optimizing QoS are presented for both objectives and QoS constraints.

SIMISS: A Model based Searching Strategy for Inventory Management Systems

Inventory management is critical in human space flight operations. Currently, we use the inventory management system (IMS) in keeping track of items on the International Space Station (ISS). One challenge is to discover lost or wrongly placed items when IMS fails to discover them due to human factors. In this paper, we will illustrate a model-based searching strategy called semantic inventory management for ISS (SIMISS), with which possible locations of lost items will be calculated based on contextual features in three dimensions: 1) spatial ; 2) temporal ; and 3) human . It contains ontologies, databases, machine learning algorithms, and ubiquitous client applications. We have implemented and tested SIMISS with the sample data from IMS, operation data files and onboard short term plan experiments have been carried out in a set of simulation scenarios.

An Agent Middleware for Supporting Ecosystems of Heterogeneous Web Services

The integration of a Multi-agent technology with a service oriented architecture provides a convenient way to build smarter applications that satisfy the demand of the current ubiquitous web systems. This paper provides a software tool to develop ubiquitous applications adopting the philosophy of agents and services as data sources. ADELE (Agent Dynamic EvoLutionary at runtime) is a middleware that allows developers to create reactive agents with the capability to evolve through the injection of external behaviors at runtime. An ADELE external behavior is a software component that allows agents to accomplish their goals. To facilitate the programming of these behaviors, agents can obtain the information consuming local and public web services (WSs) previously published on different services ecosystems. This paper shows how a Multi-agent System can consume heterogeneous WSs to satisfy the agent goals using a normative model. We have created three add-ons compatible with SOAP, RESTful, and DOHA (Dynamic Open Home-Automation) WS model. The integration of these add-ons within the ADELE tool is helpful to facilitate the invocation of heterogeneous WSs with a high abstraction level. In addition, we describe as an example, an Internet of Thing (IoT) scenario where the approach presented in this paper is very helpful. Finally, we also evaluate an ADELE application for giving home comfort employing heterogeneous WSs.

Communication Framework for Jointly Addressing Issues of Routing Overhead and Energy Drainage in MANET

The advancement into smart mobile devices has accelerated the adoption of various pervasive computing based ubiquitous applications, where Mobile Adhoc Network (MANET) has extended its usability from hard core military applications to civil society applications. The success for routing requires a robust computational mechanism of routing based on the collaborative framework of energy (i.e. battery power), signal strength and zonal routings. The paper presents a framework of novel routing technique in order to jointly address the problem pertaining to routing overhead and energy drainage among the mobile nodes. Different from conventional simulation mechanism, the paper presents a communication district with inclusion of auxiliary nodes for minimizing the overhead during the routing process. The outcome of the proposed study shows significant reduction in routing overhead along with energy efficiency as compared to existing AODV and DSDV protocols.

Multiple Risk Factor Dependence Structures: Copulas and Related Properties

Copulas have become an important tool in the modern best practice Enterprise Risk Management, often supplanting other approaches to modelling stochastic dependence. However, choosing the 'right' copula is not an easy task, and the temptation to prefer a tractable rather than a meaningful candidate from the encompassing copulas toolbox is strong. The ubiquitous applications of the Gaussian copula is just one illuminating example.Speaking generally, a 'good' copula should conform to the problem at hand, allow for asymmetry in the domain of deffinition and exhibit some extent of tail dependence. In this paper we introduce and study a new class of Multiple Risk Factor (MRF) copula functions, which we show are exactly such. Namely, the MRF copulas (1) arise from a number of meaningful default risk specifcations with stochastic default barriers, (2) are in general non-exchangeable and (3) possess a variety of tail dependences. That being said, the MRF copulas turn out to be surprisingly tractable analytically.

A Study of Security Vulnerabilities in Mobile environment

Now day's application had focus more on the security and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) had become one of the major technologies that become important for security. RFID devices are going to be ubiquitous applications that are used in different areas especially in the business because it simplifies many business transactions. However, security and privacy issues and risks are introduced by pervasiveness of RFID systems. In RFID systems, communication between tag and reader usually takes place via wireless communication. As the nature of radio frequency signal, it can go everywhere and everyone can receive this signal, which is an insecure channel. The computational resources in RFID tag are constrained and it is a big limitation that forces researcher to apply different mitigations compared to common security solutions. At the first part of this research, RFID architecture is introduced briefly. In this paper, the researcher explains existing security challenges in RFID networks then the effects of these threats on security and privacy of RFID are discussed. After analyzing security challenges of RFID networks, different countermeasures that are proposed by other researchers are discussed. At the end of this paper, future security challenges are discussed.

융합형 u-헬스케어 서비스에서 헬스 정보 교환을 위한 키 트리 기반 관리 체계 설계

u-헬스케어에서는 무선 센서와 에드혹 네트워크를 통해 사용자의 건강 정보, 응급 정보를 수집, 분석하고 있으며 상호 운용이 가능한 전자 헬스 정보의 기록 및 전송을 위하여 동적인 액세스 제어를 수행하고 있다. 네트워크 시스템을 이용한 u-헬스케어의 경우 상호 운용 가능한 전자 건강 기록과 민감한 환자 의료 정보 전송은 개인 정보 보호 및 보안에 대한 문제점을 해결하기 위하여 키 관리 체계를 사용하고 있으나 동적인 액세스 제어에서는 그룹 키 관리가 어려우며 그룹에서 접근 맴버를 추가하거나 삭제할 경우에 매번 그룹 키를 변경해야하는 문제점을 가지고 있다. 따라서 본 논문에서는 유비쿼터스 헬스 케어의 동적 액세스를 수행하는 네트워크 환경에서 헬스 정보 교환을 위한 융합형 키 관리 체계방식을 제안한다. The threats to privacy and security have received increasing attention as ubiquitous healthcare applications over the Internet become more prevalent, mobile and universal. In particular, we address the communication security issues of access sharing of health information resources in the ubiquitous healthcare environment. The proposed scheme resolves the sender and data authentication problem in information systems and group communications. We propose a novel key management scheme for generating and distributing cryptographic keys to constituent users to provide form of data encryption method for certain types of data concerning resource constraints for secure communications in the ubiquitous healthcare domains.

HIF-1α/MDR1 pathway confers chemoresistance to cisplatin in bladder cancer.

Bladder cancer (BCa) is the 9th most common malignant tumor and the 13th leading cause of death due to cancer. The development of surgery and target drugs bring new challenges for the traditional concept for BCa therapy, and chemotherapy is still the final option for many BCa patients, and cisplatin-containing regimen the most effective one. However, the ubiquitous application of cisplatin-containing regimen in BCa results in the cisplatin-resistance, in addition, the cisplatin‑resistant BCa manifests enhanced malignant behavior, the mechanism of which is unclear. In the present study, we used BCa cell lines to to clarify this point. BCa cell lines T24/J82 were pretreated with cisplatin >3 months to construct stable cisplatin-resistant cell lines (tagged T24(Cis-R) and J82(Cis-R)), which manifested as enhanced capacity of proliferation and malignant behavior in vivo and in vitro, accompanied by cisplatin, and even doxorubicin resistance. The following mechanism dissection revealed that prolonged treatment time of T24/J82 cells led to elevated expression of HIF-1α, which targeted the increased expression of MDR1 on the one hand, and contributed to BCa cell proliferation, migration/invasion on the other hand. Finally, IHC staining of human BCa tissue supported our conclusion that the expression of HIF-1α and MDR1 was higher in chemoresistant tissue vs. chemosensitive tissue. Our results provided a new view of HIF-1α in chemotherapy.

WiFi-Based Real-Time Calibration-Free Passive Human Motion Detection.

With the rapid development of WLAN technology, wireless device-free passive human detection becomes a newly-developing technique and holds more potential to worldwide and ubiquitous smart applications. Recently, indoor fine-grained device-free passive human motion detection based on the PHY layer information is rapidly developed. Previous wireless device-free passive human detection systems either rely on deploying specialized systems with dense transmitter-receiver links or elaborate off-line training process, which blocks rapid deployment and weakens system robustness. In the paper, we explore to research a novel fine-grained real-time calibration-free device-free passive human motion via physical layer information, which is independent of indoor scenarios and needs no prior-calibration and normal profile. We investigate sensitivities of amplitude and phase to human motion, and discover that phase feature is more sensitive to human motion, especially to slow human motion. Aiming at lightweight and robust device-free passive human motion detection, we develop two novel and practical schemes: short-term averaged variance ratio (SVR) and long-term averaged variance ratio (LVR). We realize system design with commercial WiFi devices and evaluate it in typical multipath-rich indoor scenarios. As demonstrated in the experiments, our approach can achieve a high detection rate and low false positive rate.

Secured Communication System Architecture Using Light Weight Algorithms

Security of systems involved in the ubiquitous applications demands computationally less intensive operations. The proposed work aims at the design of the overall secured system architecture for the resource constrained platforms. The design architecture features; 1) the secured off-chip memory, 2) the master computation unit with a specialized encoding mechanism and 3) the encrypted data transfer to the slaves along with integrity and authentication. The design explores for the first time, the light weight cryptographic algorithms, both a Feistel cipher and a Substitution Permutation cipher (SPN), in its use for security compliance. Exhaustive analyses are made for the implementation results on the xc4VLX15-12sf363 Virtex FPGA. The time overheads for the memory encryption using the light weight Feistel cipher Tiny Encryption Algorithm (TEA) and the SPN cipher PRESENT are estimated for the actual 64-bit and the 16-bit custom derived implementations. The time latency for deriving the integrity and authentication extension to the slaves depicts nominal values acceptable for RFID communication applications.