Atif Alamri

A Survey on Sensor-Cloud: Architecture, Applications, and Approaches:

Nowadays, wireless sensor network (WSN) applications have been used in several important areas, such as healthcare, military, critical infrastructure monitoring, environment monitoring, and manufacturing. However, due to the limitations of WSNs in terms of memory, energy, computation, communication, and scalability, efficient management of the large number of WSNs data in these areas is an important issue to deal with. There is a need for a powerful and scalable high-performance computing and massive storage infrastructure for real-time processing and storing of the WSN data as well as analysis (online and offline) of the processed information under context using inherently complex models to extract events of interest. In this scenario, cloud computing is becoming a promising technology to provide a flexible stack of massive computing, storage, and software services in a scalable and virtualized manner at low cost. Therefore, in recent years, Sensor-Cloud infrastructure is becoming popular that can provide an open, flexible, and reconfigurable platform for several monitoring and controlling applications. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of representative works on Sensor-Cloud infrastructure, which will provide general readers an overview of the Sensor-Cloud platform including its definition, architecture, and applications. The research challenges, existing solutions, and approaches as well as future research directions are also discussed in this paper.

Health-CPS: Healthcare Cyber-Physical System Assisted by Cloud and Big Data

The advances in information technology have witnessed great progress on healthcare technologies in various domains nowadays. However, these new technologies have also made healthcare data not only much bigger but also much more difficult to handle and process. Moreover, because the data are created from a variety of devices within a short time span, the characteristics of these data are that they are stored in different formats and created quickly, which can, to a large extent, be regarded as a big data problem. To provide a more convenient service and environment of healthcare, this paper proposes a cyber-physical system for patient-centric healthcare applications and services, called Health-CPS, built on cloud and big data analytics technologies. This system consists of a data collection layer with a unified standard, a data management layer for distributed storage and parallel computing, and a data-oriented service layer. The results of this study show that the technologies of cloud and big data can be used to enhance the performance of the healthcare system so that humans can then enjoy various smart healthcare applications and services.

AIWAC: affective interaction through wearable computing and cloud technology

To reduce the heavy burden from rapidly growing demands of healthcare service, wearable computing-assisted healthcare has been proposed for health monitoring and remote medical care. Although the provisioning of healthcare services can be significantly enhanced via wearable-enabled technologies, great challenges arise due to the lack of a human-centric mechanism for affective interaction. In this article, we propose a novel architecture, Affective Interaction through Wearable Computing and Cloud Technology (AIWAC), which includes three components: collaborative data collection via wearable devices, enhanced sentiment analysis and forecasting models, and controllable affective interactions. Based on the proposed architecture, we present our AIWAC testbed, design a practical mechanism for wearable computing-based emotional interaction, and discuss its open problems, which inspire potential research as a new direction.

Classification of the state-of-the-art dynamic web services composition techniques

Dynamic web service composition can serve applications or users on an on-demand basis. With dynamic composition, the applications capabilities can be extended at runtime so that theoretically an unlimited number of new services can be created from a limited set of service components, thus making applications no longer restricted to the original set of operations specified and envisioned at design and/or compile time. Moreover, dynamic composition is the only means to adapt the behaviour of running components in highly available applications such as, banking and telecommunication systems where services cannot be brought offline to upgrade or remove obsolete services. In this paper, we present a novel classification of the current state-of-the-art dynamic web services composition techniques with attention to the capabilities and limitations of the underlying approaches. The proposed taxonomy of these techniques is derived based on a comprehensive survey of what has been done so far in dynamic web service composition. Finally, we summarise our findings and present a vision for future research work in this area.

Haptic Virtual Rehabilitation Exercises for Poststroke Diagnosis

Nowadays, stroke is one of the most frequent causes of severe adult disability in the world. Virtual reality and haptic technologies have emerged as promising assistive tools for effective diagnosis and rehabilitation intervention. The objective of this paper is to develop and test a set of five virtual exercises on top of a framework, which is designed for the diagnosis and rehabilitation of patients with hand impairments. We have implemented task-oriented exercises based on well-established and common exercises, namely the Jebsen Test of Hand Function and the Box and Block Test. These include moving a cup, arranging blocks, navigating a maze, training with a dumbbell, and grasping a rubber ball. Furthermore, key performance measures (metrics) are proposed for each exercise to quantitatively evaluate and judge the performance of stroke patients. Our evaluation of these exercises shows promising potential to define ldquogoldenrdquo reference metrics for healthy subjects, against which the performance of a patient is compared. This will facilitate the ability of occupational therapists to assess the patients progress.

CADRE: Cloud-Assisted Drug REcommendation Service for Online Pharmacies

With the development of e-commerce, a growing number of people prefer to purchase medicine online for the sake of convenience. However, it is a serious issue to purchase medicine blindly without necessary medication guidance. In this paper, we propose a novel cloud-assisted drug recommendation (CADRE), which can recommend users with top-N related medicines according to symptoms. In CADRE, we first cluster the drugs into several groups according to the functional description information, and design a basic personalized drug recommendation based on user collaborative filtering. Then, considering the shortcomings of collaborative filtering algorithm, such as computing expensive, cold start, and data sparsity, we propose a cloud-assisted approach for enriching end-user Quality of Experience (QoE) of drug recommendation, by modeling and representing the relationship of the user, symptom and medicine via tensor decomposition. Finally, the proposed approach is evaluated with experimental study based on a real dataset crawled from Internet.

A reference model for dynamic web service composition systems

Web services have become an emerging and promising technology to design and build complex business applications out of atomic web-based software components. To enforce extensive software reuse and dynamic adaptation, dynamic service composition has experienced an increasing interest in research efforts. Together, the lack of a general conceptual reference model for dynamic web service composition systems and the widespread use of these systems in service-enabled applications constitute a problem of management for these systems. To capture the requirements and challenges of these composition systems, a survey of a representative set of these systems is presented. In this paper, we develop a reference model for describing the functional structure and evaluating the performance of dynamic web service composition systems based on existing dynamic web service composition platforms and prototypes. To the best of our knowledge there has been no such model in the literature.

Traffic Priority and Load Adaptive MAC Protocol for QoS Provisioning in Body Sensor Networks

Body sensor networks (BSNs) carry heterogeneous traffic types having diverse QoS requirements, such as delay, reliability and throughput. In this paper, we design a priority-based traffic load adaptive medium access control (MAC) protocol for BSNs, namely, PLA-MAC, which addresses the aforementioned requirements and maintains efficiency in power consumption. In PLA-MAC, we classify sensed data packets according to their QoS requirements and accordingly calculate their priorities. The transmission schedules of the packets are determined based on their priorities. Also, the superframe structure of the proposed protocol varies depending on the amount of traffic load and thereby ensures minimal power consumption. Our performance evaluation shows that the PLA-MAC achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art protocols.

Evaluating the impact of a cloud-based serious game on obese people

This paper describes the process of monitoring obese people through a cloud-based serious game that promotes them to engage in physical exercises in a playful manner. The monitoring process focuses on obtaining various health and exercise-related parameters of obese during game-play, such as heart rate, weight, step count and calorie burn, which contributes to their weight loss. While the obese are engaged in the game session, therapists/caregivers can access their health data anytime, anywhere and from any device to change the game complexity level and accordingly provide on the spot recommendation. In our study, we evaluate how the different physical activities performed through this game impact their cognitive behavior in terms of attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction. The evaluation was based on the participation of 150 undergraduate obese and overweight students who were asked to play the game and fill a questionnaire after game-play. The data analysis conducted on their feedback showed that they were self-aware and motivated to play the game for weight loss.

A buffer-aware HTTP live streaming approach for SDN-enabled 5G wireless networks

With increasing interest in the concept of 5G wireless networks and the popularization of mobile devices, users gradually watch videos through mobile devices in streaming mode rather than off-line mode. However, the latency and lags of mobile networks will reduce the quality of service. In HTTP live streaming services, when there are multiple sources for the same content stored in the streaming servers, the suited quality content is able to be selected for playing according to the networking bandwidth conditions between servers and user equipment, and the users can obtain appropriate streaming quality automatically. However, the selection policy is difficult to be approved between 5G wireless communication networks and SDNs. In this study a buffer-aware HTTP live streaming approach is proposed, which evaluates the weights of media segments to decide the transmitting priorities based on the current playing time and adjust the appropriate transmission path through the decision making network controller according to the utilization and stability of the routers and switches in SDN. Finally, the experimental results proved that the approach is able to correct the overall streaming source sequence with the buffer status to effectively upgrade overall streaming service quality, as well as maintain a certain level of streaming quality for SDN-enable 5G wireless networks.