Geoff Skinner

Development and implementation of a smartphone application to promote physical activity and reduce screen-time in adolescent boys.

Purpose: To describe the development and implementation of a smartphone application (app) designed to promote physical activity and reduce screen-time in adolescent boys considered “at-risk” of obesity. Methods: An app was developed to support the delivery of a face-to-face school-based obesity prevention program known as the “Active Teen Leaders Avoiding Screen-time” (ATLAS) program. ATLAS was guided by self-determination theory and social cognitive theory and evaluated using a cluster randomized controlled trial with 361 boys (12.7 ± 0.5 years) in 14 secondary schools. Following the completion of the study, participants in the intervention group completed a process evaluation questionnaire and focus groups were conducted with 42 students to explore their general perceptions of the ATLAS program and their experience with the smartphone app. Barriers and challenges encountered in the development, implementation, and evaluation of the app are also described. Results: Participation in the study was not contingent on ownership of a smartphone, but 70% of participants in the intervention group reported having access to a smartphone or tablet device. Focus group participants reported an enjoyment of the program, and felt that it had provided them with new skills, techniques, and routines for the future. However, their engagement with the smartphone app was limited, due to a variety of reasons. Barriers to the implementation and evaluation of the app included limited access to smartphone devices, technical problems with the push notifications, lack of access to usage data, and the challenges of maintaining participants’ interest in using the app. Conclusion: Although participants reported high levels of satisfaction with the ATLAS program in general, the smartphone app was not used extensively. Additional strategies and features may be needed to enhance engagement in adolescent boys.

A holistic review of cloud-based e-learning system

Cyber education is an emerged term for the new approach of teaching and learning. It is a general term for e-learning and refers to web based learning. Various technologies have been applied in order to support and enrich the usage of e-learning. Recently, research has focused on building collaborative and interactive e-learning systems. Cloud computing is increasingly providing the underlying technology that supports, and hosts such systems. This paper provides a review of some proposed cloud-based e-learning initiatives along with the expected benefits and challenges. Based on the review, a future vision of e-learning is given.

The TLC-PP framework for delivering a Privacy Augmented Collaborative Environment (PACE)

In order to preserve privacy in electronic collaborative environments a comprehensive multidimensional privacy protecting framework is required. Such information privacy and personal data management solutions for collaborations must incorporate a number of factors and influences in order to provide a holistic information privacy solution. Our technical, legal, and community privacy protecting (TLC-PP) framework addresses the problems associated with the multi-facetted notion of privacy. The three key components of the TLC-PP framework are merged together to provide robust privacy solutions for collaborative environment stakeholders and users alike. The application of the TLC-PP framework provides a significant contribution to the delivery of a privacy augmented collaborative environment (PACE).

Modeling Decentralized Reputation-Based Trust for Initial Transactions in Digital Environments

The advent of digital environments has generated significant benefits for businesses, organizations, governments, academia and societies in general. Today, over millions of transactions take place on the Internet. Although the widespread use of digital environments has generally provided opportunities for societies, a number of threats have limited their adoption. The de-facto standard today is for certification authorities to authenticate the identity of service providers while trust on the provided services is implied. This approach has certain shortcomings, for example, single point of failure, implied trust rather than explicit trust and others. One approach for minimizing such threats is to introduce an effective and resilient trust mechanism that is capable of determining the trustworthiness of service providers in providing their services. Determining the trustworthiness of services reduces invalid transactions in digital environments and further encourages collaborations. Evaluating trustworthiness of a service provider without any prior historical transactions (i.e. the initial transaction) pose a number of challenging issues. This article presents TIDE - a decentralized reputation trust mechanism that determines the initial trustworthiness of entities in digital environments. TIDE improves the precision of trust computation by considering raters’ feedback, number of transactions, credibility, incentive to encourage raters’ participation, strategy for updating raters’ category, and safeguards against dynamic personalities. Furthermore, TIDE classifies raters into three categories and promotes the flexibility and customization through its parameters. Evaluation of TIDE against several attack vectors demonstrates its accuracy, robustness and resilience.

SECURING AND GOVERNING ACCESS IN AD-HOC NETWORKS OF INTERNET OF THINGS

The emergence of Internet of Things (IoT) brings tremendous benefits and opportunities for individuals and businesses. However, there exist several challenges that need to be addressed before a full realization of IoT can be achieved. Fundamentally, IoT enables constant transfer and sharing of data between several “things” (i.e. humans and objects) in order to achieve particular objectives. In such sharing environments, security and privacy of data and messages become important. Authentication, authorization. access control, non-repudiation are important to ensure secure communication in an IoT environment. The lack of computing resources (such as processing power, storage, etc.) and ad-hoc nature of such networks requires researcher to re-think existing techniques to adopt to such environments. In this paper, we propose a framework for authentication, authorization and access control for an IoT environment using capability tokens, PKI and encryption which aims to use minimal computing resources.

Nutrition Interventions for Prevention and Management of Childhood Obesity: What Do Parents Want from an eHealth Program?

With the growth of Internet technologies, offering interventions for child and family weight management in an online format may address barriers to accessing services. This study aimed to investigate (i) whether an eHealth family healthy lifestyle program would be of interest to parents; and (ii) preferences and/or expectations for program components and features. Parents of children aged four to18 years were recruited through social media and completed an online survey (54 items) including closed and open-ended questions. Responses were collated using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis. Seventy-five participants were included (92% mothers, mean age 39.1 ± 8.6 years, mean BMI 27.6 ± 6.3 kg/m2). The index child had a mean age of 11 ± 6.2 years with 24% overweight/obese. The majority of parents (90.3%) reported interest in an online program, with preference expressed for a non-structured program to allow flexibility users to log-on and off as desired. Parents wanted a program that was easy to use, practical, engaging, endorsed by a reputable source, and able to provide individual tailoring and for their children to be directly involved. The current study supports the need for online delivery of a healthy lifestyle program that targets greater parental concerns of diet rather than child weight.

TIDE: measuring and evaluating trustworthiness and credibility of enterprises in digital ecosystem

In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness and appropriateness of several existing trust management systems for a Digital Ecosystem (DE) environment. DE is characterized as an open and dynamic environment where the interaction and collaboration between its entities are highly promoted. A major requirement to promote such intensive interaction and collaboration is the ability of an entity to measure the trustworthiness of other entities in performing honest transactions. However, most of the proposed trust management solutions do not provide an adequate mechanism for computing the trustworthiness values into its exact measurement. In addition, the appropriateness of these solutions to meet the unique DE characteristics is still in deficient level. Therefore, we propose a distributed trust model for individual enterprises to effectively derive the trustworthiness value of an entity. This would allow them to decide which entities are trustworthy and which entities are not. This model also allows the enterprises to progressively understand the credibility of their recommender entities.

A community based authentication and authorisation mechanism for digital ecosystem

In this paper, we present a distributed mechanism for elevating resource protection in a Digital Ecosystem environment. The dynamic interaction and collaboration between Digital Ecosystem entities poise several main challenges in protecting the resources and information. First, a strong mechanism is needed to ensure only the authentic entities that are able to access the resources. Second, this mechanism must also maintain the confidentiality and integrity of resources over the untrusted network. Unfortunately, the existing mechanisms which focus on providing a centralized protection facade several issues ranging from single point failure to huge administrative burden. Therefore, we present a distributed mechanism to address these challenges. The inclusivity of community based trust approach in our mechanism further promotes its applicability to the Digital Ecosystem environment, on which it is heavily driven by the interacting entities. Public Key Infrastructure is employed to provide a strong protection during its access workflow.

Managing enterprise authentication and authorization permissions in digital ecosystem

Intense interactions between resource providers and resource consumers in collaborating and sharing their resources frequently occur in an open and dynamic Digital Ecosystem environment. Such interactions contribute to several challenges in cyber security, particularly in protecting enterprise resources from various malicious attacks. The main challenge that occurs in protecting these resources is the ability to manage multiple unique authorization permissions over the enterprise resources. Unfortunately, the inadequacies of the current security mechanisms in addressing these challenges result in a slower implementation of a potentially highly beneficial Digital Ecosystem environment. Therefore, this paper proposes a distributed mechanism for individual enterprise’ to manage its own authorization process and resource access permissions, with the aim of providing rigorous protection of the enterprise resources in question.

Determining Trustworthiness and Quality of Mobile Applications

The growth of “smart” mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, has been exponential over the past few years. Such growth was mainly attributed to the development of mobile applications. To date, mobile applications have been increasingly used to improve our productivity and also to provide the entertainment contents. However, with a huge number of mobile applications that appear in the application stores; in particular those that provide similar functionalities, users are often confused with the selection of trustworthy and high quality mobile applications. At the current state, there is a limited research embarked to provide solutions for measuring the trustworthiness of mobile applications prior to download. Thus, the aims of this paper are to review the current research in this area and to discuss several issues in measuring the trustworthiness of mobile applications. In addition, this paper also proposes MobilTrust, a similarity trust measurement method to solve the identified issues.