Hussein Al Osman

ECG Authentication for Mobile Devices

Traditional mobile login methods, like numerical or graphical passwords, are vulnerable to passive attacks. It is common for intruders to gain access to personal information of their victims by watching them enter their passwords into their mobile screens from a close proximity. With this in mind, a mobile biometric authentication algorithm based on electrocardiogram (ECG) is proposed. With this algorithm, the user will only need to touch two ECG electrodes (lead I) of the mobile device to gain access. The algorithm was tested with a cell phone case heart monitor in a controlled laboratory experiment at different times and conditions with ten subjects and also with 73 records obtained from the Physionet database. The obtained results reveal that our algorithm has 1.41% false acceptance rate and 81.82% true acceptance rate with 4 s of signal acquisition. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach on mobile authentication that uses ECG biometric signals and it shows a promising future for this technology. Nonetheless, further improvements are still needed to optimize accuracy while maintaining a short acquisition time for authentication.

Affective Haptics: Current Research and Future Directions

Touch plays a prominent role in communicating emotions and intensifying interpersonal communication. Affective haptics is an emerging field, which focuses on the analysis, design, and evaluation of systems that can capture, process, or display emotions through the sense of touch. The objective of this paper is to present an overview of the recent achievements in affective haptics and to discuss how the sense of touch can elicit or influence human emotions. We first introduce a definition to the term affective haptics and describe its multidisciplinary nature-as a field that integrates ideas from affective computing, haptic technology, and user experience. Second, we provide a thorough discussion about the effectiveness of using the haptic channel to communicate affective information through direct and mediated means. Third, we present a variety of applications in the area ranging from interhuman social interaction systems to human robot interaction applications. Finally, we discuss some of the key findings discerned from the various surveyed papers, and present some of the challenges and trends in this field. We extract the following conclusions pertaining to affective haptics: 1) haptic stimulation can be successfully used to achieve a higher level of emotional immersion during media consumption or emotional telepresence; 2) existing research has demonstrated that haptics is effective in communicating valence and arousal, and the emotions of happiness, sadness, anger and fear, and less focus have been given to the communication of disgust and surprise; 3) the haptic-based affect detection remains an understudied topic, whereas the haptic-based affect display is a well-established subject; and 4) the interpretation of the haptic stimulation by human beings is highly contextual.

Towards context-sensitive collaborative media recommender system

With the rapid increase of social media resources and services, Internet users are overwhelmed by the vast quantity of social media available. Most recommender systems personalize multimedia content to the users by analyzing two main dimensions of input: content (item), and user (consumer). In this study, we address the issue of how to improve the recommendation and the quality of the user experience by analyzing the contextual aspect of the users, at the time when they wish to consume multimedia content. Mainly, we highlight the potential of including a user’s biological signal and leveraging it within an adapted collaborative filtering algorithm. First, the proposed model utilizes existing online social networks by incorporating social tags and rating information in ways that personalize the search for content in a particular detected context. Second, we propose a recommendation algorithm to improve the user experience and satisfaction with the use of a biosignal in the recommendation process. Our experimental results show the feasibility of personalizing the recommendation according to the user’s context, and demonstrate some improvement on cold start situations where relatively little information is known about a user or an item.

Leveraging biosignal and collaborative filtering for context-aware recommendation

Recommender systems are powerful tools that support the user in their quest to find the multimedia they are looking for. Such systems present multimedia contents or provide recommendations by taking into consideration two dimensions of inputs: content (item), and user (consumer). Little attention has been paid to increasing the quality of the experience by understanding the contextual aspect of the user when he/she wants to consume multimedia content. By including users biological signal and leveraging collaborative filtering, we can build a context-aware model that establish the bridge between the multimedia content, and the users context containing physiological parameters. Hence, the proposed model finds the latent preferences of users in a given context from other similar users. The model also finds the latent items consumed in a given context from other similar items. We then map context-based items for a particular user to find most relevant items in that context. Our experimental results have shown the feasibility to personalize the recommendation according to the users context.

Ubiquitous Biofeedback Serious Game for Stress Management

Serious games augment utilitarian applications with an entertainment dimension. Hence, information pertaining to a utilitarian objective is seamlessly incorporated into the gaming scenario. In this paper, we present the concept of ubiquitous biofeedback serious games (UBSGs), a family of games that integrate biofeedback processes in their operation. They rely on physiological inputs collected from the player through biological sensors for game control. These physiological inputs are converted into quantifiable parameters that reflect the status of a certain physiological process. To prove the practicality of this concept, we develop a UBSG aimed at providing mental stress management services to players. We assess the ability of the game feedback to assist players in modulating their behavior to reduce their stress levels. In our evaluation, we have shown that the majority of participating subjects showed more control over their mental stress when game feedback was enabled.

Toward Delay-Efficient Game-Aware Data Centers for Cloud Gaming

Gaming on demand is an emerging service that has recently started to garner prominence in the gaming industry. Cloud-based video games provide affordable, flexible, and high-performance solutions for end-users with constrained computing resources and enables them to play high-end graphic games on low-end thin clients. Despite its advantages, cloud gamings Quality of Experience (QoE) suffers from high and varying end-to-end delay. Since the significant part of computational processing, including game rendering and video compression, is performed in data centers, controlling the transfer of information within the cloud has an important impact on the quality of cloud gaming services. In this article, a novel method for minimizing the end-to-end latency within a cloud gaming data center is proposed. We formulate an optimization problem for reducing delay, and propose a Lagrangian Relaxation (LR) time-efficient heuristic algorithm as a practical solution. Simulation results indicate that the heuristic method can provide close-to-optimal solutions. Also, the proposed model reduces end-to-end delay and delay variation by almost 11% and 13.5%, respectively, and outperforms the existing server-centric and network-centric models. As a byproduct, our proposed method also achieves better fairness among multiple competing players by almost 45%, on average, in comparison with existing methods.

The HTML5 Haptics Plugin

The World Wide Web has gone a long way from its humble beginnings when simple browsers exclusively supported plain textual layouts. Nowadays, it is not uncommon for web browsers to support 3D graphics as part of a colorful palette of contents available for developers in order to relay intended information. With the formal support of WebGL in HTML 5, the stage has been set to even further augment the web experience with haptic enabled content. This paper presents the development of the HTML5 Haptics Plugin, a browser extension that enables a web based force feedback experience. Also, the paper discusses the development of a haptics enabled web application designed for educational purposes.

R-peak detection algorithm based on differentiation

This paper presents an R peak detection algorithm for ECG signals based on the second derivative. Such R peak detection techniques offer low average time error and are computationally inexpensive. However, previously proposed methods based on the second derivatives suffer from low sensitivity and positive predictivity. In this study, we introduce a new mechanism at the peaks detector stage to resolve the aforementioned issues. We compared our proposed algorithm to an existing one that is also based on second derivative. The obtained results show an improvement in terms of sensitivity and positive predictivity, while maintaining a low average time error.

A Framework of Reconfigurable Transducer Nodes for Smart Home Environments

This letter presents a transducer network framework that supports the amalgamation of multiple transducers into single wireless nodes. This approach is aimed at decreasing energy consumption by reducing the number of wireless transceivers involved in such networks. To make wireless nodes easily reconfigurable, a plug and play mechanism is applied to enable the clustering of any number of transducers. Furthermore, an algorithm is proposed to dynamically detect added and removed transducers from a node. Lastly, an XML based protocol is devised to allow nodes to communicate a description of their layout, measured data and control information. To verify the proposed framework, multiple reconfigurable wireless nodes are used to monitor the dynamic condition of a multiple rooms during a period of 24 hours in order to emulate a smart home scenario.

SmartPads: a plug-N-play configurable tangible user interface

One common concern with video games today is the lack of physical activity they demand from the user. The design of games and tangible user interfaces (TUIs) that stimulate players and engage them into fun exercising activities is starting to attract the attention of many researchers and companies. This paper presents the software and hardware design and development of a TUI intended for exercise-based games targeted mostly towards children. The proposed TUI, SmartPads, can be constructed using elemental building blocks (pads) into numerous shapes. The pads-which are individually controlled by microcontrollers-are mapped onto a computer screen in real-time. A user interacts with the TUI by stepping on the pads. To evaluate the functionality and efficiency of the TUI, we developed three games in the field of exergaming. The games also have an educational value and are integrated with multimedia output modalities to enrich children’s playing experience.