Mahmood Ashraf

Towards Natural Interaction with Wheelchair Using Nintendo Wiimote Controller

The importance of natural interaction increases when the subjects are disabled people. It has been found that embedded solutions for impaired people lack in fluid interaction properties. This work investigates the interface design of a wheelchair controller according to the rules of physicality. Our aim is to provide further ease of use to the impaired whilst strengthening link between embedded software engineering and human-computer interaction. We propose an improved multi-function interface design by using Nintendo’s Wiimote that is more intuitive, robust, low cost, and most importantly, natural to use.

Effect of thesaurus size on schema matching quality

Thesaurus is used in many Information Retrieval (IR) applications such as data integration, data warehousing, semantic query processing and schema matching. Schema matching or mapping is one of the most important basic steps in data integration. It is the process of identifying the semantic correspondence or equivalent between two or more schemas. Considering the fact of the existence of many thesauri for identical knowledge domain, the quality and the change in the results of schema matching when using different thesauri in specific knowledge field are not predictable. In this research, we studied the effect of thesaurus size on schema matching quality by conducting many experiments using different thesauri. In addition, a new method in calculating the similarity between vectors extracted from thesaurus database is proposed. The method is based on the ratio of individual shared elements to the elements in the compound set of the vectors. Moreover, we explained in details the efficient algorithm used in searching thesaurus database. After describing the experiments, results that show enhancement in the average of the similarity is presented. The completeness, effectiveness, and their harmonic mean measures were calculated to quantify the quality of matching. Experiments on two different thesauri show positive results with average Precision of 35% and a less value in the average of Recall. The effect of thesaurus size on the quality of matching was statically insignificant; however, other factors affecting the output and the exact value of change are still in the focus of our future study.

Position adjustment-based location error-resilient geo-opportunistic routing for void hole avoidance in underwater sensor networks: Geo-opportunistic routing for void hole avoidance in underwater WSNs

This paper presents four routing protocols for Underwater Sensor Networks (USNs): Location Error–resilient Transmission Range adjustment–based protocol (LETR), Mobile Sink–based GEographic and Opportunistic Routing (MSGER), Mobile Sink–based LETR (MSLETR), and Modified MSLETR (MMS‐LETR). LETR considers transmission range levels for finding neighbor nodes. If a node fails to find any neighbor node within its defined maximum transmission range level, it recovers from communication void regions using depth adjustment technology. MSGER and MSLETR avoid depth and transmission range adjustment and overcome the problem of communication void regions using MSs, whereas MMS‐LETR takes into account noise attenuation at various depth levels, elimination of retransmissions using multi‐path communication and load balancing. The performance of our proposed protocols is evaluated through simulations using different parameters. The simulation results show that MSS‐LETR supersedes all counterpart schemes in terms of packet loss ratio. LETR significantly improves network performance in terms of energy consumption, packet loss ratio, fraction of void nodes, and the total amount of depth adjustment.

A Review of SAR Hybrid De-Speckling Methods

Significance of high resolution SAR imagery is irrefutable in Earth monitoring applications as it provides valuable information to be analyzed. To examine this information, post image processing techniques such as speckle noise removal, segmentation, edge and object detection are necessary to per-form. Despeckling among them is the fundamental process that makes images visually appealing and comprehensible. This survey paper thus focuses on this primary process and investigates about the recent two-step hybrid despeckling techniques that suppress speckle noise in SAR images. The paper briefly talks about the importance of SAR imaging system, the speckle noise that distorts the information contained in them and the despeckling techniques that exist in literature to eliminate the speckle noise. The review, however, studies the hybrid despeckling techniques in detail by discussing advantages and limitations of models these techniques are following. In the end, it will provide suggestions on how to improve these models.

A Comparison of Usability Aspects between an Existing Hospital Website of Pakistan with a Template based on Usability Standards

More people search internet for medical and health information. Due to increase in demand for online health services, hospitals need to equip their websites with usability standards. Hospital websites should be user centered in order to increase the usability. In the instant research study, an existing public sector hospital website is compared with a designed template for healthcare website. Template was designed keeping in view the user demands for hospital websites. Usability evaluation of both websites has been performed. Twenty-one users were involved in the research study. Three representative tasks were performed by each user on each website and a questionnaire was presented afterwards to collect user opinion about the websites under evaluation. Average score was calculated against both websites for each usability component. 75% users responded positively to designed website template comparing with existing hospital website which got 33% positive responses only. Hence, it was evident that the designed template had better response for usability. The findings of this study justify the literature that user centered design can significantly improve usability of websites. This study is a step towards research which intends to understand usability problems and propose design rules for designing hospital websites of Pakistan in line with usability standards.

Physicality quantitative evaluation method

The physical interaction aspects of embedded systems have been neglected in comparison to internal software issues in the software engineering field. Physical interfaces suffer from interaction complexities leading to usage difficulty and poor acceptance by the end-users. Meanwhile, the usability techniques focus on the overall usability issues while overlooking the in-depth physicality aspects of the interface and interaction. This study proposes a physicality-focused quantitative evaluation method to assist the embedded system developers in managing the interaction complexities of their products. The acceptance of the embedded system developers towards the proposed method was assessed by means of a user study. The results suggested their strong acceptance. The aim of this study is to re-emphasise the natural physical aspects of embedded system interfaces leading to intuitive interaction.

Cataloguing Physicality Values Using Physical Quantitative Evaluation Method

Physical interfaces suffer from interaction complexities leading to usage difficulty and poor acceptance by the end-users. Usability techniques focus on the overall usability issues while overlooking the in-depth physicality aspects of the interface and interaction. This study proposes a physicality-focused quantitative evaluation method (PQEM) to assist embedded system developers in managing the interaction complexities of their products. The acceptance of the embedded system developers towards the proposed method was assessed by means of a user study. The results suggested their strong acceptance. By using this method, we further propose a range of values for appliances, which can be treated as a catalogue or as guidelines as they design and develop physical interfaces. A second user study was conducted to assess the acceptance of embedded system developers for the proposed catalogue. In this study, spatial cognition is concerned in assisting and facilitating the designers and developers in designing physical interfaces of embedded products. We used intensive interviewing as the cognitive method to assess the influence of the catalogue of values from PQEM on performance in designing and developing physical interfaces.