Mersini Paschou

Health Internet of Things: Metrics and methods for efficient data transfer

Abstract The rapid development of modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in recent years and their introduction into people’s daily lives worldwide, has led to new circumstances at all levels of the social environment. In health care in particular, sensors and data links offer potential for constant monitoring of patient’s symptoms and needs, in real time, enabling physicians to diagnose and monitor health problems wherever the patient is, either at home or outdoors. However, the use of Internet of Things concepts in the health domain does not come without extra data and therefore a data transfer cost overheads. To deal with these overheads, novel metrics, and methods are introduced in an attempt to maximize the capabilities and widen acceptance/usage provided by the Internet of Things. Without losing its generality, the method discussed is experimentally evaluated in the paradigm of the Health domain. The focus is on the need for an overview of available data formats and transmission methods and selection of the optimal combination, which can result to reduction/minimization of costs. An analytic methodology is presented backed with theoretical metrics and evaluated experimentally.

easyHealthApps: e-Health Apps Dynamic Generation for Smartphones & Tablets

Mobile phones and especially smartphones have been embraced by a rapidly increasing number of people worldwide and this trend is expected to evolve even more in the years to come. There are numerous smartphone Apps that record critical medical data in an effort to solve a particular health issue each time. We studied such applications and not surprisingly, we have found that development and design effort is often repeated. Software patterns have been detected to exist, however re-usability has not been enforced. This leads to lost programming manpower and to increased probability of repeating bugs in Apps. Moreover, at the moment smartphone e-Health Apps demand time, effort and costs for development. Unfortunately even simple data recording Apps are practically impossible to be produced by multiple health domain users who are not developers. In this work, we propose, design and implement a simple and integrated solution which gives healthcare professionals and researchers the ability to create their own data intensive smartphone applications, independent of the desired healthcare domain. The proposed approach applies efficient software techniques that hide development from the users and enable App creation through a simple Web User Interface. The Apps produced are in native format and it is possible to dynamically receive m-Health business logic and the chosen UI. Evaluation of the proposed solution has shown that the generated Apps are functionally and UI equivalent to human-coded Apps according to a number of comparison parameters. Furthermore, e-Health professionals show particular interest in developing Apps on their own for a particular domain they focus on.

Intelligent Mobile Recommendations for Exhibitions Using Indoor Location Services

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are utilized in an increasing number of museums and collection exhibitions world-wide. In this chapter, we present novel fully-automatic mobile assistant with indoor recommendation services. We will discuss novel efficient techniques in order to provide within a single software solution (a) typical, (b) semi automatic and (c) seamless-no human interaction tour guidance and recommendations during an exhibition tour. We have designed, developed, deployed and evaluated the solution at a real case exhibition to provide at a users’ level an intelligent personalized virtual guide. The provided solution aims to assist visitors and to provide full automatic multimedia or audio guidance during exhibition visits using Wi-Fi based indoor and outdoor positioning, mobile messaging and wireless data provisioning. In the proposed chapter we will discuss the design, implementation, deployment and outcomes of the research and development endeavor for the integration of mobile multimedia, positioning and messaging services into a novel automatic personalized exhibition recommender-assistant. Deployment and evaluation issues of the proposed solution will be discussed for the case of the Museum “Digital Exhibition of History of Olympic Games in Antiquity” in Ancient Olympia (Greece, EU).

Care@HOME: A Mobile Monitoring System for Patient Treatment and Blood Pressure Tracking

In this paper, we propose an integrated system for mobile monitoring of patient treatment and blood pressure tracking. Care@Home delivers functionality to the patient’s smartphone using an intelligent mobile App. It consists of desktop applications and loosely coupled Web Services that allow patient and doctors to interact through either a common Web database or directly through SMS text message mobile notifications. Key features of the proposed solution are (a) the dynamic character of the smartphone App (it is not a static App!), which is possible to receive treatment updates from the doctor remotely and (b) the careful design to deliver alerting on treatment and blood pressure tracking in terms of measurement and instant doctor notification in case of warning levels detection. Care@HOME App stores locally in a smartphone database all measurements taken, beside online Web database storage. In this way, it is possible to minimize data access costs and deliver the measurements during the next doctor visit and only warning level may be transmitted using SMS text messages. Initial evaluation of the prototype has already shown encouraging results.

e-souvenir appification: QoS web based media delivery for museum apps

The advent and recent proliferation of applications, created for smartphones and tablets, has altered the way users interact with information that is available online. Appification has been recently introduced to describe the rapidly widening shift from Web browsing to the usage of smartphone Apps for Internet-based information access and e-services consumption. In this paper, we present a solution that introduces e-souvenir (digital souvenir), extending the appification of e-shopping and shopping (non electronic) souvenirs while visiting cultural sights (e.g. museum, exhibitions etc). Instead of just buying a souvenir from a museum, the proposed smartphone App increases user involvement in order to personalize the App with his/her choices while sight-seeing and thus, such choices form an electronic souvenir: the e-souvenir. Additionally, our approach introduces intelligent Quality of Service (QoS) enabled features to the cultural smartphone App to improve user’s experience, while using it at cultural sights and points of interest. We facilitate efficient QoS-based media delivery to the e-souvenir solution in order to make it efficient to operate under heavy network traffic load and best-effort Internet-based connections. This is especially important to handle bottlenecks that occur, when tourists gather the most popular exhibits within the exhibition rooms, and when they visit the museum in groups (e.g. schools, cruises etc). The proposed solution is a tool for better understanding and appreciation of the cultural exhibits while being on site, and it serves as an electronic souvenir in the post-visit experience. We show how QoS assurance techniques enable efficient media delivery through smartphones to assist making the old fashioned shopping souvenirs to go online and become virtual. The proposed QoS enabled smartphone solution serves as a high quality digital souvenir after museums’ visits. This solution has already received warm feedback and encouraging comments by tourist and museum professionals.

Exposing click-fraud using a burst detection algorithm

The explosive growth in the size and use of the World Wide Web continuously creates new great challenges and needs. One such need is dealing with click fraud, which aims at increasing clicks on certain ads and thus the profit of the websites which display them. In this work, we extend the concept of click fraud and redefine it as any pattern of clicks whose goal is to alternate the normal operation of a website in order to produce specific results. An indication of a click fraud may be a burst of clicks that can be simulated by an automated program or script. We deal with the problem of efficient real-time Click Fraud detection utilizing advanced data structures and exploiting their advantages concerning space and time required.

MobiQ: Mobile Based Processes for Efficient Customer Flow Management

Queues are still a part of the everyday life, though Internet and mobile technologies are already available. Queues are formed whenever a bottleneck of customer demand for a service appears. There are workarounds for customer flow management or queue management in order to provide a level of freedom to the customers such as queue ticket numbers. However, there can be many more things that can be done to free additional time for the customer until his/her turn comes to be services. In this work, we propose an solution framework for servicing customer flow with live feedback. Our goal is to improve customers’ experience and Quality of Services (QoS), by integrating mobile access with Short Message Service (SMS) to improve customer flow in popular crowded services, where long queues are created. A fully functioning real life prototype is presented, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness in terms of time and effort.

Interoperability and Design Issues of Spatial Data and Geographic Information Systems in Greece

The heterogeneity of spatial planning data is a well known problem that admittedly limits its use and provokes numerous difficulties to planners, investors as well as decision makers. Spatial planning is confronted with a huge problem concerning the diversity in data collection, storing, processing and provision. These challenges constitute the main concern of the Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community Directive (INSPIRE). Spatial infrastructure processes can be supported by increasing transparency and developing shared methodologies. This on-going research presents the current situation in Greece and the EU Initiative on spatial data interoperability and its design effects on GIS. It identifies the problems that need to be encountered and recommends information and communication (ICT) approaches and tools suitable to overcome them.

Mobile Data Fusion for Maritime Surveillance

Maritime surveillance operations are needed worldwide to monitor and reassure safety and security across the seas. Numerous devices are employed in order to provide situational awareness of the vast sea. Lots of different technologies are involved to provide multiple views and clarify maritime conditions at a given time and place, however making interoperability a real challenge. The task is even more tedious as there is a key request to provide a single window view for multiple even all possible inputs. In this work we present an integrated mobile fusion solution for multiple tracking and monitoring sensors (e.g. low weight/high performance radar, position transmission mechanisms and electro-optic/systems and hyper-spectral sensors) to assist the detection and early identification and tracking of moving targets (e.g. with moving target indication and data fusion/correlation capabilities), as well as methods for obstacle detection and maritime surveillance. This innovative single window mobile platform presents high efficiency, low operational costs profiles and contributes to standardization in construction as it utilizes typical tracking infrastructure and standard smartphones and tablets.

Enhancing Business APPification Using SMS Text Messages: Metrics, Strategies and Alternatives

Mobile App stores and marketplaces allow sellers and developers to monetize their Apps mainly through the desktop-based download point, or by using the mobile owner’s credit card. We would like to turn monetization focus on the fact that there is already another payment channel that should not be overseen, which is fruitfully used through the premium SMSs. In this work, we propose new metrics and strategies to enhance business APPification using SMSs efficiently and effectively, in two ways: a) SMS as a premium text service can be the mean to monetize Apps more easily than using HTTP protocol and credit cards – premium SMSs cost more than regular SMSs and return usage earnings. b) SMSs can be widely used as an additional “web” data transport protocol that may reduce user data access costs in some cases and therefore, allow new margin for monetization of apps. We also show prototype results that the proposed strategies and metrics assist.