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An off-the-shelf platform for automatic and interactive text messaging using Short Message Service

Publication . Oliveira, Daniel Sabugueiro; Santos, Nuno Manuel Garcia dos; Esgalhado, Maria da Graça Proença

This dissertation presents the design and construction of a platform for the implementation of an automatic and interactive message exchanging system using Short Message Service (SMS), also known as texting, created to support a research on the Psychology field. The research included researchers from the Psychology and Education Department and the Computer Science Department from University of Beira Interior making it a multidisciplinary study. Its goal was to assess if the exposure to motivational, persuasive and informative SMS texts could improve the self-efficacy of mathematics students from that university. The platform was devised to use low cost off-the-shelf parts, yet allowing the design of an efficient and robust system. The source code for the SMS system is publicly available at the Assisted Living Computing and Telecommunications (ALLab) website.

2014-10-24Master thesis

Open access

Performance evaluation of cooperation strategies for m-health services and applications

Publication . Silva, Bruno Miguel Correia; Rodrigues, Joel José Puga Coelho

Health telematics are becoming a major improvement for patients’ lives, especially for disabled, elderly, and chronically ill people. Information and communication technologies have rapidly grown along with the mobile Internet concept of anywhere and anytime connection. In this context, Mobile Health (m-Health) proposes healthcare services delivering, overcoming geographical, temporal and even organizational barriers. Pervasive and m-Health services aim to respond several emerging problems in health services, including the increasing number of chronic diseases related to lifestyle, high costs in existing national health services, the need to empower patients and families to self-care and manage their own healthcare, and the need to provide direct access to health services, regardless the time and place. Mobile Health (m- Health) systems include the use of mobile devices and applications that interact with patients and caretakers. However, mobile devices have several constraints (such as, processor, energy, and storage resource limitations), affecting the quality of service and user experience. Architectures based on mobile devices and wireless communications presents several challenged issues and constraints, such as, battery and storage capacity, broadcast constraints, interferences, disconnections, noises, limited bandwidths, and network delays. In this sense, cooperation-based approaches are presented as a solution to solve such limitations, focusing on increasing network connectivity, communication rates, and reliability. Cooperation is an important research topic that has been growing in recent years. With the advent of wireless networks, several recent studies present cooperation mechanisms and algorithms as a solution to improve wireless networks performance. In the absence of a stable network infrastructure, mobile nodes cooperate with each other performing all networking functionalities. For example, it can support intermediate nodes forwarding packets between two distant nodes. This Thesis proposes a novel cooperation strategy for m-Health services and applications. This reputation-based scheme uses a Web-service to handle all the nodes reputation and networking permissions. Its main goal is to provide Internet services to mobile devices without network connectivity through cooperation with neighbor devices. Therefore resolving the above mentioned network problems and resulting in a major improvement for m-Health network architectures performances. A performance evaluation of this proposal through a real network scenario demonstrating and validating this cooperative scheme using a real m-Health application is presented. A cryptography solution for m-Health applications under cooperative environments, called DE4MHA, is also proposed and evaluated using the same real network scenario and the same m-Health application. Finally, this work proposes, a generalized cooperative application framework, called MobiCoop, that extends the incentive-based cooperative scheme for m-Health applications for all mobile applications. Its performance evaluation is also presented through a real network scenario demonstrating and validating MobiCoop using different mobile applications.

2015-02Doctoral thesis

Open access

Usage of KINECT to detect walking problems of elder people

Publication . Jesus, Pedro Alexandre Lopes de; Santos, Nuno Manuel Garcia dos; Pombo, Nuno Gonçalo Coelho Costa

The dissertation addresses the problem in analyzing and detecting the lack of mobility in the elder population, while enabling a rapid intervention by specialized and able people that can help improve their movement quality. In order to achieve a solution to the problem above, we used the motion detection and gestures device named Kinect, developed by Microsoft, which allowed the recording of all the movements performed by a set of randomly selected people, for the purpose of obtaining data that will allow us to further analysis and classification of motor skills on every person. Additionally, it was necessary to create an application that can extract relevant information generated by the video Kinect and treat this information in order to carry out the person movements classification. Thus, the application is divided into three main steps: -Obtaining the XYZ coordinates, for a relevant set of bones of the person skeleton, in all the recorded frames as well as the total duration of the movement itself; -Extracted data treatment and standardization, so it can later be used in the classifier; -Creation of a classifier using neural networks methodology, which uses the standardized data in order to classify the person movement, according to its quality (existence of a mobility deficit or not). Throughout the dissertation will be described every step of the development process, since the proposed solution design until the code of the developed classes.

2017-11-10Master thesis

Open access

Convergência de redes sem fios para comunicações M2M e internet das coisas em ambientes inteligentes

Publication . Gouveia, Paulo Renato Neves Torres; Velez, Fernando José da Silva

Actualmente, os Ambientes Inteligentes (AmI) estão a emergir através da convergência entre as redes de comunicação sem fios, a microelectrónica e a Internet. Este tipo de aplicações cria novas perspectivas no âmbito da partilha de informação dentro das sociedades humanas, ao mesmo tempo que surgem ideias inovadoras envolvendo espaços, objectos e entidades físicas com as quais lidamos diariamente. Com os AmI e as redes de comunicação, a partilha de informação passa a englobar coisas físicas que geram e disponibilizam dados sobre si mesmas. Nesta dissertação foram enquadradas as tecnologias de informação e a convergência entre redes de comunicação sem fios heterogéneas que suportam as aplicações dos AmI. Daqui surgem dois conceitos extremamente relevantes: a Internet of Things (IoT) e as comunicações Machine-to-Machine (M2M). A IoT, além de fornecedora de serviços virtuais, integra objectos físicos com representação virtual, interligados em rede para partilharem informação sobre vários factores. As comunicações M2M resultam da convergência de redes heterogéneas que permitem a comunicação directa entre dispositivos e objectos sem qualquer intervenção humana. A IoT é no fundo a base principal para a interligação das várias redes M2M entre objectos. As comunicações M2M são formadas por dois tipos de sub-redes: redes capilares e redes celulares. As redes capilares são compostas pelos dispositivos e os objectos embutidos nos ambientes inteligentes, que geram e difundem dados. As redes celulares são a espinha dorsal para a partilha destes dados através da Internet e centros de dados. As redes de sensores sem fios (RSSF), em conjunto com a norma IEEE 802.15.4, foram abordadas nesta dissertação para integrarem as redes capilares. As RSSF são redes com ritmos de transmissão e potência reduzida, que possibilitam o desenvolvimento de uma vasta variedade de aplicações AmI. Foi elaborado um estudo sobre a eficiência energética dos dispositivos RSSF disponíveis no mercado. A interligação das RSSF com a Internet é possível através da atribuição de endereços IPv6 aos dispositivos das RSSF. A camada de adaptação 6LoWPAN possibilita a atribuição de endereços IPv6 com overheads bastante reduzidos. Para permitir a máxima eficiência das RSSF, integradas com a IoT, foi adoptado o protocolo de encaminhamento RPL, desenvolvido no âmbito das redes 6LoWPAN. A contribuição principal desta dissertação centra-se na identificação e resolução de problemas ao nível do encaminhamento nas RSSFs, e no estudo de algumas métricas utilizadas para calcular o custo dos encaminhamentos entre nós. O protocolo RPL foi implementado no simulador OMNeT++ com o objectivo de analisar os resultados e os comportamentos das métricas de custo ETX, HOP-COUNT e RSSI. O ETX atingiu os melhores resultados para o débito binário útil, entre 75 % e 95 %, enquanto o HOP-COUNT tem resultados abaixo do 50 %. Contudo, o HOP-COUNT tem tempos de convergência superiores e latências inferiores. Com o RSSI obtêm-se resultados modestos e provou-se ser esta uma métrica de custo bastante precisa e equilibrada em todos os resultados.

2013-10Master thesis

Open access

An ambient assisted living solution for mobile environments

Publication . Horta, Edgar Tavares da; Rodrigues, Joel José Puga Coelho

An Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) mobile health application solution with biofeedback based on body sensors is very useful to perform a data collection for diagnosis in patients whose clinical conditions are not favourable. This system allows comfort, mobility, and efficiency in all the process of data collection providing more confidence and operability. A physical fall may be considered something natural in the life span of a human being from birth to death. In a perfect scenario it would be possible to predict when a fall will occur in order to avoid it. Falls represent a high risk for senior people health. Those falls can cause fractures or injuries causing great dependence and debilitation to the elderly and even death in extreme cases. Falls can be detected by the accelerometer included in most of the available mobile phones or portable digital assistants (PDAs). To reverse this tendency, it can be obtained more accurate data for patients monitoring from the body sensors attached to the human body (such as, electrocardiogram (ECG), electromyography (EMG), blood volume pulse (BVP), electro dermal activity (EDA), and galvanic skin response (GSR)). Then, this dissertation reviews the related literature on this topic and introduces a mobile solution for falls prevention, detection, and biofeedback monitoring. The proposed system collects sensed data that is sent to a smartphone or tablet through Bluetooth. Mobile devices are used to process and display information graphically to users. The falls prevention system uses collected data from sensors in order to control and advice the patient or even to give instructions to treat an abnormal condition to reduce the falls risk. In cases of symptoms that last more time it can even detect a possible disease. The signal processing algorithms plays a key role in the fall prevention system. These algorithms in real time, through the capture of biofeedback data, are needed to extract relevant information from the signals detected to warn the patient. Monitoring and processing data from sensors is realized by a smartphone or tablet that will send warnings to users. All the process is performed in real time. These mobile devices are also used as a gateway to send the collected data to a Web service, which subsequently allows data storage and consultation. The proposed system is evaluated, demonstrated, and validated through a prototype and it is ready for use.

2013-11-7Master thesis

Open access