Blekinge Institute of Technology
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Psychophysiological Interaction : Symbiosis Between Players and Video Games
No full textPsychophysiological interaction offers the opportunity of delivering unique and innovative experiences that synergize with human physiological and psychological nature. Even though several publications have explored the use of psychophysiological interaction in video games in the past, there is still a set of challenges associated with its suitability for commercial entertainment games, and with the assessment of its relationship with the perceived player experience. This dissertation explores psychophysiological interaction and its implementation within entertainment video games. It presents a review of multiple physiological methods, such as eye tracking, electrodermal activity, or electroencephalography, and discusses the possibilities and challenges that these methodologies offer for the design and implementation of natural user interaction techniques. The dissertation presents a set of user studies that evaluated the efficiency of psychophysiological interaction in desktop and virtual reality video games, and statistically assessed how the variations of player physiological data may relate to their respective changes in the perceived player experience. The dissertation also offers a set of ethical and methodological guidelines for the appropriate design of novel interaction techniques, and for the safe exposure of physiological sensors and virtual reality technologies to the general public. The results obtained from this research show that the implementation of psychophysiological interaction in entertainment video games tends to positively affect player experience. However, this benefit comes as a tradeoff to player performance and their perceived sense of control. Additionally, the variations in electrodermal activity data, specifically in the skin conductance level, showed a tendency to correlate with negative player experience variables. Finally, psychophysiological interaction should be consistent with the natural behavior and reactions from players, and should be complementary to more traditional game interaction technologies
Conceptual Metaverse Forensics Model : Proactive link between Augmented Reality and Security Incidents
No full textThe continued rise of the metaverse ecosystems and Augmented Reality (AR) technologies has shown novel dimensions of digital interaction, however, it has also created novel cybersecurity and forensics related challenges. The traditional Digital Forensic (DF) techniques are seen to struggle to address the dynamic and immersive nature of AR environments. This, has been seen in situations, where cybersecurity incidents can be complex and hard to be understood. This paper, therefore, presents a first step toward a conceptual Metaverse Forensics Model (MFM) that proactively bridges AR and potential cybesecurity-related incidents, offering a structured approach to a Digital Forensic Investigation (DFI) in virtual and hybrid spaces. To ensure compliance the suggested processes are aligned to ISO/IEC 27043 International Standard. The MFM suggests a possible integration of real-time monitoring, Potential Digital Evidence (PDE) preservation in a Digital Forensic Readiness (DFR) approach as a proactive step towards a DFI. In this context, DFR is being integrated due to the costly nature of a DFI and the unnecessary requirement of changing or tampering with the meteverse infrastructure during a DFI. On the same note, the proposed MFM model enables law enforcement, cybersecurity professionals, and DF investigators to strengthen digital attribution in metaverse ecosystems. An evaluation on the posible feasibility and effectiveness of the MFM has been conducted through a comparative analysis with the most-recent studies based on selected metrics, and from the outcome it has been seen that this area is still at infancy stage, however, the conclusion shows the need for standards and adaptive DF methodologies. HORIZON-CL4-2022-HUMAN-02-0
Advanced Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Protocol Integration with Adaptive Switching for Improved Performance
No full textThis study explores the design, implementation, and evaluation of a hybrid Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) and Long Term Evolution (LTE) protocol to enhance Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication in urban settings. The protocol addresses the limitations of standalone DSRC, which offers low latency yet limited range capabilities, and LTE, which provides reliable long range coverage but with higher latency, by integrating their strengths into a unified solution. This innovative approach aims to create a seamless communication framework suitable fordiverse urban traffic conditions. The protocol is developed within the OMNeT++ framework, utilizing Veins and Simu5G simulators to model its performance. It features dual mode On Board Units(OBUs) and Roadside Units (RSUs), supported by a dynamic switching mechanismthat adjusts based on distance and signal strength. Realistic channel models, in-cluding the Two-Ray Ground Reflection model with Nakagami-m fading for DSRC and the 3GPP Urban Micro model with Rayleigh fading for LTE, are employed tosimulate varying environmental factors, ensuring a robust simulation environment. Results demonstrate that the hybrid approach outperforms individual DSRC andLTE systems in terms of latency and reliability, with an adaptive hysteresis algorithm facilitating smooth handovers and reducing ping-pong effects. This enhanced performance positions it as a valuable tool for safety critical V2I applications such as collision avoidance and traffic management, highlighting the importance of buffer synchronization and path loss integration in optimizing the system.The study lays a scalable foundation for future intelligent transportation systems,offering a promising advancement in vehicular communication. Future research couldfocus on exploring multi vehicle scenarios and conducting real world testing to further validate and refine the protocol’s effectiveness
The City of Tomorrow? The Bo01 Housing Exhibition in Malmö, Sweden (2001), as a Model of Sustainable Urban Development
No full textThe housing exhibition Bo01, also known as the City of Tomorrow, was held in Västra Hamnen in Malmö, Sweden, from May to August 2001. Aiming to be a model for an ecologically sustainable urban development, the exhibition mobilized an unprecedented number of public resources and initiated a series of collaborations between Swedish research and manufacturing industries to design experimental solutions for ‘future’ sustainable dwellings. A completely new district with 800 apartments, a landscape display, and an art exhibition was built for Bo01 within two years. A few days before closing, Bo01 AB, a subsidiary of the City of Malmö, filed for bankruptcy. Drawing on the critical approach to sustainability developed by urban political ecology, this paper examines the housing exhibition itself, the ethics suggested by techno-managerial sustainability practices, and the shift towards municipal entrepreneurialism in the late 1990s
Uncovering the Hidden : A Forensic Tool for Metadata Analysis and Steganography Detection in Cybersecurity
No full textBackground. The increasing sophistication of cyber threats has driven adversaries to conceal malicious payloads within benign-looking files through steganography and metadata manipulation. Traditional forensic tools often operate in isolation, focusing on either metadata extraction or steganalysis, thereby creating fragmented workflows and increasing the risk of undetected threats.Objectives. This study addresses gaps in traditional forensic tools by designing and evaluating MetaShield, an integrated forensic framework that analyzes metadata to identify signs of manipulated information, uses multiple steganography detection techniques, and integrates the VirusTotal API for external threat scanning.Methods. To guide the development and validation of the proposed forensic framework, the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology was adopted. This included a literature review focused on the first research question regarding limitations and approaches of current non-ML techniques. The performance of MetaShield in identifying steganographic content was evaluated using a synthetic dataset of 15,000images containing both clean and Stego-embedded (altered) samples. In addition, its usability for junior analysts was assessed using the System Usability Scale (SUS).Results. Quantitative evaluation revealed the framework’s strong detection capability across all key metrics, confirming MetaShield’s robust detection capability. Complementary usability testing confirmed its high user satisfaction and practical accessibility.Conclusions. The findings confirm that integrating metadata forensics, steganography detection, and an external threat scanner significantly enhances analytical capability and reliability. By releasing MetaShield as an open-source tool, this work contributes a sustainable and extensible platform for advancing digital forensics research and professional practice
Prehabilitation for radiotherapy-induced vaginal and sexual health issues : Women's experiences of a novel intervention
No full textPurpose This study explores women's experiences of a novel prehabilitation intervention, integrating early vaginal dilator therapy before and during pelvic radiotherapy. Methods This qualitative study included sixteen women scheduled for pelvic radiotherapy. All participants received a pre-treatment intervention with individualized information and support to start vaginal dilator therapy prior to radiotherapy. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with all sixteen women before or during treatment. Of these, ten also participated in follow-up interviews after radiotherapy. Data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. Results Four themes were constructed reflecting women's experiences of the new prehabilitation intervention: (1) Regaining control while facing the unknown, (2) Navigating identity, (3) Conceptualizing vaginal and sexual health, and (4) Building trust. Women found that vaginal dilator therapy during prehabilitation enabled a sense of control and readiness for upcoming sexual and vaginal health concerns. The early support was perceived as timely, acceptable, and empowering, regardless of women's initial motivation to engage. None of the women preferred to only receive the information after treatment, reflecting the value of proactive care . Conclusion Integrating vaginal dilator therapy into prehabilitation may enhance preparedness, promote self-care, and reduce distress during pelvic radiotherapy. Further research is needed to confirm benefits and tailor support to individual needs
Sjuksköterskors upplevelser av att bemöta patienter med schizofreni : En allmän litteraturöversikt
No full textBakgrund: Schizofreni är en psykisk sjukdom som handlar om att individen får en förändrad verklighetsuppfattning och nedsatt funktion på ett eller flera områden både psykisktoch fysiskt. Negativa attityder om schizofreni hos sjuksköterskan grundar sig ofta i missuppfattningar om sjukdomen som kan påverka personens vård. Stigmatisering kring schizofreni är relaterat till bristande kunskaper om psykisk ohälsa som ligger till grund för dessa negativa attityder gentemot personer som lever med schizofreni. Inom omvårdnaden bör sjuksköterskan motverka stigmatiseringen och skapa trygg vårdrelation mellan sjuksköterskor och personer som är i behov av omvårdnad, motiverar patienten till engagemang, vilja till förändring och ansvarstagande för sin egen hälsa och hitta meningsfulla roller i samhället. Syfte: Syftet var att undersöka sjuksköterskors upplevelser av att bemöta patienter med schizofreni. Metod: Metoden bestod av en allmän litteraturöversikt med kvalitativ ansats som baserades utifrån tio vetenskapliga artiklar vars resultat analyserades med Fribergs analysmodell. Resultat: Utifrån analysen identifierades tre kategorier som handlar om sjuksköterskors upplevelser av att bemöta patienter med schizofreni: Betydelse av kommunikation, Behov av utbildning och kunskap och Oro och rädslor i bemötandet. Slutsats: Sjuksköterskor upplevde att kommunikation var en avgörande del i vårdandet. Sjuksköterskor upplevde svårigheter med att skapa en god relation med patienten där sjuksköterskor upplevde ett stort behov av utbildning och kunskaper i bemötandet med patienter med schizofreni. Kunskap kring sjukdom, bemötande och förhållningssätt bidrog till bättre omvårdnad av patienter med schizofreni samt minska oro och rädslor som många sjuksköterskor upplevde
Assessing your team's readiness for external contributions : A Guide for InnerSource Teams
No full textInnerSource is a collaborative and cost-effective approach to software development that encourages software reuse and co-creation. Many organizations have embraced InnerSource (IS) to reap these benefits by opening their projects for reuse within the organization and enabling contributions from various teams. However, it is crucial to establish a certain level of maturity in IS projects before inviting contributions. This paper introduces IS self-assessment guidelines designed to help IS teams at IKEA (Ingka Group) evaluate the maturity level of their IS projects. We developed the IS self-assessment guidelines following the design science methodology. The focus of the guidelines is to assess how ready IS teams are to receive external contributions.
Infrastructure and Cost–Quality Evaluation of Self-Hosted Large Language Models for Enterprise Use
No full textBackground. Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in software development for tasks such as code generation. Most organisations access these models through commercial cloud-hosted APIs, which provide strong capabilities but also raise concerns regarding privacy, compliance, and cost predictability. These limitations motivate growing interest in self-hosted open-source LLMs, which offer greater control over data and infrastructure, although their technical feasibility and cost–quality efficiency in software engineering remain insufficiently explored. Objectives. The objective of this thesis is to evaluate the technical and economic feasibility of self-hosted open-source LLMs for software-engineering tasks. The study examines whether locally deployed models can reach functional quality comparable to commercial cloud-hosted systems while maintaining lower and more predictable operational cost. Methods. The research uses controlled benchmarking on a realistic backend project. Open-source LLMs are executed locally on a GPU workstation and compared with the same or similar models accessed through commercial cloud APIs. Each model performs identical software-engineering tasks with consistent prompts and tooling. Measurements include runtime, token usage, energy consumption, and monetary cost, which are combined into a cost–quality efficiency metric. Results. The experiments show that self-hosted inference can achieve functional quality comparable to cloud-hosted execution while significantly reducing per-run cost. Among open-source models, stable reasoning behaviour contributed more to efficiency than parameter size. Local execution also matched the task completion ability of proprietary cloud models at substantially lower cost. Conclusions. Self-hosted LLMs are a technically viable and economically competitive option for enterprise software-engineering workloads. Local deployment provides predictable cost, competitive performance, and full control over data. Future work may extend this evaluation to additional programming languages, broader task types, different hardware configurations, and richer measures of code quality
Bridging Security Gaps: DevSecOps Practices in Modern Containerized Applications : Exploring Automated Security Testing and Continuous Monitoring in DevSecOps Pipelines
No full textBackground. Modern software development increasingly relies on containerized, cloud-native architectures, which introduce complex security challenges. DevSecOps promotes embedding security throughout the software lifecycle, but there is still lim- ited empirical evidence on how automated security testing and continuous monitoring actually mitigate risk in practice without undermining delivery speed. Objectives. This thesis investigates how the integration of automated security testing and continuous monitoring within DevSecOps practices helps mitigate key security challenges in containerized environments (RQ1), and how automated secu- rity testing influences the security posture of containerized applications in terms of risk scores, vulnerability exposure, and noise levels (RQ2). Methods. An Exploratory Sequential Mixed-Methods Design (QUAL → QUAN) was adopted. First, a case study with semi-structured interviews in an industrial DevOps team was conducted to elicit real-world challenges such as scanner noise, temporal instability, and the perceived need for tool complementarity. These in- sights informed a controlled, longitudinal experiment where two static vulnerability scanners, Clair and Trivy, were run daily on a fixed panel of 34 container images. The quantitative phase used a weighted risk score model, Jaccard similarity for cross-tool agreement, and additional metrics on UNKNOWN severities and temporal drift. Results. The qualitative findings highlight that teams view automated scanning and continuous monitoring as necessary but struggle with false positives, unstable results, and unclear complementary value between tools. The experiment confirms that vul- nerability databases evolve continuously, causing risk scores and total findings to drift even for unchanged images. Cross-tool agreement is partial (mean Jaccard ≈ 0.68), with Trivy contributing substantially more tool-exclusive findings. Trivy detected all Critical vulnerabilities and produced very few UNKNOWN severities, resulting in more actionable risk scores, while Clair generated a large volume of unclassified UNKNOWN entries and reported zero findings for some unsupported ecosystems. Conclusions. The results support a layered DevSecOps strategy where static vul- nerability scanning is treated as a continuous build-time activity and complemented by runtime monitoring. Tool effectiveness depends on configuration and selective combination: scanners need to be tuned for risk-based prioritisation, noise must be actively managed, and complementarity should be evaluated with concrete metrics rather than assumed. The thesis contributes empirical mixed-method evidence, a reusable metric-based evaluation approach, and an automated framework that can be extended to compare static security tools in other contexts