39 research outputs found
HealthyOffice: mood recognition at work using smartphones and wearable sensors
No full textStress, anxiety and depression in the workplace are detrimental to human health and productivity with significant financial implications. Recent research in this area has focused on the use of sensor technologies, including smartphones and wearables embedded with physiological and movement sensors. In this work, we explore the possibility of using such devices for mood recognition, focusing on work environments. We propose a novel mood recognition framework that is able to identify five intensity levels for eight different types of moods every two hours. We further present a smartphone app (‘HealthyOffice’), designed to facilitate self-reporting in a structured manner and provide our model with the ground truth. We evaluate our system in a small-scale user study where wearable sensing data is collected in an office environment. Our experiments exhibit promising results allowing us to reliably recognize various classes of perceived moods
Preemptive mobile code protection using spy agents
No full textThis thesis introduces 'spy agents' as a new security paradigm for evaluating trust in remote hosts in mobile code scenarios. In this security paradigm, a spy agent, i.e. a mobile agent which circulates amongst a number of remote hosts, can employ a variety of techniques in order to both appear 'normal' and suggest to a malicious host that it can 'misuse' the agent's data or code without being held accountable.A framework for the operation and deployment of such spy agents is described. Subsequently, a number of aspects of the operation ofsuch agents within this framework are analysed in greater detail.The set of spy agent routes needs to be constructed in a manner thatenables hosts to be identified from a set of detectable agent-specific outcomes.The construction of route sets that both reduce the probability of spy agentdetection and support identification of the origin of a maliciousact is analysed in the context of combinatorial group testingtheory. Solutions to the route set design problem are proposed.A number of spy agent application scenarios are introduced andanalysed, including: a) the implementation of a mobile code email honeypot system for identifying email privacy infringers, b)the design of sets of agent routes that enable malicious hostdetection even when hosts collude, and c) the evaluationof the credibility of host classification resultsin the presence of inconsistent host behaviour. Spy agents can be used in awide range of applications, and it appears that each applicationcreates challenging new research problems, notably in the design ofappropriate agent route sets.<br/
A Transient Reliability Model of RTP Video Streaming over WLAN
No full textReliable real time wireless video streaming is a challenging network application due its high bandwidth and low delay/jitter requirements. IEEE 802.11e helps address such QoS challenges, e.g. by prioritising video over background traffic. The reliability problem occurs since it is very challenging (near impossible) for a WLAN protocol to guarantee QoS, especially with uncoordinated contention being the main access mechanism, along with increasing numbers of stations and interfering traffic, with the hostile wireless radioenvironment making any guarantee foolhardy. With the use of RTP, the video application has some control over end-to-end delay and jitter. Still, in the presence of excessive interference, RTP packet dropping might result in video quality degradation or video outage time. We study the reliability of wireless RTP video streaming over the EDCA MAC protocol, with the ability to forecast (and mitigate the effect of) video failures. Specifically, we introduce a model to evaluate both steady-state and transient video failures due to RTP buffer overflow, the overflow in turn due to WLAN co-channel interference. Quantitative reliability measurements are taken by configuring RTP and EDCA. We evaluate the average packet loss and average outage duration and we validate the theoretical results in an experimental setup. The proposed forecast mechanism could be coupled with and help optimise a) WLAN channel assignment in an ESS network, b) multipath (multi-channel/radio/hop) video routing, and c) adaptive rate control
Connection availability and transient survivability analysis in wireless ad-hoc networks
No full text
Privacy and eHealth-enabled Smart Meter Informatics
No full textAbstract-The societal need for better public healthcare calls for granular, continuous, nationwide instrumentation and data fusion technologies. However, the current trend of centralised (database) health analytics gives rise to data privacy issues. This paper proposes sensor data mining algorithms that help infer health/well-being related lifestyle patterns and anomalous (or privacy-sensitive) events. Such algorithms enable a user-centric context awareness at the network edge, which can be used for decentralised eHealth decision making and privacy protection by design. The main hypothesis of this work involves the detection of atypical behaviours from a given stream of energy consumption data recorded at eight houses over a period of a year for cooking, microwave, and TV activities. Our initial exploratory results suggest that in the case of an unemployed single resident, the dayby-day variability of TV or microwave operation, in conjunction with the variability of the absence of other cooking activity, is more significant as compared with the variability of other combinations of activities. The proposed methodology brings together appliance monitoring, privacy, and anomaly detection within a healthcare context, which is readily scalable to include other health-related sensor streams
