Master of Science / Department of Computer Science / Mitchell L. Neilsen / Kansas State University is a world leader in the study of small grain genetics to develop new varieties which tolerate a wide range of environmental conditions. A phenotype is a composite of a plants observable traits. Several mobile applications, called PhenoApps, have been developed for field-based, high-throughput phenotyping (HTP) to advance plant breeding programs around the world. These applications require novel image analysis algorithms to be developed to model and extract plant phenotypes. Some of the first algorithms developed were focused on using static image analysis to count and characterize a wide variety of seeds in a single image with a static colored background. This thesis describes both a static algorithm and development of a hopper system for a dynamic, real-time algorithm to accurately count and characterize seeds using a modest mobile device. The static algorithm analyzes a single image of a particular seed sample, captured on a mobile device; whereas, the dynamic algorithm analyzes multiple frames from the video input of a mobile device in real time. Novel 3D models are designed and printed to set a steady flow rate for the seeds, but the analysis is also completed to consider seeds flowing at variable rates and to determine the range of allowable flow rates and achievable precision for a wide variety of seeds. Both algorithms have been implemented in user-friendly mobile applications for realistic, field-based use. A plant breeder can use the applications to both count and characterize a smaller sample using the static approach or a larger sample using the dynamic approach, with seeds sampled in real time without the need to analyze multiple static images. There are many directions for future research to enhance the algorithms performance and accuracy.

Submitted by Fernando Kaway Carvalho Ota null (fernando_ota@globo.com) on 2016-10-06T10:37:16Z No. of bitstreams: 1 DissertacaoFinal_FernandoKaway.pdf: 6557828 bytes, checksum: 8903c53d9f5c0574db52d75937b37545 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Juliano Benedito Ferreira (julianoferreira@reitoria.unesp.br) on 2016-10-10T19:47:03Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 ota_fkc_me_sjrp.pdf: 6557828 bytes, checksum: 8903c53d9f5c0574db52d75937b37545 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-10-10T19:47:03Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 ota_fkc_me_sjrp.pdf: 6557828 bytes, checksum: 8903c53d9f5c0574db52d75937b37545 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-09-06 / Outra / O desenvolvimento de tecnologias móveis tem criado oportunidades para uso de aplicações remotas executando em dispositivos como smartphones. Para algumas dessas aplicações é essencial que a autenticação seja feita de modo seguro e eficiente. Nesse sentido surge o uso da tecnologia NFC (Near Field Communication) para obter segurança para transações executadas em aplicativos móveis. Esse tipo de aplicação é bastante interessante para a realização de comércio eletrônico, bem como controle de acesso a informações sigilosas, como dados bancários, por exemplo. Neste trabalho, apresentam-se dois protocolos para fazer a autenticação de dispositivos através de etiquetas NFC, com técnicas de criptografia assimétrica usando algoritmos de curvas elípticas. Ao longo do texto são apresentados os principais conceitos sobre NFC, criptografia e a classe de web services REST (Representational State Transfer), que serve como padrão para a construção dos protótipos dos protocolos Protecting Touch aqui desenvolvidos. Os detalhes sobre a implementação desses protocolos são também apresentados, assim como resultados de experimentos para sua avaliação. / The appearance of mobile technologies created opportunities for remote applications running in devices such as smartphones. In some of these applications it is essential that authentication have to be performed in a secure and e!cient way. In this sense the use of NFC (Near Field Communication) technology came to provide safety to transactions executed through mobile applications. This kind of application is rather attractive to perform electronic commerce, as well as access control for sensitive data, such as banking accounts. In this work it is presented two protocols for user authentication through NFC tags, using asymmetric cryptography by elliptic curves. Throughout the text we present the main concepts about NFC, cryptography and the web services REST (Representational State Transfer), which is used as the building framework for the prototypes of the Protecting Touch protocols presented here. Details about the protocols implementation are also presented, as well as results from the evaluation experiments of these protocols.

Submitted by Fabio Sobreira Campos da Costa (fabio.sobreira@ufpe.br) on 2017-05-08T15:05:19Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Dissertacao-FINAL-Eduarda-Moretti.pdf: 3308653 bytes, checksum: 3408092a8d1f30798eb17a9b74b6ea46 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-05-08T15:05:19Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 1232 bytes, checksum: 66e71c371cc565284e70f40736c94386 (MD5) Dissertacao-FINAL-Eduarda-Moretti.pdf: 3308653 bytes, checksum: 3408092a8d1f30798eb17a9b74b6ea46 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-06-29 / CAPES / CNPQ / Contextualização: a realidade virtual é uma possibilidade de modalidade terapêutica utilizada nos distúrbios do assoalho pélvico. Objetivo: determinar o local anatômico do assoalho pélvico com melhor nível de atividade eletromiográfica a fim de servir como referência para o local do sensor de um jogo. Pretende-se, também desenvolver um jogo virtual para conscientização e fortalecimento da musculatura do assoalho pélvico a ser inserido em um aplicativo móvel Android, testar sua usabilidade e avaliar a satisfação. Métodos: 30 mulheres participaram da pesquisa do local anatômico do assoalho pélvico com maior nível de atividade eletromiográfica, dado por média e pico de RMS normalizados. Para eletromiografia, utilizou-se um eletromiógrafo da Miotec® (Miotool 400) e o software Miotec Suite. Cada participante compareceu a três dias de coleta, onde eram solicitadas três contrações voluntárias máximas da musculatura perineal. O sinal eletromiográfico era captado através de uma sonda intravaginal e de dois pares de eletrodos de superfície, sendo um posicionado imediatamente abaixo dos grandes lábios e outro nas horas três e nove do relógio perianal. Para elaboração do jogo, foram considerados protocolos de exercícios perineais com evidência na literatura. Posteriormente, o jogo foi inserido em um aplicativo móvel. A satisfação do sistema foi avaliada através de uma escala visual analógica, e o nível de usabilidade do aplicativo, através do MATCH (Checklist para Avaliação da Usabilidade de Aplicativos para Celular Touchscreen). O teste de Kruskal-Wallis e o post hoc de Mann-Whitney foram utilizados para comparação entre as médias e identificação das diferenças das variáveis eletromiográficas. Foi adotado um nível de significância de α ≤ 0,05 e utilizado o SPSS versão 20. Para os dados de usabilidade, as distribuições de frequência das variáveis categóricas foram obtidas através do SPSS. Medidas de tendência central e de dispersão das variáveis numéricas também foram calculadas. Resultados: os eletrodos perianais apresentaram uma média de RMS normalizada de 37,81(13,78 DP) e um pico de RMS normalizado de 47,14(16,9 DP), enquanto os eletrodos posicionados imediatamente abaixo dos grandes lábios apresentaram uma média de 20,32(10,15 DP) e pico de 25,86(12,38 DP). Os valores para média e pico de RMS captados pela sonda intravaginal foram de 33,47(20,82 DP) e 43,81(27,81 DP), respectivamente. Não foi encontrada diferença entre os valores de média e pico de RMS da sonda e dos eletrodos perianais (p=0,225; p=0,315), entretanto ambos foram maiores que os captados pelos eletrodos localizados imediatamente abaixo dos grandes lábios (média e pico em relação à sonda: p = 0,016; p=0,02. Em relação aos eletrodos perianais: p<0,001). O aplicativo de jogo desenvolvido foi denominado MyoPelvic e possui um modo de jogo para fibras musculares rápidas e outro para fibras musculares lentas. Ambos os modos envolvem o controle de uma ciclista em um percurso de subidas e decidas por montanhas através de contrações perineais. A satisfação em relação ao sistema apresentou uma mediana de 9 e a média do nível de usabilidade do aplicativo foi 62,42(5,03 DP). Conclusão: a sonda intravaginal e eletrodos de superfície posicionados nas horas três e nove do relógio perianal são equivalentes para avaliação da função do assoalho pélvico. A escolha do tipo de eletrodo deve respeitar os valores e preferências dos pacientes. O MyoPelvic apresentou alto grau de satisfação e nível de usabilidade muito alto. / Context: virtual reality is a possibility of therapeutic modality used in pelvic floor disorders. Objective: To determine the anatomical location of the pelvic floor with better level of electromyographic activity in order to serve as a reference for the location of a game’s sensor. The main aim is to develop a virtual game that raises awareness and strengthen the pelvic floor muscles. It is also intended to insert the game into a mobile application Android, test its usability and evaluate its satisfaction. Methods: 30 women participated in the study of the anatomical location of the pelvic floor with the highest level of electromyographic activity, given by the mean and the peak of normalized RMS. For electromyography, a surface electromyograph Miotec® (Miotool 400) and a Miotec Suite software were used. Each participant attended three collection days, in which three maximal voluntary contractions of the perineal muscles were requested. The electromyographic signal was picked up by an intravaginal probe and two pairs of surface electrodes, one positioned immediately below the labia majora and the other at three and nine hours of the perianal clock. Perineal exercise protocols with evidence in the literature were considered to create the game. Then, the game was inserted in a mobile application. The satisfaction with the system developed was evaluated by a visual analog scale, and the application's usability level was also evaluated by MATCH (Checklist for Usability Evaluation of Applications Touchscreen Phones). The Kruskal-Wallis test and the Mann-Whitney’s post hoc were used to compare averages and differences identification in the electromyographic variables. A significance level of α ≤ 0.05 was adopted and it was used the SPSS version 20. For the usability data, frequency distributions of categorical variables were obtained using SPSS. Measures of central tendency and dispersion of numerical variables were also calculated. Results: The perianal electrodes showed a mean of normalized RMS of 37.81 (13.78 SD) and a peak of normalized RMS of 47.14 (SD 16.9), while the electrodes positioned immediately below the labia majora had a mean of 20.32 (10.15 SD) and a peak of 25.86 (12.38 SD). The values for mean and peak RMS obtained by intravaginal probe were 33.47 (20.82 SD) and 43.81 (27.81 SD), respectively. No difference was found between the mean and the peak RMS values obtained by the probe and the perianal electrodes (p = 0.225; p = 0.315), though both were higher than those captured by the electrodes placed just below the labia majora (mean and peak according to the probe: p = 0.016; p = 0.02. According to the perianal electrodes: p <0.001). The developed game app was named MyoPelvic and has a game mode for the fast muscle fibers and another for slow muscle fibers. Both methods involve the control by perineal contractions of a cyclist on a road that goes up and down in mountains. The satisfaction with the system showed a median of 9 and the application usability level average was 62.42 (5.03 SD). Conclusion: The intravaginal probe and the surface electrodes placed at three and nine hours of perianal clock are equivalent to evaluate the pelvic floor function. The choice of the electrode type must respect the values and preferences of the patients. The MyoPelvic showed high levels of satisfaction and usability.

Mobile devices with Internet access and large amounts of sensors, pushes the development of intelligent services towards new forms of pervasive applications. These applications are made context-aware by utilizing information from sensors and hence the context of a situation, in order to provide a better service. Based on this, the focus of this thesis is on the challenge of creating context awareness in mobile applications. That both utilizes dynamic context information from globally available sensors and provides adaptive views of relevant context information to applications. The first challenge is to identify the properties of an architecture that provides scalable access to information from global sensors within bounded time, because existing systems do not support these properties in a satisfactory manner. The majority of related systems employ a centralized approach with limited support for global sensor information due to poor scalability. Therefore, this thesis proposes a distributed architecture capable of exchanging context between users and entities on a peer-to-peer overlay. Pervasive applications can thus utilize global sensor information in a scalable and manageable way within predictable time bounds. The second challenge to support continually changing and evolving context information, while providing it as both adaptive and manageable views to applications. To address this particular problem, this thesis proposes the usage of a locally stored evolving context object called a context schema. In detail, this schema contains all context information that is considered as being relevant for a specific user or entity. Furthermore, this thesis proposes an application interface that can provide snapshots of the evolving context schemas as adaptive views. These views can then be used in context-aware mobile applications, without inducing unnecessary delays. By successfully addressing the challenges, this thesis enables the creation of pervasive and adaptive applications that utilize evolving context in mobile environments. These capabilities are made possible by enabling access to global sensor information based on a distributed context exchange overlay, in combination with evolving context schemas offered as views through an application interface. In support of these claims, this thesis has developed numerous proof-of-concept applications and prototypes to verify the approach. Hence, this thesis concludes that the proposed approach with evolving context information has the ability to scale in a satisfactory manner and also has the ability to dynamically offer relevant views to applications in a manageable way. / MediaSense

Background: Successful recruitment of participants to mobile health (mHealth) studies presents unique challenges over in-person studies. It is important to identify recruitment strategies that maximize the limited recruitment resources available to researchers. Objective: The objective of this study was to describe a case study of a unique recruitment process used in a recent mHealth software app designed to increase smoking cessation among weight-concerned women smokers. The See Me Smoke-Free app was deployed to the Google Play Store (Alphabet, Inc., Google, LLC), where potential participants could download the app and enroll in the study. Users were invited in-app to participate in the study, with no in-person contact. The recruitment activities relied primarily on earned (free) and social media. Methods: To determine the relationship between recruitment activities and participant enrollment, the researchers explored trends in earned and social media activity in relation to app installations, examined social media messaging in relation to reach or impressions, and described app users' self-reported referral source. The researchers collected and descriptively analyzed data regarding recruitment activities, social media audience, and app use during the 18-week recruitment period (March 30, 2015-July 31, 2015). Data were collected and aggregated from internal staff activity tracking documents and from Web-based data analytics software such as SumAll, Facebook Insights (Facebook, Inc.), and Google Analytics (Alphabet, Inc., Google, LLC). Results: Media coverage was documented across 75 publications and radio or television broadcasts, 35 of which were local, 39 national, and 1 international. The research team made 30 Facebook posts and 49 tweets, yielding 1821 reaches and 6336 impressions, respectively. From March 30, 2015 to July 31, 2015, 289 unique users downloaded the app, and 151 participants enrolled in the study. Conclusions: Research identifying effective online recruitment methods for mHealth studies remains minimal, and findings are inconsistent. We demonstrated how earned media can be leveraged to recruit women to an mHealth smoking cessation trial at low cost. Using earned media and leveraging social media allowed us to enroll 3 times the number of participants that we anticipated enrolling. The cost of earned media resides in the staff time required to manage it, particularly the regular interaction with social media. We recommend communication and cooperation with university public affairs and social media offices, as well as affiliate programs in journalism and communications, so that earned media can be used as a recruitment strategy for mHealth behavior change interventions. However, press releases are not always picked up by the media and should not be considered as a stand-alone method of recruitment. Careful consideration of an intervention's broad appeal and how that translates into potential media interest is needed when including earned media as part of a comprehensive recruitment plan for mHealth research.

US asthma prevalence increased by five million in the last decade and health care spending for the disease increased from $53 billion to $56 billion. Children are more likely than adults to have an asthma attack and its estimated that 1-in-10 youth has asthma. Despite initiatives to promote adherence to practice guidelines, childhood asthma emergency room) visits, and hospitalizations remain steady while the number of asthma deaths have increased over a 17-year period. Preliminary studies find the majority of adolescents prefer smartphones as a means of education and guidance. A modified Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) survey was comprised of 15 statements that explored providers' acceptance of smartphone applications (apps) as an adjunct strategy for management of asthma among adolescents in the outpatient setting. Current insight in adolescent asthma demonstrates multifaceted disparities in care stemming from biological and developmental transitions unique to adolescents. The quantitative, descriptive design of the project assessed two factors integral to the TAM related to provider acceptance and perception: 1) Perceived use (PU), and 2) Perceived ease of use (PEU). The survey sample consisted of 18 providers. Overwhelmingly, the majority of providers surveyed favored use of a smartphone app for adolescent asthma and believed apps had the potential to improve the quality of adolescent asthma management. Most participants agreed; smartphone apps might help accomplish benchmarks for adolescent asthma management. Numerous studies demonstrate adolescents’ preference for technological interventions for self-management of their asthma symptoms. The survey results reinforce the willingness of providers to accept asthma smartphone apps as a potential adjunct management strategy for adolescent asthma. Additional studies involving providers are required to further explore provider attitudes of acceptance and rejection relating to smartphone apps for chronic health conditions.

A mobile application has to be able to keep up with heavy demands to compete with all the new applications that are developed each day. Good performance and nice visuals are base requirements for the development of mobile applications. There are many options for tools when developing and one of these choices is a native application, which is said to have better performance and suitability to the mobile environment. Another choice is a tool which requires only one code base for multiple platforms and is therefore easier to maintain. Flutter is an open-source User Interface (UI) toolkit created by Google that can create cross-platform applications with one code base while said to maintain the aspects of looking native. This paper explores how Flutter compares to native applications, which are currently seen as superior in mobile behaviour and performance. An experiment was conducted to test how Flutter as a cross-compiler compared to two native applications made of kotlin and Android studio and swift and XCode, in terms of CPU performance. A survey was created to see if there was a difference in the perception of users with regards to appearance and animations. A literature study was conducted to strengthen the results from the experiment and survey and to give a background to the subject. Flutter is a new tool and it continues to grow incredibly fast. Conclusions are drawn that a Flutter application can compete with a native application when it comes to CPU performance, but is not as developed in the animation area. Flutter does not require complex code for creating a simple application and uses significantly less lines of code in development compared to native. The final conclusion is that Flutter is best to use when building smaller to medium-sized applications, but has a potential to grow to overcome its current drawbacks in the animation department. Further examination of the areas examined in this paper is needed in order to ensure and strengthen the results.

<p>QC 20131115</p>

Long Term Evolution (LTE) was designed to provide fast data rates to replace 3G service for mobile devices. As LTE networks and the user base for those networks grow, it becomes necessary for the resources used for those networks to be used as efficiently as possible. This thesis presents an implementation which utilizes an algorithm extended upon the Frank Kelly algorithm to determine resource allocation for UEs and shapes traffic for each UE to meet those allocation limits. The implementation's network represents what an LTE network would do to manage data rates for a UE through a distributed algorithm for rate allocation. The main focus of the implementation is on the UE, where traffic shaping limits application rates by an elastic or inelastic classification through the use of Hierarchical Token Bucket (HTB) queuing disciplines. / Master of Science

Yes / Stroke is the leading cause of adult disability in the UK. Many stroke patients report a feeling of ‘abandonment’ when they are discharged from therapy services. This in turn, leads to readmissions and re-referrals to both hospital and community services. This paper discusses the components of E-health and how E-health could be used to supplement conventional interventions to improve patient engagement, empowerment and decreased reliance on therapy services. In doing so it will consider how such interventions could better involve carers. An integrated E-health approach has the potential to improve outcomes for stroke survivors. A person centred approach needs to be employed through partnerships between stroke survivor, carer and healthcare professional. Remote monitoring could provide specific targeted interventions, preventing unnecessary hospital admissions or re-referrals and reducing cost of care. While the issues are well defined more work is required on what these integrated, patient centred E-health solutions may look like in order to be successful in supporting stroke survivors. / The full-text of this article will be released for public view at the end of the publisher embargo on 11 Apr 2018.