CMOS Enabled Microfluidic Systems for Healthcare Based Applications

With the increased global population, it is more important than ever to expand accessibility to affordable personalized healthcare. In this context, a seamless integration of microfluidic technology for bioanalysis and drug delivery and complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology enabled data‐management circuitry is critical. Therefore, here, the fundamentals, integration aspects, and applications of CMOS‐enabled microfluidic systems for affordable personalized healthcare systems are presented. Critical components, like sensors, actuators, and their fabrication and packaging, are discussed and reviewed in detail. With the emergence of the Internet‐of‐Things and the upcoming Internet‐of‐Everything for a people–process–data–device connected world, now is the time to take CMOS‐enabled microfluidics technology to as many people as possible. There is enormous potential for microfluidic technologies in affordable healthcare for everyone, and CMOS technology will play a major role in making that happen.     

Noninvasive Featherlight Wearable Compliant “Marine Skin”: Standalone Multisensory System for Deep‐Sea Environmental Monitoring

Advances in marine research to understand environmental change and its effect on marine ecosystems rely on gathering data on species physiology, their habitat, and their mobility patterns using heavy and invasive biologgers and sensory telemetric networks. In the past, a lightweight (6 g) compliant environmental monitoring system: Marine Skin was demonstrated. In this paper, an enhanced version of that skin with improved functionalities (500–1500% enhanced sensitivity), packaging, and most importantly its endurance at a depth of 2 km in the highly saline Red Sea water for four consecutive weeks is reported. A unique noninvasive approach for attachment of the sensor by designing a wearable, stretchable jacket (bracelet) that can adhere to any species irrespective of their skin type is also illustrated. The wearable featherlight (<0.5 g in air, 3 g with jacket) gadget is deployed on Barramundi, Seabream, and common goldfish to demonstrate the noninvasive and effective attachment strategy on different species of variable sizes which does not hinder the animals' natural movement or behavior.     

Abdominal pain during pregnancy

In evaluating the pregnant patient with abdominal pain, the physician is presented with a wide range of diagnostic possibilities, including disorders that can occur in nonpregnant individuals and disorders that are unique to pregnancy. The development of modern laboratory testing methods and diagnostic imaging techniques has led to a decline in the morbidity and mortality from many of these disorders. With an understanding of the physiologic changes occurring during pregnancy, a careful history and physical examination, and judicious use of laboratory tests and imaging studies, the physician should be able to determine the cause of the patient's pain in the great majority of cases and, in the words of Babler, avoid "the mortality of delay."     

SCOUT: a sink camouflage and concealed data delivery paradigm for circumvention of sink-targeted cyber threats in wireless sensor networks

In modern epoch of cyber warfare and their countermeasures, wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are highly susceptible to cyber attacks due to their primary reliance over sink. WSNs perform routing and communication to deliver data from sources to sink. In this many-to-one communication paradigm, while some failure might be affordable at the many sources side, the single sink cannot be allowed any downtime, let alone be a failure. In a WSN security attack scenario, an attacker makes efforts to bring a sink down by identifying and capturing it. The current state of the art in sink protection schemes prevents such failures by preserving its privacy through letting it operate in promiscuous and all-the-time listening mode. However, such operation is still vulnerable to privacy divulgence because the attacker detects its all-the-time listening operation and identifies it. Furthermore, listening is an energy-expensive operation in WSNs that makes the sink battery die very quickly. In this paper, we propose a new sink privacy preservation scheme that defines the role of cooperating nodes. These cooperating nodes create a camouflage around the sink such that the location of the sink is never revealed. Such operational dispositioning reduces the susceptibility of WSNs generally and sink, particularly against the sink-targeted cyber attacks. Since the sink adopts sleep schedule, our scheme is energy efficient as well.     

Online Banking Information Systems Acceptance: An Empirical Examination of System Characteristics and Web Security

Prior work on the technology acceptance model (TAM) is mainly devoted to the influence of TAM’s core motivational factors and their impact on behavioral intent toward IS acceptance. Relatively little research has focused on what specific system design characteristics motivate individuals toward IS acceptance. This article identified specific systems design factors and examined their impact on TAM’s motivational factors through the TAM. The findings will help designers to design and implement better user-accepted systems.     

Enhanced hybrid metaheuristic algorithms for optimal sizing of steel truss structures with numerous discrete variables

The advent of modern computing technologies paved the way for development of numerous efficient structural design optimization tools in the recent decades. In the present study sizing optimization problem of steel truss structures having numerous discrete variables is tackled using combined forms of recently proposed metaheuristic techniques. Three guided, and three guided hybrid metaheuristic algorithms are developed by integrating a design oriented strategy to the stochastic search properties of three recently proposed metaheuristic optimization techniques, namely adaptive dimensional search, modified big bang-big crunch, and exponential big bang-big crunch algorithms. The performances of the proposed guided, and guided hybrid metaheuristic algorithms are compared to those of standard variants through optimum design of real-size steel truss structures with up to 728 design variables according to AISC-LRFD specification. The numerical results reveal that the hybrid form of adaptive dimensional search and exponential big bang-big crunch algorithm is the most promising algorithm amongst the other investigated techniques.     

Design and evaluation of a dynamic job search website for non-literate users of Pakistan

ABSTRACT

Among the many available online job searching solutions, very limited are proposed for non-literate users. The available solutions have tested the possibilities using static web pages which are not applicable in the real world for non-literate users because of the dynamism of the real world. In this research, a dynamic job search solution is presented for non-literate users of Pakistan. User Interface (UI) requirements were identified through an extensive literature review. The culturally specific content in the form of hand-drawn sketches, voice feedback, semi-illustrations was identified and incorporated in the job seekers (non-literate) module. The same module was evaluated by the non-literate and semi-literate participants in a field study as per the usability specification defined by ISO-9241-11. The results have shown that non-literate users could search for a job efficiently in the minimum task completion time as compared to the time reported in the previous literature. They were satisfied and motivated to use the website again to search for jobs. The results indicate a potential for designing ICT-based solutions to provide services to the non-literate users in developing countries.     

Single‐layer low‐profile wideband circularly polarized patch antenna surrounded by periodic metallic plates

This article presents a simple design of circularly polarized (CP) antenna with low profile and wideband operation characteristics. To achieve these desirable features, a truncated corner squared patch is chosen as primary radiating source and surrounded by periodic metallic plates for bandwidth enhancement. Notably, all the radiating elements are designed on a single layer of substrate using printed circuit techniques, which significantly reduces the design complexity. The final prototype with overall size of 0.60λ_o × 0.60λ_o × 0.05λ_o (λ_o is free‐space wavelength at the center operating frequency) was fabricated and tested. Measured results show that the proposed antenna has wide operation bandwidth of 19.7% (5.1‐6.2 GHz). Additionally, broadside gain ranging from 5.0 to 6.9 dBic is also attained within the operating band. In comparison with the other reported antennas in literature, the proposed one has the simplest design architecture with competitive operating bandwidth.     

Recruiting the <Emphasis Type="Italic">K</Emphasis>-most influential prospective workers for crowdsourcing platforms

Viral marketing is widely used by businesses to achieve their marketing objectives using social media. In this work, we propose a customized crowdsourcing approach for viral marketing which aims at efficient marketing based on information propagation through a social network. We term this approach the social community-based crowdsourcing platform and integrate it with an information diffusion model to find the most efficient crowd workers. We propose an intelligent viral marketing framework (IVMF) comprising two modules to achieve this end. The first module identifies the K-most influential users in a given social network for the platform using a novel linear threshold diffusion model. The proposed model considers the different propagation behaviors of the network users in relation to different contexts. Being able to consider multiple topics in the information propagation model as opposed to only one topic makes our model more applicable to a diverse population base. Additionally, the proposed content-based improved greedy (CBIG) algorithm enhances the basic greedy algorithm by decreasing the total amount of computations required in the greedy algorithm (the total influence propagation of a unique node in any step of the greedy algorithm). The highest computational cost of the basic greedy algorithm is incurred on computing the total influence propagation of each node. The results of the experiments reveal that the number of iterations in our CBIG algorithm is much less than the basic greedy algorithm, while the precision in choosing the K influential nodes in a social network is close to the greedy algorithm. The second module of the IVMF framework, the multi-objective integer optimization model, is used to determine which social network should be targeted for viral marketing, taking into account the marketing budget. The overall IVMF framework can be used to select a social network and recruit the K-most influential crowd workers. In this paper, IVMF is exemplified in the domain of personal care industry to show its importance through a real-life case.