In recent years, several research and development initiatives have focused on developing secure and trustworthy systems for the healthcare industry via pervasive and mobile healthcare (mHealth) solutions. State-of-the-art mHealth solutions primarily rely on centralized storage, such as cloud computing servers, which may escalate the maintenance costs, require ever-increasing storage infrastructure, and pose privacy and security risks to the health-critical data produced, consumed, and transmitted over ad hoc networks. To overcome these limitations, we conducted this study intending to synergize mobile computing (devices to process health-critical data) and blockchain technology (infrastructure to secure storage and retrieval of health-critical data), specifically addressing data security and privacy using a blockchain mHealth system. The research employs an incremental method by (i) developing a framework that acts as a blueprint to architect blockchain-enabled mHealth systems, (ii) implementing a suite of algorithms as a proof-of-concept to automate the framework, and (iii) experimental evaluations to validate the scalability, computation, and energy efficiency of the proposed solution. The proposed framework has been implemented as a frontend using a mobile application interface that exploits the backend via the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) system and Ethereum blockchain for secure management of mHealth data. We use a case-study-based approach demonstrating how health units, medics, and patients can securely access and distribute health-critical data. For evaluation, we deployed a smart contract prototype on the Ethereum TESTNET network in a Windows environment to test the proposed framework. Results of the evaluation indicate (a) scalability with query response time (range: 10–41 ms), (b) computational performance (CPU utilization: 1.5% – 2.5%), and (c) energy efficiency (gas consumption: 40000 units for 1000 bytes). The proposed solution – framework, algorithms, and experimental evaluation – aims to advance state-of-the-art architecting and implementing cybersecurity mHealth solutions using blockchain technology.

Automatic test oracle generation is a bottleneck in realizing full automation of the entire software testing process. This study proposes a new method for automatically generating a test oracle for a new test input on the basis of several historical test cases by using a backpropagation neural network (BPNN) model. The new method is different from existing test oracle techniques. Specifically, our method has two steps. First, the values of variables are collected as training data when several historical test inputs are used to execute the program at different breakpoints. The test oracles (pass or fail) of these test cases are utilized to classify and label the training data. Second, a new test input is used to execute the program at different breakpoints, where the trained BPNN prediction model automatically generates its test oracle on the basis of the collected values of the variables involved. We conduct an experiment to validate our method. In the experiment, 113 faulty versions of seven types of programs are used as experimental objects. Results show that the average prediction accuracy rate of 74,651 test oracles is 95.8%. Although the failed test cases in the training data account for less than 5%, the overall average recall rate (prediction accuracy of test case execution failure) of all programs is 78.9%. Furthermore, the trained BPNN can reveal not only the impact of the values of variables but also the impact of the logical correspondence between variables in test oracle generation.

Location-based services (LBS) are very important mobile app services, which provide diverse mobility services for mobile users anywhere and anytime.This brings new demands, issues, and challenges in mobile application testing.Today, mobile applications provide location-based service functions based on dynamic location contexts, mobile users and their travel patterns to deliver location-based mobile data, and service actions.Current software testing methods do not consider location-based validation coverage.Hence, there is a lack of research results addressing location-based mobile application testing.This paper focuses on mobile LBS testing.A novel test object model is proposed for quality validation of location-based mobile information services.In addition, the related test coverage metrics are also presented.These metrics can be useful for test engineers in designing test cases.A case study based on student testers is reported to demonstrate the potential application of the proposed model.