In this paper, a remote monitoring system enabled with the smart internet of things (IoT) station for ambient assisted living (AAL) and smart environments is introduced. IoT station that is based on Waspmote platform to work as an intelligent device for capturing the data and transfers through 3rd Generation (3G) cellular module to the cloud by avoiding redundancy. The complete architecture of the developed ubiquitous monitoring system for AAL is elaborated with the process flow. The video camera sensor board with a presence sensor is connected to the Waspmote to take a snapshot or a video clip when there is any movement in the surrounding. The IoT station with the sensor board have a capability to detect and take picture even in a dark environment. The Waspmote generate message as soon as the motion sensor is triggered and send the image to the storage server using file transfer protocol (FTP) or the file transfer protocol secure (FTPs) over cellular communication. The recent related work is reviewed and discussed to show the advantages of the proposed design. Furthermore, the real testbed experiment presents the efficiency of the cellular IoT based monitoring system.

Summary The exchange of information among health professionals is a common practice among clinics, laboratories, and hospitals. Cloud‐based clinical data exchange platforms enable valuable information to be available in real time and in a secure and private manner. The increasing availability of data in health information systems allows specialists to extract knowledge using pattern recognition techniques for the identification and prediction of risk situations that could lead to severe complications for a patient. Hence, this paper proposes the use of a neuro‐fuzzy machine learning technique for predicting the most complex hypertensive disorder in pregnancy called HELLP syndrome. This classifier serves as an inference mechanism for cloud‐based mobile applications, for effective monitoring through the analysis of symptoms presented by pregnant women. Results show that the proposed model achieves excellent results regarding several indicators, such as precision (0.685), recall (0.756), the F‐measure (0.705), and the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (0.829). This technique can accurately predict situations that could lead to the death of both a mother and fetus, at any location and time.

The security and privacy of healthcare enterprises (HEs) are crucial because they maintain sensitive information. Because of the unique functional requirement of omni-inclusiveness, HEs are expected to monitor patients, allowing for connectivity with vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). In the absence of literature on security provisioning frameworks that connect VANETs and HEs, this paper presents a smart zero-knowledge proof and statistical fingerprinting-based trusted secure communication framework for a fog computing environment. A zero-knowledge proof is used for vehicle authentication, and statistical fingerprinting is employed to secure communication between VANETs and HEs. Authenticity verification of the operations is performed at the on-board unit (OBU) fitted in the vehicle based on the service executions at the resident hardware platform. The processor clock cycles are acquired from the service executions in a complete sandboxed environment. The calculated cycles assist in developing the blueprint signature for the particular OBU of the vehicle. Hence, the fingerprint signature helps build trust and plays a key role in authenticating the vehicle's horizontal movement to everything or to different sections of the HEs. In an environment enabled for fog computing, our novel model can provide efficient remote monitoring.

With the progress of new technologies, certain areas such as health have seen their functioning modes to be changed to accommodate the trend of the actual world. Then, new concepts have emerged such as telemedicine, e-health, or the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT). These innovations quickly spread around the world to turn the tide. But nevertheless, some West African countries, such as Senegal, are still trying to get to grips in the perfect use of these tools by trying to provide solutions that address real societal problems. This paper proposes an IoMT application for diagnosis and help of diabetics, DiabLoop. The application measures blood glucose levels at reconfigurable time intervals to detect potential diabetes or monitor the progress of existing diabetes. An algorithm-based intelligent part is built-in that allows the system to use a knowledge base to make decisions automatically to help or send an urgent notification to a registered physician, guardian and/or to a parent. The implementation and case studies for validation show that the application facilitates the daily life of diabetics, which is an innovation in the field of health in West Africa.

Channel state information (CSI) feedback in massive MIMO systems is too large due to large pilot overhead. It is due to the large channel matrix dimension which depends on the number of base station (BS) antennas and consumes the majority of scarce radio resources. To solve this problem, we proposed a scheme for efficient CSI acquisition and reduced pilot overhead. It is based on the separation mechanism for the channel matrix. The spatial correlation among multiuser channel matrices in the virtual angular domain is utilized to split the channel matrix. Then, the two parts of the matrix are estimated by deploying the compressed sensing (CS) techniques. This scheme is novel in the sense that the user equipment (UE) directly transmits the received symbols from the BS to the BS, so a joint CSI recovery is performed at the BS. Simulation results show that the proposed channel estimation scheme effectively estimates the channel with reduced pilot overhead and improved performance as compared with the state-of-the-art schemes.

Internet of Things (IoT) is a term used to describe an environment where billions of objects, constrained in terms of resources (“things”), are connected to the Internet, and interacting autonomously. With so many objects connected in IoT solutions, the environment in which they are placed becomes smarter. A software, called middleware, plays a key role since it is responsible for most of the intelligence in IoT, integrating data from devices, allowing them to communicate, and make decisions based on collected data. Then, considering requirements of IoT platforms, a reference architecture model for IoT middleware is analyzed, detailing the best operation approaches of each proposed module, as well as proposes basic security features for this type of software. This paper elaborates on a systematic review of the related literature, exploring the differences between the current Internet and IoT-based systems, presenting a deep discussion of the challenges and future perspectives on IoT middleware. Finally, it highlights the difficulties for achieving and enforcing a universal standard. Thus, it is concluded that middleware plays a crucial role in IoT solutions and the proposed architectural approach can be used as a reference model for IoT middleware.

The current century has brought an unimaginable growth in information and communications technology (ICT) and needs of enormous computing. The advancements in computer hardware and software particularly helped fuel the requirements of human beings, and revolutionized the smart products as an outcome. The advent of wearable devices from their development till successful materialisation has only taken less than a quarter of a century. The huge benefits of these smart wearable technologies cannot be fully enjoyed until and unless the reliability of a complete system is ensured. The reliability can be increased by the consistent advancements in hardware and software in parallel. User expectations actually are the challenges that keep the advancements alive while improving at an unmatchable pace. The future of wearable and other smart devices depends on whether they can provide a timely solution that is reliable, richer in resources, smaller in size, and cheaper in price. This paper addresses the threats and opportunities in the development and the acceptance of immersive and wearable technologies. The hardware and software challenges for the purpose of development are discussed to demonstrate the bottlenecks of the current technologies and the limitations that impose those bottlenecks. For the purpose of adoption, social and commercial challenges related to innovation and acceptability are discussed. The paper proposes guidelines that are expected to be applicable in several considerable applications of wearable technologies, for example, social networks, healthcare, and banking.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) based applications for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) help elderly or individual people living home alone. AAL system reliability is mostly based on the recent emerging class of network that is known as wireless mesh network (WiMesh). In WiMesh the information security is the most difficult problem to tackle because the medium is open to cyber-attacks. Moreover, when we talk about AAL where the complete personal information is digitized and stored, the need for implementation and maintenance of strict security measures is essential. In this article, we present a critical literature survey on communication security issues in e-health care environments. We highlight and explore the representative state of the art security prototypes for eHealthcare environments and also provide the details of their security characteristics. In addition, we discuss in detail the challenges and opportunities of these systems.

Cybersecurity in the health care domain is one of the most important and critical issues of this era. In fact, it was reported in 2014 that on the black market medical records are worth 10 times more than credit card details [1]. Datasets experience a particularly high risk when shifted to a different domain for the documentation of therapeutic or diagnostic procedures. U-Prove is a token based security concept whereby a user may disclose safely and securely a limited amount of information for authentication and verification purposes. In this paper, a U-Prove based security mechanism is proposed for mobile device authentication and authorization in the eHealthcare environment. The complete architecture of the proposed security mechanism and its detailed methodology with process flow is presented. In addition, a generic security analysis is performed to show the strength of the proposed security mechanism.

Password-based authentication has been used extensively as a one of authentication techniques. Wu et al. presented a robust password authentication technique, in which they can face guessing, stolen-verifier, replaying, and impersonation attacks. However, in this paper, we are going to show that Wu et al. protocol is vulnerable to theft attack and consequentially construct a modified authentication scheme to prevent the shortcomings as a recovery. Proposed technique maintains the Wu et al's security features as well as remedies its security weakness.

The future of ambient assisted living (AAL) especially eHealthcare almost depends on the smart objects that are part of the Internet of things (IoT). In our AAL scenario, these objects collect and transfer real-time information about the patients to the hospital server with the help of Wireless Mesh Network (WMN). Due to the multi-hop nature of mesh networks, it is possible for an adversary to reroute the network traffic via many denial of service (DoS) attacks, and hence affect the correct functionality of the mesh routing protocol. In this paper, based on a comparative study, we choose the most suitable secure mesh routing protocol for IoT-based AAL applications. Then, we analyze the resilience of this protocol against DoS attacks. Focusing on the hello flooding attack, the protocol is simulated and analyzed in terms of data packet delivery ratio, delay, and throughput. Simulation results show that the chosen protocol is totally resilient against DoS attack and can be one of the best candidates for secure routing in IoT-based AAL applications.

Currently, the eHealthcare information management is the most critical and hot research topic. Especially with the involvement of new and promising telecommunication technologies like Machine to Machine (M2M) Communication. In M2M communication the devices interact and exchange information with each other in an autonomous manner to accomplish the required tasks. Mostly machine communicate to another machine wirelessly. The wireless communication opens the medium for enormous vulnerabilities and make it very easy for hackers to access the confidential information and can perform malicious activities. In this paper, we propose a Machine to Machine (M2M) Low Delay and Secure (LDS) communication system for e-healthcare community based on random distributive key management scheme and modified Kerberos realm to ensure data security. The system is capable to perform the tasks in an autonomous and intelligent manner that minimizes the workload of medical staffs, and improves the quality of patient care as well as the system performance. We show how the different actors in the e-healthcare community can interact with each other in a secure manner. The system handles dynamic assignments of doctors to specific patients. The proposed architecture further provides security against false attack, false triggering and temper attack. Finally, the simulation type implementation is performed on Visual Basic .net 2013 that shows the feasibility of the proposed Low Delay and Secure (LDS) algorithm.

The privacy of cloud users is at risk. Privacy invasive profiling technologies are becoming more powerful than ever. Users are not only identifiable through their explicitly disclosed data but also through aggregate analysis of metadata - i.e. data about their communication patterns with services. This paper, investigates the role of metadata in user profiling. We specifically aim to find out the sources of metadata and what they can reveal about a user and argue that metadata are indeed personal information. We also discuss privacy-via-anonymity as a means of anonymizing user profiles.

Pervasive computing infrastructure is highly distributed and it is essential to develop security mechanisms that enhance the security of the system by distributing trust among the various infrastructure components. We present a novel access control architecture explicitly designed to distribute trust that combines threshold cryptography, multi-layer encryption, and mediated access to contextual data to support dynamically changing access control permissions. We present several models of our access control infrastructure and evaluate how well each design distributes trust and limits the behavior of misbehaving components. We also simulate the behavior of our threshold based access control scheme and evaluate the overhead of each infrastructure model.

Pervasive environments are dynamically changing environments with enormous amounts of information available for access from anywhere. This paper presents a framework for context-aware access control using threshold cryptography (CAAC-TC) where the administration of access control is distributed between different context services. CAAC-TC encrypts information using threshold cryptography where the private key is split up between the different context conditions which must be captured or realized. The idea here is that not all specified context conditions must be captured, k captured contexts are enough. The management of access decisions is distributed among the different contexts. In CAAC-TC, multiple encryption layers can be specified where each layer is an encryption scheme of either n-out-of-n or k-out-of-n. Multiple layers simulate the use of an `AND' operator. Some of the main characteristics of CAAC-TC are: decentralization, context error tolerant (distributed trust), extensibility, flexibility and scalability.

Large screen displays are being increasingly deployed in public areas for advertising, entertainment, and information display. Recently we have witnessed increasing interest in supporting interaction with such displays using personal mobile devices. To enable the rapid development of public large screen interactive applications, we have designed and developed the MAGIC Broker. The MAGIC Broker provides a set of common abstractions and a RESTful Web services protocol to easily program interactive public large screen display applications with a focus on mobile device interactions. We have carried out a preliminary evaluation of the MAGIC Broker via the development of a number of prototypes and believe our toolkit is a valid first step in developing a generic support infrastructure to empower developers of interactive large screen display applications.

This paper describes Scavenger Hunt, a team-based orientation activity for incoming freshmen in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Like many large research universities, Illinois has struggled with the high attrition rate of first-year students in computing disciplines. Scavenger Hunt, which has been held each of the past three years, is intended to foster a sense of community within the department and acclimate new students to undergraduate life as computer science majors. A unique aspect of the activity is the use of handheld computers to manage most aspects of the competition, which enables physically handicapped students to participate on an equal footing with their able-bodied peers. Thus far, Scavenger Hunt has been directly responsible for the increased participation of new students in departmental activities and organizations. In addition, we have observed a significant correlation between student participation in Scavenger Hunt and retention rates in the department. Along with other retention-oriented activities, Scavenger Hunt is measurably improving the attitude of new students towards computer science.

Pervasive computing promotes an environment that blurs the distinction between digital and physical devices and integrates all entities in a physical space into a cohesive programmable unit. Some of the early research activities in pervasive computing focused on developing infrastructures for pervasive applications. These infrastructures successfully merged physical and digital entities in an environment to create aware homes, smart offices and active spaces. In recent years, ad-hoc pervasive computing has attracted attention with the proliferation of low cost, short-range wireless devices. Ad-hoc pervasive computing does not assume digital devices to be tied to physical environments and aims to create digital "clusters" that can be viewed as a unified entity. The user can program this cluster of devices with a single programming interface. In this paper, AVC introduce our middleware, called Mobile Gaia, for ad-hoc pervasive computing. Mobile Gaia is a services-based middleware that integrates resources of various devices. It manages several functions such as forming and maintaining device collections, sharing resources among devices and enables seamless service interactions. It also provides an application framework to develop applications for the device collection. The application framework decomposes the application into smaller components that can run on different devices in this collection. We discuss the architecture of mobile Gaia and introduce a sample application that has been designed using our middleware.

Applications designed for ubiquitous computing environments need to be coded in a specific way in order to fully realize the benefits of ubiquitous computing. Currently, applications for ubiquitous computing environments either need to be rewritten entirely to benefit from ubiquity, or special wrappers need to be written and customized for particular applications to provide limited compatibility. We argue that the real-world deployment of ubiquitous computing will be realized when users can migrate and use the applications they are familiar with in their daily lives with minimal effort. Furthermore, these applications should automatically benefit from typical ubiquitous computing features including multi-device support, runtime adaptation, environment-independence and context-awareness. In this paper we present a framework that allows us to port any generic application to the domain of ubiquitous computing without having to rewrite the code from scratch. We have experimented with the framework in our prototype ubiquitous computing platform known as active spaces. This has allowed us to explosively increase the number of applications supported by our active space.

The Gaia ubiquitous computing platform currently supports mobile devices through a thin client proxy architecture. Mobile devices run a lightweight proxy client written in J2ME to join an active space. While this approach allows a wide variety of devices to interact with active spaces, it lacks the ability to use device specific functionality. This problem is addressed by combining the J2ME client with a microserver, which is a bridge from the native language to J2ME. The microserver-proxy approach enables thin clients to fully access device-specific features while respecting security through a standard interface as Gaia services.

Pervasive Computing advocates the enhancement of physical spaces with computing and communication resources that help users perform various kinds of tasks. We call these enhanced physical spaces Active Spaces. Active Spaces are highly dynamic — the context and resources available in these evironments can change rapidly. The large number of entities present in these spaces and the dynamism associated with them make it difficult for developers to program these environments. It is not always clear at development time which resources are to be used for performing various kinds of tasks and how to use them. In this paper, we introduce a new high-level programming model for pervasive computing environments, Olympus. The main feature of this model is that developers can specify Active Space entities and common Active Space operations at an abstract, high level. Active Space entities (which include services, applications, devices, physical objects, locations and users) can be specified using high level descriptions. Our framework resolves these descriptions into actual Active Space entities based on constraints specified by the developer, ontological descriptions of entities, the resources available in the current space, space-level policies and the current context of the space. The programming model also provides the developers with operators for commonly used functions. Examples of operators include start, stop and move components. Thus, developers do not have to worry about how various tasks are performed in the space in which their program is to be deployed. These details are taken care of by the model and the developer is free to focus on the actual logic of the program. In this paper, we discuss the programming model, its implementation and several example Active Space programs that have been developed using this model.

Ubiquitous computing has fueled the idea of constructing sentient, information-rich "smart spaces" that extend the boundaries of traditional computing to encompass physical spaces, embedded devices, sensors, and other machinery. To achieve this, smart spaces need to capture situational information so that they can detect changes in context and adapt themselves accordingly. However, without considering basic security issues ubiquitous computing environments could be rife with vulnerabilities. Ubiquitous computing environments impose new requirements on security. Security services, like authentication and access control, have to be non-intrusive, intelligent, and able to adapt to the rapidly changing contexts of the spaces. We present a ubiquitous security mechanism that integrates context-awareness with automated reasoning to perform authentication and access control in ubiquitous computing environments.

Ubiquitous computing is poised to revolutionize the way we compute and interact with each other. However, unless privacy concerns are taken into account early in the design process, we will end up creating a very effective distributed surveillance system, which would be a dream come true for electronic stalkers and "big brothers". We present a protocol, which preserves the privacy of users and keeps their communication anonymous. In effect, we create a "mist" that conceals users from the system and other users. Yet, users will still be able to enjoy seamless interaction with services and other entities that wander within the ubiquitous computing environment.

We discuss our approach to constructing a dynamic and secure smart home environment and tackling the challenges associated with it. We envision a smart home as an active environment populated with smart, dynamically configurable consumer devices capable of interacting with humans and other smart devices. In such a dynamic and active environment, there is a great need for an agile, lightweight, distributed security mechanism. This security mechanism needs to be programmable and able to evolve as rapidly as the environment itself. Yet, this mechanism should be able to adapt to environments with scarce resources. We present Tiny SESAME to meet these challenges while utilizing Jini/sup TM/ technology from Sun Microsystems to handle the common parts of distributed devices. Tiny SESAME is a lightweight component-based, Java-implementation of a subset of SESAME. SESAME is an extension to Kerberos that supports public key technologies, access control, and delegation of access rights. We discuss our Tiny SESAME and how it could be integrated with handheld and consumer devices.