A methodology for the design and development of gamified mobile apps for monitoring cancer survivors.

An increasing number of cancer patients is treated and recover each year, and consequently there are survivors that require specialized and coordinated follow-up. The physical, social, working, psychological and emotional aspects of these survivors have to be characterized, investigated and treated by multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary teams. Nowadays, oncology community is focused on tracking records of interest in Patient-Reported Outcome (PROs) for patients of different cancer types. In the last years, several articles have proven that PROs are an effective method to improve the management of patient symptoms and, subsequently, clinical care. In this scenario, patient engagement is one of the most relevant aspects for PROs success. In this sense, one of the most promising strategies for increasing engagement is gamification, that is, the introduction of game elements in systems that are not games. Therefore, in this work we introduce a methodology for developing gamification apps for cancer survivors that aims at increasing engagement when collecting PROs data.

Smart Cupboard for Assessing Memory in Home Environment.

Sensor systems for the Internet of Things (IoT) make it possible to continuously monitor people, gathering information without any extra effort from them. Thus, the IoT can be very helpful in the context of early disease detection, which can improve peoples' quality of life by applying the right treatment and measures at an early stage. This paper presents a new use of IoT sensor systems-we present a novel three-door smart cupboard that can measure the memory of a user, aiming at detecting potential memory losses. The smart cupboard has three sensors connected to a Raspberry Pi, whose aim is to detect which doors are opened. Inside of the Raspberry Pi, a Python script detects the openings of the doors, and classifies the events between attempts of finding something without success and the events of actually finding it, in order to measure the user's memory concerning the objects' locations (among the three compartments of the smart cupboard). The smart cupboard was assessed with 23 different users in a controlled environment. This smart cupboard was powered by an external battery. The memory assessments of the smart cupboard were compared with a validated test of memory assessment about face-name associations and a self-reported test about self-perceived memory. We found a significant correlation between the smart cupboard results and both memory measurement methods. Thus, we conclude that the proposed novel smart cupboard successfully measured memory.

ABS-SmartComAgri: An Agent-Based Simulator of Smart Communication Protocols in Wireless Sensor Networks for Debugging in Precision Agriculture.

Smart communication protocols are becoming a key mechanism for improving communication performance in networks such as wireless sensor networks. However, the literature lacks mechanisms for simulating smart communication protocols in precision agriculture for decreasing production costs. In this context, the current work presents an agent-based simulator of smart communication protocols for efficiently managing pesticides. The simulator considers the needs of electric power, crop health, percentage of alive bugs and pesticide consumption. The current approach is illustrated with three different communication protocols respectively called (a) broadcast, (b) neighbor and (c) low-cost neighbor. The low-cost neighbor protocol obtained a statistically-significant reduction in the need of electric power over the neighbor protocol, with a very large difference according to the common interpretations about the Cohen's d effect size. The presented simulator is called ABS-SmartComAgri and is freely distributed as open-source from a public research data repository. It ensures the reproducibility of experiments and allows other researchers to extend the current approach.

Green Communication for Tracking Heart Rate with Smartbands.

The trend of using wearables for healthcare is steeply increasing nowadays, and, consequently, in the market, there are several gadgets that measure several body features. In addition, the mixed use between smartphones and wearables has motivated research like the current one. The main goal of this work is to reduce the amount of times that a certain smartband (SB) measures the heart rate (HR) in order to save energy in communications without significantly reducing the utility of the application. This work has used an SB Sony 2 for measuring heart rate, Fit API for storing data and Android for managing data. The current approach has been assessed with data from HR sensors collected for more than three months. Once all HR measures were collected, then the current approach detected hourly ranges whose heart rate were higher than normal. The hourly ranges allowed for estimating the time periods of weeks that the user could be at potential risk for measuring frequently in these (60 times per hour) ranges. Out of these ranges, the measurement frequency was lower (six times per hour). If SB measures an unusual heart rate, the app warns the user so they are aware of the risk and can act accordingly. We analyzed two cases and we conclude that energy consumption was reduced in 83.57% in communications when using training of several weeks. In addition, a prediction per day was made using data of 20 users. On average, tests obtained 63.04% of accuracy in this experimentation using the training over the data of one day for each user.

Smart System for Bicarbonate Control in Irrigation for Hydroponic Precision Farming.

Improving the sustainability in agriculture is nowadays an important challenge. The automation of irrigation processes via low-cost sensors can to spread technological advances in a sector very influenced by economical costs. This article presents an auto-calibrated pH sensor able to detect and adjust the imbalances in the pH levels of the nutrient solution used in hydroponic agriculture. The sensor is composed by a pH probe and a set of micropumps that sequentially pour the different liquid solutions to maintain the sensor calibration and the water samples from the channels that contain the nutrient solution. To implement our architecture, we use an auto-calibrated pH sensor connected to a wireless node. Several nodes compose our wireless sensor networks (WSN) to control our greenhouse. The sensors periodically measure the pH level of each hydroponic support and send the information to a data base (DB) which stores and analyzes the data to warn farmers about the measures. The data can then be accessed through a user-friendly, web-based interface that can be accessed through the Internet by using desktop or mobile devices. This paper also shows the design and test bench for both the auto-calibrated pH sensor and the wireless network to check their correct operation.

ABS-FishCount: An Agent-Based Simulator of Underwater Sensors for Measuring the Amount of Fish.

Underwater sensors provide one of the possibilities to explore oceans, seas, rivers, fish farms and dams, which all together cover most of our planet's area. Simulators can be helpful to test and discover some possible strategies before implementing these in real underwater sensors. This speeds up the development of research theories so that these can be implemented later. In this context, the current work presents an agent-based simulator for defining and testing strategies for measuring the amount of fish by means of underwater sensors. The current approach is illustrated with the definition and assessment of two strategies for measuring fish. One of these two corresponds to a simple control mechanism, while the other is an experimental strategy and includes an implicit coordination mechanism. The experimental strategy showed a statistically significant improvement over the control one in the reduction of errors with a large Cohen's d effect size of 2.55.

Spontaneous ad hoc mobile cloud computing network.

Cloud computing helps users and companies to share computing resources instead of having local servers or personal devices to handle the applications. Smart devices are becoming one of the main information processing devices. Their computing features are reaching levels that let them create a mobile cloud computing network. But sometimes they are not able to create it and collaborate actively in the cloud because it is difficult for them to build easily a spontaneous network and configure its parameters. For this reason, in this paper, we are going to present the design and deployment of a spontaneous ad hoc mobile cloud computing network. In order to perform it, we have developed a trusted algorithm that is able to manage the activity of the nodes when they join and leave the network. The paper shows the network procedures and classes that have been designed. Our simulation results using Castalia show that our proposal presents a good efficiency and network performance even by using high number of nodes.

Enabling smart workflows over heterogeneous ID-sensing technologies.

Sensing technologies in mobile devices play a key role in reducing the gap between the physical and the digital world. The use of automatic identification capabilities can improve user participation in business processes where physical elements are involved(Smart Workflows). However, identifying all objects in the user surroundings does not automatically translate into meaningful services to the user. This work introduces Parkour,an architecture that allows the development of services that match the goals of each of the participants in a smart workflow. Parkour is based on a pluggable architecture that can be extended to provide support for new tasks and technologies. In order to facilitatethe development of these plug-ins, tools that automate the development process are also provided. Several Parkour-based systems have been developed in order to validate the applicability of the proposal.

Ubiquitous monitoring of electrical household appliances.

The number of appliances at home is increasing continuously, mainly because they make our lives easier. Currently, technology is integrated in all objects of our daily life. TCP/IP let us monitor our home in real time and check ubiquitously if something is happening at home. Bearing in mind this idea, we have developed a low-cost system, which can be used in any type of electrical household appliance that takes information from the appliance and posts the information to the Twitter Social network. Several sensors placed in the household appliances gather the sensed data and send them wired or wirelessly, depending on the case, using small and cheap devices to a gateway located in the home. This gateway takes decisions, based on the received data, and sends notifications to Twitter. We have developed a software application that takes the values and decides when to issue an alarm to the registered users (Twitter friends of our smart home). The performance of our system has been measured taking into account the home network (using IEEE 802.3u and IEEE 802.11g) and the data publishing in Twitter. As a result, we have generated an original product and service for any electrical household appliance, regardless of the model and manufacturer, that helps home users improve their quality of life. The paper also shows that there is no system with the same innovative features like the ones presented in this paper.

Close2U: An App for Monitoring Cancer Patients with Enriched Information from Interaction Patterns.

The management of cancer patients' symptoms in doctor consultations is a cornerstone in clinical care, this process being fundamental for the follow-up of the evolution of these. This article presents an application that allows collecting periodically and systematically the data of cancer patients and their visualization by the medical team. In this article, we made the analysis, design, implementation, and final evaluation by analyzing the correlation of this data collection with interaction patterns to determine how the user information can be enriched with information from the interaction patterns. We have followed an agile methodology based on the iterative and incremental development of successive prototypes with increased fidelity, where the requirements and solutions have evolved over time according to the need and assessments made. The comprehensive analysis of the patient's condition allowed us to perform a first analysis of the correlation of the states of patients concerning mood, sleeping quality, and pain with the interaction patterns. A future goal of this project is to optimize the process of data collection and the analysis of information. Another future goal is to reduce the time dedicated to reporting the evolution of symptoms in face-to-face consultations and to help professionals in analyzing the patient's evolution even in the period that has not been attended in person.