Mobile phone

This paper presents the socio-economic profile of households in the Family Dynamics Study (FDS) (1997-2001) and makes comparisons with the earlier Functional Groups Study (FGS) (1992-1996). For the current study, FGS villages with a high prevalence of child malnutrition were purposively selected. In each village selected, all households were included, and interviews with a structured questionnaire were conducted in April-May 1998. Incomes were generally low and incidence of poverty was high; 49.6% of the households were under the poverty line income, of which 37.2% were poor and 12.4% were hard core poor. Overall, only 23.2% of heads of households were in agricultural occupations, others being primarily waged workers and petty traders. Livestock rearing was widespread (57.8%), and most households (90.4%) owned at least one motorised vehicle, the most common being the motorcycle. The majority of households had refrigerators (73.6%), washing machines (58.8%), and televisions (91.1%); ...

Telecommunication and more specially mobile phones have the potential to provide solution to the existing information asymmetry in various lagging sectors like Agriculture. India’s agricultural sector suffers from low growth rates and low productivity. Issues in access to information is a week point at every stage of the agrisupply chain. For small farmers base economy like India, access to information can possible enable better incomes and productivity to the farmers. This paper through focus group discussions and in-depth interview with farmers in villages of India, has tried to find answers to the use and impact of mobile and mobile enabled services on agricultural productivity. The answers to these questions are of relevance to develop better policy environment conducive for the small and medium farmers and has implications for mobile operators, for information service providers, and for policy-makers. The results show that although, mobiles can act as catalyst to improving prod...

Rising concern over the poor level of blood-pressure (BP) control among hypertensive patients has prompted searches for novel ways of managing hypertension. The objectives of this study were to develop and pilot-test a home BP tele-management system that actively engages patients in the process of care.Phase 1 involved a series of focus-group meetings with patients and primary care providers to guide the system’s development. In Phase 2, 33 diabetic patients with uncontrolled ambulatory hypertension were enrolled in a 4-month pilot study, using a before-and-after design to assess its effectiveness in lowering BP, its acceptability to users, and the reliability of home BP measurements.The system, developed using commodity hardware, comprised a Bluetooth-enabled home BP monitor, a mobile phone to receive and transmit data, a central server for data processing, a fax-back system to send physicians’ reports, and a BP alerting system. In the pilot study, 24-h ambulatory BP fell by 11/5 (±13/7 SD) mm Hg (both P < .001), and BP control improved significantly. Substantially more home readings were received by the server than expected, based on the preset monitoring schedule. Of 42 BP alerts sent to patients, almost half (n = 20) were due to low BP. Physicians received no critical BP alerts. Patients perceived the system as acceptable and effective.The encouraging results of this study provide a strong rationale for a long-term, randomized, clinical trial to determine whether this home BP tele-management system improves BP control in the community among patients with uncontrolled hypertension.

Abstract: Each mobile phone with a built-in CMOS sensor can inherently be seen as sophisticated optical sensor being able to analyze its environment in terms of visual events and its own mobility. Due to mass production their price decreases steadily, although their processing capacity increases. Mobile phones are usually attached to people, who are driven by mobility. We define activities arising from this mobility as internal activities in contrast to external activities, that are caused by visual events. Both activities can be recognized by measuring the sensor’s optical flow. We present a method to identify internal activities based on optical flow measurements and probabilistic reasoning. We implement a lifelogging application, running on a Linux-based mobile phone, that can detect internal activities such as moving left-hand, right-hand or walking with a recognition rate of 80%. While standing still external activities are recognized using object detection. 1

The need for increased individual mobility has resulted in a significant and continuous increase of road traffic density. More and more, the roads are getting congested. Modern Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are offering methods to avoid these congestions. However, this requires a dense surveillance system of sensors that is very costly. Thus, due to financial constraints, not all roads are

Multimodal interaction is becoming common in many kinds of devices, particularly mobile phones. If care is not taken in design and implementation, there may be latencies in the timing of feedback in the different modalities may have unintended effects on users. This paper introduces an easy to implement multimodal latency measurement tool for touchscreen interaction. It uses off-the-shelf components and

Mobile phones have been shown effective in several public health domains. However, there are few evaluations of the effectiveness of mobile health in health promotion. Also, although many studies have referenced behavioral theory, none appears to have explicitly tested theoretical assumptions or demonstrated mechanisms of change. More robust evaluation models that incorporate theory and measurement of behavioral mediators are needed. As in all public health programs, mobile health operates within a social ecological context. For example, organizational- and individual-level programs seek to influence health and health care practices and individual health behaviors. New programs such as Text4baby demonstrate how theory and explicit testing of mediators can be incorporated in evaluations. There are challenges and opportunities facing mHealth evaluations given the nature of the mobile channel. Mobile communication is ubiquitous, available at all times and places, and thus experimental control is often difficult. Natural experiments using variation in dosage of mHealth and place- or location-based designs may increase experimental control. Text4baby is a text messaging program that provides prenatal care messages to pregnant women and new mothers. It uses a partnership model with health care facilities often serving as local implementation partners. The authors review a case example of the evaluation of Text4baby at Madigan Army Medical Center. Participants were randomized to usual prenatal care plus text messaging or usual care alone. The evaluation has a theoretical model of behavior change and measures mediators as well as behavioral outcomes. Results will inform how behavioral theory works within mobile health programs.

Today, people are making use of several devices for communications, for accessing multi-media content services, for data/information retrieving, for processing, computing, etc.: examples are laptops, PDAs, mobile phones, digital cameras, mp3 players, smart cards and smart appliances. One of the most attracting service scenarios for future Telecommunications and Internet is the one where people will be able to browse any

This paper presents the socio-economic profile of households in the Family Dynamics Study (FDS) (1997-2001) and makes comparisons with the earlier Functional Groups Study (FGS) (1992-1996). For the current study, FGS villages with a high prevalence of child malnutrition were purposively selected. In each village selected, all households were included, and interviews with a structured questionnaire were conducted in April-May 1998. Incomes were generally low and incidence of poverty was high; 49.6% of the households were under the poverty line income, of which 37.2% were poor and 12.4% were hard core poor. Overall, only 23.2% of heads of households were in agricultural occupations, others being primarily waged workers and petty traders. Livestock rearing was widespread (57.8%), and most households (90.4%) owned at least one motorised vehicle, the most common being the motorcycle. The majority of households had refrigerators (73.6%), washing machines (58.8%), and televisions (91.1%); ...

The paper presents an empirical model of acceptance of mobile phones by elderly people. It is based on an extension of the widely used TAM-Technology Acceptance Model and aims specifically at investigating the relationship among intrinsic and extrinsic motivations to use. The data consists of 740 questionnaires from people over 65 years old. The validated model shows that intrinsic motivations play an important role albeit always mediated by utilitarian motives. Similarly, it emerges a strong influence of the reference social group (children and relatives) in increasing the utilitarian values of the use of mobile phones. These findings suggest that mobile phone usage by elderly might not be, after all, too much different, from a motivational point of view, from that of younger or adult people.

INTRODUCTION: Mobile phone dependence has become an emerging public health problem. This cross-sectional study was conducted to find out the mobile phone involvement and dependence among undergraduate medical students in a Medical College of West Bengal, India. MATERIALS AND METHODS: A study was conducted at IQ City Medical College, Durgapur, District Burdwan, West Bengal, India, during July–August 2015 among 252 undergraduate medical students. Involvement and dependence were elicited by mobile phone involvement questionnaire (MPIQ) and mobile phone dependence questionnaire (MPDQ), respectively. Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software (version 19.0) was used for analysis. RESULTS: About 14.9% of students were being highly involved with their mobile phone. The mean score of MPIQ was greatest in domain 5, i.e. euphoria followed by domain 2, i.e. behavioral salience and then domain 4, i.e. conflict with other activities. About 19.4% of males and 11.1% of females had...

The present research investigated and studied students&#x27; representations about daily life technologies, in a prospect of studying technology in Greek primary education. In the research participated 60 Greek primary school students aged 9 to 12 years old. Re- search data were collected through semi-structured, personal, clinical-type interviews. Each interview investigated student&#x27;s conceptions and views about the following thematic areas: the

Mobile visualisation of map-based information is a difficult task. Designers of such systems must contend with the limitations of mobile devices in terms of hardware, screen size and input mechanisms. These problems are exacerbated by the nature of spatial data, where a large information space needs to be presented and manipulated on a small screen. In this paper, a prototype adaptive mobile map-based visualisation system, called MediaMaps, is presented. MediaMaps allows users to capture, location-tag, sort and browse multimedia in a map-based view. MediaMaps was designed to adapt the information visualised, the map-based visualisations and the supporting user interface. The results of an international field study, in which participants used MediaMaps on their personal mobile phones for a three-week period, are also presented. These results show that the adaptations implemented achieved high levels of accuracy and user satisfaction and successfully addressed some of the limitations ...

The explosion of mobile phones into a region that, until recently, was nearly devoid of telecommunications infrastructure provides a valuable opportunity to explore the potential effects of information and communication technology on various economic and social outcomes. This article focuses specifically on the potential influence that mobile phones will exert on corruption in Africa. Two distinct empirical analyses test the

The trajectory from alcohol use to alcohol use disorders in adolescence is yet to be understood. Momentary sampling may assist in capturing &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;real-time&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39; data on young people&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#39;s alcohol use and associated motivational factors. This paper aims to review the feasibility and usefulness of a mobile phone momentary sampling program to capture data about alcohol use and related behaviours. Two studies were conducted: a school-based study with 18 Year 9 and 11 students and a clinical study with eight high-risk adolescent drinkers. Participants answered questions about their daily activities, alcohol use, stressors and negative mood four times a day for 1 week using a mobile phone momentary sampling program. In the school-based study, 61% of participants reported drinking alcohol. On drinking days participants spent less time studying (14% vs. 26%), more time sleeping or resting (35% vs. 12%) and more time hanging out (21% vs. 11%) than on non-drinking days. In the high-risk sample, 88% of participants reported drinking alcohol. On drinking days, these participants spent a greater proportion of their waking time with their boyfriend or girlfriend (19.2% vs. 6%) and generally had higher negative mood than on non-drinking days. The current mobiletype program was well suited to capturing data on alcohol use in younger, school-attending adolescents. However, to capture alcohol use in older adolescents who lead less routine lives, it is necessary to make some amendments including targeting particular behaviours and symptoms. Recommendations for future studies are proposed.

This paper examines the effects of systematic and random errors in recall and of selection bias in case-control studies of mobile phone use and cancer. These sensitivity analyses are based on Monte-Carlo computer simulations and were carried out within the INTERPHONE Study, an international collaborative case-control study in 13 countries. Recall error scenarios simulated plausible values of random and systematic, non-differential and differential recall errors in amount of mobile phone use reported by study subjects. Plausible values for the recall error were obtained from validation studies. Selection bias scenarios assumed varying selection probabilities for cases and controls, mobile phone users, and non-users. Where possible these selection probabilities were based on existing information from non-respondents in INTERPHONE. Simulations used exposure distributions based on existing INTERPHONE data and assumed varying levels of the true risk of brain cancer related to mobile phone use. Results suggest that random recall errors of plausible levels can lead to a large underestimation in the risk of brain cancer associated with mobile phone use. Random errors were found to have larger impact than plausible systematic errors. Differential errors in recall had very little additional impact in the presence of large random errors. Selection bias resulting from underselection of unexposed controls led to J-shaped exposure-response patterns, with risk apparently decreasing at low to moderate exposure levels. The present results, in conjunction with those of the validation studies conducted within the INTERPHONE study, will play an important role in the interpretation of existing and future case-control studies of mobile phone use and cancer risk, including the INTERPHONE study.