Trust has a significant impact on our personal and business relations. It is noteworthy that in the era of things based services, people trust in various companies/organizations for per sonal and business purposes. They receive their services and consequently, ‘data including personalandbusiness’isaccessibletotheseserviceproviderswhichsometimesbringunde sirable results. An example of things-based services is remote health monitoring system. In this case also, the sensitive data is accessible to known and occasionally unknown entities. Since health-related services are life-critical, therefore, the quality of such services in term of trust should not be compromised, and the context of the services should be the same as required. Hence,itisfairlysaidthatmaintainingtrustintheenvironmentofthisdominating technology is a tedious task. Web of Things (WoT) simplifies the development of things based services by providing an application layer. It is identified that the existing work focuses on building blocks of WoT architecture. However, the aspect of trust has got less attention in the area of WoT. Con sequently, this research proposes a WoT architecture focusing on Trust. It has five layers which are not like those layers defined in the OSI (Open System Interconnection) model. Instead these layers facilitate i)in making things part of the cyber world with the help of the Web technologies, ii) monitoring and evaluating trust at a central trust management layer, iii) receiving and providing recommendations through social relations, iv) and help in dis covering and selecting the required services by managing their trustworthiness at user level. For trust monitoring and management, a methodology is introduced in which entities are evaluated on the basis of multi-criteria such as context and Quality of Service (QoS). For this purpose,severalattributesrelatedtocontextandQoSareidentifiedwhichcanaffectthe trust worthiness of the entities. Direct and indirect experiences are the sources of evidence of trustworthiness. Moreover, third-party recommendations are also considered. To complete these tasks, algorithms are also designed. The research also proposes a methodology for the identification of service-related attacks which are carried out to malign the trust level of the entities present in the system. To validate the proposed architecture, a prototype is implemented which is for the real-time monitoring of a poultry farm in Pakistan. It demonstrates an instance of the architecture presenting the five layers of the architecture. The test results show the effectiveness of the architecture in maintaining the healthy environment of the poultry farm. In addition, to demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed algorithms, two specially designed environments are implemented where two real datasets are used for experimental purpose. In the first group of experiments, the algorithms for service discovery, selection, and ranking are tested along with query augmentation. In the second group of experiments, a classification ap proachalongwiththeproposedalgorithmsisusedtoidentifyvarioustypesofattacksonthe basis of feedbacks. During two kinds of experiments, the proposed algorithms demonstrate their effectiveness in discovering and ranking the services. In addition, identification of the attacks is also demonstrated. The results show that the system outperforms the existing re lated approaches in terms of the comparative analysis on the basis of performance metrics (such as precision, sensitivity, and accuracy) and parametric metrics (such as availability, interoperability, context-awareness, scalability, and QoS).
Background of the Study: To compare the effects of relaxing music therapy with task-oriented training of lower limbs on the balance and functional status in patients with chronic stroke.
Methodology: This randomized clinical trial was conducted in three outpatient physiotherapy clinics in Lahore, Pakistan. A sample of 76 participants with chronic stroke, aged 40-60 years, and on assistance walking, were recruited through a purposive sampling technique. Individuals who had physical impairments and visual or hearing deficits were not included in the study. Group A received task-oriented training with routine physical therapy while Group B received Music therapy additionally. Three sessions on alternate days per week for eight weeks were given. Balance and functional independence were the outcome variables measured using the Berg Balance Scale and Functional Independence Measure respectively. Mann-Whitney U test and Friedman ANOVA were applied for between-group and within-group differences respectively. P-value was significant at ≤0.05.
Results: The mean age of participants was 54.05 ± 3.64 years, the majority i.e., 55 (72.4%) were male, 46 (60.5%) had ischemic stroke and 53 (69.7%) were presented with left-sided weakness. A statistically significant difference was observed among both groups in balance (p =.000) and functional independence (p=0.000). The within-group difference was also significant for balance (p=0.000) and functional independence (p=0.000).
Conclusion: The integration of relaxing music therapy, task-oriented training, and routine physiotherapy is effective in improving balance and functional independence in chronic stroke patients.
This thesis deals with the development of a sophisticated multiple access communication technique, Multicarrier Interleave Division Multiple Access (MC-IDMA) and improve- ments in Orthogonal Frequency Division Mulltiplexing-Space Division Multiple Access (OFDM-SDMA) for uplink transmissions. Although different in names both theses tech- niques endeavour to describe a wide range of upcoming communication algorithms and to incorporate three key features that will be common to the next generation communication systems: multiple access capability, resistance to multipath fading and high bandwidth efficiency. The performance of the both systems is demonstrated in the presence of channel impairments. OFDM is almost completely immune to multipath fading effects and IDMA has mul- tiuser capability. MC-IDMA attempts to combine these features, so that we can have Inter Symbol Interference (ISI) free higher data rates for multiple users simultaneously. MC-IDMA uses chip level interleavers as the only means of user separation and de- votes the entire bandwidth expansion to low rate Forward Error Correcting codes (FEC) which provide additional coding gain not present in conventional Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) or Multicarrier-Code Division Multiple Access (MC-CDMA) systems. An iterative Chip-by-Chip (CBC) multiuser detection algorithm is exploited to sup- press the channel fading and Multiple Access Interference (MAI). To further improve the performance, adaptive subchannel algorithm is used to transmit information only on good conditioned subchannels. To support high order modulations, Multicode MC- IDMA is proposed which can enhance the data rate at the expense of slightly higher power to achieve the same BER. A simplification in a channel estimation algorithm for MC-IDMA system is suggested and the concept of pilot chips is introduced which is a feasible approach because MC-IDMA systems use chip level interleavers and CBC de- tection algorithm. A noval channel estimation algorithm is presented which reduces the joint estimation into several single user estimation problems and increases throughput drastically saving a lot of transmission overhead. The complexity is analyzed and Bit viiError Rate (BER) is computed to depict the performance of MC-IDMA system. The re- sults show that the MC-IDMA system outperforms the conventional MC-CDMA system by supporting a large number of users with enhanced bit error rate performance. Next, a multiple antenna aided, Minimum Bit Error Rate (MBER) based Bell Lab- oratories Layered Space Time (MBER-BLAST) algorithm for OFDM-SDMA communi- cation is presented which overcomes the limitations of detectors when the number of users exceed the number of receiver antennas. A Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm is employed for finding the optimum weight vectors for MBER Multiuser De- tector (MUD). PSO is well suited for physically realizable, real-time applications, where low complexity and fast convergence is of absolute importance. Maximum Likelihood (ML) detection algorithm is optimal but it uses exhaustive search and is prohibitively complex. The proposed algorithm outperforms the MBER detector and is capable of achieving performance similar to that attained by ML detector at a significantly lower complexity especially under high user loads. Results show that OFDM-SDMA when used with proposed algorithms promise substantially improved performance and can support throughputs as high as 11 bits/per chip at a BER of 10 −4 . It supports a large number of users by exploiting the capacity advantages of multiple antenna systems in rich scattering environments and offers a good performance-complexity trade-off.