Epidemic contact tracing with smartphone sensors

ABSTRACT

Contact tracing is widely considered as an effective procedure in the fight against epidemic diseases. However, one of the challenges for technology based contact tracing is the high number of false positives, questioning its trust-worthiness and efficiency amongst the wider population for mass adoption. To this end, this paper proposes a novel, yet practical smartphone-based contact tracing approach, employing WiFi and acoustic sound for relative distance estimate, in addition to the air pressure and the magnetic field for ambient environment matching. We present a model combining six smartphone sensors, prioritising some of them when certain conditions are met. We empirically verified our approach in various realistic environments to demonstrate an achievement of up to 95% fewer false positives, and 62% more accurate than Bluetooth-only system. To the best of our knowledge, this paper was one of the first work to propose a combination of smartphone sensors for contact tracing.     

General expression for pdf of a sum of independent exponential random variables

In order to evaluate exactly the performance of some diversity schemes, the probability density function (pdf) of a sum of independent exponential random variables (r.v.'s) must be known. This paper proposes a simple method to find it by using characteristic function., The resultant pdf is successfully applied to formulate the closed-form BER expression of 2 Tx-J Rx transmit diversity as well as the outage probability of repetition coding.     

An efficient approach for damage identification based on improved machine learning using PSO-SVM

Engineering with Computers - Structural health monitoring (SHM) and Non-destructive Damage Identification (NDI) using responses of structures under dynamic excitation have an imperative role in the...     

Bandwidth-efficient cooperative MIMO relaying schemes

Coded cooperative MIMO relaying schemes in which all successfully decoded signals from multiple sources are simultaneously forwarded by a multi-antenna relay to a common multi-antenna destination to increase bandwidth efficiency are proposed in this paper. These schemes facilitate the various retransmission strategies at relay and single-user and multi-user iterative decoding techniques at destination, suitable for trade-offs between performance, latency, and complexity. When channel state information (CSI) is available, pre-coding and power allocation at the relay can be exploited to enhance the information transmission reliability over the relay-destination channel, thus improving the overall system performance. Simulation result shows their superiority to direct transmission under the same transmit power and bandwidth efficiency.     

Impact of Primary Interference on Secrecy Performance of Physical Layer Security in Cognitive Radio Networks

Wireless Personal Communications - In cognitive radio networks (CRNs), primary interference is either neglected or considered as an additive white Gaussian random variable (r.v.). Current...     

Exact Outage Probability of Underlay Cognitive Cooperative Networks Over Rayleigh Fading Channels

Our contribution in this paper is the derivation of an exact closed-form outage probability formula for underlay cognitive cooperative networks operated over Rayleigh fading channels. The derivation considers the correlation among received signal-to-noise ratios, two critical constraints (interference power constraint and maximum transmit power constraint), and non identically distributed (i.d.) channels. The derived formula is corroborated by Monte Carlo simulations and is served as an useful and effective tool to evaluate the performance behavior of underlay cognitive cooperative networks without time-consuming simulations under different operation parameters. Numerical results illustrate that underlay cognitive cooperative networks suffer the outage saturation phenomenon for a given maximum interference power level.     

Performance Analysis of Cooperative Underlay Cognitive Networks with Channel Estimation Error

Channel information (CI) plays an important role in system design optimization. It is obtained through channel estimation process and hence, inevitably imperfect at a certain degree. Numerical evaluation of the outage performance of cooperative underlay cognitive networks under the presence of channel estimation error has been left open. This paper heals this literature gap with the proposal of a precise outage probability expression. Various results show the excellent match between analysis and simulation, and the advantage of the derived expression in studying the effect of CI imperfection on system performance.     

Crystalline molecular machines: a quest toward solid-state dynamics and function

Complex molecular machinery may be envisioned as densely packed, multicomponent, self-assembling systems built with high structural precision to control the dynamics of one or more internal degrees of freedom. With molecular gyroscopes as a test, we describe a general strategy to design crystals capable of supporting structurally programmed molecular motions, a practical approach to their synthesis, convenient strategies to characterize their solid-state dynamics, and potential applications based on polar structures responding collectively to external fields.