Smartphones

The majority of Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) prevalence is found in Sub-Saharan Africa, where 80% of the world’s population who suffer from this disease are born. Due to a lack of diagnosis and early treatments, 50-90% of these children will die before they reach the age of five. Current methods used for diagnosing SCD are based on hemoglobin analysis such as capillary electrophoresis, ion-exchange high-performance liquid chromatography, and isoelectric focusing. They require expensive laboratory equipment and are not feasible in these low-resource countries. It is, therefore, imperative to develop an alternative and cost-effective method for diagnosing and monitoring of SCD. This thesis aims to address the development and evaluation of a smartphone-based optical setup for the detection of SCD. This innovative technique can potentially be applied for low cost and accurate diagnosis of SCD and improve disease management in resource-limited settings where the disease exhibits a high prevalence. This Point-of-Care (POC) based device offers the potential to improve SCD diagnosis and patient care by providing a portable and cost effective device that requires minimal training to operate and analyze.

This study is a focused effort on elucidating the performance aspects of modern,
handheld wireless devices and associated mobile network services. Specifically addressed
thereof are: (i) Assessing the performance details on certain hardware sections of smart
handheld devices and (ii) determining the performance profile of market penetration
considerations vis-à-vis provisioning mobile networks. To meet the scope of this research,
the projected efforts are exercised in compiling relevant literature and deciding the said
hardware and technoeconomic performance issues. Hence, written in two parts, Part A is
devoted to hardware performance details of smart, handheld devices relevant to (a) delay
issues in PCB layouts; (b) crosstalk problems at the baseband level (audio/multimedia) using
EMI concepts and (c) ascertaining non-catastrophic EMP/EMI effects at the RF-sections so
as to implement protection strategies via compensating networks. Part B is concerned with the technoeconomics of wireless networks in supporting mobile (handheld devices).
Correspondingly, two market related considerations versus service performance details are
considered. The first one refers to deducing a relative performance index that includes
technology (mobile speed) details plus economics profiles of the users in the service area.
The second task refers to elucidating a performance index of such services in terms of
hedonic pricing heuristics.
The theoretical aspects of the test studies as above are supplemented with
experimental and/or simulation details as appropriate. Hence, the efficacy of performance
details are discussed in real-world applications.
Lastly, possible research items for future studies are identified as open-questions.

This thesis consists of the development of a web based wireless sensor network (WSN) monitoring system using smartphones. Typical WSNs consist of networks of wireless sensor nodes dispersed over predetermined areas to acquire, process, and transmit data from these locations. Often it is the case that the WSNs are located in areas too hazardous or inaccessible to humans. We focused on the need for access to this sensed data remotely and present our reference architecture to solve this problem. We developed this architecture for web-based wireless sensor network monitoring and have implemented a prototype that uses Crossbow Mica sensors and Android smartphones for bridging the wireless sensor network with the web services for data storage and retrieval. Our application has the ability to retrieve sensed data directly from a wireless senor network composed of Mica sensors and from a smartphones onboard sensors. The data is displayed on the phone's screen, and then, via Internet connection, they are forwarded to a remote database for manipulation and storage. The attributes sensed and stored by our application are temperature, light, acceleration, GPS position, and geographical direction. Authorized personnel are able to retrieve and observe this data both textually and graphically from any browser with Internet connectivity or through a native Android application. Web-based wireless sensor network architectures using smartphones provides a scalable and expandable solution with applicability in many areas, such as healthcare, environmental monitoring, infrastructure health monitoring, border security, and others.