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Arbetsmarknadens förändringar i form av högre arbetstakt, tillfälliga anställningar och krav på flexibla arbetsvillkor, gör att allt fler upplever stress i arbetslivet. Långvarig stress medför stora hälsorisker för individen. Eftersom många av dagens sjukskrivningar beror på stressrelaterade sjukdomar, såsom depression och utmattning är det viktigt att studera metoder för stresshantering på arbetsplatsen. Beröring i form av massage kan minska stress hos individer samt fungerar som ett komplement i behandlingen för stressrelaterade sjukdomar. Ett fältexperiment med 28 tjänstemän utfördes för att undersöka om en kortvarig massage på arbetstid kunde inverka positivt på den arbetsrelaterade stressen jämfört med en avslappningsövning och vanlig rast. Studien visade signifikant minskning av stressnivån efter massageinterventionen. Resultatet ger en antydan om att upplevelsen av stress går att reducera med hjälp av fysisk beröring. Stickprovets storlek samt förväntnings- effektens inverkan på resultatet diskuteras.

Objective: International collaboration in science has received increasing attention given emphases on relevance, generalizability, and impact of research. Implementation science (IS) is a growing discipline that aims to translate clinical research findings into health services. Research is needed to identify efficient and effective ways to foster international collaboration in IS. Concept-mapping (CM) was utilized with a targeted sample for preliminary exploration of fostering international collaboration. Concept-mapping is a mixed-method approach (qualitative/quantitative) particularly suited for identifying essential themes and action items to facilitate planning among diverse stakeholders. We sought to identify key factors likely to facilitate productive and rewarding international collaborations in implementation research. Results: We identified eleven dimensions: Strategic Planning; Practicality; Define Common Principles; Technological Tools for Collaboration; Funding; Disseminate Importance of Fostering International Collaboration in IS; Knowledge Sharing; Innovative & Adaptive Research; Training IS Researchers; Networking & Shared Identity; Facilitate Meetings. Strategic Planning and Funding were highest rated for importance and Strategic Planning and Networking and Shared Identity were rated most feasible to institute. Fostering international collaboration in IS can accelerate the efficiency, relevance, and generalizability of implementation research. Strategies should be developed and tested to improve international collaborations and engage junior and experienced investigators in collaborations advancing implementation science and practice. 

Imagination Studios is a company specialized in motion capturing and animation. Part of their daily business is working at trade shows where they have a booth to keep close contact with existing customers and also to find new ones. However, usually only two to three people will be working at the booth, and frequently, these people will be in meetings with potential customers. During a time like this, nobody is free to attend to other people checking out the booth. This can result in a potential loss of a new customer. This project seeks a way to alleviate that problem.The idea behind this project was to create an application that trade show visitors can interact with in a playful and innovative way while also giving them a feel of what Imagination Studios is all about while looking for information about the company. To do this it was decided to let users interact with the system by using a Microsoft Kinect. The Kinect allows for easy implementation of a user interface based on motion capturing while also being very cost effective. A new user interface was to be designed as well, without copying already existing solutions and without simply expanding a traditional UI with new elements. To achieve this several design sketches were made, and the most interesting ones were then turned into storyboards. These were then used to decide on the final design, which was then elaborated on by use of video sketches and a collage in Adobe Photoshop.Several tools were used during the actual implementation. For the actual visualization and graphical design, the Unreal Engine 3 in combination with UDK was decided upon. To connect Kinect and Unreal Engine 3, a third party addon called NIUI which makes use of the open source SDK OpenNI was used. For ease of debugging and programming in Unrealscript, the programming language used by the Unreal Engine 3, an addon for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 called nFringe (Pixel Mine, Inc., 2010) was used.

Många rekryteringsmetoder som används i dag, som CV och referenstagning, har enligt studier låg validitet, däremot visar många studier att personlighet är stabilt över tid och därför är en mer valid prediktor för att kunna predicera arbetsprestation. Studiens syfte var att undersöka Shapes, ett internetbaserat personlighetstest, och dess arton kompetensdimensioner med test-retest utifrån tre frågeställningar. En datainsamling med 91 deltagare (29 män och 62 kvinnor) gjordes vid två tillfällen med tre veckors mellanrum. Deltagarna delades upp i kön- och åldersgrupper för att se skillnad över tid inom grupperna. Medelvärdesskillnader och korrelationer över tid jämfördes där resultatet visade att det fanns positiva samband mellan båda testtillfällena på samtliga dimensioner. Sju av de arton dimensionerna hade skillnader på medelvärde från testtillfälle ett och testtillfälle två. Detta skulle kunna bero på att Shapes inte är tillräckligt tillförlitligt för att mäta dessa dimensioner eller att dessa dimensioner inte är stabila över tid.  

CO2 is becoming increasingly important as a mediating fluid, and simulation studies are indispensable for corresponding developments. In this study, a simulation-based performance investigation of a solar water heating system using CO2 as a mediating fluid under sub-zero temperature condition is performed using the TRNSYS® software. The maximum performance is achieved at a solar savings fraction of 0.83 during July. The as lowest solar savingss fraction of 0.41 is obtained during December. The annual heat production of the proposed system under Fargo climate is estimated to be about 2545 kWh. An evacuated glass tube solar collector is designed, fabricated and tested for various climate conditions. Moreover, a detailed comparison of the system's performance at sub/supercritical and supercritical pressures shows that the annual heat transfer efficiency of the modeled system is 10% higher at supercritical pressure than at sub/supercritical pressures. This result can be attributd to the strong convection flow of CO2 caused by density inhomogeneities, especially in the near critical region. This condition resuls in high heat transfer rates.

The aim of this paper is to present fixed point result of mappings satisfying a generalized rational contractive condition in the setup of multiplicative metric spaces. As an application, we obtain a common fixed point of a pair of weakly compatible mappings. Some common fixed point results of pair of rational contractive types mappings involved in cocyclic representation of a nonempty subset of a multiplicative metric space are also obtained. Some examples are presented to support the results proved herein. Our results generalize and extend various results in the existing literature.

The aim of this paper is to present coincidence and common fixed point results of set-valued mappings satisfying certain generalized graphic F-contractive conditions on a family of sets endowed with a graph. It is worth mentioning that these results are obtained without appealing to any form of continuity of mappings involved herein. Some examples are presented to support the results proved in this paper. Our results unify, generalize and extend various comparable results in the existing literature. © 2016, Springer International Publishing.

Software systems often target a variety of different market segments. Targeting varying customer requirements requires a product-focused development process. Software Product Line (SPL) engineering is one possible approach based on reuse rationale to aid quick delivery of quality product variants at scale. SPLs reuse common features across derived products while still providing varying configuration options. The common features, in most cases, are realized by reusable assets. In practice, the assets are reused in a clone-and-own manner to reduce the upfront cost of systematic reuse. Besides, the assets are implemented in increments, and requirements prioritization also has to be done. In this context, the manual reuse analysis and prioritization process become impractical when the number of derived products grows. Besides, the manual reuse analysis process is time-consuming and heavily dependent on the experience of engineers.

In this licentiate thesis, we study requirements-level reuse recommendation and prioritization for SPL assets in industrial settings. We first identify challenges and opportunities in SPLs where reuse is done in a clone-and-own manner.  We then focus on one of the identified challenges: requirements-based SPL assets reuse and provide automated support for identifying reuse opportunities for SPL assets based on requirements. Finally, we provide automated support for requirements prioritization in the presence of dependencies resulting from reuse.

Problem: The goal of a software product line is to aid quick and quality delivery of software products, sharing common features. Effectively achieving the above-mentioned goals requires reuse analysis of the product line features. Existing requirements reuse analysis approaches are not focused on recommending product line features, that can be reused to realize new customer requirements. Hypothesis: Given that the customer requirements are linked to product line features' description satisfying them: then the customer requirements can be clustered based on patterns and similarities, preserving the historic reuse information. New customer requirements can be evaluated against existing customer requirements and reuse of product line features can be recommended. Contributions: We treated the problem of feature reuse analysis as a text classification problem at the requirements-level. We use Natural Language Processing and clustering to recommend reuse of features based on similarities and historic reuse information. The recommendations can be used to realize new customer requirements.

[Context and Motivation] Content-based recommender systems for requirements are typically built on the assumption that similar requirements can be used as proxies to retrieve similar software. When a new requirement is proposed by a stakeholder, natural language processing (NLP)-based similarity metrics can be exploited to retrieve existing requirements, and in turn, identify previously developed code. [Question/problem] Several NLP approaches for similarity computation are available, and there is little empirical evidence on the adoption of an effective technique in recommender systems specifically oriented to requirements-based code reuse. [Principal ideas/results] This study compares different state-of-the-art NLP approaches and correlates the similarity among requirements with the similarity of their source code. The evaluation is conducted on real-world requirements from two industrial projects in the railway domain. Results show that requirements similarity computed with the traditional tf-idf approach has the highest correlation with the actual software similarity in the considered context. Furthermore, results indicate a moderate positive correlation with Spearman's rank correlation coefficient of more than 0.5. [Contribution] Our work is among the first ones to explore the relationship between requirements similarity and software similarity. In addition, we also identify a suitable approach for computing requirements similarity that reflects software similarity well in an industrial context. This can be useful not only in recommender systems but also in other requirements engineering tasks in which similarity computation is relevant, such as tracing and categorization.

Requirements prioritization plays an important role in driving project success during software development. Literature reveals that existing requirements prioritization approaches ignore vital factors such as interdependency between requirements. Existing requirements prioritization approaches are also generally time-consuming and involve substantial manual effort. Besides, these approaches show substantial limitations in terms of the number of requirements under consideration. There is some evidence suggesting that models could have a useful role in the analysis of requirements interdependency and their visualization, contributing towards the improvement of the overall requirements prioritization process. However, to date, just a handful of studies are focused on model-based strategies for requirements prioritization, considering only conflict-free functional requirements. This paper uses a meta-model-based approach to help the requirements analyst to model the requirements, stakeholders, and inter-dependencies between requirements. The model instance is then processed by our modified PageRank algorithm to prioritize the given requirements. An experiment was conducted, comparing our modified PageRank algorithm’s efficiency and accuracy with five existing requirements prioritization methods. Besides, we also compared our results with a baseline prioritized list of 104 requirements prepared by 28 graduate students. Our results show that our modified PageRank algorithm was able to prioritize the requirements more effectively and efficiently than the other prioritization methods.

The software system controlling a train is typically deployed on various hardware architectures and is required to process various signals across those deployments. Increases of such customization scenarios, as well as the needed adherence of the software to various safety standards in different application domains, has led to the adoption of product line engineering within the railway domain. This paper explores the current state-of-practice of software product line development within a team developing industrial embedded software for a train propulsion control system. Evidence is collected by means of a focus group session with several engineers and through inspection of archival data. We report several benefits and challenges experienced during product line adoption and deployment. Furthermore, we identify and discuss research opportunities, focusing in particular on the areas of product line evolution and test automation.

Categorizing existing test specifications can provide insights on coverage of the test suite to extra-functional properties. Manual approaches for test categorization can be time-consuming and prone to error. In this short paper, we propose a semi-automated approach for semantic keywords-based textual test categorization for extra-functional properties. The approach is the first step towards coverage-based test case selection based on extra-functional properties. We report a preliminary evaluation of industrial data for test categorization for safety aspects. Results show that keyword-based approaches can be used to categorize tests for extra-functional properties and can be improved by considering contextual information of keywords.

This tutorial explores requirements-based reuse recommendation for product line assets in the context of clone-and-own product lines.

Software product lines (SPLs) are based on reuse rationale to aid quick and quality delivery of complex products at scale. Deriving a new product from a product line requires reuse analysis to avoid redundancy and support a high degree of assets reuse. In this paper, we propose and evaluate automated support for recommending SPL assets that can be reused to realize new customer requirements. Using the existing customer requirements as input, the approach applies natural language processing and clustering to generate reuse recommendations for unseen customer requirements in new projects. The approach is evaluated both quantitatively and qualitatively in the railway industry. Results show that our approach can recommend reuse with 74% accuracy and 57.4% exact match. The evaluation further indicates that the recommendations are relevant to engineers and can support the product derivation and feasibility analysis phase of the projects. The results encourage further study on automated reuse analysis on other levels of abstractions.

The aim of this paper is to present common fixed point results of set-valued graphic F-contraction mappings on a family of sets endowed with a graph. Some examples are presented to support the results proved herein. Our results unify, generalize and extend various results in the existing literature.

This essay aims to analyze based on the theory SEB and Nordea´s credit assessment process against small enterprises.

Date:                        2018-01-15

Level:                       Bachelor thesis in Business Administration, 15 cr

Institution:                         School of Business, Society and Engineering, Mälardalen University

Authors:                  Rami Abbas             Simon Issa                          Kevin Landenberg              92/03/26                                 92/02/02                                       94/08/11

Title:                        Dividend in close companies

Keywords:              Dividend, qualified shares, the canceled proposition 2017, tax behavior

Research

Questions:               What possible changes in behavior has the cancelled proposition generated at decision making in close companies?

                                 What impact do tax reforms have on tax behavior?

Purpose:                  The purpose of the survey is to create an understanding about if and how close companies have acted towards the rejected proposition of change in the 3:12 rules. In addition to this, the purpose is also to create an understanding of what impact tax reforms have on tax behavior.

Method:                   Regulations regarding dividend opportunities in close companies, have been collected and analyzed. Theoretical data collection on reformers' impact on tax behavior has been collected. In addition, interviews have been conducted with owners of close companies and authorized auditors.

Conclusion:              The proposition of change that were rejected in the summer of 2017 had no significant impact on majority of the shareholders at close companies. This is due to complicated regulations. In specific cases, when reforms are too complicated, it requires the involved partners a learning time to acquire new knowledge and therefore do not have the time or knowledge to respond to the reform requirements.

This thesis is about identification of rare and similar cases in post operative pain. This thesis works with real data consisting of about 3793 cases collected from various hospitals all around the World. It also implements four clustering techniques to study their results and choose the best one among them for the identification of rare cases

The purpose of this study is to investigate group-oriented pedagogy and its effects, based on the subjective experiences of social students, i.e. to study the pedagogical and special educational significance of the group work. This has been done through a qualitative approach where the selection was turned towards a targeted group, and then semi-structured interviews were conducted. The result shows that group-oriented pedagogy was perceived positively, instructively and educating in large part among the respondents despite some conflicts and different views. Furthermore, characteristics such as acceptance, responsiveness, adaptation and openness are highlighted and emphasized as something that is bred or refined by working in groups. Other aspects that emerged from the results were prerequisites for a functional group work, where the respondents listed some criteria such as willingness to cooperate, group size and constellation as important conditions for a well- functioning group work. In summary, the study's content highlights that there are great opportunities for development within group work, but that it is also important to continuously develop and keep an eye on the group processes.

The connection between objects and information exchange has been possible in recent years, with the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) in different industries. We can meet different requirements in each industry utilizing this feature. Intelligent transportation uses the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) as a solution for communication among vehicles. It improves traffic management applications and services to guarantee safety on roads. We categorize services, applications, and architectures and propose a taxonomy for IoV. Then, we study open issues and challenges for future works. We highlighted applications and services due to drivers' requirements and nonfunctional requirements, considering the qualitative characteristic. This paper summarizes the current state of the IoV in architectures, services, and applications. It can be a start view to provide the solutions for challenges in traffic management in cities. The present study is beneficial for smart city developments and management. According to this paper's result, the services and applications evaluate performance with 34% frequency, safety and data accuracy, and security with a 13% frequency in selected papers. These measurements are essential due to the IoV characteristics such as real-time operation, accident avoidance in applications, and complicated user data management. 

Concurrent software has been increasingly adopted in recent years, mainly due to the introduction of multicore platforms. However, concurrency bugs are still difficult to test and debug due to their complex interactions involving multiple threads (or tasks). Typically, real world concurrent software has huge state spaces. Thus, testing techniques and handling of concurrency bugs need to focus on exposing the bugs in this large space. However, existing solutions typically do not provide debugging information to developers (and testers) for understanding the bugs.

Our work focuses on improving concurrent software reliability via three contributions: 1) An investigation of concurrent software challenges with the aim to help developers (and testers) to better understand concurrency bugs. We propose a classification of concurrency bugs and discuss observable properties of each type of bug. In addition, we identify a number of gaps in the body of knowledge on concurrent software bugs and their debugging. 2) Exploring concurrency related bugs in real-world software with respect to the reproducibility of bugs, severity of their consequence and effort required to fix them. Our findings here is that concurrency bugs are different from other bugs in terms of their fixing time and severity, while they are similar in terms of reproducibility. 3) A model for monitoring concurrency bugs and the implementation and evaluation of a related runtime verification tool to detect the bugs. In general, runtime verification techniques are used to (a) dynamically verify that the observed behaviour matches specified properties and (b) explicitly recognize understandable behaviors in the considered software. Our implemented tool is used to detect concurrency bugs in embedded software and is in its current form tailored for the FreeRTOS operating system. It helps developers and testers to automatically identify concurrency bugs and subsequently helps to reduce their finding and fixing time.

In software engineering, classification is a way to find an organized structure of knowledge about objects. Classification serves to investigate the relationship between the items to be classified, and can be used to identify the current gaps in the field. In many cases users are able to order and relate objects by fitting them in a category. This paper presents initial work on a taxonomy for classification of errors (bugs) related to concurrent execution of application level software threads. By classifying concurrency bugs based on their corresponding observable properties, this research aims to examine and structure the state of the art in this field, as well as to provide practitioner support for testing and debugging of concurrent software. We also show how the proposed classification, and the different classes of bugs, relates to the state of the art in the field by providing a mapping of the classification to a number of recently published papers in the software engineering field.

Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) bridge the cyber-world of computing and communications with the physical world and require development of secure and reliable software. It asserts a big challenge not only on testing and verifying the correctness of all physical and cyber components of such big systems, but also on integration of these components. This paper develops a categorization of multiple levels of testing required to test CPS and makes a comparison of these levels with the levels of software testing based on the V-model. It presents a detailed state-of-the-art survey on the testing approaches performed on the CPS. Further, it provides challenges in CPS testing.

Myoelectric pattern recognition (MPR) to decode limb movements is an important advancement regarding the control of powered prostheses. However, this technology is not yet in wide clinical use. Improvements in MPR could potentially increase the functionality of powered prostheses. To this purpose, offline accuracy and processing time were measured over 44 features using six classifiers with the aim of determining new configurations of features and classifiers to improve the accuracy and response time of prosthetics control. An efficient feature set (FS: waveform length, correlation coefficient, Hjorth Parameters) was found to improve the motion recognition accuracy. Using the proposed FS significantly increased the performance of linear discriminant analysis, K-nearest neighbor, maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), and support vector machine by 5.5%, 5.7%, 6.3%, and 6.2%, respectively, when compared with the Hudgins’ set. Using the FS with MLE provided the largest improvement in offline accuracy over the Hudgins feature set, with minimal effect on the processing time. Among the 44 features tested, logarithmic root mean square and normalized logarithmic energy yielded the highest recognition rates (above 95%). We anticipate that this work will contribute to the development of more accurate surface EMG-based motor decoding systems for the control prosthetic hands.

With the development of multicore hardware, concurrent, parallel and multicore software are becoming increasingly popular. Software companies are spending a huge amount of time and resources to nd and debug the bugs. Among all types of software bugs, concurrency bugs are also important and troublesome. This type of bugs is increasingly becoming an issue particularly due to the growing prevalence of multicore hardware. In this position paper, we propose a model for monitoring and debugging Starvation bugs as a type of concurrency bugs in multicore software. The model is composed into three phases: monitoring, detecting and debugging. The monitoring phase can support detecting phase by storing collected data from the system execution. The detecting phase can support debugging phase by comparing the stored data with starvation bug's properties, and the debugging phase can help in reproducing and removing the Starvation bug from multicore software. Our intention is that our model is the basis for developing tool(s) to enable solving Starvation bugs in software for multicore platforms.

This article presents a runtime verification tool for embedded software executing under the open source real-time operating system FreeRTOS. The tool detects and diagnoses concurrency bugs such as deadlock, starvation, and suspension based-locking. The tool finds concurrency bugs at runtime without debugging and tracing the source code. The tool uses the Tracealyzer tool for logging relevant events. Analysing the logs, our tool can detect the concurrency bugs by applying algorithms for diagnosing each concurrency bug type individually. In this paper, we present the implementation of the tool, as well as its functional architecture, together with illustration of its use. The tool can be used during program testing to gain interesting information about embedded software executions. We present initial results of running the tool on some classical bug examples running on an AVR 32-bit board SAM4S. 

Concurrent programming puts demands on software debugging and testing, as concurrent software may exhibit problems not present in sequential software, e.g., deadlocks and race conditions. In aiming to increase efficiency and effectiveness of debugging and bug-fixing for concurrent software, a deep understanding of concurrency bugs, their frequency and fixing-times would be helpful. Similarly, to design effective tools and techniques for testing and debugging concurrent software, understanding the differences between non-concurrency and concurrency bugs in real-word software would be useful. This paper presents an empirical study focusing on understanding the differences and similarities between concurrency bugs and other bugs, as well as the differences among various concurrency bug types in terms of their severity and their fixing time, and reproducibility. Our basis is a comprehensive analysis of bug reports covering several generations of five open source software projects. The analysis involves a total of 11860 bug reports from the last decade, including 351 reports related to concurrency bugs. We found that concurrency bugs are different from other bugs in terms of their fixing time and severity while they are similar in terms of reproducibility. Our findings shed light on concurrency bugs and could thereby influence future design and development of concurrent software, their debugging and testing, as well as related tools.

Debugging – the process of identifying, localizing and fixing bugs – is a key activity in software development. Due to issues such as non-determinism and difficulties of reproducing failures, debugging concurrent software is significantly more challenging than debugging sequential software. A number of methods, models and tools for debugging concurrent and multicore software have been proposed, but the body of work partially lacks a common terminology and a more recent view of the problems to solve. This suggests the need for a classification, and an up-to-date comprehensive overview of the area. 

This paper presents the results of a systematic mapping study in the field of debugging of concurrent and multicore software in the last decade (2005– 2014). The study is guided by two objectives: (1) to summarize the recent publication trends and (2) to clarify current research gaps in the field.

Through a multi-stage selection process, we identified 145 relevant papers. Based on these, we summarize the publication trend in the field by showing distribution of publications with respect to year , publication venues , representation of academia and industry , and active research institutes . We also identify research gaps in the field based on attributes such as types of concurrency bugs, types of debugging processes , types of research  and research contributions.

The main observations from the study are that during the years 2005–2014: (1) there is no focal conference or venue to publish papers in this area, hence a large variety of conferences and journal venues (90) are used to publish relevant papers in this area; (2) in terms of publication contribution, academia was more active in this area than industry; (3) most publications in the field address the data race bug; (4) bug identification is the most common stage of debugging addressed by articles in the period; (5) there are six types of research approaches found, with solution proposals being the most common one; and (6) the published papers essentially focus on four different types of contributions, with ”methods” being the type most common one.

We can further conclude that there is still quite a number of aspects that are not sufficiently covered in the field, most notably including (1) exploring correction  and fixing bugs  in terms of debugging process; (2) order violation, suspension  and starvation  in terms of concurrency bugs; (3) validation and evaluation research  in the matter of research type; (4) metric  in terms of research contribution. It is clear that the concurrent, parallel and multicore software community needs broader studies in debugging.This systematic mapping study can help direct such efforts.

Concurrent programming puts demands on software debugging and testing, as concurrent software may exhibit problems not present in sequential software, e.g., deadlocks and race conditions. In aiming to increase efficiency and effectiveness of debugging and bug-fixing for concurrent software, a deep understanding of concurrency bugs, their frequency and fixingtimes would be helpful. Similarly, to design effective tools and techniques for testing and debugging concurrent software understanding the differences between non-concurrency and concurrency bugs in real-word software would be useful.

Multicore hardware development increases the popularity of parallel and multicore software, while testing and debugging the software become more difficult, frustrating and costly. Among all types of software bugs, concurrency bugs are both important and troublesome. This type of bugs is increasingly becoming an issue, particularly due to the growing prevalence of multicore hardware. Suspension-based-locking bug is one type of concurrency bugs. This position paper proposes a model based on runtime verification and reflection technique in the context of multicore and parallel software to monitor and detect suspension-based-locking bugs. The model is not only able to detect faults, but also diagnose and even repair them. The model is composed of four layers: Logging, Monitoring, Suspension Bug Diagnosis and Mitigation. The logging layer will observe the events and save them into a file system. The monitoring layer will detect the presents of bugs in the software. The suspension bug diagnosis will identify Suspension bugs by comparing the captured data with the suspension bug properties. Finally, the mitigation layer will reconfigure the software to mitigate the suspension bugs. A functional architecture of a runtime verification tool is also proposed in this paper. This architecture is based on the proposed model and is comprised of different modules. 

Losing a limb causes difficulties in our daily life. To regain the ability to live an independent life, artificial limbs have been developed. Hand prostheses belong to a group of artificial limbs that can be controlled by the user through the activity of the remnant muscles above the amputation. Electromyogram (EMG) is one of the sources that can be used for control methods for hand prostheses. Surface EMGs are powerful, non-invasive tools that provide information about neuromuscular activity of the subjected muscle, which has been essential to its use as a source of control for prosthetic limbs. However, the complexity of this signal introduces a big challenge to its applications. EMG pattern recognition to decode different limb movements is an important advancement regarding the control of powered prostheses. It has the potential to enable the control of powered prostheses using the generated EMG by muscular contractions as an input. However, its use has yet to be transitioned into wide clinical use. Different algorithms have been developed in state of the art to decode different movements; however, the challenge still lies in different stages of a successful hand gesture recognition and improvements in these areas could potentially increase the functionality of powered prostheses. This thesis firstly focuses on improving the EMG signal’s quality by proposing novel and advanced filtering techniques. Four efficient approaches (adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system-wavelet, artificial neural network-wavelet, adaptive subtraction and automated independent component analysis-wavelet) are proposed to improve the filtering process of surface EMG signals and effectively eliminate ECG interferences. Then, the offline performance of different EMG-based recognition algorithms for classifying different hand movements are evaluated with the aim of obtaining new myoelectric control configurations that improves the recognition stage. Afterwards, to gain proper insight on the implementation of myoelectric pattern recognition, a wide range of myoelectric pattern recognition algorithms are investigated in real time. The experimental result on 15 healthy volunteers suggests that linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) outperform other classifiers. The real-time investigation illustrates that in addition to the LDA and MLE, multilayer perceptron also outperforms the other algorithms when compared using classification accuracy and completion rate.

Electromyography (EMG) is a tool routinely used for a variety of applications in a very large breadth of disciplines. However, this signal is inevitably contaminated by various artifacts originated from different sources. Electrical activity of heart muscles, electrocardiogram (ECG), is one of sources which affects the EMG signals due to the proximity of the collection sites to the heart and makes its analysis non-reliable. Different methods have been proposed to remove ECG artifacts from surface EMG signals; however, in spite of numerous attempts to eliminate or reduce this artifact, the problem of accurate and effective de-noising of EMG still remains a challenge. In this study common methods such as high pass filter (HPF), gating method, spike clipping, hybrid technique, template subtraction, independent component analysis (ICA), wavelet transform, wavelet-ICA, artificial neural network (ANN), and adaptive noise canceller (ANC) and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) are used to remove ECG artifacts from surface EMG signals and their accuracy and effectiveness is investigated. HPF, gating method and spike clipping are fast; however they remove useful information from EMG signals. Hybrid technique and ANC are time consuming. Template subtraction requires predetermined QRS pattern. Using wavelet transform some artifacts remain in the original signal and part of the desired signal is removed. ICA requires multi-channel signals. Wavelet-ICA approach does not require multi-channel signals; however, it is user-dependent. ANN and ANFIS have good performance, but it is possible to improve their results by combining them with other techniques. For some applications of EMG signals such as rehabilitation, motion control and motion prediction, the quality of EMG signals is very important. Furthermore, the artifact removal methods need to be online and automatic. Hence, efficient methods such as ANN-wavelet, adaptive subtraction and automated wavelet-ICA are proposed to effectively eliminate ECG artifacts from surface EMG signals. To compare the results of the investigated methods and the proposed methods in this study, clean EMG signals from biceps and deltoid muscles and ECG artifacts from pectoralis major muscle are recorded from five healthy subjects to create 10 channels of contaminated EMG signals by adding the recorded ECG artifacts to the clean EMG signals. The artifact removal methods are also applied to the 10 channels of real contaminated EMG signals from pectoralis major muscle of the left side. Evaluation criteria such as signal to noise ratio, relative error, correlation coefficient, elapsed time and power spectrum density are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods. It is found that the performance of the proposed ANN-wavelet method is superior to the other methods with a signal to noise ratio, relative error and correlation coefficient of 15.53, 0.01 and 0.98 respectively.

Web services are used in many Web applications in order to save time and cost during software development process. To peruse Web service response time, a suitable tool is needed to automate the measurement of the response time. However, not many suitable tools are available for automatic measurement of response time. This research is carried out in the context of quality of Web services in order to measure and visualize Web service response time. The method proposed in this research for accomplishing this goal is based on creating a proxy for connecting to the required Web service, and then calculating the Web services response time via the proxy. A software tool is designed based on the proposed method in order to guide the implementation that is still in progress. The tool can be validated through empirical validation using three test cases for three different Web service access situations.

In recent years, the removal of electrocardiogram (ECG) interferences from electromyogram (EMG) signals has been given large consideration. Where the quality of EMG signal is of interest, it is important to remove ECG interferences from EMG signals. In this paper, an efficient method based on a combination of adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) and wavelet transform is proposed to effectively eliminate ECG interferences from surface EMG signals. The proposed approach is compared with other common methods such as high-pass filter, artificial neural network, adaptive noise canceller, wavelet transform, subtraction method and ANFIS. It is found that the performance of the proposed ANFIS-wavelet method is superior to the other methods with the signal to noise ratio and relative error of 14.97 dB and 0.02 respectively and a significantly higher correlation coefficient (p < 0.05).

Recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) led to effective methods and tools for analyzing the human behavior. Human Activity Recognition (HAR) is one of the fields that has seen an explosive research interest among the ML community due to its wide range of applications. HAR is one of the most helpful technology tools to support the elderly’s daily life and to help people suffering from cognitive disorders, Parkinson’s disease, dementia, etc. It is also very useful in areas such as transportation, robotics and sports. Deep learning (DL) is a branch of ML based on complex Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) that has demonstrated a high level of accuracy and performance in HAR. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) are two types of DL models widely used in the recent years to address the HAR problem. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of their integration in recognizing daily activities, e.g., walking. We analyze four hybrid models that integrate CNNs with four powerful RNNs, i.e., LSTMs, BiLSTMs, GRUs and BiGRUs. The outcomes of our experiments on the PAMAP2 dataset indicate that our proposed hybrid models achieve an outstanding level of performance with respect to several indicative measures, e.g., F-score, accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.

Accurate recording and precise analysis of the electrocardiogram (ECG) signals are crucial in the pathophysiological study and clinical treatment. These recordings are often corrupted by different artifacts. The aim of this study is to propose two different methods, wavelet transform based on nonlinear thresholding and a combination method using wavelet and independent component analysis (ICA), to remove motion artifact from ECG signals. To evaluate the performance of the proposed methods, the developed techniques are applied to the real and simulated ECG data. The results of this evaluation are presented using quantitative and qualitative criteria. The results show that the proposed methods are able to reduce motion artifacts in ECG signals. Signal to noise ratio (SNR) of the wavelet technique is equal to 13.85. The wavelet-ICA method performed better with SNR of 14.23.

This study aims at proposing an efficient method for automated electrocardiography (ECG) artifact removal from surface electromyography (EMG) signals recorded from upper trunk muscles. Wavelet transform is applied to the simulated data set of corrupted surface EMG signals to create multidimensional signal. Afterward, independent component analysis (ICA) is used to separate ECG artifact components from the original EMG signal. Components that correspond to the ECG artifact are then identified by an automated detection algorithm and are subsequently removed using a conventional high pass filter. Finally, the results of the proposed method are compared with wavelet transform, ICA, adaptive filter and empirical mode decomposition-ICA methods. The automated artifact removal method proposed in this study successfully removes the ECG artifacts from EMG signals with a signal to noise ratio value of 9.38 while keeping the distortion of original EMG to a minimum.

Pattern recognition algorithms have been widely used to map surface electromyographic signals to target movements as a source for prosthetic control. However, most investigations have been conducted offline by performing the analysis on pre-recorded datasets. While real-time data analysis (i.e., classification when new data becomes available, with limits on latency under 200-300 milliseconds) plays an important role in the control of prosthetics, less knowledge has been gained with respect to real-time performance. Recent literature has underscored the differences between offline classification accuracy, the most common performance metric, and the usability of upper limb prostheses. Therefore, a comparative offline and real-time performance analysis between common algorithms had yet to be performed. In this study, we investigated the offline and real-time performance of nine different classification algorithms, decoding ten individual hand and wrist movements. Surface myoelectric signals were recorded from fifteen able-bodied subjects while performing the ten movements. The offline decoding demonstrated that linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) significantly (p < 0.05) outperformed other classifiers, with an average classification accuracy of above 97%. On the other hand, the real-time investigation revealed that, in addition to the LDA and MLE, multilayer perceptron also outperformed the other algorithms and achieved a classification accuracy and completion rate of above 68% and 69%, respectively.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how young people perceive living in a social vulnerable area, how they perceive the media image as well as what constraints and opportunities the housing area implies for their future.

To answer our questions, we have used qualitative semistructured interviews with six adolescents in the social vulnerable Stockholm suburb Tensta. Theories that we have used in the processing of data collection are recognition theory and the stigma theory of Goffman.

The results of the interviews show that the adolescents enjoys living in the area despite the neglected media image of Tensta. Their own perception of the area differs from the perceived media image. At the same time, adolescents realized that their own future goals are not limited by the area in which they live, but governed by the individual's own will to succeed.