The dark side of Moore's Law is our society's insatiable need to constantly upgrade our computing devices. The high cost in manufacturing energy, materials and disposal is more worrisome the increasing number of smartphones. Repurposing smartphones for educational purpose is a promising idea and shown success in recent years. Our previous work has shown that although different components in smartphones degrade from use, their functionalities, available resources and power supplies are still able to satisfy the requirement of educational applications. In this study, we demonstrate the potential benefits of reusing smartphones by analyzing their manufacturing and life-time energy. The key challenge is the design of software that can adapt to extreme heterogeneity of devices. We also characterize different types of heterogeneities among different generations of smartphones from HTC and Apple, including processing capability, storage resource and various features. We propose insights to aid establishing a sustainable model of designing mobile applications for phone reuse.

Background: Suicide is a recognized public health issue, with approximately 800,000 people dying by suicide each year. Among the different technologies used in suicide research, closed-circuit television (CCTV) and video have been used for a wide array of applications, including assessing crisis behaviors at metro stations, and using computer vision to identify a suicide attempt in progress. However, there has been no review of suicide research and interventions using CCTV and video.Objective: The objective of this study was to review the literature to understand how CCTV and video data have been used in understanding and preventing suicide. Furthermore, to more fully capture progress in the field, we report on an ongoing study to respond to an identified gap in the narrative review, by using a computer vision–based system to identify behaviors prior to a suicide attempt.Methods: We conducted a search using the keywords “suicide,” “cctv,” and “video” on PubMed, Inspec, and Web of Science. We included any studies which used CCTV or video footage to understand or prevent suicide. If a study fell into our area of interest, we included it regardless of the quality as our goal was to understand the scope of how CCTV and video had been used rather than quantify any specific effect size, but we noted the shortcomings in their design and analyses when discussing the studies.Results: The review found that CCTV and video have primarily been used in 3 ways: (1) to identify risk factors for suicide (eg, inferring depression from facial expressions), (2) understanding suicide after an attempt (eg, forensic applications), and (3) as part of an intervention (eg, using computer vision and automated systems to identify if a suicide attempt is in progress). Furthermore, work in progress demonstrates how we can identify behaviors prior to an attempt at a hotspot, an important gap identified by papers in the literature.Conclusions: Thus far, CCTV and video have been used in a wide array of applications, most notably in designing automated detection systems, with the field heading toward an automated detection system for early intervention. Despite many challenges, we show promising progress in developing an automated detection system for preattempt behaviors, which may allow for early intervention.

Ubiquitous positioning is considered to be a highly demanding application for today’s Location-Based Services (LBS). While satellite-based navigation has achieved great advances in the past few decades, positioning and navigation in indoor scenarios and deep urban areas has remained a challenging topic of substantial research interest. Various strategies have been adopted to fill this gap, within which vision-based methods have attracted growing attention due to the widespread use of cameras on mobile devices. However, current vision-based methods using image processing have yet to revealed their full potential for navigation applications and are insufficient in many aspects. Therefore in this paper, we present a hybrid image-based positioning system that is intended to provide seamless position solution in six degrees of freedom (6DoF) for location-based services in both outdoor and indoor environments. It mainly uses visual sensor input to match with geo-referenced images for image-based positioning resolution, and also takes advantage of multiple onboard sensors, including the built-in GPS receiver and digital compass to assist visual methods. Experiments demonstrate that such a system can greatly improve the position accuracy for areas where the GPS signal is negatively affected (such as in urban canyons), and it also provides excellent position accuracy for indoor environments.

Development of veterinary subunit vaccines comes with a spectrum of challenges, such as the choice of adjuvant, antigen delivery vehicle, and optimization of dosing strategy. Over the years, our laboratory has largely focused on investigating silica vesicles (SVs) for developing effective veterinary vaccines for multiple targets. Rhipicephalus microplus (cattle tick) are known to have a high impact on cattle health and the livestock industry in the tropical and subtropical regions. Development of vaccine using Bm86 antigen against R. microplus has emerged as an attractive alternative to control ticks. In this study, we have investigated the biodistribution of SV in a live animal model, as well as further explored the SV ability for vaccine development. Rhodamine-labeled SV-140-C₁₈ (Rho-SV-140-C₁₈) vesicles were used to adsorb the Cy5-labeled R. microplus Bm86 antigen (Cy5-Bm86) to enable detection and characterization of the biodistribution of SV as well as antigen in vivo in a small animal model for up to 28 days using optical fluorescence imaging. We tracked the in vivo biodistribution of SVs and Bm86 antigen at different timepoints (days 3, 8, 13, and 28) in BALB/c mice. The biodistribution analysis by live imaging as well as by measuring the fluorescent intensity of harvested organs over the duration of the experiment (28 days) showed greater accumulation of SVs at the site of injection. The Bm86 antigen biodistribution was traced in lymph nodes, kidney, and liver, contributing to our understanding how this delivery platform successfully elicits antibody responses in the groups administered antigen in combination with SV. Selected tissues (skin, lymph nodes, spleen, kidney, liver, and lungs) were examined for any cellular abnormalities by histological analysis. No adverse effect or any other abnormalities were observed in the tissues.

In this paper, we propose a method of vision-based positioning with the use of single camera and newly defined 3D maps for indoor localization and navigation purposes. Our work here is to address the accuracy and reliability concerns of an indoor navigation system. The main contribution will be the adoption of photogrammetric 6DOF pose estimation method to improve the positioning accuracy. DOPs are introduced to evaluate positioning precision within vision-based domain. Quality control strategies are also applied to detect outliers in the observation and strengthen system reliability. Besides, only natural landmarks are required in the proposed method to provide absolute position and orientation information.