#ALGORITHMS: "Medical Privacy Secured on Smartphones"

Anti-cloning encryption technology is being used to secure validated medical data, which can only be accessed by an attending physician or the patient.



The U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) mandated that medical data be standardized for easy exchange between institutions, but was crafted before the proliferation of smartphones and other wireless access devices. To protect standardized medical records from being hacked--while simultaneously securing confidential communications of medical advice to patients on their smartphones--is the aim of a new genre of anti-cloning encryption algorithm.
Smartphones and tablets have given health care providers, including attending physicians, a wireless portal into medical databases. In fact, according to some industry estimates, more than 50 percent of the U.S. population will have smartphones by the end of 2011, a percentage that will grow to more than 70 percent by 2013.

MobiSecure Health’s mobile technology supports secure data messaging such as alerts, question/response and advanced questionnaires.
Unfortunately, most of the security measures already in place for HIPAA-compliant databases assume that access will be from computer terminals that are secured by virtue of being on-site. Today, however, physicians expect access from wireless devices. In addition, app-generation patients expect medical professionals to offer smart software that can give advice and reminders about specific directions they are supposed to be following. Both require a new generation of anti-cloning technologies to insure that HIPAA-compliant databases are not exposed by hackers gaining access through wireless devices.
Many U.S. service providers are addressing the need to integrate wireless access into HIPAA-compliant databases, but Diversinet Corp. (Toronto) claims to have a unique approach to the mobile-health care--what it calls "MobiHealth"--that locks secure medical data to a specific mobile device. Diversinet's end-to-end MobiSecure solution--based on Open Authentication (OATH)--secures messaging, and on-the-go storage of personal health data.
Diversinet's unique patented technology (U.S. Patent No. 8,051,297) locks data to a specific mobile device by using its serial number to generate a unique encryption key. As a result, even if medical data is cloned to another device and the hacker steals the user's password, access to the data will still be denied by decryption algorithms which combine the password with a device's serial number to derive the correct decryption passkey.
Other solutions require that user's be online to access medical data, but Diversinet's MobiSecure solution enables both doctors and patients to store and view medical data on their smartphones--Apple, Android or BlackBerry--even when no network access is available.
Merck--the pharmaceutical giant---recently chose Diversinet's solution as a part of a deal with MiHealth Global Systems to promote MobiSecure to Canadian doctors. Part of that effort includes the ability to prompt patients to take their medications on time and to follow other directions, which are securely loaded into the patient's smartphone and accessed with an app.
Further Reading

#MEMS: "Sports Analytics Smartens Surfing"

Smarter surf reports contain not only how high the waves are, but also how long the rides last, how fast the surfers are going and even how long it is taking riders to paddle out, thanks to smart wireless sensors surfers can attach to any board.


Motion-capture analytics could revolutionize surfing by transforming data from board-mounted sensors into recreational intelligence--such as, the most likely beach and sweet-spot to paddle out to for the best surfing, according to speakers at the MEMS Executive Congress (Nov. 2-3, 2011, Monterey, Calif.).
Surfers are religious about checking the "surf report" for a particular beach before they leave the house and head over to catch some waves, but now smarter surf reports can rely on motion-capture analytics uploaded from smart microelectromechanical system (MEMS) sensors attached to surf boards.
The Syride sensor (the black triangle on the nose of board) tracks location, height of wave, speed of surfer, length of ride, time to paddle out and even the calories the rider burns.
MEMS sensors already perform a variety of tasks for smartphone users, such as automatically rotating from portrait to landscape view. MEMS sensors also lock up the heads on a dropped laptop's hard drive before it hits the floor by sensing free fall. But the same MEMS accelerometer, in combination with a built-in GPS, can also enable all kinds of analytics on surf stats, from how high the waves are, to how fast the surfers are going, to how long it is taking riders to paddle out, to how many calories a rider is likely to burn per hour.
"Syride has spent five years developing a feather-light, ultra-reliable MEMS-based sensor and motion-capture technology," said Romain Lazerand, who is in charge of North American business development for Syride. "Now surfers can compare their runs with the best surfers in the world."
The Syride Sys Evo motion sensor mounts on any surfboard by first attaching a carrier--with a sticky backing--onto the board where the smart sensor is mounted. During a surfing session, the smart sensor tracks location, speed and the distance traveled on each wave, which is automatically logged alongside the tide schedule for that spot. Analytics then takes over to deduce for each run the height of the wave, the elapsed time of the ride, the peak speed, the time and distance paddled out, the calories spent for each hour and the sweet-spot most likely to give the best rides in the future.
After the surfing day is done--back at the homestead--the surfer detaches the smart sensor from the surfboard, dries it off and plugs it into his or her PC with a USB cable. Supplied software displays the results of the motion-capture analytics in charts and graphs that recount the best and worst runs of the day, tallies up averages and recommends when would be the most likely time to return to that beach, depending on tides, and the most likely sweet-spot to paddle out to for the best rides.
Finally, the application uploads the board's data to the Syride Website, so it can be integrated with that of all the other surfers visiting that beach, allowing surfers to compare their results with those of the best runs at that beach.
Further Reading

#MEMS: "ADI debuts tactical-grade MEMS"

A new tactical-grade inertial-measurement unit (IMU) from Analog Devices Inc. achieves performance rivaling expensive, bulky fiber-optic based units by virtue of micro-electro-mechanical system (MEMS) chips that are almost eight-times smaller and over 10-times lighter, according to the company.



The first two members of the new tactical-grade MEMS family, include a 10-degree-of-freedom IMU that combines a three-axis accelerometer, a three-axis gyroscope, a three-axis magnetometer, and a barometric pressure sensor to determine altitude—the 10th dimension. Drift is 6 degrees per hour for a unit that consumes just 0.7 watts.
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#MATERIALS: "Superinsulators Self-Heal to Rival Superconductors"

Supercomputers have already helped design superconducting wires that can transmit high-voltage energy for power grids with zero resistance between power stations, and now supercomputers will be used to design superinsulators that self-repair, thereby preventing power losses over the conventional wires that deliver electricity from power stations to residential and industrial users.



Power generation creates megawatts of power, but transmission and distribution lines can siphon off kilowatts during the routing of that power to users. Superconducting wires can be used to transmit megawatts of electricity with virtually no resistance on the first leg of its journey between power stations, but when sending high-voltage transmissions from power stations to users, a significant portion can be lost to the environment due to weaknesses in conventional insulators. Now IBM Research (Zurich), in collaboration with ABB Corporate Research Center, is using supercomputers to design superinsulators that remedy the problem with self-healing.
Energy-efficient power cables using high-temperature superconductor (HTS) wire from American Superconductor (foreground) will soon be joined by superinsulators to mitigate power losses during transmission and distribution (T&D).
ABB--named for the first letters in the two companies that were merged to form it, Swedish corporation Allmanna Svenska Elektriska Aktiebolaget and the Swiss company Brown, Boveri & Cie--is now the world's largest builder of electricity grids, with over 124,000 employees in 100 countries and revenue of nearly $32 billion. ABB ranks 143th in the Fortune 500 listing of the world's largest and most successful companies, and its corporate research labs are near IBM's research labs in the Zurich area.
IBM Research scientists Alex Mueller and Georg Bednorz were recognized with the Nobel Prize for Physics for their seminal work leading to superconducting wires. Now IBM hopes to make a similar contribution in the field of superinsulators, together with ABB. Using supercomputers to test alternative formulations, these new superinsulators for high-voltage conventional power lines aim to eliminate the significant losses in-current worldwide as electricity is shuttled from power stations during transmission and distribution (T&D) to residential and industrial users.
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, up to 7 percent of electrical energy is lost during transmission and distribution. IBM and ABB scientists reasoned that these losses were due to materials factors, such as deterioration of insulators after they are exposed to harsh weather conditions. Both underground and overhead power lines use insulators to prevent electricity from bleeding off, but aging and other environmental factors--including humidity, high winds and pollution--conspire with weather to waste generated power. As a result, more power is generated that is used--to compensate for the losses--causing both higher-than-needed prices and even an occasional power outage that could have been prevented with more efficient power transmission materials.
To remedy that, IBM and ABB researchers have been cooperating to accurately simulate the molecular dynamics of conventional silicon rubber (polymethylhydrosiloxane, or PDMS) insulators in an effort to accurately model the physical processes that affect power lines.
The team is using IBM's Blue Gene/P--a second-generation Blue Gene supercomputer capable of running continuously at 1 petaFLOPS (1 million gigaFLOPS or floating-point operations per second)--to create ultra-high-resolution simulations that go down to the molecular level of the PDMS insulators. Simulations of up to 1 million atoms and their interactions were used to carefully characterize the material, after which alternative formulations have been tried to remedy shortcomings with self-healing that improves the superinsulator's resiliency to damage.
Based on amorphous siloxane polymers, which are hydrophobic (repel water), these superinsulators mitigate the main source of losses by self-healing tiny defects that today accumulate to cause insulators to slowly deteriorate over time.
Further Reading

#ALGORITHMS: "In a smart-system world, data’s ‘the new currency’"

We give them human names—Watson, Siri—that suggest how much “like us” they are. Today’s smart systems can intuitively handle tasks that until now have been impossible to automate in real-time.



And by mining the resultant sea of real-time data coming in from billions of streams worldwide, analytics science is creating services that have even more value than the smart systems themselves.

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#WIRELESS: "Samsung Passes Apple Smartly"

Samsung took over the No. 1 spot in quarterly sales of smartphones from Apple, and the two are currently neck-in-neck for the title of most popular smartphone maker of 2011.



Samsung is the top-selling smartphone worldwide for the first time ever, according to Information Handling Services Inc. The combination of Samsung's growing and Apple's declining during the third quarter of 2011 caused the reversal of fortunes. However, Apple's pent-up demand in the third quarter has been released in the fourth quarter, resulting in a stunning sales record since its recent introduction of the iPhone 4S, putting Apple back on course to outsell Samsung in the fourth quarter. The crown of top 2011 smartphone hangs in the balance, a race that is too close to call, according to IHS.
According to IHS, Samsung shipped over 27 million smartphones in the third quarter of 2011, up almost 44 percent over the second quarter when it shipped 19 million smartphones. However, Apple's sales went down in the third quarter of 2011. This was a result of people holding off on buying an iPhone in anticipation of a new model, which was expected to be the iPhone 5, but was in fact the iPhone 4S. As a result, Apple's shipments declined to just over 17 million in the third quarter of 2011, down from more than 20 million shipped in the second quarter (which was 1 million more than Samsung).
Samsung’s overall market share in smartphones in the third quarter rose to over 23 percent from about 17 percent in the second quarter. This put Samsung in the No. 1 slot, ahead of Apple with its share of less than 15 percent, compared with more than 18 percent in the second quarter. As a result, Apple fell to the No. 2 slot for the first time since it began selling smartphones.
"With the iPhone 4S now shipping in high volume, Apple is enjoying a sales spike in the fourth quarter that is expected to put it in a neck-and-neck battle for smartphone leadership with Samsung," said Wayne Lam, senior analyst, wireless communications at IHS.
So far, Apple appears to be on-track to regain the No. 1 spot in the fourth quarter of 2011, reporting a stunning 4 million units sold during the first weekend of availability of the iPhone 4s. IHS predicts that Apple will sell more than 30 million smartphones in the fourth quarter, giving it total unit sales of 85 million for the year.
Samsung, on the other hand, is enjoying stronger growth overall, second only to the growth of HTC, which expanded its market share by 10 percent, compared with a 5 percent expansion by Samsung.
Further Reading

#MEMS: "On parade at Executive Congress"

MEMS was the word at the MEMS Executive Congress this week, where new improved chips, software and process technologies debuted.



Further Reading

#WIRELESS: "Enterprise Mobility Management Soars"

Mobility management services for the enterprise is a fast growing market that includes management of mobile apps, mobile devices, content, network services, expenses, policy, and security.


Enterprise mobility-management is a business-to-business service that got off the ground when employees started using smartphones. Now with the wide proliferation of touch-screen tablets across enterprises worldwide, mobility-management services are taking off. In fact, the market for these services is expected to grow from roughly $1 billion in 2010 to $11 billion by 2016, according to Allied Business Intelligence Inc. (ABI Research, New York City).
Mobility management services today are mostly used by medium and large enterprises, but by 2016 they will also be serving small businesses and even "SoHo" businesses with fewer than five employees.
Enterprise mobility-management services began as almost a niche market, when a few large enterprises standardized on the iPhone as their mobile-worker platform, using specially written apps to perform common functions like access corporate databases and file expense reports. As smartphone usage grew, and Android smartphones took off, the mobility management service sector started a period of rapid growth. Now with the introduction of both iOS- and Android-based tablets, and an avalanche of smart apps for performing nearly every corporate-computer function remotely, mainstream players are entering the fast-growing enterprise mobility-management market.
AT&T, Motorola Mobility, and Samsung Mobile are the latest entrants to this fast-growing market, offering services that include management of mobile apps, mobile devices, content delivery, network services, expense reports, policy references, and security. What began as an answer to employee requests to IT for technology to connect to the corporate servers, has now grown into an enterprise-wide outsourced service that can remotely configure devices, provision them with apps and data, monitor and control their access to corporate networks, ensure security, and control the cost of managing multiple mobile operating systems.
According to ABI Research, in its recently released report Enterprise Mobility Management Services for Smartphones and Media Tablets, the usage of mobile devices by enterprise employees is rising dramatically. By 2016, up to 85 percent of enterprise employees worldwide will be toting smartphones or tablets, according to ABI Research, with penetration as high as 95 percent at many large corporations.
Entry into the market by carriers like AT&T and companies like Motorola Mobile and Samsung reflects the desire by many enterprises for one-stop-shopping where both the devices and all the necessary services can be obtained from a single supplier, according to ABI Research. Businesses are also seeking to consolidate around just one or two suppliers for wireless mobility services combined with management of their other endpoints such as PCs, notebooks, and Internet appliances.
Further Reading