Pedro Brandão

• PhD in Computer Science
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Porto

World-wide statistics show a considerable growth of the occurrence of different types of Diabetes Mellitus, posing diverse challenges at many levels for public health policies. Some of these challenges may be addressed by means of computerised systems which may pave the way to provide practitioners with insight on their patient’s conditions anywher...

Diabetes type I is a chronic disease that requires strict supervision. MyDiabetes is a utility application for diabetic users. This application served as basis to develop a logical unit, composed of logical rules, translated from medical protocols and guidelines, to advise the user. The data in the application is a source of knowledge about the use...

The emergence of personal and other low-cost health devices opened new perspectives for expanding and improving access to health care, with a potentially huge societal impact. We developed a modular and reconfigurable Health Kiosk based on such devices, where users can autonomously measure vital signs for screening or continued monitoring. However,...

Mobile AdHoc NETworks (MANETs) have been identified as a key emerging technology for scenarios in which IEEE 802.11 or cellular communications are either infeasible, inefficient, or cost-ineffective. Smartphones are the most adequate network nodes in many of these scenarios, but it is not straightforward to build a network with them. We extensively...

We describe the architecture, problems and lessons learned from building a Health Kiosk from commercial, off-the shelf Personal Health Devices and a computer with a touch-screen interface. The kiosk is used autonomously by patients to measure vital data prior to a consultation, in the scope of a population screening, or for routinely monitoring. Th...

We propose a multi-platform framework for easy development of applications that share live or recorded data of any type in a classroom. It is especially aimed at training in the medical area, where it can make the learning process much more interactive and enriching, but is equally well suited for use in any type of workshop, tutorial, or other lea...

Applications running over mobile ad-hoc networks (MANET) often can trade-off some delay versus reliability in case of spo-radic disconnection periods. However, existing solutions for network partition [1,2] usually focus on settings for which dis-connection is at least as normal as connection. We propose Disconnection Tolerant Networking (DisToNet)...

I'll expose USB vulnerability in some vendor's customization of the Android system, I'll also target that vulnerability in a specific vendor, together with a proof of concept of the attack and practical scenario environment, and I will unveil the implications of such vulnerability. Culminating in the flashing of a compromised boot partition, and ro...

E-health has raised a great deal of expectations on improving the quality of health services while simultaneously enabling health services cost reductions. To advance towards those visions, it is imperative to gain the trust of the involved stakeholders, doctors and other medical personnel, patients, families, health care providers and regulators....

We expose an USB vulnerability in some vendors’ customization of the android system, where the serial AT commands processed by the cellular modem are extended to allow other functionalities. We target that vulnerability for the specific vendor system and present a proof of concept of the attack in a realistic scenario environment. For this we use a...

Recently, a few applications appeared that emulate the behaviour of a wireless ad-hoc network at the application layer, or make it accessible through a full programming framework on the Android platform. We show in this demo how to en- able mesh networking at the network level, in a transparent manner to applications. We use this network to relay i...

Body Sensor Networks (BSNs) are the natural candidates to provide multi-parameter patient monitoring. Tapping into multiple inputs and correlating them to infer new information, cleaning received data and inferring state should be objectives of BSNs. These systems will need to deduce information from a variety of raw sensor data and accuracy in the...

We propose a time synchronization protocol specific for Body Area Networks (BAN). The diversity of hardware on which sensors will be deployed, the need for energy efficiency and the degree of accuracy required by different applications, are constraints that are not always addressed in current synchronization schemes. Using a broadcast message schem...

Healthcare is changing, correction...healthcare is in need of change. The population ageing, the increase in chronic and heart diseases and just the increase in population size will overwhelm the current hospital-centric healthcare. There is a growing interest by individuals to monitor their own physiology. Not only for sport activities, but also...

Healthcare involves sharing sensitive information. In health, access control technologies tend to involve patient records. However, as healthcare is becoming increasingly pervasive, it is necessary to control access to live information streams, such as those from sensor devices. As opposed to bespoke, scenariospecific access control regimes, the mi...

A BSN is a heterogeneous environment populated with different types of sensors. As such it needs a framework to abstract to applications the underlying sensor resources they need to get the information from. Such framework (a middleware), should allow applications to issue information requests with a set of requirements to be met. This would then b...

In the sensor network area, BSNs encompass a particular set of restrictions and conditions that separate them from normal WSNs. More so than WSNs, BSNs would profit from different types of sensing information and the sensor network itself provides more opportunities for different applications to use the same resources. However, the heterogeneity of...

Virtual electronic patient records (VEPR) enable the integration and sharing of healthcare information within large and heterogeneous organizations by aggregating known data elements about patients from different information systems in real-time. However, healthcare professionals need to access a terminal every time they treat a patient. This may n...

This is the presentation and not dataset. Unable to change or remove it after adding it.

In this paper we present the development, implementation and simulation of a simple Distributed Hash Table (DHT) protocol for a Peer to peer (P2P) overlay network inspired by small world [3, 2] concepts. Our simulation and implementation, done on the Peersim [10] Java network simulator, showed results consistent with other state of the art DHT impl...

Virtual electronic patient records (VEPR) enable the integration and sharing of healthcare information within large and heterogeneous organizations. The use of wireless technology can improve and hasten healthcare treatment because it brings information to the point of decision allowing also for users' mobility. This use has to comply with security...

Sensor networks are currently the focus of active research in a considerable number of fields. Because of their many applications, ranging from forest surveillance to anti-terrorist protection, from medical monitoring to crops inspection, from traffic sensing to environment control, sensors are gaining a big momentum in our every day life. The depl...

Controlled access to resources offered by network operators and service providers is a key component for any commercial deployment of a Beyond-3G (B3G) communication system: complex scenarios involving users accessing advanced multimedia services using heterogeneous network technologies in different administrative domains do require tight access co...

Ad Hoc networks dramatically increase the network security concerns. This paper presents a security protocol for ad hoc networks, denoted AD hoc SEcure Routing (ADSER), that copes with the majority of the security issues raised by the incremental deployment of ad hoc networks. This protocol copes with message integrity and signing, encryption of in...

This paper presents a comparative evaluation of the Scalable Reservation-Based QoS (SRBQ) and the RSVP Reservation Aggregation (RSVPRAgg) architectures, both designed to provide QoS levels similar to RSVP/IntServ without the scalability concerns that prevent its usage in high-speed core networks. The comparative analysis, based on simulation result...

This paper contains an evaluation of the RSVP Reservation Aggregation architecture, proposed by the IETF as a scalable alternative to the standard RSVP/IntServ for usage in high-speed core networks. We point out its main strengths, weaknesses and limitations, and describe our implementation of the architecture in the ns-2 simulator, including the d...

This paper performs a comparative evaluation of two QoS architectures, RSVP Reservation Aggregation and Scalable ReservationBased QoS, aimed at providing QoS levels similar to the ones provided by the well-known RSVP/IntServ architecture, but scalable enough for use in high traffic core networks. The comparative analysis, based on each model's char...

This paper presents a performance evaluation study of the scalable reservation-based QoS architecture. This architecture introduces a scalable per-flow signalling model, using techniques and algorithms developed to minimise the computational complexity, namely a label switching mechanism and an efficient timer implementation. The underlying archite...

This paper proposes an extension to the AODV protocol, denoted preemptive local route repair (PLRR), that aims to avoid route failures by preemptively local repairing routes when a link break is about to occur. This protocol extension resorts to AODV layer 3 connectivity information with new mobility extensions. Our proposal is to enhance node's in...

This paper describes a new architecture that provides end-to-end QoS support, and analyses its performance in terms of QoS guarantees and scalability of the solution. This architecture introduces a scalable per-flow signalling model, using several techniques and algorithms developed in order to minimise the computational complexity. A label switchi...

This paper proposes a new QoS architecture that provides end-to-end QoS support. The architecture is based on scalable per-flow signaling and resource reservation for aggregates of flows at both core and access networks. The underlying architecture is based on DiffServ, where the edge nodes perform policing of the incoming aggregates in order to en...

The digital age is appearing at every corner. Moreover, it is searched by many and yarned by even more. Even if one has digital contents there are still different ways of transporting its bits, and producers want to employ whichever resources are more suitable to deliver their product with the best quality, in the most efficient and, above all, mor...

Dissertação apresentada para obtenção parcial do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores, na Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, sob a orientação do Prof. Doutor José António Ruela Simões Fernandes