Food prices and food affordability are important determinants of food choices, obesity and non-communicable diseases. As governments around the world consider policies to promote the consumption of healthier foods, data on the relative price and affordability of foods, with a particular focus on the difference between ‘less healthy’ and ‘healthy’ foods and diets, are urgently needed. This paper briefly reviews past and current approaches to monitoring food prices, and identifies key issues affecting the development of practical tools and methods for food price data collection, analysis and reporting. A step-wise monitoring framework, including measurement indicators, is proposed. ‘Minimal’ data collection will assess the differential price of ‘healthy’ and ‘less healthy’ foods; ‘expanded’ monitoring will assess the differential price of ‘healthy’ and ‘less healthy’ diets; and the ‘optimal’ approach will also monitor food affordability, by taking into account household income. The monitoring of the price and affordability of ‘healthy’ and ‘less healthy’ foods and diets globally will provide robust data and benchmarks to inform economic and fiscal policy responses. Given the range of methodological, cultural and logistical challenges in this area, it is imperative that all aspects of the proposed monitoring framework are tested rigorously before implementation.

Monitoring the price and affordability of foods and diets globally

The increasing global demand for food and nutrition security has raised the need to automate processes in modern farming. As such, a promising way to automate those processes is by using smart agriculture applications (SAAs). Different studies in the literature classify these applications based on agricultural themes, agricultural domains, and farming scenarios. However, this classification is not sufficient for researchers and industry to gain deeper insights on software engineering issues pertaining to SAAs. In this survey, we explore SAAs and further classify them based on architectural models, supported software engineering issues, and target mobile platforms. The survey results show that SAAs in general (1) follow different architectural models, (2) are targeted for different mobile platforms, and (3) satisfy different software engineering issues. Most importantly, the key findings from this study reveal that SAAs can fail to meet their intended purpose if developers ignore key software engineering issues. These findings can be used as a starting point for researchers and industry to implement smart agriculture related mobile applications.

A Survey on Mobile Applications for Smart Agriculture

The study focused on the development of a mobile application which aims to assist farmers and target users with the different techniques in planting crops. The application includes suggestions on which type of crop is suitable to plant in a specific type of soil and season. This application also provides guidelines on how to make essential fertilizer to help farmers in treating different crops condition. Furthermore, the developers implemented the time-series moving average algorithm which allows farmers and other users to monitor their expenses and forecast the demand on their crops. The Prototyping method was applied by the researchers as the methodology during the development of the project due to the increase in the number of requirements and series of remodeling. The developed application was evaluated by agriculturist, IT professionals and target users using ISO/IEC 9126 as a tool for software testing, usability, functionality, and reliability. The results of the evaluation showed that the application was able achieved the defined objectives from the outcome of the survey given to the experts and other evaluators.

A Mobile Application for Organic Farming Assistance Techniques using Time-Series Algorithm

One of the recurring issues mobility-impaired persons have to deal with is traveling alone in a wheelchair blindly without prior information regarding the accessibility of the planned route. Ordinary people usually choose the shortest path, but people with ambulant disabilities may prefer a longer route that does not include an uphill. The purpose of this paper is to extract the graph representation for people with reduced mobility across Baguio's Central Business District. The PWD ramps and wheelchair passable drop curbs were located with a smartphone GPS. Google Maps was used to verify the coordinates. The road distance was calculated using the Haversine formula as verified using Google Earth. The Lavene's Test for equality of variances and T-test of equality of means were used to check the significant difference between the derived values against Google's data. The derived latitude and longitude using a mobile phone's GPS did not differ significantly from the Google Maps coordinates. Moreover, the study showed that the calculated road distance using the Haversine formula did not vary considerably from the Google Earth distance. As such, the study aims to provide time and safety benefits by presenting a novel model representing the road network as a graph for mobility-impaired persons.

Graph Representation of Road Network for Mobility-Impaired Persons

This paper discusses the implementation of the Escaping Technique in an Online Inventory System to prevent the Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attack. It also covers discussion about XSS described as a kind of injection attack that injects malicious scripts in the web application. This study also discusses the different types of XSS attacks citing some related studies which provide additional necessary information. Furthermore, a discussion of preventive measures to address the vulnerabilities of XSS attack is also covered in this study. Likewise, the escaping process is able to secure the developed online inventory system against XSS attack. Stripping out unwanted data, like malformed HTML or script tags prevents this data from being seen as code. The implementation of this technique is to be seen in an online inventory system. All of the possible situations were analyzed and imbedded on the developed online inventory system. Thus, it is very vital to secure the confidentiality, availability and integrity of the data inside the system and to mitigate the vulnerability to spread widely.

Integrating the Escaping Technique in Preventing Cross Site Scripting in an Online Inventory System

In this paper, we developed a new mobile application designed to protect your images stored on your mobile phone using Advanced Encryption Standard algorithm to secure images by encrypting it and Least Significant Bit algorithm to process the encrypted image and embed it into another image. To achieve high level of encryption, a 256 bit length key of Advance Encryption Standard is used to maximize protection and Diffie-Hellman algorithm to secure the processed key to both parties without interference from outside. In steganography, the encrypted image will be invisible into the cover image in which potential hackers do not have any idea about the original image embedded inside of the cover image, and with this even if the hacker got the image it will still need the correct key to decrypt it or else the image will be deleted The study used Rapid Application Development Model as the project development methodology, which allows the preceding phase to iterate until the application is refined, requirements are gathered and allows early testing of the prototypes during every iteration to reduce the risk of any major issues in the final deployment of the application. With the use of ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119 Testing Standards, the application was evaluated in terms of its security, usability and reliability. Based on the evaluation results, the application satisfied the respondents and possible users with an overall mean rating 4.17 or acceptable.

BlockSight: A Mobile Image Encryption Using Advanced Encryption Standard and Least Significant Bit Algorithm

Unfamiliarity about the school campus grounds results common problems for new students or visitors. They tend to get lost inside the campus, arrive late in classes or meetings. They navigate by themselves and ask security personnel, still they tend to take time to reach their destination or most often they get lost. This study is for new students and visitors. It helps them to explore and navigate the campus grounds thru a mobile application. The mobile application provides a user-friendly interface which considers user experience. The mobile application serves as a guiding tool in navigating around the school campus grounds. In the study, the mobile application used Google Map to track the current location of the user and plot the route from the origin to the destination inside the Technological Institute of the Philippines Quezon City campus using fuzzy logic algorithm to get the shortest route and channel selection algorithm to get the nearby user within a perimeter. The study used the Rapid Application Development model in order to deliver expected outputs. Surveys using a questioner drafted from ISO 25010 were conducted to determine the effectiveness of the developed mobile application in terms of its functionality, reliability and efficiency. It was concluded that the mobile application is an effective tool in giving navigation and campus information for its users. For the result, the average mean of all the criteria yields 4.12 interpreted as very effective using the 5 point Likert’s Scale. Thus, the mobile application is useful reliable, functional, and efficient to serve its purpose.

/pdf/tip-express-an-android-school-navigation-application-47u5rd6m8r.pdf

TIP EXPRESS: An Android School Navigation Application

According to American Social Health Association, more than half of all people in the world will have Sexually Transmitted Infection (STI) or popularly known as STD at some point in their lifetime. This paper presents the work of developing a mobile expert system to provide information about the most common venereal and sexually transmitted diseases in the Philippines. The mobile application developed is capable of diagnosing the user based from the different physical manifestations of symptoms and usual signs that occur in their body. The source of data used to build the expert system was collected from various related literature studies and interviews with experts in venereology. The information provided by the application will help users in identifying early signs and symptoms of VD/STD and will also improve their knowledge regarding these infectious diseases. Detection of the VD/STD at a primary stage is essential as to increase people’s survival rate. A fuzzy logic algorithm was utilized to filter different symptoms and provide an accurate result of the diagnostic testing. The system was evaluated by venereal disease expert, venereal disease/ sexually transmitted disease patients and IT Professionals through its functionality, efficiency, and portability. The results of the evaluation showed that the application was able achieved the defined objectives from the outcome of the survey given to the experts and other evaluators. 

http://www.jait.us/uploadfile/2018/0831/20180831053838824.pdf

A Mobile Expert System Utilizing Fuzzy Logic for Venereal and Sexually Transmitted Diseases

Every day, almost every Filipino citizen goes to a public market to purchase different agricultural products for their daily food consumption. Some merchants and dealers increase the price of their products for their own sake. Many Filipino citizens earn a minimum wage to feed their family. Certain major problems existing in the majority of our public markets cover important aspects of market operations such as location, construction, sanitation, security /safety, market fee collection, and occupancy of stalls result in the gradual but progressive deterioration of the markets. This study focuses on the analysis, design, and whole development of the mobile application, Price Watch and implementation of Exponential Smoothing algorithm. This mobile application helps Filipino citizens be aware of the prices of commodities in the public market. The mobile application allows its users to see the prices of different products in the public market and show the graph so users will easily recognize the increase in the price of the products every day, monthly, and yearly. It also has the capability to forecast the daily price of the product in the public market. Also show the price of the agri products of selected market in NCR. With the use of ISO/IEC/IEEE 29119 Testing Standards, the application was evaluated in terms of its functional suitability, usability and reliability. Based on the evaluation results, the application satisfied the respondents and possible users, with an overall mean rating of 4.22.

Paula Jean M. Castro

Papers

BlockSight: A Mobile Image Encryption Using Advanced Encryption Standard and Least Significant Bit Algorithm

TIP EXPRESS: An Android School Navigation Application

A Mobile Expert System Utilizing Fuzzy Logic for Venereal and Sexually Transmitted Diseases

A Mobile Application for Organic Farming Assistance Techniques using Time-Series Algorithm

Price Watch: An Online Price Monitoring Mobile Application with Exponential Smoothing for Agribusiness and Marketing Assistance Service