BackgroundRelationships between several built environment factors and physical activity and walking behavior are well established, but internationally-comparable built environment measures are lacking. The Microscale Audit of Pedestrian Streetscapes (MAPS)-Global is an observational measure of detailed streetscape features relevant to physical activity that was developed for international use. This study examined the inter-observer reliability of the instrument in five countries.MethodsMAPS-Global was developed by compiling concepts and items from eight environmental measures relevant to walking and bicycling. Inter-rater reliability data were collected in neighborhoods selected to vary on geographic information system (GIS)-derived macro-level walkability in five countries (Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Hong Kong-China, and Spain). MAPS-Global assessments (n = 325) were completed in person along a ≥ 0.25 mile route from a residence toward a non-residential destination, and a commercial block was also rated for each residence (n = 82). Two raters in each country rated each route independently. A tiered scoring system was created that summarized items at multiple levels of aggregation, and positive and negative valence scores were created based on the expected effect on physical activity. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was computed for scales and selected items using one-way random models.ResultsOverall, 86.6% of individual items and single item indicators showed excellent agreement (ICC ≥ 0.75), and 13.4% showed good agreement (ICC = 0.60–0.74). All subscales and overall summary scores showed excellent agreement. Six of 123 items were too rare to compute the ICC. The median ICC for items and scales was 0.92 with a range of 0.50–1.0. Aesthetics and social characteristics showed lower ICCs than other sub-scales, but reliabilities were still in the excellent range (ICC ≥ 0.75).ConclusionEvaluation of inter-observer reliability of MAPS-Global across five countries indicated all items and scales had “good” or “excellent” reliability. The results demonstrate that trained observers from multiple countries were able to reliably conduct observations of both residential and commercial areas with the new MAPS-Global instrument. Next steps are to evaluate construct validity in relation to physical activity in multiple countries and gain experience with using MAPS-Global for research and practice applications.

In medical organizations, healthcare providers need to have fast access to patients' medical information in order to make accurate diagnoses as well as to provide appropriate treatments. Efficient healthcare is thus highly dependent on doctors being provided with access to patients' medical information at the right time and place. However it frequently happens that critical pieces of pertinent information end up not being used because they are located in information systems that do not inter-operate in a timely manner. Unfortunately the standard operational mode for many healthcare applications, and even healthcare institutions, is to be managed and operated as isolated islands that do not share information in an efficient manner. There are many reasons that contribute to this grim state of affairs, but what interests us the most is the lack of enforceable security policies for systems interoperability and data exchange and the existence of many heterogeneous legacy systems that are almost impossible to directly include into any reasonable secure interoperable workflow. In this paper we propose a RBAC mobile agent access control model supported by a specially managed public key infrastructure for mobile agent's strong authentication and access control. Our aim is to create the right means for doctors to be provided with timely accurate information, which would be otherwise inaccessible, by the means of strongly authenticated mobile agents capable of securely bridging otherwise isolated institutional eHealth domains and legacy applications.

Abstract. Personal mobile devices with real practical computational power and Internet connectivity are currently widespread throughout all levels of society. This is so much so that the most popular of these devices, the smart phone, in all its varied ubiquitous manifestations is nowadays the de facto personal mobile computing platform, be it for civil or even military applications. In parallel with these developments, Internet application providers like Google and Facebook are developing and deploying an ever increasing set of personal services that are being aggregated and structured over personal user accounts were an ever increasing set of personal private sensitive attributes is being massively aggregated. In this paper we describe OFELIA (Open Federated Environment for Leveraging of Identity and Authorization), a framework for user centric identity management that provides an identity/authorization versatile infrastructure that does not depend upon the massive aggregation of users identity attributes to offer a versatile set of identity services. In OFELIA personal attributes are distributed among and protected by several otherwise unrelated AAs (Attribute Authorities). Only the user mobile device knows how to aggregate these scattered AAs identity attributes back into some useful identifiable entity identity. Moreover by recurring to an IdB (Identity Broker), acting as a privacy enhancing blind caching-proxy, in OFELIA the identity attributes location in the Internet is hidden from the RP/SP (Relying Party, Service Provider) that wants to have temporary access to the users personal data. The mobile device thus becomes the means by which the user can asynchronously exercise discretionary access control over their most sensitive dynamic identity attributes in a simple but highly transparent way.

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