In this paper, we describe the design considerations and implementation of a smart toy system, a technology for supporting the automatic recording and analysis for detecting developmental delays recognition when children play using the smart toy. To achieve this goal, we take advantage of the current commercial sensor features (reliability, low consumption, easy integration, etc.) to develop a series of sensor-based low-cost devices. Specifically, our prototype system consists of a tower of cubes augmented with wireless sensing capabilities and a mobile computing platform that collect the information sent from the cubes allowing the later analysis by childhood development professionals in order to verify a normal behaviour or to detect a potential disorder. This paper presents the requirements of the toy and discusses our choices in toy design, technology used, selected sensors, process to gather data from the sensors and generate information that will help in the decision-making and communication of the information to the collector system. In addition, we also describe the play activities the system supports.
The challenge of ad-hoc computing is to find the way of taking advantage of spare cycles in an efficient way that takes into account all capabilities of the devices and interconnections available to them. In this paper we explore distributed evolutionary computation based on the Ruby on Rails framework, which overlays a Model-View-Controller on evolutionary computation. It allows anybody with a web browser (that is, mostly everybody connected to the Internet) to participate in an evolutionary computation experiment. Using a straightforward farming model, we consider different factors, such as the size of the population used. We are mostly interested in how they impact on performance, but also the scaling behavior when a non-trivial number of computers is applied to the problem. Experiments show the impact of different packet sizes on performance, as well as a quite limited scaling behavior, due to the characteristics of the server. Several solutions for that problem are proposed.
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