Vol. 24 No. 2/2020

Issue Topic: Internet of Things (IoT)

Using the Consumption Values Theory to Analyze the Relationship between the Motives for Facebook Use and Its Perceived Usefulness for University Students
Costin PRIBEANU 5
The usage of Facebook among university students is more and more widespread. Students are using Facebook anywhere and anytime, sometimes too much. Several researchers questioned the usefulness and the motives for its use. This paper aims to analyze the relationship between the motives for Facebook use and its perceived usefulness from the perspective of consumption values theory. The motives for Facebook use have been conceptualized as a formatively meas-ured construct that impacts two drivers of the intention to use: the perceived usefulness and the perceived ease of use. This approach has the advantage of using a small set of indicators corre-sponding to the main categories of motives. The model has been tested on a sample of 182 uni-versity students from a technical faculty. The results show that the perceived usefulness is rela-tively low, a little bit over the neutral value. As regards the motives for using Facebook, the es-timation results revealed four motives: keeping in touch with known people, finding information and resources, socialization, and entertainment.
Keywords: Motives for Facebook use, perceived usefulness, formative measurement, MIMIC models

Blockchain Technology – Support for Collaborative Systems
Gheorghe MATEI 15
Blockchain technology is one of the most promising new technology, a new approach in data registration and distribution, and represents a new paradigm for how information is shared. Blockchain technology gained attention after the first application of this technology – Bitcoin blockchain – was deployed. The tech community considers that blockchain is one of the most disruptive technologies and saw more possibilities of using it in many other sectors. The technology can create trusted, secured, transparent, verifiable, real-time communication networks capable to support almost everything, from payments networks to supply chains, real estate deals, healthcare data sharing, voting systems protected from falsification, etc. This paper aims to briefly present the blockchain technology and how it could be applied in a collaborative system in the healthcare industry.
Keywords: blockchain, Bitcoin, hash, peer-to-peer, proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, private key, public key

The Impact of Mobile e-Commerce on GDP: A Comparative Analysis between Romania and Germany and how Covid-19 Influences the e-Commerce Activity Worldwide
Florin-Valeriu PANTELIMON, Tiberiu-Marian GEORGESCU, Bogdan-Ştefan POSEDARU 27
During recent years, there has been an increase in the usage of mobile devices as well as a widening of the range of activities that can be performed using them. Thus, a new field of study has been developed, the mobile commerce, which represents the activity of using mobile devices (phones, tablets or any other portable devices) to buy and sell products and services through online store platforms, whether they are business to business, business to customer or customer to customer. Our study consists of two parts, the first one analyses the impact of the mobile commerce’s growth on the Gross Domestic Product for both a West European country - Germany and an East European country – Romania from 2014 to 2019. The analysis aims to understand the mobile commerce importance in the pre-COVID-19 era, in the context of stable economies. The second part studies the general consumer behavior towards classic commerce and electronic commerce in the context of COVID-19 pandemic state. In this regard we analyzed data for January-April 2020 and studied the main changes for the countries which were either early affected by the pandemic, severely affected or both.
Keywords: e-Commerce, Mobile commerce, Comparative analysis, Covid-19

The Influence of Privacy and Security on the Future of IoT
Mihaela Mădălina ANGHEL, Petru IANC, Marian ILEANA, Laura Iulia MODI 42
Internet of things (IoT) is a hot topic for study in the last decades. IoT is the internet working of physical devices, vehicles and other objects which consists of an embedded system with sensors, actuators and network connectivity that enable to collect and exchange data. The IoT permits articles to be detected as well as controlled remotely across existing system foundation, making open doors for more coordination of the physical world into PC based frameworks, and result in improved accuracy, efficiency and economic benefit. The IoT is a rapidly increasing and promising technology which becomes more and more present in our everyday lives. Further-more, the technology is an instance of the more general class of cyber-physical systems, which also encompasses technologies such as smart grids, smart homes and smart cities. Considering the high-rate improvement of IoT advancements, and the critical addition in the quantity of the associated gadgets, complete diagram of the IoT framework points, design, challenges, appli-cations, conventions, and market outline were examined. In order to give an example of IoT se-curity.
Keywords: IoT security, IoT Privacy, IoT attacks, IoT future, Internet of Things, blockchain, thingbot.

Internet of Things Hardware and Software
Iulia-Antonia BÎRLOG, Dumitru-Marius BORCAN, George-Manuel COVRIG 54
This paper is meant to describe the interaction between the main components of an IoT system. As the Internet of Things is gaining increasing attention, the overall purpose of the study is to analyze the procedure of transforming signals into processible data. To offer a better under-standing of the complexity this modern concept involves, the research guides the readers to-wards its wide applicability, depicting the main technologies included in both hardware and software components. While these elements are connected and integrated together, a detailed decomposition of the factors involved needs to be illustrated in order to fully demonstrate the significant potential this technology of the future possesses.
Keywords: Internet, hardware, software, physical world, digital world, signals, sensors, smart devices, communication protocol, wireless sensor network, IoT platform, interconnection

IoT Integration with Mobile and Cloud Solutions
Iurie CATRUC, Dorin IOSIFESCU 63
IoT Solution started to have a significant impact on many aspects of our lives. Intelligent Chatbots became the most era-defining technology to drive automation through mobile apps and bring never-before results for the enterprises across the niches. How innovative you can incorporate such bots into your mobile app marketing strategy will be the key. In this paper the focus is to discover solutions by analyzing the latest technologies and breakthroughs. The IoT features provide the opportunity to collect and exchange data without a need for human interaction. Cheap mobile phones are nowadays available with equally impressive features, which makes the implementation of a mobile application more facile and legitimate. Security is turning into a major boondocks for mobile application developers due to the increased amount of personal data and confidential information the applications are required to manage. An IoT based infrastructure is proposed in this paper that aims to present a way of integrating Cloud based chatbots in mobile applications.
Keywords: IoT, Mobile applications, cloud, chatbots, security

IoT System in Diagnosis of Covid-19 Patients
Dan CACOVEAN, Irina IOANA, Gabriela NITULESCU 75
Implementation of an IoT system for the detection of Covid-infected 19. A sample of 300 people participated in this experiment. They are assigned wearables that they must wear for a period of one week throughout the day. The data is retrieved in real time at an interval of 60 minutes. These wearables are equipped with temperature, heart rate and GPS sensors to determine people inside or outside virus outbreaks. The data is then retrieved and sent to Oracle Cloud. Here they are processed according to Machine Learning algorithms and sent predictions to the subjects' family doctors, but also to the national health system. If patients are suspected of being infected with the virus, then they should be contacted as soon as possible for testing.
Keywords: Internet of Things, healthcare, health-IoT, software, hardware, cloud

Agile Software Development
Alina-Mădălina GHEORGHE, Ileana Daniela GHEORGHE, Ioana Laura IATAN 90
Agile software development represents a major departure from traditional, plan-based approaches to software engineering. The selections of appropriate software development methodologies for a given project and tailoring the methodologies to a specific requirement have been a challenge since the establishment of software development as a discipline. The research speaks about what is currently known about the benefits and limitations of agile methods and methodologies. Agile software development is a particularly important topic in software engineering and information systems. We approach the idea of the four core of agile software development that are essential to ease the process of software development.
Keywords: software development, agile, manifesto, principles, methodologies, project life cycle, concept

Publishing Guide for Authors 101

INFOREC Association 103