P2P Content Distribution to Mobile Bluetooth Users

Using handheld devices such as cellular phones and smart phones for personal entertainment has become commonplace in today’s lifestyle. Virtually all of these devices are equipped with Bluetooth technology that can be used to distribute entertainment contents such as music and movie clips. Mobile users can download content from the opportunistically available infrastructure (e.g., Digital Billboards) as well as direct Peer- oPeer (P2P) collaboration which significantly increases content availability/coverage. P2P content distribution protocol design is heavily influenced by the characteristics of Bluetooth, which is the main departure from Internet-based content distribution. However, little has been done to understand the performance of overall Bluetooth operations, ranging from peer discovery to data downloading, in dynamic environments with  mobility, interference, and different Bluetooth versions/chipsets. In this paper, we first perform extensive experiments to measure the performance of Bluetooth in dynamic environments. We find that Bluetooth-based content distribution faces several challenges such as time/energy consuming resource discovery and limited bandwidth even with the enhanced features of the latest Bluetooth version. We then propose trategies that can effectively improve the performance of resource discovery and downloading phases.Our simulation and experimental results document the improvements obtained with our proposed techniques.

Noise Reduction Techniques for Microcontroller-Based Systems

With today’s advancements in semiconductor technology and the push toward faster microcontroller units (MCUs) and peripherals, new product designs are faced with an increasing threat from electromagnetic interference (EMI). Earlier, the issue of emission and interference was referred to as EMI or RFI (for radio frequency interference). It is now referred to in more positive terms by replacing interference"withcompatability." Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) encompasses both emission and

susceptibility for a given system. Although this application note focuses primarily on emission, some of the guidelines presented throughout this document will affect susceptibility as well. EMI can, and often does, cause delays in the product development schedule. Early and continuous attention to the effects of EMC/EMI will give the product the best possible chance for minimum cost and schedule delays, while lack of attention in this area will almost certainly translate to added cost and schedule delay.

Automated Defect Recognition Method by Using Digital Image Processing

As existing infrastructure systems are aged and deteriorated rapidly, state agencies started searching for more advanced ways to maintain their valuable assets to the acceptable level. One of them is the application of digital image processing. Recently, in the civil engineering domain, digital image processing methods have been developed to the areas of pavement conditions, underground pipeline inspection, and steel bridge coating assessment. The main reasons to count on the advanced technology are due to such advantages as accuracy, objectivity, speed, and consistency. These distinct advantages have brought attention to state agencies to minimize the shortcomings of existing inspection practices. This paper deals with a digital image processing method to apply it to the evaluation of steel bridge coating conditions. Infrastructure condition assessment can be made more accurately and quickly with the aid of computerized processing system. The proposed method in this paper was designed to recognize the existence of bridge coating rust defects. It was developed by making pair-wise comparisons between a defective group and a non-defective group and generating eigenvalues to separate two groups. An automated defect recognition method can make a decision whether a given digitized image contains defects. 

As existing infrastructure systems are aged and deteriorated rapidly, state agencies started searching for more advanced ways to maintain their valuable assets to the acceptable level. One of them is the application of digital image processing. Recently, in the civil engineering domain, digital image processing methods have been developed to the areas of pavement conditions, underground pipeline inspection, and steel bridge coating assessment (H. D. Cheng et al. 1999, S. K. Sinha et al. 2003, S. Lee et al. 2005). The main reasons to count on the advanced technology are due to such advantages as accuracy, objectivity, speed, and consistency. These distinct advantages have brought attention to state agencies to minimize the shortcomings of existing inspection practices. The conditions of steel bridge painting surfaces can be evaluated accurately and quickly by applying digital image processing. Also, machine vision-dependent inspections can provide more consistent inspection results than human visual inspections. Because conventional inspection heavily relies on individual abilities, inspection results are errorprone and may have wide variations between inspectors. The results can be different depending on personal preferences, work experiences, and the workload of the inspectors. It is pretty important to develop reliable infrastructure condition assessment for better maintenance of the assets. In case of bridge coating, bridge managers can more realistically develop long-term cost-effective maintenance programs if they have dependable coating condition data. Also, they can make decisions as to whether a bridge shall be painted again immediately or later. Efficient coating condition assessment is also essential for the successful implementation of steel bridge coating warranty contracting. Under the warranty contracting, an owner and a contractor inspect steel bridge coating conditions on a regular basis and decide whether additional maintenance actions are needed. However, it is extremely difficult to determine if a bridge contains more defects than an allowable level. If they are in conflict, they will go through a lengthy process to reach an agreement.

Flexible Home Care Automation

Health monitoring and healthcare provisioning at home (i.e., outside the hospital) have received increasingly attention as a possible and partial solution for addressing the problems of an aging population. There are still many technological issues that need to be solved before home healthcare systems can be really cost-effective and efficient. However, in this paper we will highlight another category of issues which we call architectural challenges. Each patient is unique, and each patient has a unique lifestyle, living environment and course of life. Therefore it should be possible to personalize the services provided by home healthcare systems according to the needs and preferences of each individual patient, and it should be possible to make incremental adaptations at later points in time if this is necessary due to, for example, a changing health condition. The architectural challenges and solution directions related to this has been discussed in this paper. 

Healthcare provisioning in the home has been proposed as a cost-effective solution for the demographic changes in especially western countries that put increasing pressure on 

the traditional healthcare systems [1]. In addition, higher living standards enabled people's concern for personal health and quality of life and generated interest for home-based solutions that support well-being, health monitoring and independent living. Arguments for home healthcare include economical benefits (by providing more efficient healthcare solutions and unburdening institutionalized healthcare) and social benefits (by facilitating and prolonging independent living). However, a medical motivation for promoting home healthcare is the ability to monitor patients continuously in their familiar environment, often in a non-intrusive way and without causing stress, as opposed to medical examinations in the hospital, which have to take place on appointment at a specific time and place. We are now witnessing many innovations in the area of home healthcare, thanks to recent technology advances in areas such as sensor technology, body area networks, wireless communication and information processing. This already enabled an array of applications, ranging from health monitoring, event-based alarm, automated analysis to communication of health-related information .