Assim Sagahyroon

Classifying obstructive sleep apnea using smartphones

Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is a serious sleep disorder which is characterized by frequent obstruction of the upper airway, often resulting in oxygen desaturation. The serious negative impact of OSA on human health makes monitoring and diagnosing it a necessity. Currently, polysomnography is considered the gold standard for diagnosing OSA, which requires an expensive attended overnight stay at a hospital with considerable wiring between the human body and the system. In this paper, we implement a reliable, comfortable, inexpensive, and easily available portable device that allows users to apply the OSA test at home without the need for attended overnight tests. The design takes advantage of a smatrphones built-in sensors, pervasiveness, computational capabilities, and user-friendly interface to screen OSA. We use three main sensors to extract physiological signals from patients which are (1) an oximeter to measure the oxygen level, (2) a microphone to record the respiratory effort, and (3) an accelerometer to detect the bodys movement. Finally, we examine our systems ability to screen the disease as compared to the gold standard by testing it on 15 samples. The results showed that 100% of patients were correctly identified as having the disease, and 85.7% of patients were correctly identified as not having the disease. These preliminary results demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed system when compared to the gold standard and emphasize the important role of smartphones in healthcare.

Development of a monitoring and control platform for PLC-based applications

This paper discusses the design and implementation of a platform to remotely monitor and control PLC-based processes over TCP/IP or by using the GSM network. The platform is built using industry-standard off-the-shelf PLCs. Integrated with each PLC are communication processors that can be used for connectivity to the network and to a GSM modem. The communication processor module (Ethernet module) used in this work, provides an industrial compatible protocol over TCP/IP that achieves the same functionality as Profinet but at a much higher bandwidth (10/100 Mbps). Additionally, a mobile-based communication protocol that facilitates remote monitoring and control of PLCs using SMS messages has also been developed. The intent here is to provide system users with a back-up communication mechanism in case of a network failure.

Using SAT-based techniques in power estimation

Recent algorithmic advances in Boolean satisfiability (SAT), along with highly efficient solver implementations, have enabled the successful deployment of SAT technology in a wide range of applications domains, and particularly in electronic design automation (EDA). SAT is increasingly being used as the underlying model for a number of applications in EDA. This paper describes how to formulate two problems in power estimation of CMOS combinational circuits as SAT problems or 0-1 integer linear programming (ILP). In these circuits, it was proven that maximizing dissipation is equivalent to maximizing gate output activity, appropriately weighted to account for differing load capacitances. The first problem in this work deals with identifying an input vector pair that maximizes the weighted circuit activity. In the second application we attempt to find an estimate for the maximum power-up current in circuits where power cut-off or gating techniques are used to reduce leakage current. Both problems were successfully formulated as SAT problems. SAT-Based and generic Integer Linear Programming (ILP) solvers are then used to find a solution. The experimental results obtained on a large number of benchmark circuits provide promising evidence that the proposed complete approach is both viable and useful and outperforms the random approach.

Power Consumption in Handheld Computers

While the computing requirements of mobile battery-powered systems in general are increasing, it is clear that advances in battery technology have not kept pace with the ever increasing energy demands of these devices. Researchers are exploring architectural, hardware, software and system level optimization techniques to minimize the overall energy consumption of these computers. An analysis of the power consumption behavior of these devices when running representative workloads will provide a critical and a needed insight that will assist designers in developing low power future generations devices. In this work, and in order to get a better understanding of the factors that affect power consumption in pocket PCs, a series of experiments were performed on pocket computers while being subjected to a variety of operational scenarios. Based on the analysis and observations made from these measurements we were able to relate the consumption behavior of the computer to some of its operational parameters

Optimizing Complex Cluster Formation in MANETs Using SAT/ILP Techniques

Over the course of the last decade, there have been several improvements in the performance of Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) solvers. These improvements have encouraged the application of SAT and ILP techniques in modeling complex engineering problems. One such problem is the Clustering Problem in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs). The Clustering Problem in MANETs consists of selecting the most suitable nodes of a given MANET topology as clusterheads, and ensuring that regular nodes are connected to clusterheads such that the lifetime of the network is maximized. This paper proposes the development of an improved ILP formulation of the Clustering Problem. Additionally, various enhancements are implemented in the form of extensions to the improved formulation, including the establishment of intra-cluster communication, multihop connections and the enforcement of coverage constraints. The improved formulation and enhancements are implemented in a tool designed to visually create network topologies and cluster them using state-of-the art Generic ILP and SAT solvers. Through this tool, feasibility of using the proposed formulation and enhancements in a real-life practical environment is assessed. It is observed that the Generic ILP solvers, CPLEX, and SCIP, are able to handle large network topologies, while the 0–1 SAT-based ILP solver, BSOLO, is effective at handling the smaller scale networks. It is also observed that while these enhanced formulations enable the generation of complex network solutions, and are suitable for small scale networks, the time taken to generate the corresponding solution does not meet the strict requirements of a practical environment.

FPGA-Based Parallel Hardware Architecture for Real-Time Image Classification

This paper proposes a parallel hardware architecture for real-time image classification based on scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT), bag of features (BoFs), and support vector machine (SVM) algorithms. The proposed architecture exploits different forms of parallelism in these algorithms in order to accelerate their execution to achieve real-time performance. Different techniques have been used to parallelize the execution and reduce the hardware resource utilization of the computationally intensive steps in these algorithms. The architecture takes a 640 × 480 pixel image as an input and classifies it based on its content within 33 ms. A prototype of the proposed architecture is implemented on an FPGA platform and evaluated using two benchmark datasets: 1) Caltech-256 and 2) the Belgium Traffic Sign datasets. The architecture is able to detect up to 1270 SIFT features per frame with an increment of 380 extra features from the best recent implementation. We were able to speedup the feature extraction algorithm when compared to an equivalent software implementation by 54× and for classification algorithm by 6×, while maintaining the difference in classification accuracy within 3%. The hardware resources utilized by our architecture were also less than those used by other existing solutions.

Design and implementation of a wearable healthcare monitoring system

A wearable healthcare monitoring unit that integrates various technologies was developed to provide patients with the option of leading a healthy and independent life without risks or confinement to medical facilities. The unit consists of various sensors integrated to a microcontroller and attached to the patients body, reading vital signs and transmitting these readings via a Bluetooth link to the patients mobile phone. Short-Messaging-Service (SMS) is incorporated in the design to alert a physician in emergency cases. Additionally, an application program running on the mobile phone uses the internet to update (at regular intervals) the patient records in a hospital database with the most recent readings. To reduce development costs, the components used were both off-the-shelf and affordable.

Modeling smartphones power

Battery technology did not advance rapidly enough to keep pace with the growing energy demands of todays portable electronics. Leading this critical need for energy are smartphone devices which are being deployed and adopted at an increasing rate. Developing sound energy management techniques for these devices requires a good understanding of where and how battery-energy is being utilized. Developing power consumption models is therefore crucial for the understanding of these devices and for developing energy-efficient software to run on them. In this work, we attempt to develop a power model for an Andorid-based smartphone that uses a dual core processor. The model draws on users activity and is implemented using regression techniques where model predictors are tightly related to these activities.

Security of mobile health (mHealth) systems

mHealth is a growing field that enables individuals to monitor their health status and facilitates the sharing of medical records with physicians and between hospitals anytime and anywhere. Unfortunately, smartphones and mHealth applications are still vulnerable to a wide range of security threats due to their portability and weaknesses in management and design. Nevertheless, mHealth users are becoming more aware of the security and privacy issues related to their personal healthcare information. This survey discusses the security and privacy issues in current mHealth systems and their impact. We also discuss the latest threats, attacks and proposed countermeasures that could support secure sensitive mHealth systems. Finally, we conclude with a brief summary of open security problems that still need to be addressed in the mHealth field.

Monitoring patients' signs wirelessly

Recent developments in off-the-shelf wireless embedded computing boards and the increasing need for efficient health monitoring systems, fueled by the increasing number of patients, has prompted R&D professionals to explore better health monitoring systems that are both mobile and cheap. This work investigates the feasibility of using the ZigBee embedded technology in health-related monitoring applications. Selected vital signs of patients are acquired using sensor nodes and readings are transmitted wirelessly using devices that utilize the ZigBee communications protocols. A prototype system has been developed and tested with encouraging results.