Karin Klabunde

Reliable Set-Up of Medical Body-Sensor Networks

Wireless medical body sensor networks enable a new way of continuous patient monitoring, extending the reach of current healthcare solutions. They improve care giving by a flexible acquisition of relevant vital sign data, and by providing more convenience for patients.

Human-centric connectivity enabled by body-coupled communications

With the growing number of mobile devices surrounding a persons body, there is an increasing need to connect this electronic equipment efficiently into a wireless body-area network. In this article we review the body-coupled communications technology, which we show to be a viable basis for future BANs. In BCC, the human body is used as a signal propagation medium, which provides a key benefit - the communication is centered around the user and limited to his or her close proximity, that is, this technology provides human-centric connectivity. This enables unique applications that are illustrated in this work. Moreover, we outline the fundamental properties of the BCC technology and provide different trade-offs and challenges for modulation and protocol design. This article also discusses the outlook for BCC and suggests a number of important research topics.

Plug 'n Play Simplicity for Wireless Medical Body Sensors

Wireless medical body sensors are a key technology for unobtrusive health monitoring. The easy setup of such wireless body area networks is crucial to protect the user from the complexity of these systems. But automatically forming a wireless network comprising all sensors attached to the same body is challenging. We present a method for making wireless body-worn medical sensors aware of the persons they belong to by combining body-coupled with wireless communication. This enables a user to create a wireless body sensor network by just sticking the sensors to her body. A personal identifier allows sensors to annotate their readings with a user ID thereby ensuring safety in personal healthcare environments with multiple users.

Intelligent networks as a data intensive application (INDIA)

The Intelligent Network (IN) is an architectural concept that enables telematic services (freephone, virtual private network, televoting, etc.) to be rapidly deployed and effectively used in the telephone network. The INDIA project investigates database techniques for dealing with the severe data and service evolution management problems resulting from the IN concept. A concurrency management technique called Atomic Delayed Replication (ADR) is presented that takes advantage of the special application semantics of the Service Logic Programs that implement IN. It can address replicated concurrency control for both the service data and the service logic. ADR has been implemented on top of a commercial DBMS as part of an experimental IN environment.

A service creation environment for intelligent networks

The great demand for rapid introduction of new telematic services requires new methods and tools for the creation and development of such services. Therefore, Philips Research has conceived and realized a service creation tool for intelligent networks. This tool enables-by methods of interactive visual programming-the composition of new services from service building blocks and the monitoring of their execution in the intelligent network. The service creation environment is embedded in an IN prototype implementation attached to a Philips switching system.<<ETX>>

Concepts for service management by end users

The main idea behind the intelligent network is the rapid and versatile service creation and deployment that will ultimately result in increasing revenues for network operators and service providers. Today the efforts concentrate on defining and implementing a functional architecture. However, service management by end users, i.e. end user facilities for service subscription and customization, has been neglected so far. Current approaches do not satisfy end user needs. Starting with CS-1 targeted services, the authors develop an end user approach to service management that enables subscription and customization by telephone. They give illustrating examples based on the experience made with the service creation environment developed at Philips Research.<<ETX>>

The Multimedia Reference Model: A Framework Facilitating the Creation of Multi-User, Multimedia Applications

This paper focuses on the application control functionality required for future interactive multi-user, multimedia applications. Accordingly a new service control reference model is described which is part of a more general Multimedia Reference Model. This service control reference model introduces application building blocks that facilitate application creation and management in all kinds of multi-user, multi-point and multi-channel environments in interactive video and other multimedia broadband networks. The Multimedia Reference Model is derived by applying the conceptual modelling technique standardized for Intelligent Networks by ITU-T. Based on the service control reference model, a distributed functional architecture is developed which contains — among others — the functionality for application control, session management, and security handling. The functional design of the architecture enables it to be mapped in various ways onto the physical network components, for example, in a set-top box/video server configuration. The new Multimedia Reference Model is applied to an interactive multi-user video games environment.

An Improved Method for Consistent Replicated Data in the Intelligent Network

The Intelligent Network (IN) is a novel architectural concept for telecommunication networks that enables network operators as well as independent service providers to swiftly introduce new services into networks. Furthermore, these services can be made flexible enough so that after deployment, service subscribers can directly tailor them to their requirements. The main idea behind the IN concept is the separation of switching functionality from service control. In order to achieve a high degree of flexibility the service logic is realized by software modules called service logic programs which can be customized with subscriber specific data. Thus, a large amount of data (service logic programs, subscriber specific data and management information) needs to be handled. As telecommunication systems are of highly parallel nature the main problem for the database system is to provide consistent data for all these service logic programs running at the same time. Using a centralized DBMS to control data consistency will rapidly lead to a bottleneck. Therefore you have to deal with distributed databases having the problem of heavy communication to provide data consistency. If you intend to replicate data (fully or partially) over the whole distributed system due to performance reasons and reliability then the communication overhead further increases because of the synchronization of the replicas. We developed a concept for the specific needs of the IN. It can be seen as a replicated database system having lower communication overhead than classical distributed database systems. It also impresses by its ease of scalabilig. In this talk we will first look at the IN architecture, then discuss our concept in detail and finally show how it can be integrated into the IN.