A Mobile Geo-Communication Dataset for Physiology-Aware DASH in Rural Ambulance Transport

Use of telecommunication technologies for remote, continuous monitoring of patients can enhance effectiveness of emergency ambulance care during transport from rural areas to a regional center hospital. However, the communication along the various routes in rural areas may have wide bandwidth ranges from 2G to 4G; some regions may have only lower satellite bandwidth available. Bandwidth fluctuation together with real-time communication of various clinical multimedia pose a major challenge during rural patient ambulance transport.; AB@The availability of a pre-transport route-dependent communication bandwidth database is an important resource in remote monitoring and clinical multimedia transmission in rural ambulance transport. Here, we present a geo-communication dataset from extensive profiling of 4 major US mobile carriers in Illinois, from the rural location of Hoopeston to the central referral hospital center at Urbana. In collaboration with Carle Foundation Hospital, we developed a profiler, and collected various geographical and communication traces for realistic emergency rural ambulance transport scenarios. Our dataset is to support our ongoing work of proposing "physiology-aware DASH", which is particularly useful for adaptive remote monitoring of critically ill patients in emergency rural ambulance transport. It provides insights on ensuring higher Quality of Service (QoS) for most critical clinical multimedia in response to changes in patients' physiological states and bandwidth conditions. Our dataset is available online for research community.Comment: Proceedings of the 8th ACM on Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys'17), Pages 158-163, Taipei, Taiwan, June 20 - 23, 201

Desktop multimedia environments to support collaborative distance learning

Desktop multimedia conferencing, when two or more persons can communicate among themselves via personal computers with the opportunity to see and hear one another as well as communicate via text messages while working with commonly available stored resources, appears to have important applications to the support of collaborative learning. In this paper we explore this potential in three ways: (a) through an analysis of particular learner needs when learning and working collaboratively with others outside of face-to-face situations; (b) through an analysis of different forms of conferencing environments, including desktop multimedia environments, relative to their effectiveness in terms of meeting learner needs for distributed collaboration; and (c) through reporting the results of a formative evaluation of a prototype desktop multimedia conferencing system developed especially for the support of collaborative learning. Via these analyses, suggestions are offered relating to the functionalities of desktop multimedia conferencing systems for the support of collaborative learning, reflecting new developments in both the technologies available for such systems and in our awareness of learner needs when working collaboratively with one other outside of face-to-face situations

Collaborative video searching on a tabletop

Almost all system and application design for multimedia systems is based around a single user working in isolation to perform some task yet much of the work for which we use computers to help us, is based on working collaboratively with colleagues. Groupware systems do support user collaboration but typically this is supported through software and users still physically work independently. Tabletop systems, such as the DiamondTouch from MERL, are interface devices which support direct user collaboration on a tabletop. When a tabletop is used as the interface for a multimedia system, such as a video search system, then this kind of direct collaboration raises many questions for system design. In this paper we present a tabletop system for supporting a pair of users in a video search task and we evaluate the system not only in terms of search performance but also in terms of user–user interaction and how different user personalities within each pair of searchers impacts search performance and user interaction. Incorporating the user into the system evaluation as we have done here reveals several interesting results and has important ramifications for the design of a multimedia search system