10,821 research outputs found

    The future of laboratory medicine - A 2014 perspective.

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    Predicting the future is a difficult task. Not surprisingly, there are many examples and assumptions that have proved to be wrong. This review surveys the many predictions, beginning in 1887, about the future of laboratory medicine and its sub-specialties such as clinical chemistry and molecular pathology. It provides a commentary on the accuracy of the predictions and offers opinions on emerging technologies, economic factors and social developments that may play a role in shaping the future of laboratory medicine

    Walking Box Ranch Planning and Design Quarterly Progress Report: Period ending April 10, 2011

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    UNLV participated in the two-day 65% Design Development project meeting and assisted in planning and design of the future WBR museum and field/research station. UNLV held several internal meetings to advance planning for IT and security at the ranch. UNLV (Cline) and BLM (McAboy) have begun a series of meetings regarding updating the current Task Order, requesting a two-year no-cost extension for the two Assistance Agreements, and to develop a concept plan for the future WBR operating agreement between BLM and UNLV. Weather station progress included adding a Pyrheliometer that measures solar radiation received to the station. Progress was made in making past weather information available via the website, and two technical papers on renewable energy were submitted for publication. UNLV has begun funding a UNLV photography project at the ranch that involves documenting historic land use in the Mojave Desert. Progress on the Multimedia Field Guides project that will develop and disseminate a modern geological and environmental field guide includes: 1) remote sensing and geologic data collection for the WBR area, 2) development of a preliminary geologic/surface-type map of the region, and 3) testing of technology at the field site. PLI educators (Allison Brody and Amy Page) will submit an application to the Clark County School District (CCSD) for a Professional Development workshop on Environmental Literacy in April 2011. The workshop, which will be held at the ranch, will be directed at sixth, seventh, and ninth grade teachers who teach earth science, life science and environmental science, and offer one professional development credit. A final business plan was received by UNLV from Dornbusch and Associates, and was disseminated to BLM and AECOM team leaders. UNLV and BLM will meet to discuss the plan in April 2011

    Platform-based design, test and fast verification flow for mixed-signal systems on chip

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    This research is providing methodologies to enhance the design phase from architectural space exploration and system study to verification of the whole mixed-signal system. At the beginning of the work, some innovative digital IPs have been designed to develop efficient signal conditioning for sensor systems on-chip that has been included in commercial products. After this phase, the main focus has been addressed to the creation of a re-usable and versatile test of the device after the tape-out which is close to become one of the major cost factor for ICs companies, strongly linking it to model’s test-benches to avoid re-design phases and multi-environment scenarios, producing a very effective approach to a single, fast and reliable multi-level verification environment. All these works generated different publications in scientific literature. The compound scenario concerning the development of sensor systems is presented in Chapter 1, together with an overview of the related market with a particular focus on the latest MEMS and MOEMS technology devices, and their applications in various segments. Chapter 2 introduces the state of the art for sensor interfaces: the generic sensor interface concept (based on sharing the same electronics among similar applications achieving cost saving at the expense of area and performance loss) versus the Platform Based Design methodology, which overcomes the drawbacks of the classic solution by keeping the generality at the highest design layers and customizing the platform for a target sensor achieving optimized performances. An evolution of Platform Based Design achieved by implementation into silicon of the ISIF (Intelligent Sensor InterFace) platform is therefore presented. ISIF is a highly configurable mixed-signal chip which allows designers to perform an effective design space exploration and to evaluate directly on silicon the system performances avoiding the critical and time consuming analysis required by standard platform based approach. In chapter 3 we describe the design of a smart sensor interface for conditioning next generation MOEMS. The adoption of a new, high performance and high integrated technology allow us to integrate not only a versatile platform but also a powerful ARM processor and various IPs providing the possibility to use the platform not only as a conditioning platform but also as a processing unit for the application. In this chapter a description of the various blocks is given, with a particular emphasis on the IP developed in order to grant the highest grade of flexibility with the minimum area occupation. The architectural space evaluation and the application prototyping with ISIF has enabled an effective, rapid and low risk development of a new high performance platform achieving a flexible sensor system for MEMS and MOEMS monitoring and conditioning. The platform has been design to cover very challenging test-benches, like a laser-based projector device. In this way the platform will not only be able to effectively handle the sensor but also all the system that can be built around it, reducing the needed for further electronics and resulting in an efficient test bench for the algorithm developed to drive the system. The high costs in ASIC development are mainly related to re-design phases because of missing complete top-level tests. Analog and digital parts design flows are separately verified. Starting from these considerations, in the last chapter a complete test environment for complex mixed-signal chips is presented. A semi-automatic VHDL-AMS flow to provide totally matching top-level is described and then, an evolution for fast self-checking test development for both model and real chip verification is proposed. By the introduction of a Python interface, the designer can easily perform interactive tests to cover all the features verification (e.g. calibration and trimming) into the design phase and check them all with the same environment on the real chip after the tape-out. This strategy has been tested on a consumer 3D-gyro for consumer application, in collaboration with SensorDynamics AG

    Bluetooth Low PowerModes Applied to the Data Transportation Network in Home Automation Systems

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    Even though home automation is a well-known research and development area, recent technological improvements in different areas such as context recognition, sensing, wireless communications or embedded systems have boosted wireless smart homes. This paper focuses on some of those areas related to home automation. The paper draws attention to wireless communications issues on embedded systems. Specifically, the paper discusses the multi-hop networking together with Bluetooth technology and latency, as a quality of service (QoS) metric. Bluetooth is a worldwide standard that provides low power multi-hop networking. It is a radio license free technology and establishes point-to-point and point-to-multipoint links, known as piconets, or multi-hop networks, known as scatternets. This way, many Bluetooth nodes can be interconnected to deploy ambient intelligent networks. This paper introduces the research on multi-hop latency done with park and sniff low power modes of Bluetooth over the test platform developed. Besides, an empirical model is obtained to calculate the latency of Bluetooth multi-hop communications over asynchronous links when links in scatternets are always in sniff or the park mode. Smart home devices and networks designers would take advantage of the models and the estimation of the delay they provide in communications along Bluetooth multi-hop networks

    Design of a dual species atom interferometer for space

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    Atom interferometers have a multitude of proposed applications in space including precise measurements of the Earth's gravitational field, in navigation & ranging, and in fundamental physics such as tests of the weak equivalence principle (WEP) and gravitational wave detection. While atom interferometers are realized routinely in ground-based laboratories, current efforts aim at the development of a space compatible design optimized with respect to dimensions, weight, power consumption, mechanical robustness and radiation hardness. In this paper, we present a design of a high-sensitivity differential dual species 85^{85}Rb/87^{87}Rb atom interferometer for space, including physics package, laser system, electronics and software. The physics package comprises the atom source consisting of dispensers and a 2D magneto-optical trap (MOT), the science chamber with a 3D-MOT, a magnetic trap based on an atom chip and an optical dipole trap (ODT) used for Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) creation and interferometry, the detection unit, the vacuum system for 101110^{-11} mbar ultra-high vacuum generation, and the high-suppression factor magnetic shielding as well as the thermal control system. The laser system is based on a hybrid approach using fiber-based telecom components and high-power laser diode technology and includes all laser sources for 2D-MOT, 3D-MOT, ODT, interferometry and detection. Manipulation and switching of the laser beams is carried out on an optical bench using Zerodur bonding technology. The instrument consists of 9 units with an overall mass of 221 kg, an average power consumption of 608 W (819 W peak), and a volume of 470 liters which would well fit on a satellite to be launched with a Soyuz rocket, as system studies have shown.Comment: 30 pages, 23 figures, accepted for publication in Experimental Astronom

    Fog Computing in Medical Internet-of-Things: Architecture, Implementation, and Applications

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    In the era when the market segment of Internet of Things (IoT) tops the chart in various business reports, it is apparently envisioned that the field of medicine expects to gain a large benefit from the explosion of wearables and internet-connected sensors that surround us to acquire and communicate unprecedented data on symptoms, medication, food intake, and daily-life activities impacting one's health and wellness. However, IoT-driven healthcare would have to overcome many barriers, such as: 1) There is an increasing demand for data storage on cloud servers where the analysis of the medical big data becomes increasingly complex, 2) The data, when communicated, are vulnerable to security and privacy issues, 3) The communication of the continuously collected data is not only costly but also energy hungry, 4) Operating and maintaining the sensors directly from the cloud servers are non-trial tasks. This book chapter defined Fog Computing in the context of medical IoT. Conceptually, Fog Computing is a service-oriented intermediate layer in IoT, providing the interfaces between the sensors and cloud servers for facilitating connectivity, data transfer, and queryable local database. The centerpiece of Fog computing is a low-power, intelligent, wireless, embedded computing node that carries out signal conditioning and data analytics on raw data collected from wearables or other medical sensors and offers efficient means to serve telehealth interventions. We implemented and tested an fog computing system using the Intel Edison and Raspberry Pi that allows acquisition, computing, storage and communication of the various medical data such as pathological speech data of individuals with speech disorders, Phonocardiogram (PCG) signal for heart rate estimation, and Electrocardiogram (ECG)-based Q, R, S detection.Comment: 29 pages, 30 figures, 5 tables. Keywords: Big Data, Body Area Network, Body Sensor Network, Edge Computing, Fog Computing, Medical Cyberphysical Systems, Medical Internet-of-Things, Telecare, Tele-treatment, Wearable Devices, Chapter in Handbook of Large-Scale Distributed Computing in Smart Healthcare (2017), Springe
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