A wearable repeater relay system for interactive real-time wireless capsule endoscopy

Real-time wireless capsule endoscopy offers more flexibility and more precise screening options over commercially available passive endoscopy systems by allowing physicians to steer endoscopy capsules in real time. Yet, this requires reliable uninterrupted high frame-rate video streaming. In this contribution, we present a wearable repeater relay system that overcomes the impairments of the in-to-out body propagation channel and reliably relays implant data to a remote access point. The system consists of a set of wearable textile repeater nodes, exploiting receive diversity to provide a sufficiently large instantaneous carrier-to-noise ratio for live video streaming. Each wearable node, combining a dedicated receive antenna capturing the implant signal, an amplifier and an off-body transmit antenna, is fully implemented in textile materials, such that the comfort of the patient is not disturbed by the relay system. After outlining the design steps for the wearable relay node, in particular demonstrating stable robust antenna characteristics for the textile receive antenna oriented towards the body, we experimentally verify that a 6th-order diversity system provides the best compromise between user comfort and signal quality

Semantic multimedia remote display for mobile thin clients

Current remote display technologies for mobile thin clients convert practically all types of graphical content into sequences of images rendered by the client. Consequently, important information concerning the content semantics is lost. The present paper goes beyond this bottleneck by developing a semantic multimedia remote display. The principle consists of representing the graphical content as a real-time interactive multimedia scene graph. The underlying architecture features novel components for scene-graph creation and management, as well as for user interactivity handling. The experimental setup considers the Linux X windows system and BiFS/LASeR multimedia scene technologies on the server and client sides, respectively. The implemented solution was benchmarked against currently deployed solutions (VNC and Microsoft-RDP), by considering text editing and WWW browsing applications. The quantitative assessments demonstrate: (1) visual quality expressed by seven objective metrics, e.g., PSNR values between 30 and 42 dB or SSIM values larger than 0.9999; (2) downlink bandwidth gain factors ranging from 2 to 60; (3) real-time user event management expressed by network round-trip time reduction by factors of 4-6 and by uplink bandwidth gain factors from 3 to 10; (4) feasible CPU activity, larger than in the RDP case but reduced by a factor of 1.5 with respect to the VNC-HEXTILE

Norm-based and commitment-driven agentification of the Internet of Things

There are no doubts that the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has conquered the ICT industry to the extent that many governments and organizations are already rolling out many anywhere,anytime online services that IoT sustains. However, like any emerging and disruptive technology, multiple obstacles are slowing down IoT practical adoption including the passive nature and privacy invasion of things. This paper examines how to empower things with necessary capabilities that would make them proactive and responsive. This means things can, for instance reach out to collaborative peers, (un)form dynamic communities when necessary, avoid malicious peers, and be “questioned” for their actions. To achieve such empowerment, this paper presents an approach for agentifying things using norms along with commitments that operationalize these norms. Both norms and commitments are specialized into social (i.e., application independent) and business (i.e., application dependent), respectively. Being proactive, things could violate commitments at run-time, which needs to be detected through monitoring. In this paper, thing agentification is illustrated with a case study about missing children and demonstrated with a testbed that uses different IoT-related technologies such as Eclipse Mosquitto broker and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport protocol. Some experiments conducted upon this testbed are also discussed

Objective assessment of region of interest-aware adaptive multimedia streaming quality

Adaptive multimedia streaming relies on controlled adjustment of content bitrate and consequent video quality variation in order to meet the bandwidth constraints of the communication link used for content delivery to the end-user. The values of the easy to measure network-related Quality of Service metrics have no direct relationship with the way moving images are perceived by the human viewer. Consequently variations in the video stream bitrate are not clearly linked to similar variation in the user perceived quality. This is especially true if some human visual system-based adaptation techniques are employed. As research has shown, there are certain image regions in each frame of a video sequence on which the users are more interested than in the others. This paper presents the Region of Interest-based Adaptive Scheme (ROIAS) which adjusts differently the regions within each frame of the streamed multimedia content based on the user interest in them. ROIAS is presented and discussed in terms of the adjustment algorithms employed and their impact on the human perceived video quality. Comparisons with existing approaches, including a constant quality adaptation scheme across the whole frame area, are performed employing two objective metrics which estimate user perceived video quality