The FABRIC Project

The FABRIC project aims at the integration of middleware standards used in home networks to provide high quality streaming over a heterogeneous network without introducing new standards

Wearable biosensing: signal processing and communication architectures issues, Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2005, nr 4

Long-term monitoring of human vital signs is becoming one of the most important fields of research of biomedical engineering. In order to achieve weeks to months of monitoring, new strategies for sensing, conditioning, processing and communication have to be developed. Several strategies are emerging and show different possible architectures. This paper essentially focuses on issues in wearable biosignal processing and communication architecture currently running at the Swiss Center for Electronics andMicrotechnology (CSEM) in the framework of several European projects

Temporally Determinate Disk Access: An Experimental Approach

Disk drives are the most commonly used secondary storage devices in computer systems. The way operating systems access these devices leads to a wide range of variability in access time. In this paper we study the detailed temporal characteristics of disk drives. We describe a comprehensive set of experiments designed to build a model for the disk drive. Simulation is used to validate the model. This disk model will help design a device driver which can achieve a high degree of temporal determinacy. 1 Introduction During the recent years, disk drives have tremendously improved in terms of capacity, speed, reliability, and physical size. Even though several other secondary storage technologies have emerged, disk drives remain the dominant choice. However, the traditional method to access a disk has not changed. Applications send a read/write request with the proper disk address to an operating system process called the device driver. The application process requesting the disk service i..

The WiseSkin artificial skin for tactile prosthetics: A power budget investigation

The use of prosthetic hands are limited partly due to the fact that they lack the provision of sensory feedback to the user. A first step to providing sensory feedback is having adequate sensors in the prosthesis. The WiseSkin project targets the use of artificial skin embedding ultra-low power wireless sensor nodes. This paper provides an overview of the WiseSkin artificial skin for tactile prosthetics and specifically addresses the power consumption by the sensor nodes

Proactive Reconfiguration of Wireless Sensor Networks

Network dynamics, such as mobility and increase in network load, caninfluencetheperformanceofaWireless SensorNetwork (WSN). In this paper, we introduce a method which exploits design-time knowledge of the application scenario dynamics to construct a proactive run-time reconfiguration approach. The approach anticipates for the impact that predefined dynamic events can have on the performance of the WSN by switching between various modes of operation defined at design-time. A mode defines the values for the controllable parameters of the network protocol stack. Our approach explicitly differentiates between parameters that can be adapted locally, per node, and those that should be considered globally for the whole WSN. Design-time definition of modes results in a very low run-time overhead as we only require detection of the mode to use and a low overhead synchronization to change global parameters. The approach is made robust by using a recovery approach for nodes unaware of their global mode after, for example, (re-)joining the network. Experiments with an office monitoring deployment and extensive simulations of a cow-health monitoring scenario show that our approach can easily be adopted by practical WSN deployments and results in a significant reduction in resource usage, e.g., power consumption in our examples, at a very low run-time overhead cost

Smart Skin for tactile prosthetics

This paper provides an overview of a concept for a Smart Skin, for enabling tactile prosthetics that provide for a natural sensation of touch. The solution embeds miniature, ultra-low power, wireless sensors into the silicone coating of the prosthetic. The solution offers advantages in terms of scalability, ability to place the sensors almost anywhere, fault tolerance and potential ease of manufacturing