SysML based Design for Variability enabling the Reusability of Legacy Systems towards the support of Diverse Standard Compliant Implementations or Standard Updates: The Case of IEEE-802.15.6 Standard for e-Health Applications

The aim of this paper is to provide a consistent development path enabling the re-usability of in house legacy systems or architectures towards their re-design, in order to ensure compliance with evolving standards, by using the new features of SysML for modelling variants. Modern standards evolve quickly, include advanced functionalities and operations and support diverse implementations. System industries need to cope with such standards changes by modifying their current technologies. This paper shows how a novel engineering process (SysML modelling) could be employed to define consistently the specification and the migration procedure of legacy systems to their variants. Within this work SysML characteristics such as package and block diagrams, are employed, with an emphasis on variability modelling, as a basis for standard compliant architecture implementation, thus providing design flexibility and reusability at several abstraction levels. As an illustration of our proposed method we present models of two variant Physical Layer structures for IEEE-802.15.6 Standard for e-Health Applications. The advanced SysML features are used to target the re-usability of a legacy Narrow-Band (NB) physical layer subsystem for the Wireless Body Area Network standard and to implement the alternative Ultra-Wide Band (UWB). Therefore, we contend that such methods bring potential benefits to those needing to ensure compliance when producing product variants

Olive phenology as a sensitive indicator of future climatic warming in the Mediterranean

Experimental and modelling work suggests a strong dependence of olive flowering date on spring temperatures. Since airborne pollen concentrations reflect the flowering phenology of olive populations within a radius of 50 km, they may be a sensitive regional indicator of climatic warming. We assessed this potential sensitivity with phenology models fitted to flowering dates inferred from maximum airborne pollen data. Of four models tested, a thermal time model gave the best fit for Montpellier, France, and was the most effective at the regional scale, providing reasonable predictions for 10 sites in the western Mediterranean. This model was forced with replicated future temperature simulations for the western Mediterranean from a coupled ocean-atmosphere general circulation model (GCM). The GCM temperatures rose by 4·5 °C between 1990 and 2099 with a 1% per year increase in greenhouse gases, and modelled flowering date advanced at a rate of 6·2 d per °C. The results indicated that this long-term regional trend in phenology might be statistically significant as early as 2030, but with marked spatial variation in magnitude, with the calculated flowering date between the 1990s and 2030s advancing by 3–23 d. Future monitoring of airborne olive pollen may therefore provide an early biological indicator of climatic warming in the Mediterranean

Threat of allergenic airborne grass pollen in Szczecin, NW Poland: the dynamics of pollen seasons, effect of meteorological variables and air pollution

The dynamics of Poaceae pollen season, in particularly that of the Secale genus, in Szczecin (western Poland) 2004–2008 was analysed to establish a relationship between the meteorological variables, air pollution and the pollen count of the taxa studied. Consecutive phases during the pollen season were defined for each taxon (1, 2.5, 5, 25, 50, 75, 95, 97.5, 99% of annual total), and duration of the season was determined using the 98% method. On the basis of this analysis, the temporary differences in the dynamics of the seasons were most evident for Secale in 2005 and 2006 with the longest main pollen season (90% total pollen). The pollen season of Poaceae started the earliest in 2007, when thermal conditions were the most favourable. Correlation analysis with meteorological factors demonstrated that the relative humidity, mean and maximum air temperature, and rainfall were the factors influencing the average daily pollen concentrations in the atmosphere; also, the presence of air pollutants such as ozone, PM10 and SO2 was statistically related to the pollen count in the air. However, multiple regression models explained little part of the total variance. Atmospheric pollution induces aggravation of symptoms of grass pollen allergy

Phase noise performance of fully differential sub-harmonic injection-locked PLL

A fully differential sub-harmonic injection-locked phase-locked loop (PLL) that achieves improved levels of phase noise performance through the incorporation of injection locking and fully differential architecture is presented. Details concerning the design of each building block are given and the corresponding simulation results are presented. The system level architecture exploration is introduced together with the phase noise analysis. A physical implementation of the proposed design using a standard 0.5 mu m SiGe BiCMOS process is also presented as a case study in order to prove the functionality as well as the overall performance. Phase noise improvement is 20 dB at 1 kHz when a sub-harmonic of the free-running oscillation frequency at 2.5 GHz with a -15 dBm power level is injected

Design of a Multi-purpose Surface-EMG Readout System for Draft Control Applications

This paper presents current work on the design of a multi-purpose surface-electromyography (EMG) readout system that can be used in various draft controlled applications of low-accuracy (e.g. rehabilitation environments for stroke patients, ambient assisted living for elders, remote control of robotic arm). The proposed system interfaces six low-cost and low-power EMG channels exhibiting pm 1.5 mV sensitivity and 400mV output range. The ADC converters of a microcontroller (i.e. Arduino) platform are used to fetch the analog signal from the read-out system. Digital data is verified after ADC conversion using oscilloscope instruments. The microcontroller is programmed to filter the analog signal and identify its rough changes based on continuously adjustable thresholds. The measured data are transmitted in a flexible digital coded format via the microcontroller's network connectivity hardware to the associated control receiver, which in turn decodes it and performs the associated operation as required by the draft-controlled environment. The current consumption ranges from 330uA to 2.9mA per channel, depending on the type of operational amplifier used. © 2019 IEEE

ASTRAL, DRAGON and SEDAN scores predict stroke outcome more accurately than physicians

Background and purpose: ASTRAL, SEDAN and DRAGON scores are three well-validated scores for stroke outcome prediction. Whether these scores predict stroke outcome more accurately compared with physicians interested in stroke was investigated. Methods: Physicians interested in stroke were invited to an online anonymous survey to provide outcome estimates in randomly allocated structured scenarios of recent real-life stroke patients. Their estimates were compared to scores' predictions in the same scenarios. An estimate was considered accurate if it was within 95% confidence intervals of actual outcome. Results: In all, 244 participants from 32 different countries responded assessing 720 real scenarios and 2636 outcomes. The majority of physicians' estimates were inaccurate (1422/2636, 53.9%). 400 (56.8%) of physicians' estimates about the percentage probability of 3-month modified Rankin score (mRS) > 2 were accurate compared with 609 (86.5%) of ASTRAL score estimates (P < 0.0001). 394 (61.2%) of physicians' estimates about the percentage probability of post-thrombolysis symptomatic intracranial haemorrhage were accurate compared with 583 (90.5%) of SEDAN score estimates (P < 0.0001). 160 (24.8%) of physicians' estimates about post-thrombolysis 3-month percentage probability of mRS 0–2 were accurate compared with 240 (37.3%) DRAGON score estimates (P < 0.0001). 260 (40.4%) of physicians' estimates about the percentage probability of post-thrombolysis mRS 5–6 were accurate compared with 518 (80.4%) DRAGON score estimates (P < 0.0001). Conclusions: ASTRAL, DRAGON and SEDAN scores predict outcome of acute ischaemic stroke patients with higher accuracy compared to physicians interested in stroke. © 2016 EA

On practical implementation and generalizations of max * Operator for turbo and LDPC decoders

In this paper, we deal with practical implementation issues of the max * operation in generalized form used for decoding of both turbo and low-density-parity-check (LDPC) codes. In particular, first, a unified framework for the so-called generalized max * operation is established, which includes most of the previously published algorithms already known for turbo decoding. Next, the hardware architectures used for the practical implementation of the generalized max * operation, which is derived from this novel framework, are revealed for the first time and further analyzed, in terms of hardware complexity reduction. It is also shown how this generalized max * operation can be adopted in LDPC decoding, achieving essentially optimal bit error rate performance with small computational complexity against other algorithms in joint turbo-LDPC architectures. This solution is useful in applications where joint decoding architectures are deployed to decode both turbo and LDPC codes. An important example of such application is in software radio receivers of 4G wireless communication systems, such as those proposed in conjunction with the WiMAX standard. © 2011 IEEE