AMON: a wearable multiparameter medical monitoring and alert system

This paper describes an advanced care and alert portable telemedical monitor (AMON), a wearable medical monitoring and alert system targeting high-risk cardiac/respiratory patients. The system includes continuous collection and evaluation of multiple vital signs, intelligent multiparameter medical emergency detection, and a cellular connection to a medical center. By integrating the whole system in an unobtrusive, wrist-worn enclosure and applying aggressive low-power design techniques, continuous long-term monitoring can be performed without interfering with the patients' everyday activities and without restricting their mobility. In the first two and a half years of this EU IST sponsored project, the AMON consortium has designed, implemented, and tested the described wrist-worn device, a communication link, and a comprehensive medical center software package. The performance of the system has been validated by a medical study with a set of 33 subjects. The paper describes the main concepts behind the AMON system and presents details of the individual subsystems and solutions as well as the results of the medical validation

Combinatorial Preconditioners for Scalar Elliptic Finite-Element Problems

We present a new preconditioner for linear systems arising from finite-element discretizations of scalar elliptic partial differential equations (PDE's). The solver splits the collection $\{K_{e}\}$ of element matrices into a subset of matrices that are approximable by diagonally dominant matrices and a subset of matrices that are not approximable. The approximable $K_{e}$'s are approximated by diagonally dominant matrices $L_{e}$'s that are assembled to form a global diagonally dominant matrix $L$. A combinatorial graph algorithm then approximates $L$ by another diagonally dominant matrix $M$ that is easier to factor. Finally, $M$ is added to the inapproximable elements to form the preconditioner, which is then factored. When all the element matrices are approximable, which is often the case, the preconditioner is provably efficient. Approximating element matrices by diagonally dominant ones is not a new idea, but we present a new approximation method which is both efficient and provably good. The splitting idea is simple and natural in the context of combinatorial preconditioners, but hard to exploit in other preconditioning paradigms. Experimental results show that on problems in which some of the $K_{e}$'s are ill conditioned, our new preconditioner is more effective than an algebraic multigrid solver, than an incomplete-factorization preconditioner, and than a direct solver

A System for Real World Monitoring of Prostheses and Footwear

The problem the EU sponsored Real-Prof project[1] seeks to address is that there is no means of scientifically monitoring the performance of therapeutic footwear and lower limb prostheses in the real world. This prevents the early detection of problems under the sole of the foot or on the stump which lead to ulceration, and potentially amputation. Also, clinicians prescribing the footwear or prosthesis and designers of these devices currently have no means of monitoring the performance of the device once fitted, which is a prerequisite for treatment improvements[2]. This paper details the progress in this project so far