Active Node support for Autonomic Communications supporting Pervasive Systems

In the past, pervasive systems have concentrated largely on integrating contextawareness for supporting application adaptations to suit user activities. However, with the increase complexity of pervasive computing applications and their requirements, there is also a need for more autonomic functionalities in the communication infrastructure to support this complexity. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical architecture based on active nodes, which maximizes the computational capabilities of various nodes within the pervasive computing environment, to support both pervasive user applications as well as autonomic functionalities within the communication infrastructures. The migratable active node architecture employs various decision-making processes for evaluating a rich set of context information

Context Management Support for Activity Recognition in Health-Care

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Deep brain drug-delivery control using vagus nerve communications

Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) uses electrical impulses applied at the neck in order to mitigate the effects of, for example, epileptic seizures. We propose using VNS to provide data pulses to communicate with a drug-delivery system embedded near the brainstem. We model the generation of a vagus nerve compound action potential (CAP), calculating the signal attenuation and the resulting transmission range. The metabolic cost of CAP transmission in terms of the use of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is also calculated. The channel capacity for on-off keying (OOK) is computed from the CAP characteristics, the neural refractory period and the level of background neural noise. The resulting low bit-rate, unidirectional asynchronous transmission system is analysed for the use of different methods of forward error correction (FEC) to improve bit-error rate (BER). We show a proposed data packet structure that could deliver instructions to an embedded drug-delivery system with multiple addressable drug reservoirs. We also analyse the scope for powering the drug-delivery system with energy harvested from cerebrospinal glucose