The Front End Design of a Health Monitoring System

Abstract. In this paper an efficient e-health platform based on a low-cost sensor controller system is presented, exhibiting enhanced key characteristics able to provide broad coverage of medical scenarios in a reliable and flexible way. The heart of the system is a low-cost sensor controller capable of performing both simple medical tests and more advanced ones communicating with a Gateway and a tablet or smart phone providing instructions to the patient. Equipped with a simple and flexible communication protocol for data and command exchange, the developed platform is capable of readily supporting a variety of sensors with different sampling profiles. Furthermore, first promising results of on-going work pave the way for achieving considerable enhancement of sensors' accuracy (close to high-cost commercial ones) and significant extension of platform's portability through power consumption minimization. These characteristics have been verified by experimenting with various medical scenarios one of which is demonstrated here in detail

Deep sea tests of a prototype of the KM3NeT digital optical module

The first prototype of a photo-detection unit of the future KM3NeT neutrino telescope has been deployed in the deepwaters of the Mediterranean Sea. This digital optical module has a novel design with a very large photocathode area segmented by the use of 31 three inch photomultiplier tubes. It has been integrated in the ANTARES detector for in-situ testing and validation. This paper reports on the first months of data taking and rate measurements. The analysis results highlight the capabilities of the new module design in terms of background suppression and signal recognition. The directionality of the optical module enables the recognition of multiple Cherenkov photons from the same (40)Kdecay and the localisation of bioluminescent activity in the neighbourhood. The single unit can cleanly identify atmospheric muons and provide sensitivity to the muon arrival directions

An Adaptive Downsampling FPGA-Based TDC Implementation for Time Measurement Improvement

In this work, we present a compact “adaptive downsampling” method that mitigates the nonlinearity problems associated with FPGA-based TDCs that utilize delay lines. Additionally, this generic method allows for trade-offs between resolution, linearity, and resource utilization. Since nonlinearity is one of the predominant issues regarding delay lines in FPGA-based TDCs, combined with the fact that delay lines are utilized for a wide range of TDC architectures (not limited to the delay-line TDC), other implementations (e.g., Vernier or wave union TDCs), also in different FPGA devices, can directly benefit from the proposed adaptive method, with no need for either custom routing or complex tuning of the converter. Furthermore, implementation-related challenges regarding clock skew, measurement uncertainty, and the placement of the TDC are discussed and we also propose an experimental setup that utilizes only FPGA resources in order to characterize the converter. Although the TDC in this work was implemented in a Xilinx Virtex-6 device and was characterized under different operational modes, we successfully optimized the converter’s nonlinearity and resource utilization while retaining single-shot precision. The best performing (in terms of linearity) implementation reached DNLrms and INLrms values of 0.30 LSB and 0.45 LSB, respectively, and the single-shot precision (σ) was 9.0 ps

An Automatic Design Framework for Real-Time Power System Simulators Supporting Smart Grid Applications

Smart grid technology is the next step to the evolution of classical power grids, providing robustness, reliability, and security throughout the network, enabling real-time management and control. To achieve these goals, distributed computing (microgrid concept) and intelligent control algorithms, tailored to the nature and needs of the network under study, are necessary. To deal with the vast diversity of power grids, being able to capture the dynamics of any given network, and create tools for network analysis, apparatus testing, and power grid management, an automatic design framework for real-time power system simulators is needed. In this article, a prototype of this approach is presented, employing Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) platforms due to their reconfigurability that enables low-power, low-latency, and high-performance designs, as a first attempt towards an open source platform, compatible with the majority of hardware design suites. It comprises two major parts: (i) a user-oriented section, built in Matlab/Simulink; and (ii) a hardware-oriented section, written in Matlab and Very High Speed Integrated Circuit (VHSIC)-Hardware Description Language (VHDL) code. To verify its functionality, two test power networks were given in a schematic format, analyzed through Matlab code and turned into dedicated hardware simulators with the aid of the VHDL template. Then, simulation results from Simulink and the prototype were compared for error estimation. The results show the prototype’s successful implementation with minimal resources utilization, high performance and low latency in the order of nanoseconds in Xilinx 6- and 7-series FPGAs, therefore proving its modularity and efficient use in many different scenarios, meeting low-latency/real-time requirements while enabling further smart grid research