The virtual hospital: the emergence of telemedicine

The current practice of medicine, while utilizing the advances in biological and physical science, still takes place in the physician office or hospital. Unfortunately, traditional practice as integrated into the current Healthcare system is unsustainable. Accommodating the increase demand for medical services with the attendant rising costs has caused a crisis in healthcare. Telemedicine, the practice of medicine by means of mobile/internet is a transformative process that will impact healthcare globally. Already, teleradiology (diagnostic radiology remotely by means of digital images that are electronically exported) and electronic medical records are gaining wide acceptance. The ability to distribute medical services by means of mobile and internet technology is a natural and almost irresistible direction for the field of Medicine. The healthcare crisis has created an opportunity for new solutions and mobile/Internet technology has laid the infrastructure upon which one can build a powerful, innovative and badly needed platform for health services: The Global Virtual Hospital (GVH). The GVH will be a group of connected centers around the world that overlap (in time zones) throughout the working day. Patients will have access through the Internet or mobile phones. Medical records will be electronically stored, shared among authorized personal and updated with each medical interaction. The GVH, will serve as a platform and laboratory for the creation of innovative devices and technology that will improve the remote interaction.The Global Virtual Hospital System will exemplify the convergence of technology and medicine and will be integrated into standard practice in the next 5-10 years

The virtual hospital: the emergence of telemedicine

The current practice of medicine, while utilizing the advances in biological and physical science, still takes place in the physician office or hospital. Unfortunately, traditional practice as integrated into the current Healthcare system is unsustainable. Accommodating the increase demand for medical services with the attendant rising costs has caused a crisis in healthcare. Telemedicine, the practice of medicine by means of mobile/internet is a transformative process that will impact healthcare globally. Already, teleradiology (diagnostic radiology remotely by means of digital images that are electronically exported) and electronic medical records are gaining wide acceptance. The ability to distribute medical services by means of mobile and internet technology is a natural and almost irresistible direction for the field of Medicine. The healthcare crisis has created an opportunity for new solutions and mobile/Internet technology has laid the infrastructure upon which one can build a powerful, innovative and badly needed platform for health services: The Global Virtual Hospital (GVH). The GVH will be a group of connected centers around the world that overlap (in time zones) throughout the working day. Patients will have access through the Internet or mobile phones. Medical records will be electronically stored, shared among authorized personal and updated with each medical interaction. The GVH, will serve as a platform and laboratory for the creation of innovative devices and technology that will improve the remote interaction.The Global Virtual Hospital System will exemplify the convergence of technology and medicine and will be integrated into standard practice in the next 5-10 years

Algorithmic Foundations of Inexact Computing

Inexact computing also referred to as approximate computing is a style of designing algorithms and computing systems wherein the accuracy of correctness of algorithms executing on them is deliberately traded for significant resource savings. Significant progress has been reported in this regard both in terms of hardware as well as software or custom algorithms that exploited this approach resulting in some loss in solution quality (accuracy) while garnering disproportionately high savings. However, these approaches tended to be ad-hoc and were tied to specific algorithms and technologies. Consequently, a principled approach to designing and analyzing algorithms was lacking. In this paper, we provide a novel model which allows us to characterize the behavior of algorithms designed to be inexact, as well as characterize opportunities and benefits that this approach offers. Our methods therefore are amenable to standard asymptotic analysis and provides a clean unified abstraction through which an algorithm's design and analysis can be conducted. With this as a backdrop, we show that inexactness can be significantly beneficial for some fundamental problems in that the quality of a solution can be exponentially better if one exploits inexactness when compared to approaches that are agnostic and are unable to exploit this approach. We show that such gains are possible in the context of evaluating Boolean functions rooted in the theory of Boolean functions and their spectra, PAC learning, and sorting. Formally, this is accomplished by introducing the twin concepts of inexactness aware and inexactness oblivious approaches to designing algorithms and the exponential gains are shown in the context of taking the ratio of the quality of the solution using the "aware" approach to the "oblivious" approach

Automatic Generation of Inexact Digital Circuits by Gate-level Pruning

Inexact or approximate circuits show great ability to reduce power consumption at the cost of occasional errors in comparison to their conventional counterparts. Even though the benefits of such circuits have been proven for many applications, they are not wide spread owing to the absence of a clear design methodology and the required CAD tools. In this regard, this paper presents a methodology to automatically generate inexact circuits starting from a conventional design by adding only one small step in the digital design flow. Further, this paper also demonstrates that achieving pruning at gate-level can lead to substantial savings in terms of power consumption, critical path delay and silicon area. An order of magnitude area and power savings is demonstrated for a 64-bit gate level pruned high-speed adder for a 10% relative error magnitude

On the use of inexact, pruned hardware in atmospheric modelling

Inexact hardware design, which advocates trading the accuracy of computations in exchange for significant savings in area, power and/or performance of computing hardware, has received increasing prominence in several error-tolerant application domains, particularly those involving perceptual or statistical end-users. In this paper, we evaluate inexact hardware for its applicability in weather and climate modelling. We expand previous studies on inexact techniques, in particular probabilistic pruning, to floating point arithmetic units and derive several simulated setups of pruned hardware with reasonable levels of error for applications in atmospheric modelling. The setup is tested on the Lorenz ‘96 model, a toy model for atmospheric dynamics, using software emulation for the proposed hardware. The results show that large parts of the computation tolerate the use of pruned hardware blocks without major changes in the quality of short- and long-time diagnostics, such as forecast errors and probability density functions. This could open the door to significant savings in computational cost and to higher resolution simulations with weather and climate models

Award and power aware computing through management of computational entropy

Issued as final reportUnited States. Air Force