The average age of population is predicted to be raised universally but the number of nursing staff is not increasing at the same rate. This leads us to the situation where, e.g., we have too many patients for one nurse. On the other hand, sparse population in some regions, such as Northern or Eastern Finland, causes a severe problem that doctors are far away from patient. In this paper, we summarize the possibilities and applications that utilize wireless technologies in healthcare sector and which can be useful in nursing activities. The use of new innovations is one way to solve the problems that are based on the expected lack of professional staff in the future. Despite of the very natural hospital link, the developed technical solutions have applications outside hospital. Remote care of aging people and other special groups need to be done daily and almost real-time. Keeping people home instead of hospital is one way to decrease the entire care costs. In addition to the obvious human context, we derive some other applications where we can benefit wireless nursing and remote sensing techniques.

We have proposed a tunable laser with silica-waveguide ring resonators. In this tunable laser, a semiconductor optical amplifier was passively aligned and mounted onto a silica-waveguide substrate. The ring resonators can be tuned by controlling their temperatures using the thermo optic heaters formed on them, and there are no mechanically moving parts. Thus, they are sufficiently stable and reliable for practical use. Our tunable laser exhibits a high fiber-output power of more than 15 dBm and a wide tunable range of 60 nm (L-band, 50 GHz spacing, 147 channels). Moreover, a tunable laser with a much wider tunable range of 96 nm using 100-GHz-FSR ring resonators is also reported.

A self-stabilizing protocol is a protocol that achieves its intended behavior regardless of the initial configuration (i.e., global state). Thus, a self-stabilizing protocol is adaptive to any number and any type of topology changes of networks: after the last topology change occurs, the protocol starts to converge to its intended behavior. This advantage makes self-stabilizing protocols extremely attractive for designing highly dependable distributed systems on dynamic networks. While conventional self-stabilizing protocols require that the networks remain static during convergence to the intended behaviors, some recent works undertook the challenge of realizing self-stabilization in dynamic networks with frequent topology changes. This paper introduces some of the challenges as a new direction of research in self-stabilization.

With the rapid progress of electronic and information technology, an expectation for the realization of body area network (BAN) by means of ultra wide band (UWB) techniques has risen. Although the signal from a single UWB device is very low, the energy absorption may increase significantly when many UWB devices are simultaneously adorned to a human body. An analysis method is therefore required from the point of view of biological safety evaluation. In this study, two approaches, one is in the time domain and the other is in the frequency domain, are proposed for the specific energy absorption (SA) and the specific absorption rate (SAR) calculation. It is shown that the two approaches have the same accuracy but the time-domain approach is more straightforward in the numerical analysis. By using the time-domain approach, SA and SAR calculation results are given for multiple UWB pulse exposure to an anatomical human body model under the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) UWB limit.

This paper focuses on optical integration technology and its application in optical microsensors used in biomedical fields. The integration is based on the hybrid integration approach, achieving high performance, small size and weight, and lower cost. First, we describe the key technologies used in hybrid integration, namely passive alignment technology, low temperature bonding technology, and packaging technology for realizing advanced microsensors. Then, we describe an integrated laser Doppler flowmeter that can monitor blood flow in human skin.

This paper describes a general quantum lower bounding technique for the communication complexity of a function that depends on the inputs given to two parties connected via paths, which may be shared with other parties, on a network of any topology. The technique can also be employed to obtain a lower-bound of the quantum communication complexity of some functions that depend on the inputs distributed over all parties on the network. As a typical application, we apply our technique to the distinctness problem of deciding whether there are a pair of parties with identical inputs, on a k-party ring; almost matching upper bounds are also given.

We propose a gap-less optical interconnection between BGA package and board for practical on-board, chip-to-chip optical interconnection. The optical interconnect consists of polymer optical waveguides, an integral mirror on the PWB (printed wiring board), an optical via hole through package, and a connection structure and method requiring no alignment process. Optical waveguide, mirror, waveguide extensions and alignment studs were fabricated on the PWB as horizontal optical interconnect. Coaxial structured optical vias with core and cladding were formed through the package and with precise holes for alignment. Two packages were attached onto the PWB using standard BGA technology utilizing passive optical alignment. The optical characteristics and 10 Gbit/s open-eye diagram were measured. A completely gap-less three dimensional optical interconnect between package-PWB-package was demonstrated.

This paper reviews our recent progress on arrayed waveguide gratings (AWGs) using super-high-Δ silica-based planar lightwave circuit (PLC) technology and their application to integrated optical devices. Factors affecting the chip size of AWGs and the impact of increasing relative index difference Δ on the chip size are investigated, and the fabrication result of a compact athermal AWG using 2.5%-Δ silica-based waveguides is presented. As an application of super-high-Δ AWGs to integrated devices, a flat-passband multi/demultiplexer consisting of an AWG and cascaded MZIs is presented.

Background modeling is one of the most challenging and time consuming tasks in motion detection from video sequence. This paper presents a background independent moving object segmentation algorithm utilizing the spatio-temporal information of the last three frames. Existing three-frame based methods face challenges due to the insignificant gradient information in the overlapping region of difference images and edge localization errors. These methods extract scattered moving edges and experience poor detection rate especially when objects with slow movement exist in the scene. Moreover, they are not much suitable for moving object segmentation and tracking. The proposed method solves these problems by representing edges as segments and applying a novel segment based flexible edge matching algorithm which makes use of gradient accumulation through distance transformation. Due to working with three most recent frames, the proposed method can adapt to changes in the environment. Segment based representation facilitates local geometric transformation and thus it can make proper use of flexible matching to provide an effective solution for tracking. To segment the moving object region from the detected moving edges, we introduce a watershed based algorithm followed by an iterative background removal procedure. Watershed based segmentation algorithm helps to extract moving object with more accurate boundary which eventually achieves higher coding efficiency in content based applications and ensures a good visual quality even in the limited bit rate multimedia communication.

In the proposed scheme, every sensor establishes communications keys with its neighbors after deployment. They are selectively employed for intra-cluster communications, and the employed keys are determined by local topology of clusters. Thus, our scheme periodically changes the local topology of clusters so as to renew the intra-cluster communication keys. Besides, new Cluster Heads (CHs) easily share a key with the Base Station (BS) by informing the BS of their member information without sending key materials. Simulation results prove that our approach has strong resiliency against the increase of compromised sensors. It also achieves a performance gain in terms of energy.

As a method to realize a high-speed communication in the home network, the power-line communication (PLC) technique is known. A problem of PLC is that leakage radiation interferes with existing systems. When OFDM is used in a PLC system, the leakage radiation is not sufficiently reduced, even if the subcarriers corresponding to the frequency-band of the existing system are never used, because the signal is not strictly band-limited. To solve this problem, each subcarrier must be band-limited. In this paper, we apply the OQAM based multi-carrier transmission (OQAM-MCT) to a high-speed PLC system, where each subcarrier is individually band-limited. We also propose a pilot-symbol sequence suitable for frequency offset estimation, symbol-timing detection and channel estimation in the OQAM-MCT system. In this method, the pilot signal-sequence consists of a repeated series of the same data symbol. With this method, the pilot sequence approximately becomes equivalent to OFDM sequence and therefore existing pilot-assisted methods for OFDM are also applicable to OQAM-MCT system. Computer simulation results show that the OQAM-MCT system achieves both good transmission rate performance and low out-of-band radiation in PLC channels. It is also shown that the proposed pilot-sequence improves frequency offset estimation, symbol-timing detection and channel estimation performance as compared with the case of using pseudo-noise sequence.

This work elucidates the evolution of three generations of the laboratory information system in the National Taiwan University Hospital, which were respectively implemented in an IBM Series/1 minicomputer, a client/server and a plug-and-play HL7 interface engine environment respectively. The experience of using the HL7 healthcare information exchange in the hospital information system, laboratory information system, and automatic medical instruments over the past two decades are illustrated and discussed. The latest design challenge in developing intelligent laboratory information services is to organize effectively distributed and heterogeneous medical instruments through the message gateways. Such experiences had spread to some governmental information systems for different purposes in Taiwan; besides, the healthcare information exchange standard, software reuse mechanism, and application service provider adopted in developing the plug-and-play laboratory information system are also illustrated.

Scalability is one of the most important requirements for secure multicast in a multi-group environment. In this study, we propose a decentralized multi-group key management scheme that allows each multicast group sender to control the access to its group communication independently. Scalability is enhanced by local rekeying and inter-working among different subgroups. The group key secrecy and backward/forward secrecy are also guaranteed.

Trust negotiation is an authorizing technique based on digital credentials, in which both a user and a server gradually establish trust in each other by repeatedly exchanging their credentials. A trust negotiation strategy is a function that answers a set of credentials to disclose to the other party, depending on policies and the set of already disclosed credentials. The disclosure tree strategy (DTS), proposed by Yu et al., is one of the strategies that satisfies preferable properties. DTS in a simple implementation requires exponential time and space; however, neither an efficient algorithm nor the lower-bound of its complexity was known. In this paper, we investigate the computational complexity of DTS. We formulate subproblems of DTS as problems on derivation trees of a context-free grammar (CFG), and analyze the computational complexity of the subproblems using the concepts of CFGs. As a result, we show that two subproblems EVL and MSET of DTS are NP-complete and NP-hard, respectively, while both are solvable in polynomial time if we modify EVL not to require non-redundancy and MSET not to answer any subset useless for leading the negotiation to success.

In this letter, we propose a hybrid authentication algorithm to alleviate the latent security problems of mobile multi-hop networks. The proposed scheme uses centralized authentication when a node first joins the network, and uses distributed authentication for the hop-by-hop authentication among multi-hop nodes. We also analyze performance of the proposed scheme.

A static dependency pair method, proposed by us, can effectively prove termination of simply-typed term rewriting systems (STRSs). The theoretical basis is given by the notion of strong computability. This method analyzes a static recursive structure based on definition dependency. By solving suitable constraints generated by the analysis result, we can prove the termination. Since this method is not applicable to every system, we proposed a class, namely, plain function-passing, as a restriction. In this paper, we first propose the class of safe function-passing, which relaxes the restriction by plain function-passing. To solve constraints, we often use the notion of reduction pairs, which is designed from a reduction order by the argument filtering method. Next, we improve the argument filtering method for STRSs. Our argument filtering method does not destroy type structure unlike the existing method for STRSs. Hence, our method can effectively apply reduction orders which make use of type information. To reduce constraints, the notion of usable rules is proposed. Finally, we enhance the effectiveness of reducing constraints by incorporating argument filtering into usable rules for STRSs.

An adaptive zero forcing maximum likelihood soft input soft output (AZFML-SISO) detector for multiple input multiple output (MIMO) wireless systems is presented. Its performance in an iterative MIMO receiver is analyzed. The AZFML-SISO detector calculates the soft outputs, applying the ML approach to the list that contains only those signal vectors limited by a hypersphere around the zero forcing (ZF) solution. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated on a communication system based on the standard for single carrier broadband wireless communication IEEE 802.16, with three transmit and three receive antennas. It is shown by computer simulation that the computational complexity in an average sense of the receiver running the AZFML-SISO algorithm is reduced by 90% at the SNR values of 30 dB and by 50% for SNR values of 15 dB in comparison to the receiver with an ML detector, while the system performance degrades by less than 1 dB.

In this paper, we present a recently developed pattern search method called Genetic Pattern Search algorithm (GPSA) for the global optimization of cost function subject to simple bounds. GPSA is a combined global optimization method using genetic algorithm (GA) and Digital Pattern Search (DPS) method, which has the digital structure represented by binary strings and guarantees convergence to stationary points from arbitrary starting points. The performance of GPSA is validated through extensive numerical experiments on a number of well known functions and on robot walking application. The optimization results confirm that GPSA is a robust and efficient global optimization method.

The purpose of this study is the real-time estimation of Doppler spectral moments for precipitation in the presence of ground clutter overlap. The proposed method is a frequency domain approach that uses a Gaussian model both to remove clutter spectrum and to estimate weather spectrum. The main advantage of this method is that it does not use processes like several fitting procedures and enables to estimate profiles of precipitation in a short processing time. Therefore this method is efficient for real-time radar observation with high range and time resolution. The performance of this method is evaluated based on simulation data and the observation data acquired by the Ku-band broad band radar (BBR) [1].

This paper investigates and analyzes the resistive averaging network and interpolation technique to estimate the power consumption of preamplifier arrays in a flash analog-to-digital converter (ADC). By comparing the relative power consumption of various configurations, flash ADC designers can select the most power efficient architecture when the operation speed and resolution of a flash ADC are specified. Based on the quantitative analysis, a compact 5-bit flash ADC is designed and fabricated in a 0.13-µm CMOS process. The proposed ADC consumes 180 mW from a 1.2-V supply and occupies 0.16-mm2 active area. Operating at 3.2 GS/s, the ENOB is 4.44 bit and ERBW 1.65 GHz. At 4.2 GS/s, the ENOB is 4.20 bit and ERBW 1.75 GHz. This ADC achieves FOMs of 2.59 and 2.80 pJ/conversion-step at 3.2 and 4.2 GS/s, respectively.