We developed curved spiral antennas for use in underwater (freshwater) communications. Specifically, these antennas will be integrated in so-called mussel backpacks. Backpacks are compact electronics that incorporate sensors and a small radio that operate around 300 MHz. Researchers attach these backpacks in their freshwater mussel related research. The antennas must be small, lightweight, and form-fit the mussel. Additionally, since the mussel orientation is unknown, the antennas must have broad radiation patterns. Further, the electromagnetic environment changes significantly as the mussels burrow into the river bottom. Broadband antennas, such a spiral antennas, will perform better in this instance. While spiral antennas are well established, there has been little work on their performance in freshwater. Additionally, there has been some work on curved spiral antennas, but this work focused on curving in one dimension, namely curving around a cylinder. In this thesis we develop spiral antennas that curve in two dimensions in order to conform the contour of a mussel's shell. Our research has three components, namely (a) an investigation of the relevant theoretical underpinning of spiral antennas, (b) extensive computer simulations using state-of-the art computational electromagnetics (CEM) simulation software, and (c) experimental validation. The experimental validation was performed in a large tank in a laboratory setting. We also validated some designs in a pool (∼300,000 liters of water and ∼410 squared-meter dive pool) with the aid of a certified diver. To use CEM software and perform successful antenna-related experiments require careful attention to many details. The mathematical description of radiation from an antenna, antenna input impedance and so on, is inherently complex. Engineers often make simplifying assumptions such as assuming no reflections, or an isotropic propagation environment, or operation in the antenna far field, and so on. This makes experiments on antennas challenging since it often quite difficult to replicate the simplifying assumptions in an experimental setting. Still, with careful consideration of the important factors and careful experimental design it is possible to perform successful experiments. For example, antenna measurements are often performed in anechoic chambers. For our research we used a large swimming pool to mimic an underwater anechoic chamber. Our CEM simulations and experimental results are in most cases congruent. We are confident that we can design formfitting, compact (spiral) antennas that one could deploy on mussels. This will greatly enhance the mussel backpacks that are used by researchers at the University of Iowa.

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Despite concerted efforts to decrease costs and increase public health, the embattled U.S. health care system continues to struggle to alleviate these widespread issues. Because the problem of hospital utilizations among patients with heart failure is posited to increase as the population ages, innovative methodologies need to be explored to mitigate adverse events. Remote monitoring harnesses the strength of advanced information and communication technology to affect positive changes in health care quality and cost. By reaching across geographical boundaries, remote monitoring may support increased access to less costly services and improve the quality of home health care. The purpose of the study was to examine the home care quality effects of remote monitoring technology in patients with heart failure and to provide an economic justification for its adoption and diffusion. It compared remote monitoring as a potential intervention strategy to a standard no-intervention group (without remote monitoring). Specifically, it analyzed remote monitoring as a viable strategy to decrease hospital readmissions and emergency department visits. It also compared the cost of remote monitoring against the current standard-of-care. The theoretical framework of Donabedian's Quality Model was used in the evaluation of remote monitoring. A retrospective posttest only, case control study design was used to test the degree which remote monitoring was effective in promoting health care quality (hospital readmissions and decreased emergency department visits). Retrospective chart reviews were performed using electronic medical records (EMR). Analysis of Variance, Path Analysis, Automatic Interaction Detector Analysis (Dtreg), and Cost Outcomes Ratio were used to test the hypotheses and validate the proposed theoretical model. No significant difference was noted in remote monitoring and usual care groups. Results suggested that remote monitoring does not statistically lead to a decrease in heart failure-related hospital readmissions and all-cause emergency department visits. Results of the cost ratio analysis suggested that there was no statistically significant difference in the net income between usual care and remote monitoring; however, data suggest that there were significant increases in cost and intensity of nursing utilization for the remote monitoring intervention. The Automatic Interaction Detector Analysis showed that the unfavorable results in hospital readmissions were due to a decrease in collaborative care and patient education prior to the recommendation for hospitalization. The role of nursing care, whether in hospital or community-based care, in heart failure management is critical to quality outcomes. As the field continues to consider the use of technology in health care, decision makers should think through the process of patient care such that preventable hospital readmissions are decreased and patients received quality care.

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A rapidly growing interest in augmented and virtual reality within industrial areas such as manufacturing, quality control, and fleet monitoring has been seen in the last couple of years. This technology shift could bring a new era to the industry sector in the near future. This study aims to evaluate if using virtual reality can be a more efficient way of monitoring lots of data than a traditional monitor based solution or not. In this study, a virtual reality application has been created in order to provides a virtual environment where operators can access and monitor their assets, which a proof-of-concept digital model represents. The digital model presents information about the components from a physical asset’s current state and status. This VR application was then evaluated in an A/B test against an existing monitor-based dashboard application. The A/B test was conducted with 10 participants performing 11 different tasks. The results show that VR technology could be a promising solution for operating and monitoring fleet unit assets, with an overall improvement in the efficiency of 17% for all of the participants.

Yes / Wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) has great advantages over traditional endoscopy because it is portable and easy to use, especially in remote monitoring health-services. However, during the WCE process, the large amount of captured video data demands a significant deal of computation to analyze and retrieve informative video frames. In order to facilitate efficient WCE data collection and browsing task, we present a resource- and bandwidth-aware WCE video summarization framework that extracts the representative keyframes of the WCE video contents by removing redundant and non-informative frames. For redundancy elimination, we use Jeffrey-divergence between color histograms and inter-frame Boolean series-based correlation of color channels. To remove non-informative frames, multi-fractal texture features are extracted to assist the classification using an ensemble-based classifier. Owing to the limited WCE resources, it is impossible for the WCE system to perform computationally intensive video summarization tasks. To resolve computational challenges, mobile-cloud architecture is incorporated, which provides resizable computing capacities by adaptively offloading video summarization tasks between the client and the cloud server. The qualitative and quantitative results are encouraging and show that the proposed framework saves information transmission cost and bandwidth, as well as the valuable time of data analysts in browsing remote sensing data. / Supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Education (2013R1A1A2012904).

This thesis introduces the circuit and system design of interactive Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. IoT has the vision of connectivity for anything, at anytime and anywhere. One of the most important characteristics of IoT is the automatic and massive interaction of real physical world (things and human) with the virtual Internet world.RFID tags integrated with sensors have been considered as one suitable technology for realizing the interaction. However, while it is important to have RFID tags with sensors as the input interaction, it is also important to have RFID tags with displays as the output interaction.Display interfaces vary based on the information and application scenarios. On one side, remote and centralized display interface is more suitable for scenarios such as monitoring and localization. On the other side, tag level display interface is more suitable for scenarios such as object identification and online to offline propagation. For tag level display, though a substantial number of researches have focused on introducing sensing functionalities to low power Ultra-High Frequency (UHF) RFID tags, few works address UHF RFID tags with display interfaces. Power consumption and integration with display of rigid substrate are two main challenges.With the recent emerging of Electronic Paper Display (EPD) technologies, it becomes possible to overcome the two challenges. EPD resembles ordinary ink on paper by characteristics of substrate flexibility, pattern printability and material bi-stability. Average power consumption of display is significantly reduced due to bi-stability, the ability to hold color for certain periods without power supplies. Among different EPD types, Electrochromic (EC) display shows advantage of low driving voltage compatible to chip supply voltage.Therefore this thesis designs a low power UHF RFID tag integrated in 180 nm CMOS process with inkjet-printed EC polyimide display. For applications where refresh rate is ultra-low (such as electronic label in retailing and warehouse), the wireless display tag is passive and supplied by the energy harvested from UHF RF wave. For applications where refresh rate is not ultra-low (such as object identification label in mass customized manufacturing), the wireless display tag is semi-passive and supplied by soft battery. It works at low average power consumption and with out-of-battery alert. For remote and centralized display, the limitations of uplink (from tags to reader) capacity and massive-tag information feedback in IoT scenarios is the main challenge. Compared to conventional UHF RFID backscattering whose data rate is limited within hundreds of kb/s, Ultra-wideband (UWB) transmission have been verified with the performance of Mb/s data rate with several tens of pJ/pulse energy consumption.Therefore, a circuit prototype of UHF/UWB RFID tag replacing UHF backscattering with UWB transmitter is implemented. It also consists of Analog-to-Digital Converter (ADC) and Electrocardiogram (ECG) electrodes for healthcare applications of real-time remote monitoring of multiple patients ECG signals. The ECG electrodes are fabricated on paper substrate by inkjet printing to improve patient comfort. Key contribution of the thesis includes: 1) the power management scheme and circuit design of passive UHF/UWB RFID display tag. The tag sensitivity (the input RF power) is -10.5 dBm for EC display driving, comparable to the performance of conventional passive UHF RFID tags without display functions, and -18.5 dBm for UWB transmission, comparable to the state-of-the-art performance of passive UHF RFID tag. 2) communication flow and circuit design of UHF/UWB RFID tag with ECG sensing. The optimum system throughout is 400 tags/second with 1.5 KHz ECG sampling rate and 10 Mb/s UWB pulse rate. / <p>QC 20151012</p>

This is a foundational study that applies Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis to the evaluation of a chronic disease model that utilizes Remote Monitoring (RM) devices to identify clinical deterioration in a Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD) population. Background: RM programmes in Disease Management (DM) are proliferating as one strategy to address management of chronic disease. The need to validate and quantify evidence-based value is acute. There is a need to apply new methods to better evaluate automated RM systems. ROC analysis is an engineering approach that has been widely applied to medical programmes but has not been applied to RM systems. Evaluation of classifiers, determination of thresholds and predictive accuracy for RM systems have not been evaluated using ROC analysis. Objectives: (1) apply ROC analysis to evaluation of a RM system; (2) analyse the performance of the model when applied to patient outcomes for a COPD population; (3) identify predictive classifier(s); (4) identify optimal threshold(s) and the predictive capacity of the classifiers. Methods: Parametric and non-parametric methods are utilized to determine accuracy, sensitivity, specificity and predictive capacity of classifiers Saturated Peripheral Oxygen (SpO2), Blood Pressure (BP), Pulse Rate (PR) based on event-based patient outcomes that include hospitalisation (IP), accident & emergency (A&E) and home visits (HH). Population: Patients identified with a primary diagnosis of COPD, monitored for a minimum of 183 days with at least one episode of in-patient (IP) hospitalisation for COPD in the 12 months preceding the monitoring period. Data Source: A subset of retrospective de-identified patient data from an NHS Direct evaluation of a COPD RM programme. Subsets utilized include classifiers, biometric readings, alerts generated by the system and resource utilisation. Contribution: Validates ROC methodology, identifies classifier performance and optimal threshold settings for the classifier, while making design recommendations and putting forth the next steps for research. The question answered by this research is that ROC analysis can provide additional information on the predictive capacity of RM systems. Justification of benefit: The results can be applied when evaluating health services and planning decisions on the costs and benefits. Methods can be applied to system design, protocol development, work flows and commissioning decisions based on value and benefit. Conclusion: Results validate the use of ROC analysis as a robust methodology for DM programmes that use RM devices to evaluate classifiers, thresholds and identification of the predictive capacity as well as identify areas where additional design may improve the predictive capacity of the model.

Este trabalho descreve o desenvolvimento e a implementação de um sistema de aquisição automática de variáveis edafo-ambientais, que inclui a transmissão de dados, em tempo real ou posterior para as facilidades computacionais de um laboratório. Esses dados alimentam um programa de modelamento do transporte de pesticidas no solo, o qual é executado em uma estação de trabalho RISC/UNIX. O sistema foi projetado e implementado considerando uma arquitetura serial multiponto, que permite a leitura de até 240 sensores. A transmissão de dados e realizada por dois enlaces, um via radio (3 Km) e outro via linha telefônica discada (130 Km). Unindo esses enlaces, ha um microcomputador PC, que se convencionou chamar de Unidade Remota de Armazenamento. O sistema de aquisição opera sob a supervisão da Unidade Remota. Para isso, foi criado um programa em ambiente gráfico (Windows), o qual assume que os sensores edáficos estejam distribuídos em até quatro parcelas. Esse programa tem as funções de: a) controlar os parâmetros do sistema de aquisição de dados, como intervalo entre amostragens e faixa de leitura dos sensores; b) verificar a consistência dos dados; c) permitir a complementação de dados, com entradas manuais relativas a aplicação de pesticidas e chuvas artificiais; d) armazenar localmente os dados em memória de massa; e) enviar dados para o laboratório, quando requisitados; f) monitorar leituras em tempo real e g) indicar possíveis falhas do sistema. O enlace via linha telefônica serve não somente para a transferência dos dados, mas também possibilita que as funções da Unidade Remota sejam observadas e controladas a distância. O sistema está em operação no campo (Estação Experimental de Pindorama, do IAC) há mais de dois anos. Estão sendo adquiridos dados climatológicos, temperatura do solo e potencial mátrico, em intervalos de 10 minutos. No decorrer desse período, os danos causados por efeitos secundários de relâmpagos durante tempestades resultaram em várias interrupções na operação do sistema. Apesar de terem sido tomadas as precauções usuais, como circuitos de proteção de linha, aterramento adequado do sistema e instalação de pára-raios, estes esforços não foram totalmente eficientes e devem ser melhorados / This work describes the development of an automatic data acquisition system for environmental variables that includes the transmission of the acquired data in real time or later time to the computational facilities of a laboratory. These data are to be supplied for a modeling of pesticide transport in soil program that is executed in a RISC/UNIX workstation. The system was devised and implemented considering multipoint serial bus architecture and reads up to 240 sensors. The data transmission is performed through a two-link telemetry chain, radio (3 km) and telephone line (130 km). A personal computer named Remote Storage Unit (RSU) was used to join these links. The data acquisition is supervised by the RSU. In order to execute this task a graphics user interface based program (Windows) was created. The program presupposes the distribution of the soil sensors in up to four plots. This program performs the functions of: a) controlling the data acquisition system such as sample intervals and sensors range; b) verifying the consistency of data; c) allowing the complementation of data with manual entries related to artificial rains and pesticide applications; d) locally storing the data in mass memory; e) sending these data to the laboratories, when requested; f) real time monitoring of readings; and g) indicating any system failure. Besides the data transmission the telephone line link can also be used to operate the RSU remotely. The system is operating in the field (Estação Experimental de Pindorama, IAC) for more than two years. Climatologically variables, soil temperature and soil matric potential are being measured at 10 minutes sample interval. During this test period the system operation was interrupted several times due to secondary effects of lightning. Despite of the usual taken cares as line-protection circuits, adequate system grounding and the installation of lightning rods these efforts were not efficient and must be improved