Preventable medical errors are a severe problem in healthcare, causing over 400,000 deaths per year in the US in hospitals alone. In acute care, the branch of medicine encompassing the emergency department (ED) and intensive care units (ICU), error rates may be higher to due low situational awareness among clinicians performing resuscitation on patients. To support cognition, novice team leaders may rely on reference guides to direct and anticipate future steps. However, guides often act as a fixation point, diverting the leader's attention away from the team. To address this issue, we conducted a qualitative study that evaluates a collaborative cognitive aid co-designed with clinicians called Visual TASK. Our study explored the use of Visual TASK in three simulations employing a projected shared display with two different interaction modalities: the Microsoft Kinect and a touchscreen. Our results suggest that tools like the Kinect, while useful in other areas of acute care like the OR, are unsuitable for use in high-stress situations like resuscitation. We also observed that fixation may not be constrained to reference guides alone, and may extend to other objects in the room. We present our findings, and a discussion regarding future avenues in which collaborative cognitive aids may help in improving situational awareness in resuscitation.

New trends in Wireless Sensor Networks envisage deployments for distributed applications requiring real-time support at the kernel level and Quality of Service at the network level. In this domain, at the design stage, particular attention must be devoted to individual data packets as those entities carrying unique (not redundant) information. The performances of the deployed system (hereby felt as a black box) must be tracked against the reliability and timeliness offered in message delivery.

A Visual Tracking case study is discussed throughout this paper with the support of a simulation package modelling real-time scheduling policies at the device node kernels and bandwidth allocation techniques for network reliable communications as standardized in the IEEE 802.15.4 suite of protocols. A set of results is carried out estimating the performances of the Visual Tracking system in two contexts (those of a monitored junction in an airport taxiway and in a parking area) very different for criticality and average volume of network traffic.

The Vital Jacket® (VJ) is a wearable vital signs monitoring system that joins textiles with microelectronics. After several years of development within the university lab, it has been licensed to a start-up company. Its evolutions have focused on cardiology and sports and scaled down from a jacket to a single T-shirt. The VJ manufacturing process has recently been certified to comply with the standards ISO9001 and ISO13485 and the cardiology version was approved as a Medical Device for the European market compliant with the MDD directive 42/93/CE, holding the CE1011 mark. The authors intend to wear VJs during the days of the congress to demonstrate its usefulness in first hand and will exemplify the different scenarios of use of this innovative wearable intelligent garment.

The goal of the Vital Responder research project is to explore the synergies between innovative wearable technologies, scattered sensor networks, intelligent building technology and precise localization services to provide secure, reliable and effective first-response systems in critical emergency scenarios. Critical events, such as natural disaster or other large-scale emergency, induce fatigue and stress in first responders, such as fire fighters, policemen and paramedics. There are distinct fatigue and stress factors (and even pathologies) that were identified among these professionals. Nevertheless, previous work has uncovered a lack of real-time monitoring and decision technologies that can lead to in-depth understanding of the physiological stress processes and to the development of adequate response mechanisms. Our “silver bullet” to address these challenges is a suite of non-intrusive wearable technologies, as inconspicuous as a t-shirt, capable of gathering relevant information about the individual and disseminating this information through a wireless sensor network. In this paper we will describe the objectives, activities and results of the first two years of the Vital Responder project, depicting how it is possible to address wearable sensing challenges even in very uncontrolled environments.

Developing region road traffic has a unique characteristic of high heterogeneity in vehicle types. In this paper, we describe VividhaVahana, a smartphone sensor based system to categorize road vehicles into four predominant categories: two-wheeler bikes, three-wheeler auto-rickshaws, four-wheeler cars and public transport like buses. Using a variety of sensor based features, our system is able to achieve above 90% classification accuracy, evaluated over 1500+ Km of driving data, on two urban road stretches in the Indian city of Delhi. We also apply VividhaVahana to empirically examine four representative transport applications, namely travel time estimation, driving behavior detection, traffic state classification and road surface monitoring. We show how each of these applications would benefit from a vehicle class specific analysis, compared to the vehicle agnostic analysis as has been done in the past. Our work gives useful insights on how such applications can be re-designed, to better fit developing region traffic characteristics and requirements.

Recently, a multi-hop wireless LAN system that APs (Access Point) are connected by ad-hoc network technology each other without the need for any cable, is introduced to expand the coverage easily. And some WISPs (Wireless Internet Service Providers) announced that they will offer a public wireless LAN service in partnership with a company providing the physical wireless infrastructure. To realize that service, the VLAN technology is very useful. So we proposed VLAN over multi-hop wireless LAN system, VLAN information exchange protocol and developed the prototype system.

Many vehicles rely on the Global Positioning System (GPS) to compute their locations. The inaccuracy of GPS devices means sometimes vehicles believe they are located in different lanes or roads altogether. Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) allow vehicles to communicate with each other using wireless means and thus connect them in a very dynamic wireless network. The algorithm VANET LOCation Improve (VLOCI), proposed in this work, uses VANETs and distance measurements taken by each vehicle to improve the location estimates provided by all GPS devices. VLOCI is shown to perform efficient when erroneous distance measurements are present in the environment/ computations.

Multiply and accumulate function is the important part of digital signal processing algorithms. This can be implemented more effectively with distributed arithmetic (DA) architecture [1]. These architectures make extensive use of look-up tables, which make them ideal for implementing digital signal processing functions on Xilinx FPGAs. An emerging arithmetic-intensive digital signal processing algorithm is the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) which have proven to be extremely useful for image and video coding applications like MPEG-4 and JPEG 2000[2]. But the limitation of this architecture is that the size of look-up tables get increased exponentially as the constant coefficients of wavelet used for these applications increases. In this paper, we proposed a novel methodology to implement the Burrows wheeler transform (BWT) [3] block in FPGA for achieving memory reduced DA.

Integrating realistic behavior of end systems into simulations is challenging since the mechanisms used in protocols and applications such as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) are complex and continuously evolving. In this paper, we present VMSimInt, a new approach which allows the INTegration of arbitrary Operating Systems (OSs) and ap- plication code into an event-driven network SIMulator by using Virtual Machines (VMs). In contrast to existing ap- proaches which integrate parts of OS kernels, our approach uses unmodified OS kernels, which eases maintenance and provides additional flexibility. By controlling the time and all I/O of the VMs, our approach guarantees that external factors such as the performance of the host do not influence the simulation outcome, so that simulations are exactly re- producible. We validated our system against the Network Simulation Cradle (NSC) by simulating the same models and comparing the system behavior. In addition, we show that our approach provides sufficient performance for usage in day-to-day research.

Collaborators use vocabulary germane to the domain in context. Collaboration applications and collaborating systems use vocabularies at different (lower) layers that are specific to the state in which they execute. Distributed, yet collaborative domain-specific applications have demonstrated success when lower layer vocabularies are well defined. These standard vocabularies enable platform neutral, programming language neutral and client neutral mechanisms to realize successful handshake between collaboration applications. The concept can be extended to an application neutral, protocol neutral, platform neutral, programming language neutral and client neutral vocabulary model that will facilitate harmonious handshake of collaboration channels. This paper addresses the need for standardizing vocabulary at the collaboration channel level and presents a model for realizing vocabulary-awareness in a generalized neutral format. A pilot study done to implement the model using a sample vocabulary is presented.