Wireless sensor networks for rehabilitation applications: Challenges and opportunities

Rehabilitation supervision has emerged as a new application of wireless sensor networks (WSN), with unique communication, signal processing and hardware design requirements. It is a broad and complex interdisciplinary research area on which more than one hundred papers have been published by several research communities (electronics, bio-mechanical, control and computer science). In this paper, we present WSN for rehabilitation supervision with a focus on key scientific and technical challenges that have been solved as well as interdisciplinary challenges that are still open. We thoroughly review existing projects conducted by several research communities involved in this exciting field. Furthermore, we discuss the open research issues and give directions for future research works. Our aim is to gather information that encourage engineers, clinicians and computer scientists to work together in this field to tackle the arising challenges. We believe that bridging researchers with different scientific backgrounds could have a significant impact on the development of WSN for rehabilitation and could improve the way rehabilitation is provided today.     

A New LTE/EPC Control-Plane Based Transmission Procedure to Cope with Short Data Push Services

The architecture and the protocols of LTE/EPC were designed to deliver high transmission rates with QoS requirements. In order to be able to guarantee different levels of QoS, each transmission is based on a bearer, which needs to be set up within the network. It then requires to store contexts in the various entities of the network and to set up several tunnels or connections both in the user and the control planes. This approach is, however, inadequate when considering a class of value-added services obedient to a “Short Data push principle”. This category which contains, at least, very popular services like Short Message Service (SMS) and Twitter, or new ones like Machine-to-Machine communication services, represents on one hand a continuously growing part of the worldwide amount of data traffic exchanged and on the other hand is easily recognizable thanks to its specific traffic pattern. To allow LTE/EPC to conveniently cope with the sporadic nature of these services, we introduce a new procedure based on a set of simple messages to transport such isolated messages only in the control plane. We show that this procedure may generate additional signaling in some cases but is efficient as soon as the proportion of sporadic traffic is not negligible. We illustrate our approach in the case of the SMS which is emblematic of the targeted category of services. The proposed procedure is, however, generic and may be used for any type of sporadic traffic.     

Anti-GM-CSF monoclonal antibody therapy for refractory acute leukemia

Several phase I trials and pilot studies using Monoclonal Antibody (MoAb) have been performed in B-cell neoplasms, but this approach has not until now been extensively tested in myeloid leukemias. Recently, we evaluated the use of anti-Granulocyte-Macrophage Colony-Stimulating Factor MoAb (Anti-GM-CSF MoAb) in acute myeloid leukemia (AML). Eight patients fulfilled inclusion criteria and received a single course of Anti-GM-CSF MoAb infusion during 5 to 15 days. Anti-GM-CSF MoAb was well tolerated and was detectable in pharmacokinetics studies. Using Human Anti-Rat Antibodies (HARA), we also observed an immunological response to the MoAb. Despite sufficient levels detected in the serum and biological activity of Anti-GM-CSF MoAb in vivo, no anti-leukemic effect was noted, except for one patient who had a decrease of 50% in the marrow blast cell mass. These observations indicate that leukemic proliferation in vivo involves a complex network spanning many mechanisms, and inhibition of leukemia is not effective if only one of these key targets is attacked. The development of these new approaches may be more effective in the future.     

A Simple Priority Mechanism for Shared-Protection Schemes

One of the major challenges of optical network operators is ensuring the stringent levels of availability required by their highest-class clients. To achieve this, we introduce relative priorities among the different primary connections contending for access to the protection paths. In this letter, we propose an analytical model for the proposed priority-enabled scheme. As a key distinguishing feature from existing literature, we derive explicit analytic expressions for the average availability and service disruption rate for the different priority classes     

Introducing a Relative Priority for the Shared-Protection Schemes

One the of major challenges of optical network operators is ensuring the stringent levels of availability required by their highest class clients. To achieve this, we introduce relative priorities among the different primary connections contending for access to the shared-protection paths. In this paper, we provide an analytical model for the proposed priority-enabled scheme. As a key distinguishing feature from existing literature, we derive explicit analytic expressions for average the availability and service disruption rate for the different priority classes.     

Optical resources provisioning: multipoint‐to‐point lightpaths mapping in all‐optical networks

In wavelength‐division multiplexing (WDM) optical networks, the bandwidth request of a traffic stream can be much lower than the capacity of a lightpath. Efficiently grooming low‐speed connections onto high‐capacity lightpaths will improve the network throughput and reduce the network cost. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a new concept of traffic aggregation in WDM mesh networks that aims to eliminate both the bandwidth under‐utilization and scalability concerns that are typical in all‐optical wavelength routed networks. This approach relies on the multipoint‐to‐point lightpath concept. In order to assess the efficiency of our proposal, all underlying network costs are compared. To achieve this aim, we devise a new provisioning algorithm to map the multipoint‐to‐point lightpaths in the network. Our results show that the proposed aggregation technique can significantly improve the network throughput while reducing its cost. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Study of structural,impedance spectroscopy and dielectric properties of Li and Al co-doped Ba0.85Ca0.15Ti0.9Zr0.1O3 ceramics

Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics - In this work, we investigate the effect of lithium and aluminium co-doping (0, 0.1, 0.2, and 0.3 mol%) on the phase formation,...     

Reliable and energy aware query-driven routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks become very attractive in the research community, due to their applications in diverse fields such as military tracking, civilian applications and medical research, and more generally in systems of systems. Routing is an important issue in wireless sensor networks due to the use of computationally and resource limited sensor nodes. Any routing protocol designed for use in wireless sensor networks should be energy efficient and should increase the network lifetime. In this paper, we propose an efficient and highly reliable query-driven routing protocol for wireless sensor networks. Our protocol provides the best theoretical energy aware routes to reach any node in the network and routes the request and reply packets with a lightweight overhead. We perform an overall evaluation of our protocol through simulations with comparison to other routing protocols. The results demonstrate the efficiency of our protocol in terms of energy consumption, load balancing of routes, and network lifetime.