Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
This paper aims to describe and discuss a proposal to incorporate digital auscultation and its processing into an existing EHR. The architecture was planned to be used in both primary and hospital care, and includes a digital stethoscope; an exam collection module; an integration module; an EHR web service; and an EHR. Special attention was given to standardize communications using HL7 and openEHR. The proposed implementation uses a commercial stethoscope, an android app to collect the data, a mirth integration engine that communicates using HL7 or openEHR through REST or SOAP calls. The signal processing of the sounds is also included. The auscultation sound files are made available to the EHR users. This solution will open the possibility to have richer patient records than can be very important for patient care, research and medical teaching. It also raises issues regarding ethical and legal concerns that must be considered in future research.

Abstract

Abstract
Current generation of computing platforms is embracing multi-core and many-core processors to improve the overall performance of the system, meeting at the same time the stringent energy budgets requested by the market. Parallel programming languages are nowadays paramount to extracting the tremendous potential offered by these platforms: parallel computing is no longer a niche in the high performance computing (HPC) field, but an essential ingredient in all domains of computer science. The advent of next-generation many-core embedded platforms has the chance of intercepting a converging need for predictable high-performance coming from both the High-Performance Computing (HPC) and Embedded Computing (EC) domains. On one side, new kinds of HPC applications are being required by markets needing huge amounts of information to be processed within a bounded amount of time. On the other side, EC systems are increasingly concerned with providing higher performance in real-time, challenging the performance capabilities of current architectures. This converging demand raises the problem about how to guarantee timing requirements in presence of parallel execution. The paper presents how the time-criticality and parallelisation challenges are addressed by merging techniques coming from both HPC and EC domains, and provides an overview of the proposed framework to achieve these objectives.

Abstract
In this paper a novel battery electric vehicle (BEV) concept based on a small fixed and a big swappable li-ion battery pack is proposed in order to achieve: longer range, lower initial purchase price and lower energy consumption at short ranges. For short ranges the BEV is only powered by the relatively small fixed battery pack, without the large swappable battery pack. In this way the mass of the vehicle is reduced and therefore the energy consumed per unit distance is improved. For higher ranges the BEV is powered by both battery packs. This concept allows the introduction of subscription-based ownership models to distribute the cost of the large battery pack over the vehicle lifetime. A methodology is proposed for the analysis and evaluation of the proposed concept in comparison with a direct owned non swappable single pack BEV, proving that significant improvements on city fuel economy (up to 20 %) and economic benefits are achievable under several scenarios. These results encourage further study of battery swapping service plans and energy management strategies.