The following topics are dealt with: diseases; medical image processing; learning (artificial intelligence); molecular biophysics; medical signal processing; genetics; neurophysiology; electroencephalography; feature extraction; bioinformatics.

An acupuncture points localization method is implemented on an Android platform. Such a system can be used to locate the relevant acupuncture point and/or drive a robot arm for the purpose of symptom relief (e.g. through acupressure).

An acupuncture points localization method is implemented on an Android platform. Such a system can be used to locate the relevant acupuncture point and/or drive a robot arm for the purpose of symptom relief (e.g. through acupressure).

An acupuncture points localization method is implemented on an Android platform. Such a system can be used to locate the relevant acupuncture point and/or drive a robot arm for the purpose of symptom relief (e.g. through acupressure).

An augmented reality (AR) system for acupuncture points localization is implemented on an Android smartphone. The user can utilize such a system to locate the relevant acupuncture point for the purpose of symptom relief (e.g. through acupressure).

Chinese herbal medicine (CHM) plays an important role of treatment in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). Traditionally, CHM is used to restore the balance of the body for sick people and maintain health for common people. However, lack of the knowledge of the herbs may cause misuse of the herbs. In this demo, we will present a real-time smartphone application, which can not only recognize easily-confused herb based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), but also provide relevant information about the detected herbs. Our Chinese herb recognition system is implemented on a cloud server and can be used by the client user via smartphone. The recognition system is evaluated by 5-fold cross validation method and the accuracy is around 96%, which is adequate for real-world use.

Tongue fur is an important objective basis for clinical diagnosis and treatment in western medicine and tongue diagnosis for Chinese medicine. Given the high penetration and built-in sensors of smartphones, and the need for continuous monitoring of health conditions, we propose an automatic tongue diagnosis framework on smartphone. However, tongue images taken by smartphone are quite different in color due to various lighting conditions, so we have to solve this problem to detect the correct tongue furs. In previous work mentioned that their tongue diagnosis systems are set up in a constrained well-controlled environment (e.g. with fixed lighting condition), but we purpose to let users make tongue diagnosis with their own smartphones no matter where they are. Therefore, we provide a way to detect tongue furs under different lighting conditions (e.g. fluorescent, halogen, and incandescent illuminant) by the combination of series methods: 1. Lighting condition estimation, 2. Tongue image color correction 3. Tongue fur (white fur) detection. We use the SVM to estimate the lighting condition and do the color correction with the corresponding correction matrix for current lighting condition. After getting the corrected tongue images, we use the detection model training by SVM to detect the white fur region in corrected tongue images. In this thesis, we propose a lighting condition estimation method according to color difference of tongue images taken with and without flash on the smartphone under different lighting condition; we also verify that it need to search corresponding parameter of correction matrix for color correction depend on different lighting condition; finally, we observe that the overlap rate of corrected tongue images for Hal. and Inc. lighting has been clearly upgraded with our correction parameter and the white fur can be identify if the overlap rate of corrected tongue images exceed 60%.

The authors of the paper (K.-C. Lan, and W.-Y. Shih, "Using smart-phones and floor plans for indoor location tracking," IEEE Trans. Human-Mach. Syst., vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 211-221, Apr. 2014), acknowledge duplicate publication. Some text, images, tables, and ideas in references [1]-[4] share similarity and this duplication was not cited in the published version. The duplicated figures are presented.

Given peoples increasing dependence on communication networks, vulnerabilities of communication networks and the Internet can significantly impact our lives. These networks and services are susceptible to accidents or natural disasters that can disrupt service and compromised the network infrastructure. In the face of these disasters, the need for greater resilience for the Internet has attracted the attention of researchers. In this work, we propose an architecture that allows a disconnected smart-phone in a disaster situation to utilize the Internet connections of neighboring smart-phones. We evaluate the performance of our protocol by comparing it with the Concurrent Multipath Transfer SCTP (CMT-SCTP), and the results show that our protocol can achieve similar or better performance.

We implement pedestrian dead reckoning (PDR) for indoor localization. With a waist-mounted PDR based system on a smart-phone, we estimate the user's step length that utilizes the height change of the waist based on the Pythagorean Theorem. We propose a zero velocity update (ZUPT) method to address sensor drift error: Simple harmonic motion and a low-pass filtering mechanism combined with the analysis of gait characteristics. This method does not require training to develop the step length model. Exploiting the geometric similarity between the user trajectory and the floor map, our map matching algorithm includes three different filters to calibrate the direction errors from the gyro using building floor plans. A sliding-window-based algorithm detects corners. The system achieved 98% accuracy in estimating user walking distance with a waist-mounted phone and 97% accuracy when the phone is in the user's pocket. ZUPT improves sensor drift error (the accuracy drops from 98% to 84% without ZUPT) using 8 Hz as the cut-off frequency to filter out sensor noise. Corner length impacted the corner detection algorithm. In our experiments, the overall location error is about 0.48 meter.

While wearable sensor systems are now widely used to monitor vital signs in hospitals and at home, most such systems are designed for bedridden patients. In contrast, the use of wireless sensors to capture physiological data from patients for long term health monitoring is becoming increasingly popular although some previous studies recorded complaints from users about discomfort when wearing these. In addition, these systems can sometimes suffer from interference from existing Wi-Fi traffic. Therefore, a sensor system that is both comfortable to use and does not encounter interference with existing wireless traffic is required. This paper presents a system design that includes a probe, sensor, radio, and receiver for a long term heart rate monitoring in a senior center. This system has been deployed in a senior center since May 2012, and 63 seniors have used this system in this period. The senior center has its own wireless network, and no changes were made to this. The monitoring system presented in this work runs together with the existing network, and achieves a 97% packet delivery rate.

Mobile surveillance has been recently proposed as a replacement for traditional road-side surveillance system. One important aspect of a mobile surveillance system is to decide what the events of interest are. In this work, we adopt the concept of participatory sensing for mobile surveillance by involving a human into the loop of data collection. We introduce a virtual credit based mechanism to motivate the participants to collect data and share their bandwidth. Finally, we use a large-scale real- world vehicle trace to evaluate the feasibility of our proposed framework.

Some prior studies proposed the use of Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) for indoor localization. The PDR system does not require a beacon-based infrastructure, in which a small number of sensors are put on the pedestrian. These sensors (such as G-sensor and Gyro) are used to estimate the distance and direction that the user traveled. The PDR approach can be generally categorized into two types: foot-mounted and waist-mounted. In general, the foot-mounted system can get accurate step length, but perform poorly in estimated heading direction. On the other hand, the waist-mounted system can estimate direction with high accuracy, but is hard to measure the step length. In this work, we proposed a waist-mounted based PDR to estimate step length using one 3-axis accelerometer. We utilize vertical acceleration to implement double integral for measuring the user's instant height change and use some physical features of vertical acceleration during the walking to calibrate the measurement. Based on the Pythagoras' Theorem, we can then estimate each step length based on the user's height change during his/her walking.

There are increasing interest recently in using 802.11p for ETC (Electronic Toll Collection) communication. However, there are two potential problems for using 802.11p for mission-critical applications like ETC. First, a 802.11p wireless network is prone to fading, shadowing, and interferences, which might result in packet losses. But the WSMP protocol in 802.11p standard does not provide any reliability mechanism. Second, since the frequency bands used by 802.11a and 802.11p are relatively close, it is possible that any 802.11a-based devices could potentially interfere the 802.11p traffic and disrupt the service. We previously proposed a simple session-layer protocol to improve the reliability of WSMP for ETC communication. In this work, we focus on investigating the effect of on-board 802.11a devices on ETC communication. We first demonstrate the possibility of that 802.11a could potentially interfere 802.11p traffic through theory and real-world experiments. Then, with extensive simulations, we discuss how on-board 802.11a devices could degrade ETC services in different scenarios.

Previously, a multi-homed NEMO architecture has been proposed to improve the reliability and aggregate the bandwidth of MR by simultaneously using multiple wireless links. In this work, we propose a novel protocol called ETOM (Enhancements for TCP On a Multi-homed mobile router) to improve the performance of sending a single TCP connection over multiple wireless links on a MR. ETOM consists of three components. First, we use a reordering buffer to eliminate unnecessary retransmission caused by out-of-order packets. Second, we develop a Multi-homed Split Connection mechanism to enable the TCP connection to quickly adapt to the conditions of multiple links when packet loss occurs. Finally, a Scheduled Window-based Transmission Control algorithm is proposed to mitigate the negative effects of out-of-order packets in the case of using heterogeneous links in a multi-homed environment. We evaluate the performance of ETOM by comparing it with the Concurrent Multi-path Transfer SCTP (CMT-SCTP). ETOM resolves several performance issues that could hinder the development and practical application of multi-homed mobile router technology.

A huge body of work utilized signal strength of short range signal (such as WiFi, Bluetooth, ultra sound or Infrared) to build a radio map for indoor localization, by deploying a great number of beacon nodes in the building. The drawback of such an infrastructure-based approach is that the deployment and calibration of the system is costly and labor-intensive. To overcome that, some prior studies proposed the use of Pedestrian Dead Reckoning (PDR) for indoor localization. The PDR system does not require to build a beacon-based infrastructure, in which a small number of sensors are put on the pedestrian. These sensors (such as G-sensor and Gyro) are used to estimate the distance and direction that the user traveled. The PDR approach can be generally categorized into two types: foot-mounted and waist-mounted. In general, the foot-mounted system can get accurate step length, but perform poorly in estimated heading direction. On the other hand, the waist-mounted system can estimate direction with high accuracy, but is hard to measure the step length. In this work, we proposed a waist-mounted based PDR using one 3-axis accelerometer and one gyroscope sensor. We utilize vertical acceleration to implement double integral for measuring the user's instant height change and use some physical features of vertical acceleration during the walking to calibrate the measurement. Then based on the Pythagoras' Theorem, we can estimate each step length based on the user's height change during his/her walking. Our experiment results show that the accuracy is about 98.26% in estimating the user's walking distance.

Voice over IP (VoIP) is one of the most popular Internet applications. Many VoIP protocols (e.g. SIP) are based on a central-server scheme in which a caller needs to query the central server first for the callee's information (e.g. IP address) before it can connect to them. However, such a centralized architecture has some drawbacks, such as an unbalanced load and a single point of the failure. As a result, some researchers have proposed the use of peer-to-peer (P2P) techniques for VoIP communication. However, compared to a centralized approach, setting up a VoIP connection over multiple hops could potentially take a longer time and might discourage users from utilizing this service. In this paper, we set out to study the performance of existing P2P protocols for VoIP applications in a more realistic setting based on traces collected from the Skype network. The Skype traces are used as an input to model the VoIP network topology. We evaluated the performance of three types of distribute hash table(DHT) protocols, namely, flat DHT, hierarchical DHT and proximity DHT, in terms of their lookup latency for the connection setup phase of VoIP applications. In addition, to understand the feasibility of using infrastructure-less VoIP in the real world, we adopted pair comparison techniques to evaluate the quality of the user experience. Finally, we proposed a new hybrid protocol for the infrastructure-less VoIP communication. We concluded that current P2P protocols for VoIP are not satisfactory as compared to the traditional centralized approach and there is still a lot of room for improvement.

Saving DTNs' battery power to prolong the system life time has been an important research topic which scientists try to optimize. Most researches fall into two categories - Time Division Multiple Access based ones, and Low Power Listening ones by turning the listener's radio on/off intermittenly with long sending preambles. In this paper we propose solving the problem from a whole new angle - by using the motes' physical behavior, which is detectable by relatively energy-cheap accelerometer, as the judgment for turning the radio on/off. This scheme can be used in combination with any energy efficient DTN MAC protocols. We evaluate the protocol by running simulations with real hikers' traces and the result is shown in the evaluation section.

Vehicular Network is becoming increasingly popular in recent years, in which vehicles constitute a wireless mobile network. Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) are two different modes of communication in a vehicular network. Some measurement studies have previously been undertaken to understand the feasibility of using WiFi for V2V and V2I communication. Recently WiMAX is emerging as one of the possible candidates for next generation mobile networks. In this work, we set out to understand the feasibility of using WiMAX for V2I communication as compared to the use of WiFi. Due to the hardware limitation, we focus on a static setting in urban environment. Our initial measurement studies show that while WiMAX can offer a longer communication range than WiFi, its latency can be significantly larger than that of WiFi at a short distance (e.g. less than 100 m). In addition, we show the setting of frame size has a strong impact on the performance of WiMAX.

Wireless mesh networks (WMN) have attracted considerable interest in years as a convenient, flexible and low-cost alternative to wired communication infrastructures in many contexts. However, the great majority of research on metropolitan-scale WMN has been centered around maximization of available bandwidth, suitable for non-real-time applications such as Internet access for the general public. On the other hand, the suitability of WMN for mission-critical infrastructure applications remains by and large unknown, as protocols typically employed in WMN are, for the most part, not designed for real-time communications. In this paper, we describe the smart transport and roads communications (STaRComm) project at National ICT Australia (NICTA), which sets a goal of designing a wireless mesh network architecture to solve the communication needs of the traffic control system in Sydney, Australia. This system, known as SCATS (Sydney coordinated adaptive traffic system) and used in over 100 cities around the world, connects a hierarchy of several thousand devices - from individual traffic light controllers to regional computers and the central traffic management centre (TMC) - and places stringent requirements on the reliability and latency of the data exchanges. We discuss our experience in the deployment of an initial testbed consisting of 7 mesh nodes placed at intersections with traffic lights, and share the results and insights learned from our measurements and initial trials in the process.

One emerging, new type of ad-hoc network is the vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET), in which vehicles constitute the mobile nodes in the network. Due to the prohibitive cost of deploying and implementing such a system in real world, most research in VANET relies on simulations for evaluation. A key component for VANET simulations is a realistic vehicular mobility model that ensures conclusions drawn from simulation experiments will carry through to real deployments. In this work, we introduce a tool MOVE that allows users to rapidly generate realistic mobility models for VANET simulations. MOVE is built on top of an open source micro-traffic simulator SUMO. The output of MOVE is a realistic mobility model and can be immediately used by popular network simulators such as ns-2 and qualnet. We evaluate and compare ad-hoc routing performance for vehicular nodes using MOVE to that using the random waypoint model. We show that the simulation results obtained when nodes moving according to a realistic mobility model is significantly different from that of the commonly used random waypoint model.

In geographic routing, nodes need to maintain up-to-date positions of their immediate neighbours for making effective forwarding decisions. Periodic broadcasting of beacon packets that contain the geographic location coordinates of the nodes is a popular method used by most geographic routing protocols to maintain neighbour positions. We contend that periodic beaconing regardless of network mobility and traffic pattern does not make optimal ulilisation of the wireless medium and node energy. For example, if the beacon interval is too small compared to the rate at which a node changes its current position, periodic beaconing will create many redundant position updates. Similarly, when only a few nodes in a large network are involved in data forwarding, resources spent by all other nodes in maintaining their neighbour positions are greatly wasted. To address these problems, we propose the Adaptive Position Update (APU) strategy for geographic routing. Based on mobility prediction, APU enables nodes to update their position adaptively to the node mobility and traffic pattern. We embed APU into the well known Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing Protocol (GPSR), and compare it with original GPSR in the ns-2 simulation platform. We conducted several experiments with randomly generated network topologies and mobility patterns. The results confirm that APU significantly reduces beacon overhead without having any noticeable impact on the data throughput of the network. This result is further validated through a trace driven simulation of a practical vehicular ad-hoc network topology that exhibits realistic movement patterns of public transport buses in a metropolitan city.

The extension of Internet services to public transport passengers is slowly becoming inevitable. Several architectures for providing Internet access to moving vehicles have been evaluated in the past. However, most of these studies have focused on using static gateways. In this paper, we study the feasibility of an architecture that involves deploying mobile gateways on a selected subset of public transport vehicles for providing Internet connectivity to the entire fleet. The vehicles organize as dynamic clusters and connect to the Internet by communicating with the gateways via multi-hop paths. We evaluate the underlying connectivity characteristics and the coverage achieved by employing an optimal gateway placement strategy. In our analysis, we use realistic movement patterns of public transport buses in a metropolitan city. We also propose a prediction based enhancement, which takes advantage of the known mobility patterns of the buses to improve the performance of the multi-hop routing protocols employed within each cluster.

A research topic that is becoming increasingly popular is that of on-board mobile communication, where users on a vehicle are connected to a local network that attaches to the Internet via a mobile router and a wireless link. However, wireless data transmission is less efficient, prone to error and unreliable in a mobile environment. There is a need to make use of multiple access links simultaneously (so-called multihoming), to improve the aggregate bandwidth and the overall service availability on a mobile network. In this paper, we introduce a novel on-board multihoming agent for supporting the future on-board multihomed mobile routers. The multihoming agent can intelligently stripe user traffics into multiple active WAN interfaces based on the policy in use and the real-time network status and automatically shift user traffics from unavailable links to available ones. We show that by properly deploying the policies defined in the policy database and continuously collecting network status, a user can run intelligent load distribution algorithms on top of the mobile router to improve network performance and reliability via our multihoming agent

Measuring the performance of an implementation of a set of protocols and analyzing the results is crucial to understanding the performance and limitations of the protocols in a real network environment. Based on this information, the protocols and their interactions can be improved to enhance the performance of the whole system. To this end, we have developed a network mobility testbed and implemented the network mobility (NEMO) basic support protocol and have identified problems in the architecture which affect the handoff and routing performance. To address the identified handoff performance issues, we have proposed the use of make-before-break handoffs with two network interfaces for NEMO. We have carried out a comparison study of handoffs with NEMO and have shown that the proposed scheme provides near-optimal performance. Further, we have extended a previously proposed route optimization (RO) scheme, OptiNets. We have compared the routing and header overheads using experiments and analysis and shown that the use of the extended OptiNets scheme reduces these overheads of NEMO to a level comparable with Mobile IPv6 RO. Finally, this paper shows that the proposed handoff and RO schemes enable NEMO protocol to be used in applications sensitive to delay and packet loss

The inherent difficulty in faithfully modeling wireless channel characteristics in simulators has prompted researchers to build wireless network testbeds for realistic testing of protocols. While previous testbeds are mostly designed to provide a research environment of static wireless networks, our work is aimed to assess protocols used for mobile wireless networks (such as an on-board network on public transport vehicles). In this work, we describe our on-going efforts in designing and implementing a network mobility testbed for network mobility (NEMO) protocol. This paper attempts to provide an initial reference to identify the feature set necessary for a network mobility testbed. We first describe the architecture of our testbed. Next, we present some preliminary results to demonstrate the use of our testbed in evaluating the performance of NEMO protocol under different scenarios.

Network models today are often derived from two different methods. On one hand, detailed traffic models are generated based on traces from a single tap into the network. Alternatively, one can collect higher-level traffic-matrix data with SNMP from many routers. However, inferring flow-level details from such data is still an open research issue. Today it is infeasible to collect a fine-grained, packet-level representation of a complete, multi-router network. Even if it were economically feasible to synchronize and monitor every router in a large network, the amount of data generated would tax storage and computation resources. In this work, we propose a methodology to infer flow-level traffic across a network by exploiting the correlations between user populations across different networks. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, based on traces of Web traffic collected from two different sources, we observe that the user-behavior parameters of the traffic (such as user "think" time in Web traffic) are correlated across time, while the application-specific parameters of the traffic (such as object size) are correlated across "similar" networks. Second, by utilizing the correlations between similar networks, we propose a methodology for inferring traffic at places where continuously taking measurements is infeasible. We evaluate the effectiveness of our methodology via simulation