International standards have proven invaluable in the technology sector for developing functional and reliable products for the global marketplace. Standards provide performance criteria that technical engineers can use to design products to optimize the reliability and safety of new products. For example, standards have played a decisive role in the development of products associated with the senses of vision, audition, and touch. The design of products that perform automated “visual” tasks including unmanned vehicles, autonomous robots, optical tracking systems, and highway traffic monitoring devices has relied heavily on standards as well as technical regulations. Likewise, standards related to the sense of hearing have played a major role in the development of devices and systems that assist or mimic “audition” including cochlear implants, hearing aids, and voice and speech recognition systems. Standards related to the sense of touch have been seminal in the design of robotic arms and prosthetic hands. Unlike the senses of vision, audition, and touch, there are, however, no formal standards for electronic devices called e-noses and e-tongues that are designed to detect and evaluate odors and tastes. The purpose of this opinion piece is to give a brief background on the senses of smell and taste, to describe why standards for e-noses and e-tongues are needed, and to call for IEEE volunteers to participate and collaborate on technical standards development to ensure that machine olfaction and taste provide reliable and reproducible results that are comparable to human smell and taste.

In this paper, two versions of fabric-based active electrodes are presented to provide a wearable solution for ECG monitoring clothing. The first version of active electrode involved direct attachment of surface-mountable components to a textile screen-printed circuit using polymer thick film techniques. The second version involved attaching a much smaller, thinner, and less obtrusive interposer containing the active electrode circuitry to a simplified textile circuit. These designs explored techniques for electronic textile interconnection, chip attachment to textiles, and packaging of circuits on textiles for durability. The results from ECG tests indicate that the performance of each active electrode is comparable to commercial Ag/AgCl electrodes. The interposer-based active electrodes survived a five-cycle washing test while maintaining good signal integrity.

One of major issues on oriental medicine is to clarify effects and substances of a vital energy called as 'Qi(Ki) '. 'Qi(Ki) ' is a flow of the vital energy which is channeled via Kyung-rak in the structure of the human body. The oriental medicine says that when the flow of the vital energy is blocked, a health is lost. The oriental medicine recovers the health by controlling the flow of the vital energy with acupuncture. Spots responded to a disease is the Kyung-hyul on the Kyung-rak. The Kyung-rak is a meridian of a medical treatment by acupuncture. This study is intended to measure changes of the flow of the vital energy in connection with changes of current capacity through measuring the current change of the Kyung-hyul by impressing DC voltage. The change of the vital energy flow was indirectly expressed by measuring the changes of the body current on the physical change of the body before and after the meal among physical environmental changes. For it, an experiment was conducted for the above physical changes. As the result of the study, healthy persons showed a regular change of the body current pattern before and after the meal. On the other hand, the pattern of unhealthy persons current changes was very different from the pattern of health person's current changes.

The performance of a pattern recognition system is dependent on, among other things, an appropriate data-preprocessing technique, In this paper, we describe a method to evaluate the performance of a variety of these techniques for the problem of odour classification using an array of gas sensors, also referred to as an electronic nose. Four experimental odour databases with different complexities are used to score the data-preprocessing techniques. The performance measure used is the cross-validation estimate of the classification rate of a K nearest neighbor voting rule operating on Fisher's linear discriminant projection subspace.

This paper presents, in a tutorial fashion, a test technique that employs the transient power supply current, i/sub DDT/, as a window of observability into the switching behaviour of an integrated circuit. The premise is that when a circuit switches states, a temporary path is established between power and ground which results in a transient current. With proper power tree distribution, observing this transient current provides direct insight into the switching pattern of a circuit under a given stimulus. This paper includes an overall summary of physical experiments that have been conducted (previously reported in parts) as well as new results on the test overhead. The physical experimental results show i/sub DDT/ to be effective in detecting disturb faults in SRAMs and drain/ source opens in general CMOS logic structures.

Methods are presented for the detection and analysis of heart period variation (HPV) in both the time domain and the frequency domain. Fractal analysis and rate-change detection procedures are used for the recognition of transients in the HPV random variable. The power spectra of HPV are used to quantify relative autonomic input to the heart, with power at high frequencies (sinus arrhythmia) sensitive to parasympathetic input and low frequency power due to a combination of sympathetic and parasympathetic activities. Spectral analysis of HPV is used to study the dynamic activity of the autonomic nervous system, under conditions observed clinically which are considered to be risk factors for sudden death in epileptics. Results and conclusions from a study of a population of epilepsy patients are also presented.>

A fault-tolerant system architecture for medical applications in which the processors and software interactions are treated in a unified manner is proposed. An overview of the requirements of such a system, which includes fully testable processors that are self-checking and which can execute multiversion software in parallel, is provided. The system will facilitate the interactions and provide for performance and fault monitoring, adjudication of outputs, and dynamic system reconfiguration. An implementation plan for the processor is presented.>

During the 1960's, with the introduction of digital computers, we have witnessed an intensive activity in discrete-data control systems [1]-[9]. With the recent invention of the “ubiquitous” microprocessors, there is a renewed interest in digital control systems [10]-[15]. The present book by Phillips and Nagle is one of such recent books.

Sign/logarithm arithmetic is applicable to a variety of numerical applications where wide dynamic range and small wordsize are required. In this paper the basic sign/logarithm arithmetic operations required for signal processing (i.e., addition, subtraction, and multiplication) are reviewed, the computational errors are analyzed for FFT realization, and simulation results are presented which serve to verify the analysis. It is shown that the sign/logarithm approach provides improved arithmetic quantization error performance for a given word size over FFT's implemented with conventional fixed or floating point arithmetic, and that the sign/logarithm implementation is faster and less complex than conventional approaches.

This paper describes a general-purpose digital-signal processor which is constructed with 4 bit bipolar microprocessor slices. The signal processor is microprogrammable and contains special features which allow it to employ distributed arithmetic. Hence, the processor can achieve high sampling rates without using a hardware multiplier unit. The processor's architecture is presented and its micro-order structure is examined. The processor wordlength is 16 bit; its basic cycle time, 300 ns; its data memory size, 2K words; its control store size, 256 × 56 bits. It consumes 48 W of power and has special address processing hardware. Experimental results with a twelfth-order digital filter are demonstrated. The signal processor is also compared with several other signal processors of its class described in the literature.

A family of multiple-valued (MV) electronic memory elements, referred to herein as flip-flops, is presented along with a system of MV algebra upon which they are based. These MV flip-flops are compared to binary flip-flops. MV asynchronous set-clear flip-flops and synchronous set-clear, D-type, JK, and modulo N counter flip-flops are presented, their next-state equations are derived, and they are shown to have desirable properties for use in MV sequential circuits. Experimental results and schematic diagrams are presented for a level restoring three-valued logic gate, the clocked set-clear flip-flop, and an example synchronous sequential circuit.