Laser acupuncture has long been regarded as an effective and minimally intrusive practice for regulating body dysfunctions. However, there are critical gaps, notably unwearable devices and difficulty in acupoint localization without professional guidance, that impede the ability to introduce laser acupuncture therapy pervasively into telemedicine scenarios. This paper proposed a prototype wearable cyber-physical system for auricular laser acupuncture therapy that enables realtime, quantitative evaluation of treatment effectiveness. This paper also presents background research on laser acupuncture and a literature review of the most commonly used laser parameters for laser acupuncture. IoT sensors are also utilized for the real-time monitoring of physiological signals and feedback control during the telemedicine process of laser acupuncture therapy. The objective data collected by sensors along with subjective survey data are critical to assess the treatment effectiveness and provide crucial insights for personalizing the most effective laser parameters. The proposed wearable system has the potential to overcome gaps in current laser acupuncture practice and improve the customization of effective therapy in telemedicine settings.

In Internet of Things (IoT), the freshness of status updates is crucial for mission-critical applications. In this regard, it is suggested to quantify the freshness of updates by using Age of Information (AoI) from the receiver’s perspective. Specifically, the AoI measures the freshness over time. However, the freshness in the content is neglected. In this paper, we introduce an age-based utility, named asAge of Changed Information(AoCI), which captures both the passage of time and the change of information content. By modeling the underlying physical process as a discrete time Markov chain, we investigate the AoCI in a time-slotted status update system, where a sensor samples the physical process and transmits the update packets to the destination. With the aim of minimizing the weighted sum of the AoCI and the update cost, we formulate an infinite horizon average cost Markov Decision Process. We show that the optimal updating policy has a special structure with respect to the AoCI and identify the condition under which the special structure exists. By exploiting the special structure, we provide a low complexity relative policy iteration algorithm that finds the optimal updating policy. We further investigate the optimal policy for two special cases. In the first case where the state of the physical process transits with equiprobability, we show that optimal policy is of threshold type and derive the closed-form of the optimal threshold. We then study a more generalized periodic Markov model of the physical process in the second case. Lastly, simulation results are laid out to exhibit the performance of the optimal updating policy and its superiority over the zero-wait baseline policy.

The freshness of status updates is imperative in mission-critical Internet of things (IoT) applications. Recently, Age of Information (AoI) has been proposed to measure the freshness of updates at the receiver. However, AoI only characterizes the freshness over time, but ignores the freshness in the content. In this paper, we introduce a new performance metric, Age of Changed Information (AoCI), which captures both the passage of time and the change of information content. Also, we examine the AoCI in a time-slotted status update system, where a sensor samples the physical process and transmits the update packets with a cost. We formulate a Markov Decision Process (MDP) to find the optimal updating policy that minimizes the weighted sum of the AoCI and the update cost. Particularly, in a special case that the physical process is modeled by a two-state discrete time Markov chain with equal transition probability, we show that the optimal policy is of threshold type with respect to the AoCI and derive the closed-form of the threshold. Finally, simulations are conducted to exhibit the performance of the threshold policy and its superiority over the zero-wait baseline policy.