• Title/Summary/Keyword: Hand-held devices

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Wearable Computers

  • Cho, Gil-Soo;Barfield, Woodrow;Baird, Kevin
    • Fiber Technology and Industry
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    • v.2 no.4
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    • pp.490-508
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    • 1998
  • One of the latest fields of research in the area of output devices is tactual display devices [13,31]. These tactual or haptic devices allow the user to receive haptic feedback output from a variety of sources. This allows the user to actually feel virtual objects and manipulate them by touch. This is an emerging technology and will be instrumental in enhancing the realism of wearable augmented environments for certain applications. Tactual displays have previously been used for scientific visualization in virtual environments by chemists and engineers to improve perception and understanding of force fields and of world models populated with the impenetrable. In addition to tactual displays, the use of wearable audio displays that allow sound to be spatialized are being developed. With wearable computers, designers will soon be able to pair spatialized sound to virtual representations of objects when appropriate to make the wearable computer experience even more realistic to the user. Furthermore, as the number and complexity of wearable computing applications continues to grow, there will be increasing needs for systems that are faster, lighter, and have higher resolution displays. Better networking technology will also need to be developed to allow all users of wearable computers to have high bandwidth connections for real time information gathering and collaboration. In addition to the technology advances that make users need to wear computers in everyday life, there is also the desire to have users want to wear their computers. In order to do this, wearable computing needs to be unobtrusive and socially acceptable. By making wearables smaller and lighter, or actually embedding them in clothing, users can conceal them easily and wear them comfortably. The military is currently working on the development of the Personal Information Carrier (PIC) or digital dog tag. The PIC is a small electronic storage device containing medical information about the wearer. While old military dog tags contained only 5 lines of information, the digital tags may contain volumes of multi-media information including medical history, X-rays, and cardiograms. Using hand held devices in the field, medics would be able to call this information up in real time for better treatment. A fully functional transmittable device is still years off, but this technology once developed in the military, could be adapted tp civilian users and provide ant information, medical or otherwise, in a portable, not obstructive, and fashionable way. Another future device that could increase safety and well being of its users is the nose on-a-chip developed by the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. This tiny digital silicon chip about the size of a dime, is capable of 'smelling' natural gas leaks in stoves, heaters, and other appliances. It can also detect dangerous levels of carbon monoxide. This device can also be configured to notify the fire department when a leak is detected. This nose chip should be commercially available within 2 years, and is inexpensive, requires low power, and is very sensitive. Along with gas detection capabilities, this device may someday also be configured to detect smoke and other harmful gases. By embedding this chip into workers uniforms, name tags, etc., this could be a lifesaving computational accessory. In addition to the future safety technology soon to be available as accessories are devices that are for entertainment and security. The LCI computer group is developing a Smartpen, that electronically verifies a user's signature. With the increase in credit card use and the rise in forgeries, is the need for commercial industries to constantly verify signatures. This Smartpen writes like a normal pen but uses sensors to detect the motion of the pen as the user signs their name to authenticate the signature. This computational accessory should be available in 1999, and would bring increased peace of mind to consumers and vendors alike. In the entertainment domain, Panasonic is creating the first portable hand-held DVD player. This device weight less than 3 pounds and has a screen about 6' across. The color LCD has the same 16:9 aspect ratio of a cinema screen and supports a high resolution of 280,000 pixels and stereo sound. The player can play standard DVD movies and has a hour battery life for mobile use. To summarize, in this paper we presented concepts related to the design and use of wearable computers with extensions to smart spaces. For some time, researchers in telerobotics have used computer graphics to enhance remote scenes. Recent advances in augmented reality displays make it possible to enhance the user's local environment with 'information'. As shown in this paper, there are many application areas for this technology such as medicine, manufacturing, training, and recreation. Wearable computers allow a much closer association of information with the user. By embedding sensors in the wearable to allow it to see what the user sees, hear what the user hears, sense the user's physical state, and analyze what the user is typing, an intelligent agent may be able to analyze what the user is doing and try to predict the resources he will need next or in the near future. Using this information, the agent may download files, reserve communications bandwidth, post reminders, or automatically send updates to colleagues to help facilitate the user's daily interactions. This intelligent wearable computer would be able to act as a personal assistant, who is always around, knows the user's personal preferences and tastes, and tries to streamline interactions with the rest of the world.

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High Performance RF Passive Integration on a Si Smart Substrate for Wireless Applications

  • Kim, Dong-Wook;Jeong, In-Ho;Lee, Jung-Soo;Kwon, Young-Se
    • ETRI Journal
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    • v.25 no.2
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    • pp.65-72
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    • 2003
  • To achieve cost and size reductions, we developed a low cost manufacturing technology for RF substrates and a high performance passive process technology for RF integrated passive devices (IPDs). The fabricated substrate is a conventional 6" Si wafer with a 25${\mu}m$ thick $SiO_2$ surface. This substrate showed a very good insertion loss of 0.03 dB/mm at 4 GHz, including the conductive metal loss, with a 50 ${\Omega}$ coplanar transmission line (W=50${\mu}m$, G=20${\mu}m$). Using benzo cyclo butene (BCB) interlayers and a 10 ${\mu}m$ Cu plating process, we made high Q rectangular and circular spiral inductors on Si that had record maximum quality factors of more than 100. The fabricated inductor library showed a maximum quality factor range of 30-120, depending on geometrical parameters and inductance values of 0.35-35 nH. We also fabricated small RF IPDs on a thick oxide Si substrate for use in handheld phone applications, such as antenna switch modules or front end modules, and high-speed wireless LAN applications. The chip sizes of the wafer-level-packaged RF IPDs and wire-bondable RF IPDs were 1.0-1.5$mm^2$ and 0.8-1.0$mm^2$, respectively. They showed very good insertion loss and RF performances. These substrate and passive process technologies will be widely utilized in hand-held RF modules and systems requiring low cost solutions and strict volumetric efficiencies.

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Automatic RF Input Power Level Control Methodology for SAR Measurement Validation

  • Kim, Ki-Hwea;Choi, Dong-Geun;Gimm, Yoon-Myoung
    • Journal of electromagnetic engineering and science
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    • v.15 no.3
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    • pp.181-184
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    • 2015
  • Evaluation of radiating radiofrequency fields from hand-held and body-mounted wireless communication devices to human bodies are conducted by measuring the specific absorption rate (SAR). The uncertainty of system validation and probe calibration in SAR measurement depend on the variation of RF power used for the validation and calibration. RF input power for system validation or probe calibration is controlled manually during the test process of the existing systems in the laboratories. Consequently, a long time is required to reach the stable power needed for testing that will cause less uncertainty. The standard uncertainty due to this power drift is typically 2.89%, which can be obtained by applying IEC 62209 in a normal operating condition. The principle of the Automatic Input Power Level Control System (AIPLC), which controls the equipment by a program that maintains a stable input power level, is suggested in this paper. The power drift is reduced to less than ${\pm}1.16dB$ by AIPLC, which reduces the standard uncertainty of power drift to 0.67%.

Recent Developments in Metal Oxide Gas Sensors for Breath Analysis (산화물 반도체를 이용한 최신 호기센서 기술 동향)

  • Yoon, Ji-Wook;Lee, Jong-Heun
    • Ceramist
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    • v.22 no.1
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    • pp.70-81
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    • 2019
  • Breath analysis is rapidly evolving as a non-invasive disease recognition and diagnosis method. Metal oxide gas sensors are one of the most ideal platforms for realizing portable, hand-held breath analysis devices in the near future. This paper reviewed the recent developments in metal oxide gas sensors detecting exhaled biomarker gases such as nitric oxides, acetone, ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and hydrocarbons. Emphasis was placed on strategies to tailor sensing materials/films capable of highly selective and sensitive detection of biomarker gases with negligible cross-response to ethanol, the major interfering breath gas. Specific examples were given to highlight the validity of the strategies, which include optimization of sensing temperature, doping additives, utilizing acid-base interaction, loading catalysts, and controlling gas reforming reaction. In addition, we briefly discussed the design and optimization method of gas sensor arrays for implementing the simultaneous assessment of multiple diseases. Breath analysis using high-performance metal oxide gas sensors/arrays will open new roads for point-of-care diagnosis of diseases such as asthma, diabetes, kidney dysfunction, halitosis, and lung cancer.

Transceiver for Human Body Communication Using Frequency Selective Digital Transmission

  • Hyoung, Chang-Hee;Kang, Sung-Weon;Park, Seong-Ook;Kim, Youn-Tae
    • ETRI Journal
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    • v.34 no.2
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    • pp.216-225
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    • 2012
  • This paper presents a transceiver module for human body communications whereby a spread signal with a group of 64 Walsh codes is directly transferred through a human body at a chip rate of 32 Mcps. Frequency selective digital transmission moves the signal spectrum over 5 MHz without continuous frequency modulation and increases the immunity to induced interference by the processing gain. A simple receiver structure with no additional analog circuitry for the transmitter has been developed and has a sensitivity of 250 ${\mu}V_{pp}$. The high sensitivity of the receiver makes it possible to communicate between mobile devices using a human body as the transmission medium. It enables half-duplex communication of 2 Mbps within an operating range of up to 170 cm between the ultra-mobile PCs held between fingertips of each hand with a packet error rate of lower than $10^{-6}$. The transceiver module consumes 59 mA with a 3.3 V power supply.

The Natural Way of Gestures for Interacting with Smart TV

  • Choi, Jin-Hae;Hong, Ji-Young
    • Journal of the Ergonomics Society of Korea
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    • v.31 no.4
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    • pp.567-575
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    • 2012
  • Objective: The aim of this study is to get an optimal mental model by investigating user's natural behavior for controlling smart TV by mid-air gestures and to identify which factor is most important for controlling behavior. Background: A lot of TV companies are trying to find simple controlling method for complex smart TV. Although plenty of gesture studies proposing they could get possible alternatives to resolve this pain-point, however, there is no fitted gesture work for smart TV market. So it is needed to find optimal gestures for it. Method: (1) Eliciting core control scene by in-house study. (2) Observe and analyse 20 users' natural behavior as types of hand-held devices and control scene. We also made taxonomies for gestures. Results: Users' are trying to do more manipulative gestures than symbolic gestures when they try to continuous control. Conclusion: The most natural way to control smart TV on the remote with gestures is give user a mental model grabbing and manipulating virtual objects in the mid-air. Application: The results of this work might help to make gesture interaction guidelines for smart TV.

Performance Evaluation of Fixed-Grid File Index on NAND Flash Memory (NAND 플래쉬메모리에서 고정그리드화일 색인의 성능 평가)

  • Kim, Dong-Hyun
    • The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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    • v.10 no.2
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    • pp.275-282
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    • 2015
  • Since a NAND-flash memory is able to keep data during electricity-off and has small cost to store data per bytes, it is widely used on hand-held devices. It is necessary to use an index in order to process mass data effectively on the flash memory. However, since the flash memory requires high cost for a write operation and does not support an overwrite operation, it is possible to reduce the performance of the index when the disk based index is exploited. In this paper, we implement the fixed grid file index and evaluate the performance of the index on various conditions. To do this, we measure the average processing time by the ratio of query operations and update operations. We also the compare the processing times of the flash memory with those of the magnetic disk.

A Survey of the Index Schemes based on Flash Memory (NAND 플래쉬메모리 기반 색인에 관한 연구)

  • Kim, Dong-Hyun;Ban, Chae-Hoon
    • The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
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    • v.8 no.10
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    • pp.1529-1534
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    • 2013
  • Since a NAND-flash memory is able to store mass data in a small sized chip and consumes low power, it is exploited on various hand-held devices, such as a smart phone and a sensor node, etc. To process efficiently mass data stored in the flash memory, it is required to use an index. However, since the write operation of the flash memory is slower than the read operation and an overwrite operation is not supported, the usage of existing index schemes degrades the performance of the index. In this paper, we survey the previous researches of index schemes for the flash memory and classify the researches by the methods to solve problems. We also present the performance factor to be considered when we design the index scheme on the flash memory.

A Study on High Speed Transmission System of Medical Information Based on PXA255 (PXA255기반 의료정보 고속 전송 시스템에 관한 연구)

  • Han Young-Jae;Yu Ho-Jun;Kim Young-Kil
    • Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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    • 2006.05a
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    • pp.386-389
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    • 2006
  • At ubiquitous environment of the future, the platform that is mobile and suitable in such environment transmit and receive many data freely. In medical treatment field, medical device with advancement of the sensor and multimedia technique will develop as the household and hand-held device. So It will be developed as the health care device easily exchanging data to other devices and transmitting information of medical device to server. In this paper, currently the mobile platform based on the PXA255 such as a powerful microprocessor which connected the WLAN for guaranteeing a mobility and a speed transmits medical information to hospital server. It put an importance in providing the system for an efficient service.

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Development of a portable system for monitoring indoor particulate matter concentration (휴대용 실내 미세먼지 농도 측정 장치 개발)

  • Kim, Yoo Jin;Choi, Hyun Seul;Go, Taesik
    • Journal of the Korean Society of Visualization
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    • v.20 no.1
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    • pp.45-51
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    • 2022
  • Airborne particulate matter(PM) has been a global environmental problem. PM whose diameter is smaller than 10 ㎛ can permeate respiratory organs and has harmful effects on human health. Therefore, PM monitoring systems are necessary for management of PM and prevention of PM-induced negative effects. Conventional PM monitoring techniques are expensive and cumbersome to handle. In the present study, two types of PM monitoring devices were designed for measuring indoor PM concentration, portably. We experimentally investigated the performance of three commercial PM concentration measurement sensors in a closed test chamber. As a result, PM2008 sensor showed the best PM concentration measurement accuracy. Linear regression method was applied to convert PM concentration value acquired from PM2008 sensor into ground truth value. A mobile application(app.) was also created for users to check the PM concentration, easily. The mobile app. also provides safety alarm when the PM10 concentration exceeds 81 ㎛/m3. The developed hand-held system enables the facile monitoring of surrounding air quality.