Arm Devices Research Articles

Comparison between Digital Blood Pressure Monitors for Home Use (Wrist) and (Arm) with a Mercury Sphygmomanometer

Blood pressure disease (BP) is one of the major public health problems around the world. There are many digital BP devices used at home. Doubts are usually raised about these devices. This study aimed to compare home (wrist) and (arm) digital blood pressure monitors with a mercury sphygmomanometer. This study was conducted at the University of Tabuk, comparing a digital BP meter (arm) and (wrist) with a properly calibrated mercury BP. A total of 100 randomly selected students aged 18 to 39 years were enrolled. Two blood pressure measurements for each person were recorded by all devices, and the values were recorded taking into account the environment of a person. The data were entered into MS Excel and analysis was done by using Social Sciences version 23.0. The normality of data was performed by the Shapiro-Wilk test and it was normally distributed. The mean and standard deviation were calculated for quantitative variables, while frequencies and percentages were provided for qualitative variables. Paired sample t-test was used to compare the mean values of systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP). Digital arm devices had sensitivity and specificity of 62.5% and 63%, respectively, compared to digital wrist devices, which had sensitivity and specificity of 75% and 56%, respectively. The readings of the digital blood pressure monitors were comparable to the readings of the mercury blood pressure monitor. Both devices could be considered indispensable tools for detecting hypertension at home and thus useful for early diagnosis.

Armed with Faster Crypto: Optimizing Elliptic Curve Cryptography for ARM Processors

Elliptic curve cryptography is a widely deployed technology for securing digital communication. It is the basis of many cryptographic primitives such as key agreement protocols, digital signatures, and zero-knowledge proofs. Fast elliptic curve cryptography relies on heavily optimised modular arithmetic operations, which are often tailored to specific micro-architectures. In this article, we study and evaluate optimisations of the popular elliptic curve Curve25519 for ARM processors. We specifically target the ARM NEON single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) architecture, which is a popular architecture for modern smartphones. We introduce a novel representation for 128-bit NEON SIMD vectors, optimised for SIMD parallelisation, to accelerate elliptic curve operations significantly. Leveraging this representation, we implement an extended twisted Edwards curve Curve25519 back-end within the popular Rust library “curve25519-dalek”. We extensively evaluate our implementation across multiple ARM devices using both cryptographic benchmarks and the benchmark suite available for the Signal protocol. Our findings demonstrate a substantial back-end speed-up of at least 20% for ARM NEON, along with a noteworthy speed improvement of at least 15% for benchmarked Signal functions.

Five-day evaluation of the acceptability and comfort of wearable technology at four anatomical locations during military training

IntroductionWearable sensor technologies enable Defence to optimise human performance, remotely identify physiological abnormalities and enhance medical support. Maximising the acceptability of devices will ensure they are worn alongside other equipment....

A Lightweight Network Deployed on ARM Devices for Hand Gesture Recognition

Hand gestures are a well-known and straightforward method of human-computer interaction. The majority of the study focused on hand gesture recognition. However, little work has been done to develop a complete set of gesture recognition applications. With the improvement of model feature extraction ability and the increase in the number of model parameters, it is becoming more challenging to achieve a small memory footprint on mobile devices based on an ARM architecture or CPU devices based on x86 architecture. However, these existing methods are heavy, requiring more memory and inference time. The execution of memory-efficient CNNs without compromising accuracy has been a challenge, especially when the inference has to be performed on an edge computing device in real time. Therefore, we propose a lightweight network for hand gesture recognition (LHGR-Net) and deploy it on a Raspberry Pi. LHGR-Net consists of three main parts: the base network structure, the multiscale structure (MSS), and the lightweight attention structure (LAS). We present pre-trained weights that are learned from other data to initialize the network structure. In addition, the LHGR-Net model was made to be deployed on a Raspberry Pi, and a deployed model can be used to control home appliances. Extensive experiments show that our method achieves almost as good as state-of-the-art performance in hand gesture recognition and running time.

Remote self-collection of capillary blood using upper arm devices for autoantibody analysis in patients with immune-mediated inflammatory rheumatic diseases

ObjectivesTo evaluate the feasibility, accuracy, usability and acceptability of two upper arm self-sampling devices for measurement of autoantibodies and C reactive protein (CRP) levels in patients with immune-mediated rheumatic diseases...

Choice of home blood pressure monitoring device: the role of device characteristics among Alaska Native and American Indian peoples

BackgroundHome blood pressure monitoring (HBPM) is an effective tool in treatment and long-term management of hypertension. HBPM incorporates more data points to help patients and providers with diagnosis and management. The characteristics of HBPM devices matter to patients, but the relative importance of the characteristics in choosing a device remains unclear.MethodsWe used data from a randomized cross-over pilot study with 100 Alaska Native and American Indian (ANAI) people with hypertension to assess the choice of a wrist or arm HBPM device. We use a random utility framework to evaluate the relationship between stated likely use, perceived accuracy, ease of use, comfort, and participant characteristics with choice of device. Additional analyses examined willingness to change to a more accurate device.ResultsParticipants ranked the wrist device higher compared to the arm on a 5-point Likert scale for likely use, ease of use, and comfort (0.3, 0.5, 0.8 percentage points, respectively). Most participants (66%) choose the wrist device. Likely use (wrist and arm devices) was related to the probability of choosing the wrist (0.7 and − 1.4 percentage points, respectively). Independent of characteristics, 75% of participants would be willing to use the more accurate device. Ease of use (wrist device) and comfort (arm device) were associated with the probability of changing to a more accurate device (− 1.1 and 0.5 percentage points, respectively).ConclusionUsability, including comfort, ease, and likely use, appeared to discount the relative importance of perceived accuracy in the device choice. Our results contribute evidence that ANAI populations value accurate HBPM, but that the devices should also be easy to use and comfortable to facilitate long-term management.

Complications Associated With Totally Implanted Venous Access Devices in the Arm Versus the Chest: A Short-Term Retrospective Study.

To retrospectively compare complications for totally implanted venous access devices (TIVADs or ports) in the arm vs. the chest. One participating institution implanted all TIVADs in the arm, whereas the other institution implanted them in the chest. Subjects were consecutive patients > 18 years with a device inserted between July 2017 and January 2019 at either Hospital A, where all devices were implanted in the arm, or at Hospital B, where all devices were implanted in the chest. Complications (rates/1,000 catheter-days and frequencies) were compared between the arm and chest locations. 201 arm devices (71% female, mean age 59.4 years) and 203 chest devices (66% female, mean age 61.5 years) were assessed. Overall complication rates did not differ between the arm and chest [arm: 30 complications per 56,938 catheter-days (0.530/1,000 catheter-days) vs. chest: 47 complications per 63,324 catheter-days (0.742/1,000 catheter-days), p-value 0.173]. Periprocedural complications and mechanical malfunction also did not differ. Although prophylactic antibiotic use was higher in the chest (79.3% vs. 1.50%, p-value < 0.0001), infection rates did not differ. Arm venous thrombosis was significantly higher in the arm cohort (0.205 vs. 0.017/1,000 catheter-days, p-value 0.003) and pulmonary thromboembolism in the chest cohort (0.269 vs 0.056/1,000 catheter-days, p-value 0.002). While arm venous thrombosis was higher in the arm and pulmonary thromboembolism in the chest cohort, other complications were similar. Antibiotic use was more frequent in the chest cohort, while infection rates remained similar in both cohorts.

Monitoring of Treatment for Arterial Hypertension–The Role of Office, Home, and 24 h Ambulatory Blood Pressure Measurement.

The treatment of arterial hypertension can be monitored by office blood pressure (office BP), home blood pressure (home BP), or 24 hours ambulatory blood pressure (ABPM). In this review, we present current recommendations from Germany and from international guidelines as well as the findings of the main studies on the use of these methods to guide treatment. This review is based on pertinent publications retrieved by a selective search in PubMed up to and including March 2020. Special attention was paid to guidelines and position papers. The guidelines offer heterogeneous recommendations for treatment monitoring. Home BP is the most reproducible method, with test-retest correlation coefficients of 0.91/0.86 (systolic/diastolic), in comparison to office BP (0.77/0.76). Two meta-analyses revealed better blood pressure control with home measurement than with usual care (systolic, -3.2 to -8.9 mmHg). A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials also suggests that home measurement promotes adherence. In the randomized and controlled TASMINH4 trial, the home BP group with telemetric surveillance achieved better blood pressure control than the group with treatment titration based on office BP (systolic -4.7 [CI: -7; -2.4] mmHg, diastolic -1.3 [-2.5; 0.02] mmHg). With ABPM, patients frequently reported moderate to severe discomfort, limiting its practical applicability. Blood pressure measurement at home is recommended for treatment monitoring, using validated, automatic upper arm devices with data storage and trend analysis. Changes of treatment should be based on average values (28 home measurements) from seven days (two morning and two evening measurements per day). Office BP is mainly used for for screening purposes. There have not yet been any randomized trials comparing the three measuring methods in terms of hard cardiovascular endpoints.

ReS2tAC-UAV-Borne Real-Time SGM Stereo Optimized for Embedded ARM and CUDA Devices.

With the emergence of low-cost robotic systems, such as unmanned aerial vehicle, the importance of embedded high-performance image processing has increased. For a long time, FPGAs were the only processing hardware that were capable of high-performance computing, while at the same time preserving a low power consumption, essential for embedded systems. However, the recently increasing availability of embedded GPU-based systems, such as the NVIDIA Jetson series, comprised of an ARM CPU and a NVIDIA Tegra GPU, allows for massively parallel embedded computing on graphics hardware. With this in mind, we propose an approach for real-time embedded stereo processing on ARM and CUDA-enabled devices, which is based on the popular and widely used Semi-Global Matching algorithm. In this, we propose an optimization of the algorithm for embedded CUDA GPUs, by using massively parallel computing, as well as using the NEON intrinsics to optimize the algorithm for vectorized SIMD processing on embedded ARM CPUs. We have evaluated our approach with different configurations on two public stereo benchmark datasets to demonstrate that they can reach an error rate as low as 3.3%. Furthermore, our experiments show that the fastest configuration of our approach reaches up to 46 FPS on VGA image resolution. Finally, in a use-case specific qualitative evaluation, we have evaluated the power consumption of our approach and deployed it on the DJI Manifold 2-G attached to a DJI Matrix 210v2 RTK unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), demonstrating its suitability for real-time stereo processing onboard a UAV.

Smartphone application-supported validation of three automatic devices for self-measurement of blood pressure according to the European Society of Hypertension International Protocol revision 2010: the Omron HEM-7120, Yuwell YE680A and Cofoe KF-65B.

BackgroundAccurate measurement of blood pressure (BP) is crucial to hypertension control and prevention of future stroke and heart attack. All BP measuring devices must be validated independently in the clinical setting.ObjectiveTo validate the accuracy of three automatic upper arm devices (Omron HEM-7120, Yuwell YE680A and Cofoe KF-65B) for self-measurement of BP in Chinese adults with arm size of 22–32 cm.MethodsThe validation was conducted independently for each of the three devices according to the European Society of Hypertension International Protocol revision 2010 (ESH-IP revision 2010), with the facilitation of a designated smartphone application. Subjects were recruited from those attending Beijing Anzhen Hospital for routine physical examination and clinic visits. For each device, BP was measured sequentially in 33 adults using a mercury sphygmomanometer (two observers) and the test device (one supervisor) with seven measurements alternating between observers and the device, which generated a total of 99 before/after paired values for SBP and DBP separately. The judgments were made based on the distribution of the paired difference among the 99 measurements (Part 1) and among the 33 subjects (Part 2). To pass, a device must achieve all the minimum Pass requirements in Part 1 and Part 2 for both SBP and DBP (Part 3).ResultsOnly HEM-7120 achieved the part 1 and part 2 targets for both SBP and DBP. KF-65B achieved the DBP targets of part 1 and part 2 but failed for SBP. YE680A only achieved the DBP targets of part 2 but failed for all others. The findings also indicated that the devices had higher SBP readings (1.3 mmHg, 1.0 mmHg and 4.1 mmHg higher for HEM-7120, YE680A and KF-65B, respectively) and lower DBP readings (2.0 mmHg, 1.1 mmHg and 3.3 mmHg lower, respectively) when compared to the mercury sphygmomanometer.ConclusionsThe Omron HEM-7120 passed the requirements of the ESH-IP 2010 revision, while the Yuwell YE680A and Cofoe KF-65B failed (part 3).

Evaluation of Cache Attacks on Arm Processors and Secure Caches

Timing-based side and covert channels in processor caches continue to be a threat to modern computers. This work shows for the first time, a systematic, large-scale analysis of Arm devices and the detailed results of attacks the processors are vulnerable to. Compared to x86, Arm uses different architectures, microarchitectural implementations, cache replacement policies, etc., which affects how attacks can be launched, and how security testing for the vulnerabilities should be done. To evaluate security, this paper presents security benchmarks specifically developed for testing Arm processors and their caches. The benchmarks are evaluated with sensitivity tests, which examine how sensitive the benchmarks are to having a correct configuration in the testing phase. Further, to evaluate a large number of devices, this work leverages a novel approach of using a cloud-based Arm device testbed for architectural and security research on timing channels and runs the benchmarks on 34 different physical devices. In parallel, there has been much interest in secure caches to defend the various attacks. Consequently, this paper also investigates secure cache architectures using proposed benchmarks. Especially, this paper implements and evaluates secure PL and RF caches, showing the security of PL and RF caches, but also uncovers new weaknesses.

Privacy-Enhancing Group Signcryption Scheme

In the last decades, several signcryption schemes have been developed for different privacy-enhancing purposes. In this paper, we propose a new privacy-enhancing group signcryption scheme that provides: unforgeability, confidentiality, ciphertext and sender anonymity, traceability, unlinkability, exculpability, coalition-resistance, and unforgeable tracing verification. It is important to notice that the proposed scheme allows a signer to anonymously signcrypt a message on the group’s behalf (i.e., sender’s anonymity). The security analysis of the scheme is also provided. Our proposal is proven to be strongly existentially unforgeable under an adaptive chosen message attack, indistinguishable under an adaptive chosen ciphertext attack, and to provide ciphertext anonymity under an adaptive chosen ciphertext attack. Furthermore, the scheme is extended to work in a multi-receiver scenario, where an authorized group of receivers is able to unsigncrypt the ciphertext. The experimental results show that our scheme is efficient even on computationally restricted devices and can be therefore used in many IoT applications. The Signcrypt protocol on smart cards takes less than 1 s (including communication overhead). The time of the Unsigncrypt protocol on current ARM devices is negligible (less than 40 ms).

OPCIO

Battery lifetime is one of the main challenges that impedes the deployment of energy-constrained wireless networks, such as unattended Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems. To prolong battery lifetime, the duty-cycle mode is utilized in many IoT systems, especially in environment monitoring Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) and Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN). In duty-cycle mode, devices transmit packets during the active phase, which lasts for a short time, and sleeps the rest of the time. Prior research mainly focuses on energy efficiency in the active phase; energy consumption during the sleep phase, however, is always ignored, as it is assumed to have little margin to be optimized. In this work, we reveal that sleep phase can become a significant battery consumer due to the misconfiguration of General-Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) pins of micro-controllers. We propose OPCIO, which incorporates a genetic algorithm to obtain energy-efficient GPIO configurations automatically to squeeze the energy waste during the sleep phase. We prototype OPCIO on off-the-shelf devices and evaluate it on two ARM devices. Experiment results show that OPCIO can effectively find multiple low-power configurations that prolong the lifespans up to 10×.

Rospix: modular software tool for automated data acquisitions of Timepix detectors on Robot Operating System

We present software for interfacing FITPix and USB Lite compatible readout electronics using Robot Operating System (ROS). ROS is widely adopted middleware for integration of sensors, processing algorithms and logic to autonomous systems such as robots, unmanned helicopters, and robotic payloads. Thanks to ROS, Timepix detectors can be deployed in automated experiments on platforms spanning from traditional desktop computers to small ARM devices such as Raspberry Pi and Odroid. Acquisition and detector settings can be controlled in Linux shell allowing deployment on headless devices. Using ROS networking capabilities, captured frames and detector control can be transmitted via a network, which allows building distributed processing pipelines. The proposed software is a lightweight package, easily connectable to existing visualization, logging, and processing software in ROS. It offers simple bindings to custom Python and C++ programs for real-time control of the acquisition or processing of the captured frames. Rospix was deployed on NASA suborbital rocket, which was successfully launched on April 4, 2018, from Kwajalein Atoll by Pennsylvania State University. Rospix provides reliable solution for mobile robots where the collected data are used in real time to guide the robot through an environment. We release Rospix using the GitHub platform and welcome the community to contribute on the first project connecting the fields of ionizing radiation imaging and mobile robotics.

On Feasibility of Post-Quantum Cryptography on Small Devices

In this work, we investigate the feasibility of post-quantum cryptography in small and constrained devices such as those used for mobile and Internet-of-Things networks. We describe our experimental post-quantum cryptography implementations on small devices with different platforms. Then, we present and compare the performance results of chosen post-quantum key exchange schemes and their message sizes on selected ARM devices. In addition, we discuss the perspective types of post-quantum cryptographic schemes for various IoT systems with different requirements.

Use of oscillometric devices in atrial fibrillation: a comparison of three devices and invasive blood pressure measurement

Background: The use of automated (oscillometric) blood pressure (BP) devices is not validated in atrial fibrillation (AF) patients.Objectives: To assess the reliability of three oscillometric BP devices, and the agreement with invasive arterial blood pressure(IBP) in AF patients.Methods: 48 AF patients with randomized sequences of 10 consecutive BP measurements with two pairs of devices: (1) OmronR7™(wrist) and OmronHEM907™(arm); (2) OmronR7™ and Microlife WatchBPhome(arm). Reliability and agreement of each device were assessed by the intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) for the continuous BP measurements and Bland & Altman methodology, respectively. In 10 additional AF patients, 10 consecutive measurements with IBP and OmronHEM907™, and IBP and Microlife WatchBPhome were performed.Results: The OmronR7™ was not able to obtain any BP Readings. Arm devices presented better ICC for systolicBP(SBP) than for diastolicBP(DBP) (Omron HEM907™:0.94 [0.90; 0.97] vs. 0.77 [0.67; 0.89]; Microlife WatchBPhome:0.92 [0.88; 0.96] vs.0.79 [0.69; 0.89]).The correlation coefficient between Microlife WatchBPhome and IBP computed using the average of repeated measurements from two to ten measurements improved up to the third and remained stable afterwards.The agreement between IBP and SBP, and IBP and DBP, was moderate as illustrated by a wide limit of agreement [−24; 26](SBP) and [−15;17](DBP) for Microlife WatchBPHome, respectively and [−30; 13](SBP) and [−7; 15](DBP) for OmronHEM907.Conclusions: BP measurement using the two arm oscillometric devices achieved a high reliability for SBP. The agreement between IBP and arm devices was low but using the average of three consecutive measurements improved the results substantially.

Control of Low-Cost Customizable Robot Arm Actuated by Elastic Tendons

[abstFig src='/00280004/09.jpg' width='300' text='Elastic tendon driven robot arm' ] This paper presents a low-cost, lightweight robot arm with very low stiffness actuated by elastic tendons. To simplify the string tension control, a new winding device was developed. Small pulleys were incorporated into the winding drum to reduce friction between the tendon and the drum. A marionette-style two-link robot arm with compliant joints was prototyped. Because the arm and winding devices were separate from each other, the cost and weight of the robot were reduced. The links are made with lightweight wood connected by simple shaft joints. The robot design can be easily modified by the user because the mechanical parts do not require high machining accuracy. This robot is intended for implementation in tasks that do not require high positioning accuracy using a simple force control under environmental constraints. Because of its low stiffness, simple and sensor-less force control can be easily implemented based on the relationship between forces under static conditions. The proposed simple control method was evaluated experimentally by conducting position, static force, and hybrid position/force control tasks and was shown to perform well. The results also demonstrate that employing additional sensors, such as a camera, improves the accuracy of the controller.

Determining image base of firmware for ARM devices by matching literal pools

In the field of reverse engineering, the correct image base of firmware has very important significance for the reverse engineers to understand the firmware by building accurate cross references. Furthermore, patching firmware needs to insert some instructions that references absolute addresses depending on the correct image base. However, for a large number of embedded system firmwares, the format is nonstandard and the image base is unknown. In this paper, we present a two-step method to determine the image base of firmwares for ARM-based devices. First, based on the storage characteristic of string in the firmware files and the encoding feature of literal pools that contain string addresses, we propose an algorithm called FIND-LP to recognize all possible literal pools in firmware. Second, we propose an algorithm called Determining image Base by Matching Literal Pools (DBMLP) to determine the image base. DBMLP can obtain the relationship between absolute addresses of strings and their corresponding offsets in a firmware file, thereby a candidate list for image base value is obtained. If the number of matched literal pools corresponding to a certain candidate image base is far greater than the others, this candidate is considered as the correct image base of the firmware. The experimental result indicates that the proposed method can effectively determine image base for a lot of firmwares that use the literal pools to store the string addresses.

Determining Image Base of Firmware Files for ARM Devices

Determining Image Base of Firmware Files for ARM Devices

PP.31.04

Objective: Current guidelines suggest Home Blood Pressure Monitoring (HBPM) as a complementary measurement method compared with Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring (ABPM), in identification of arterial hypertension (AH). The main purpose of our study was to identify which factors increase HBPM accuracy, testing a short HBPM schedule compared with ABPM. We tried to identify the best HBPM device and which patients were more reliable in HBPM execution. Design and method: We enrolled 321 consecutive patients who performed ABPM in our Hypertension Centre and completed a short HBPM schedule (two measurements, twice daily, for four days) between November 2011 and December 2014. First we compared three techniques: arm and wrist automated devices and manual sphygmomanometers. For the better accuracy we continued our analyses on 270 people who used automated arm devices. Results: Pearson correlation coefficients of arm and wrist automated devices and manual sphygmomanometers for systolic blood pressure (SBP) were 0.59, 0.20 and 0.62, and for diastolic blood pressure (DBP) were 0.72, 0.33 and 0.59. ROC curves for automated arm devices described AUC for SBP of 0.795 and for DBP of 0.847. Box plots of daily mean pressure values did not show significant differences. No significant difference was found between first day coefficient and the others for SBP, p-value 0.06, and for DBP, p-value 0.262. Men and women correlation coefficient were respectively 0.65 and 0.51 for SBP and 0.75 and 0.67 for DBP. Dividing patients by age, the correlation coefficient for SBP were 0.52 (<= 40 years), 0.55 (40–65), 0.69 (>= 65) and for DBP were respectively 0.74, 0.62, 0.66. Conclusions: HBPM has a moderate correlation and a good accuracy in the identification of AH compared with ABPM. We confirm the need to use automated arm devices in HBPM execution. In contrast with current guidelines we do not suggest the elimination of first day measurements. Men and over 65 years patients have more reliability in HBPM execution.