Handheld Communication Devices Research Articles

Nurse Leaders and the Use of Social Media: Becoming Literate to Lead

Social Media, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other web-based group with which one may associate for the purpose of communicating with members, is now ingrained in our culture. Recent surveys showed that 60% of people in the world are actively using text technology—the ability to send short, written messages to either individuals or groups, primarily from handheld communication devices—and that over 193,000 text messages are sent every second. Texting is the most used data service in the world. 1 Burrus D Better results using text messaging to dramatically improve your marketing efforts. May 2, 2013. LinkedIn. http://bigthink.com/flash-foresight/better-results-using-text-messaging-to-dramatically-improve-your-marketing-efforts Google Scholar Even more telling is the fact that 48% of all adults use social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter, and that such use accounts for a quarter of all time spent on the internet. 2 Chinn T How nurses can use social media professionally. Nursing Times. July 13, 2012; (Accessed May 31, 2013.)http://www.nursingtimes.net/nursing-practice/clinical-zones/management/how-nurses-can-use-social-media-professionally/5047059.article Google Scholar Yet many healthcare organizations either fail to have any official policy regarding the use of social media or are tied to guidelines that fail to acknowledge the realities of this cultural shift and try to limit or prohibit this form of communication. Social Media, whether it be Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or any other web-based group with which one may associate for the purpose of communicating with members, is now ingrained in our culture. Recent surveys showed that 60% of people in the world are actively using text technology—the ability to send short, written messages to either individuals or groups, primarily from handheld communication devices—and that over 193,000 text messages are sent every second. Texting is the most used data service in the world. 1 Burrus D Better results using text messaging to dramatically improve your marketing efforts. May 2, 2013. LinkedIn. http://bigthink.com/flash-foresight/better-results-using-text-messaging-to-dramatically-improve-your-marketing-efforts Google Scholar Even more telling is the fact that 48% of all adults use social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter, and that such use accounts for a quarter of all time spent on the internet. 2 Chinn T How nurses can use social media professionally. Nursing Times. July 13, 2012; (Accessed May 31, 2013.)http://www.nursingtimes.net/nursing-practice/clinical-zones/management/how-nurses-can-use-social-media-professionally/5047059.article Google Scholar Yet many healthcare organizations either fail to have any official policy regarding the use of social media or are tied to guidelines that fail to acknowledge the realities of this cultural shift and try to limit or prohibit this form of communication.

Printed dual‐feed triangular patch antenna disposed in a small notch in the handheld device system ground plane for LTE/WWAN operation

ABSTRACTA printed triangular patch antenna disposed in a small notch at one corner of the system ground plane of the handheld communication device such as the smartphone, tablet computer, and phone tablet for long term evolution/wireless wide area network (LTE/WWAN) operation is presented. The small notch has a size of 10 × 20 mm2 only, and two tips of the triangular patch disposed therein are in close proximity to two adjacent perpendicular edges of the notch. The two tips are the antenna's two feeds for achieving LTE/WWAN operation. Each tip can be connected to an ON/OFF switch (e.g., a PIN diode) such that the antenna can be controlled to be fed at either the first or the second tip. When fed at the first tip, the antenna will operate in a high‐frequency band (1710–2690 MHz) to cover the GSM1800/1900/UMTS/LTE2300/2500 operation. When fed at the second tip and aided by a matching circuit, the antenna will operate at a low‐frequency band (824–960 MHz) to cover the GSM850/900 operation. Design considerations of the proposed antenna are described. Parametric studies and experimental results of the antenna are presented and discussed. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 55:2767–2773, 2013

Hand-held Communication Devices: Friend or Foe?

Hand-held Communication Devices: Friend or Foe?

Optimal control location for the customer-oriented design of smart phones

Recently, the smart phone has become a representative device in information communication. The smart phone generally adopts a full touch-screen panel that reflects the growing need for improved multimedia access. In the interest of customer-oriented design, HCI features such as controllability and a menu structure have to be properly considered. Among the numerous factors that have an effect on the controllability when using smart phones, the effects of the phone size, user’s hand length and control location are investigated in this paper. Moreover, an effort was made to determine the changes in the user preference according to the control location. A series of experiments were conducted, in which preference scores were measured. It was found that the product width and thickness have significant effects on the user preference. Specifically, the effect of the product width is greater than that of thickness. However, the optimal control location varies little regardless of phone size and hand length. A desirable phone size was defined for the customer-oriented development of smart phones. Iso-preference contour plots in the form of a rotated ellipse were derived by the Support Vector Regression (SVR) method while the difference in sensitivity was assessed with respect to the meridian (horizontal and vertical directions). The concept of the preferable control zone was developed by linking the critical points in four directions despite the difference in the angle of rotation. In addition, the situation where the product is concurrently controlled by both hands was investigated. The results of the study are expected to aid in defining the size of handheld information communication devices such as smart phones and PDAs. It is also expected that the optimal control location and proposed contours can guide the designer to optimally layout various functions of the menu on the display.

Small directional microelectromechanical systems microphone arrays

Directional microphone arrays that are physically small compared to the acoustic wavelength are of great interest for hand-held communication devices. Spatially directive microphones can reduce the impact of background acoustic noise without adding distortion to the signal. This talk will present some design topologies and requirements as well as a new physical design that could enable directional microphone responses while being small in size.

The U.S. Army Telemedicine and m-Health Program: Making a Difference at Home and Abroad

This article highlights the deployment of telemedicine by the U.S. Army through the various echelons of care and in overseas locations, including range and scope of health services provided by telemedicine in a challenging environment. This is followed by a discussion of technological developments advances in mobile communications likely to change the practice of telemedicine in the military from limited fixed-point access to a highly mobile individual with handheld communication devices.

Switching Megawatts with Power Transistors

Semiconductor silicon revolutionized the computing and communication industries in the last century. With the invention of the semiconductor transistor, miniaturization of electronic systems took place at an unprecedented rate. Today, everyone has access at their fingertips to computing and communication devices capable of delivering multi-megabits of data within seconds, once simply unthinkable. The advent of silicon integrated circuit (IC) technology enabled the information revolution, and information technology (IT) was a prime driver of the 20th century global economic boom. With the advent of information technology, energy technology has become more critical than ever before.1 Batterypowered, wireless handheld computing and communication devices are finding applications in every walk of life from the boardroom to the emergency room. However, further miniaturization and performance enhancement of these devices are hindered by battery size and limited storage capacity. At the same time, batterychargers are inefficient and waste nearly 25% of the electricity used.2 Hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) are becoming cost-effective and popular; and there is growing interest in developing all-electric transportation, especially from the perspective of environmental concerns.3 The electricity transmission and distribution infrastructure is more than 100 years old and is in the midst of the greatest change in its history.4 A flexible and robust smart electricity grid is needed that is capable of efficiently integrating distributed renewable energy resources, including solar and wind generators.5 At the same time, alternative and more efficient methods of electricity delivery such as direct DC are under development and have the potential for rapid penetration of renewable energy for local utilization.6

An energy harvesting system surveyed for a variety of unattended electronic applications

All energy-harvesting schemes require some form of “intermediate” storage – batteries or capacitors that reservoir energy harvested from the environment. There are a number of reasons for this requirement. Ambient energy fluctuates and intermediate storage smoothes out the impact of these fluctuations on the power delivered to a load. In addition, energy must be “conditioned” to be useful in a given application. It must be set to a certain voltage or made capable of delivering a desired current to load. In this article, a complete energy harvesting system including storage and conditioning electronics is described with a concentration on radio frequency (RF) harvesting. The system is capable of harvesting energy from a commercially available hand-held communication device, and exhibits an overall energy harvesting efficiency of 13.2%. Several potential applications have been investigated based on the performance of this system. Highlighted example applications include power sources for nodes in an architectural structural integrity monitor, and limb prosthesis.

A radio-frequency energy harvesting scheme for use in low-power ad hoc distributed networks

While RF energy harvesting has proven to be a viable power source for low-power electronics, it is still a challenge to obtain significant amounts of energy fast and efficiently from the ambiance. Available RF power is usually very weak, resulting in a weak voltage applied to a demodulator to drive it into a region of significant nonlinearity. An RF energy harvesting system consisting of a rectenna, a dc-dc voltage converter, and a novel battery cell is proposed. The rectenna is an integration of an antenna and rectifying diodes. In addition, a switched-capacitor dc-dc voltage converter is integrated on a silicon integrated circuit with energy transfer efficiency as high as 40.5%. A new battery system that can be recharged at low voltage (<; 1.2 V) is demonstrated. In this brief, all of these elements are tested as a system to achieve RF battery recharging from a commercially available hand-held communication device. The system exhibited an overall harvesting efficiency of 11.6%.

Searchlight

The rapid deployment of millions of handheld communication devices has resulted in a demand for physical proximitybased opportunistic networking. However, the success of these emerging ad hoc networks requires that a device should be able to search and find other devices in its vicinity without infrastructure support, without consuming too much battery power, and preferably without requiring clock synchronization. While approaches exist to solve this problem of energy-efficient asynchronous neighbor discovery, they present an unpleasant trade-off between good average-case performance (probabilistic approaches) and strict bound on worstcase discovery latency (deterministic approaches). In response to these limitations, we present Searchlight, an asynchronous neighbor discovery protocol that has both deterministic and probabilistic components, a novel combination that enables it to have both good average-case performance and the best worst-case bound for any given energy budget.

Interventions to Enhance Adherence to Medications in Patients With Heart Failure

Prognosis remains poor for patients with chronic heart failure (CHF), despite improvements in the prevention and treatment of heart failure over the last 25 years. Recent estimates indicate that the median survival after a first episode of heart failure is 2.3 years for men and 1.8 years for women.1 It is suggested that the improvements in outcomes that have been achieved can be partly explained by increases in prescribing rates of medications such as angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors,2 β-blockers,3 and spironolactone4 over this period.1 Although the evidence on medication efficacy for certain subgroups of patients with CHF is clear, there are also compelling data showing that many of these patients do not take their medications as prescribed by health care providers.5,6 This “nonadherence” to medication therefore remains a significant barrier to enhancing the effectiveness of existing treatments. Estimates for nonadherence to medications in CHF have varied widely.5 One of the largest studies found that only 80% of patients with a prescription for angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors at hospital discharge completed the prescription form 30 days after discharge, and this rate subsequently fell to 60% over 1 year.7 Full adherence, defined as filing enough prescriptions to have daily medication available for 1 year, may be as low as 10% in CHF.8 Poor adherence to medication in CHF is associated with worse outcomes in observational studies, including shorter event-free survival.9 Therefore, strategies to enhance adherence provide a potentially valuable strategy for improving survival, reducing hospitalization and managing patient symptoms in CHF. In this report, we provide an up-to-date review and analysis of those studies that have developed and evaluated medication adherence interventions in CHF. Because CHF is typically symptomatic and includes medication with actions that are discernible to the patient within hours …

Assessment of communication needs for emergency management officials in high-consequence emergencies

Objective: To identify the communication needs for Bahamian emergency management officials using wireless technology to support emergency-related activities.Design: This study began with literature review, a focus group interview, and a paper-based survey of emergency management officials.Setting: Focus group interview was held at the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) office in Nassau, Bahamas, with subject matter experts (SMEs). A survey was conducted in which 31 Bahamian emergency management officials had participated. Data were compiled and analyzed at the University of Central Florida (UCF).Subjects and participants: A focus group consisting of 14 SMEs representing NEMA, emergency support functions, and affiliated organizations. Thirty-one Bahamian emergency management officials including 14 SMEs participated in the survey.Interventions: Professors at the College of The Bahamas and UCF read and gave input at each phase of the study, as well as final review in the form of thesis defense at UCF.Main outcome measures: A list of communication needs for emergency management officials in high-consequence emergency management situations was compiled.Results: Identified communication needs include an improved wireless communication infrastructure, official implementation of wireless devices for use in emergencies, and devices with improved durability, usability, and functionality.Conclusions: The surveys and interviews with officials proved to be an effective technique for identifying user problems, difficulties, and preferences with wireless handheld communication devices and telecommunication systems. This methodology can be used to identify the communication needs for emergency management officials around the globe.

Circuit Agility

Over the last decade, mobile communication and its associated mass volume market has become one of the driving forces in the technology evolution of semiconductor and microwave circuits. For handheld communication devices, it is now mainstream to support increasing numbers of communication standards and localization services that occupy ever-expanding wide frequency ranges and bandwidths. At the same time, the physical dimensions of handheld user devices are shrinking, leading to even tighter specifications for the highly integrated front-end architectures of mobile radios. Todays radio front-end architectures use dedicated receive and transmit paths for each covered communication standard, thus the overall complexity and occupied area is increasing as well. The wide frequency allocation of the regulated communication bands along with the variety of standards, which have to be covered by these radios, calls for reconfigurable and frequency agile microwave subsystems. The scope of this article is to provide a comprehensive understanding of design principles for frequency agile and reconfigurable microwave circuits such as power dividers and couplers and how they can be used in radio-frequency (RF)-transceiver subsystems to pave the way toward reconfigurable radio front-end architectures. Introducing reconfigurability in microwave circuits is achieved by tunable passive components. Tunable passives can be implemented in a variety of technologies such as ferroelectric varactors, semiconductor diodes, and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) components. Attractive applications for tunable circuits in the RF front end are tunable matching networks, filters, reconfigurable power amplifiers, tunable voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) circuits, and finally, couplers and dividers.

A New Support System Using a Mobile Device (Smartphone) for Diagnostic Image Display and Treatment of Stroke

With the increasing demand for rapid diagnosis and treatment of stroke, the telemedicine role of coordinating timely the efforts of the stroke team became important. We developed a system for rapidly exchanging diagnostic images and clinical and management information. A system was created on the basis of communicating patient data and images between hospital systems and participating staff members in and out of the hospital through their standard, currently used handheld communication devices. The system is able to transfer clinical data, CT, MR, angiographic, intraoperative images, and expert opinion in real time. A pilot application of the system in our hospital showed successful information transfer, allowing medical staff to discuss patients' diagnosis and management using a Twitter system. The system (i-Stroke) may become a useful tool for acute patient management in the field of neurology and neurosurgery.

Privacy preservation in the dissemination of location data

The rapid advance in handheld communication devices and the appearance of smartphones has allowed users to connect to the Internet and surf on the WWW while they are moving around the city or traveling. Location based services have been developed to deliver content that is adjusted to the current user location. Social networks have also responded to the challenge of users who can access the Internet from any place in the city, and location based social-networks like Foursquare have become very popular in a short period of time. The popularity of these applications is linked to the significant advantages they offer: users can exploit live location-based information to take dynamic decisions on issues like transportation, identification of places of interest or even on the opportunity to meet a friend or an associate in nearby locations. A side effect of sharing location-based information is that it exposes the user to substantial privacy related threats. Revealing the user's location carelessly can prove to be embarrassing, harmful professionally, or even dangerous. Research in the data management field has put significant effort on anonymization techniques that obfuscate spatial information in order to hide the identity of the user or her exact location. Privacy guaranties and anonymization algorithms become increasingly sophisticated offering better and more efficient protection in data publishing and data exchange. Still, it is not clear yet what are the greatest dangers to user privacy and which are the most realistic privacy breaching scenarios. The aim of the paper is to provide a brief survey of the attack scenarios, the privacy guaranties and the data transformations employed to protect user privacy in real time. The paper focuses mostly on providing an overview of the privacy models that are investigated in literature and less on the algorithms and their scaling capabilities. The models and the attack scenarios are classified and compared, in order to provide an overview of the cases that are covered by existing research.

HearCom: Hearing in the Communication Society

A group of 28 research partners joined the EU-funded project HearCom with the overall aim to improve hearing communication. One of the main achievements has been the provision of advanced hearing screening tests by telephone and Internet. Next to that it was aimed to harmonize hearing diagnostic tests for European languages. For this the concept of an Auditory Profile was defined on which a number of diagnostic hearing tests were developed in several languages. As hearing problems are also a result of adverse acoustical circumstances such as for room acoustics and telecom systems, these effects have been studied, modelled and evaluated for hearing impaired persons. In the area of rehabilitation a large scale comparison study was performed on signal enhancement techniques for hearing devices. Both objective and subjective benefits were found for specific listening conditions in relation to a chosen signal processing method. As modern technology may assist on hearing and communication it was studied how the use of automatic speech transcription or the use of handheld communication devices may help people with hearing problems. It is shown that communication benefits can be obtained, but that the benefit is limited in practice as processing power of today's handheld devices is still insufficient. An overview is given on the HearCom portal with sections for screening diagnostics, hearing information for the public and professionals, and a new HearCompanion service that provides step-by-step support for the hearing rehabilitation process. © S. Hirzel Verlag.

Specific Absorption rate (SAR) Post-Processing Implementation: Numerical Approach [EM Programmer's Notebook

The accepted dosimetric measure of electromagnetic (EM) exposure is the specific absorption rate (SAR), which is defined as the power absorbed per unit mass of tissue. International standards for compliance testing of hand-held mobile communication devices define various cubical averaging schemes to obtain the spatial peak averaged specific absorption rate. In this paper, a numerical approach to illustrate the validation and uncertainty contributions of a SAR post-processing algorithm is described. Simplified interpolation and extrapolation techniques to calculate the 1g SAR for a 2.5 mm mesh grid are evaluated. Furthermore, using linear, nearest, and spline interpolation in MATLAB, the effects of the extrapolation order on the assessment of the resultant error are examined.

Dialing Up and Drilling Down: Forensic Preservation of Handheld Devices

Cell phones, pagers and other personal digital assistants (PDAs) provide people with the ability to exchange pictures, check email, surf the Web, capture videos, listen to music, or watch movies in the palm of their hand. The future holds even greater promise as these devices may be used as “digital wallets” to pay bills, check account balances, and store other forms of data. In some circumstances, however, a handheld device can become the focus of litigation, investigation, or law enforcement action. At that point, a tool of convenience becomes a source of digital evidence. Digital forensic examiners may be called upon to preserve a wide variety of handheld devices that can produce critical evidence, including email, call logs, pictures, password, videos, user-created documents, and text messages. As PDAs, cell phones, and other handheld devices integrate new technologies for communications and data storage, they will continue to emerge as sources of additional evidence in criminal and civil investigations. Consequently, digital forensic examiners must know how to preserve and acquire data effectively on handheld communication devices. This article provides an overview of preservation issues, solutions for examiners, and tips for successful preservation of hand-held devices.

Early Symptomatic Presbyopes—What Correction Modality Works Best?

To compare the performance of a low-addition silicone hydrogel multifocal soft lens with other soft lens correction options in a group of habitual soft lens wearers of distance correction who are symptomatic of early presbyopia. This clinical study was designed as a prospective, double-masked, randomized, crossover, dispensing trial consisting of four 1-week phases, one for each of the correction modalities: a low-addition silicone hydrogel multifocal soft lens, monovision, habitual correction, and optimized distance visual correction. The prescriptions of all modalities were finalized at a single fitting visit, and the lenses were worn according to a randomized schedule. All lenses were made from lotrafilcon B material. A series of objective vision tests were conducted: high- and low-contrast LogMAR under high- and low-room lighting conditions, stereopsis, and critical print size. A number of other data collection methods used were novel: some data were collected under controlled laboratory-based conditions and others under "real-world" conditions, some of which were completed on a BlackBerry hand-held communication device. All participants were able to be fit with all four correction modalities. Objective vision tests showed no statistical difference between the lens modalities except in the case of low-contrast near LogMAR acuity under low-lighting levels where monovision (+0.29 +/- 0.10) performed better than the multifocal (+0.33 +/- 0.11, P=0.027) and the habitual (+0.37 +/- 0.12, P<0.001) modalities. Subjective ratings indicated a statistically better performance provided by the multifocal correction compared with monovision, particularly for the vision associated with driving tasks such as driving during the daytime (93.3 +/- 8.8 vs. 84.2 +/- 23.7, P=0.05), at nighttime (88.8 +/- 11.7 vs. 74.9 +/- 23.6, P=0.001), any associated haloes or glare (92.0 +/- 10.6 vs. 78.0 +/- 22.8, P=0.003), and observing road signs (90.1 +/- 11.8 vs. 79.4 +/- 20.2, P=0.027). Preference for the multifocal compared with monovision was also reported when watching television (95.0 +/- 6.4 vs. 82.6 +/- 20.1, P=0.001) and when changing focus from distance to near (87.0 +/- 13.4 vs. 66.1 +/- 32.2, P<0.001). For this group of early presbyopes, the AIR OPTIX AQUA MULTIFOCAL--Low Add provided a successful option for visual correction, which was supported by the results of subjective ratings, many of which were made during or immediately after performing such activities as reading, using a computer, watching television, and driving. These results suggest that making a prediction of "success or not" based on consulting room acuity tests alone is probably unwise.

INTRODUCTION: What's in a Name?

We live in a world of euphemisms and acronyms. Handheld communication devices have reduced us to sending messages reading LOL (laughing out loud) and BFF (best friends forever). Whatever happened to the time when we were cool because we said TGIF (thank god, it's Friday)? Is this a change in use of language? When asked for an address, does this mean your street or e-mail? Does puppy still mean young dog? And is that the four-legged kind or a two-legged one? As our forms of communication evolve, our language follows suit.