Handheld PDA Research Articles

Monitoring aquatic plants: An evaluation of hydroacoustic, on-site digitising and airborne remote sensing techniques

Aquatic macrophytes are often monitored to detect change in ecosystem function and state, as well as assessing the effectiveness of invasive aquatic plant management. This study compares seven methodologies to monitor the distribution and abundances of aquatic macrophytes. Four line transect methodologies and three spatial mapping techniques were employed in parallel over a broad turbidity gradient in two lentic habitats of south-eastern Australia. The methodologies examined included hydroacoustic surveys, on-site digitising, and digitisation of airborne remote sensing imagery. Variation in estimates of macrophyte coverage were observed between methodologies. Consistency in the collection and interpretation of data was greatest for the line transect methodologies and the digitisation of satellite imagery. Duel-frequency identification sonar proved to be an effective novel hydroacoustic technique to monitor macrophyte abundances over broad spatial scales. Single beam sonar transects was also an objective, repeatable and scalable methodology. Videography and on-site handheld PDA mapping were of limited utility due to restrictions imposed by turbidity. The utility of sidescan sonar could be improved when used in conjunction with on-site handheld PDA mapping. This study outlines important considerations when selecting a methodology to monitor macrophyte distribution and abundance. Results indicate that no one specific method can be employed across all macrophyte monitoring studies. The method or combination of methods employed during macrophyte monitoring studies is dependent upon the study objectives, budget and environmental conditions of the study site.

Dedicated design and usability of a context-aware ubiquitous learning environment for developing receptive language skills: a case study

There has been little informal learning research concerning the issues and learning factors for students who are engaged in receptive language skills reading and listening development in a Context-Aware Ubiquitous Language Learning CAULL context. Therefore, the researchers first developed a CAULL environment for students to learn the surroundings of Cheng Kung Lake with the use of the handheld PDA, the wireless internet, and RFID readers and tags. There were three sections in the learning content about Cheng Kung Lake, including the reading units, scenario-based conversations, and RFID-generated Q&A in the reading and audio clips. Further, there were 47 intermediate-proficiency-level graduate students participating in this study. The results indicate that most students benefited from using this kind of CAULL and improved their receptive language skills, as well as demonstrate students' positive attitudes towards the implementation. Finally, design and development issues, affecting learning factors, problems and suggestions in such a CAULL environment were discussed.

Clinical and psychological telemonitoring and telecare of high risk heart failure patients

We conducted a trial of telemonitoring and telecare for patients with chronic heart failure leaving hospital after being treated for clinical instability. Eighty patients were randomized before hospital discharge to a usual care group (n = 40: follow-up at the outpatient clinic) or to an integrated management group (n = 40: patients learned to use a handheld PDA and kept in touch daily with the monitoring centre). At enrolment, the groups were similar for all clinical variables. At one-year follow-up, integrated management patients showed better adherence, reduced anxiety and depression, and lower NYHA class and plasma levels of BNP with respect to the usual care patients (e.g. NYHA class 2.1 vs 2.4, P < 0.02). Mortality and hospital re-admissions for congestive heart failure were also reduced in integrated management patients (P < 0.05). Integrated management was more expensive than usual care, although the cost of adverse events was 42% lower. In heart failure patients at high risk of relapse, the regular acquisition of simple clinical information and the possibility for the patient to contact the clinical staff improved drug titration, produced better psychological status and quality of life, and reduced hospitalizations for heart failure.

The Design and Application of WiFi-Smart Socket in Smart Home

Smart home system mainly consists of home networking, home wireless LAN and the external network components. It will achieve the intelligentize and informatization of the home furnishing. Smart socket is one of which belongs to the smart home terminal devices. This article is to talk about smart socket. The core chips of this system are Texas Instruments CC3000MOD and MSP430FR5739MCU. Using WiFi wireless communications technology control and process signals coming from the side of the handheld PDA. Controller side can support two software platforms IAR or CCS. This design uses IAR workbench. PDA client software using the Android operating system is used to receive and process analog signals from controller side. In this paper, WiFi wireless transmission technology as the basis, based on IEEE802.11b/g wireless protocol, It achieves a WiFi wireless communication system for remote or local client and terminal equipment, enabling the intelligent control of the home furnishing.

Sweetened drink and snacking cues in adolescents. A study using ecological momentary assessment

The objective of this study was to identify physical, social, and intrapersonal cues that were associated with the consumption of sweetened beverages and sweet and salty snacks among adolescents from lower SES neighborhoods. Students were recruited from high schools with a minimum level of 25% free or reduced cost lunches. Using ecological momentary assessment, participants (N=158) were trained to answer brief questionnaires on handheld PDA devices: (a) each time they ate or drank, (b) when prompted randomly, and (c) once each evening. Data were collected over 7days for each participant. Participants reported their location (e.g., school grounds, home), mood, social environment, activities (e.g., watching TV, texting), cravings, food cues (e.g., saw a snack), and food choices. Results showed that having unhealthy snacks or sweet drinks among adolescents was associated with being at school, being with friends, feeling lonely or bored, craving a drink or snack, and being exposed to food cues. Surprisingly, sweet drink consumption was associated with exercising. Watching TV was associated with consuming sweet snacks but not with salty snacks or sweet drinks. These findings identify important environmental and intrapersonal cues to poor snacking choices that may be applied to interventions designed to disrupt these food-related, cue-behavior linked habits.

Integrating paper-based habitat mapping with mobile electronic field recording procedures

A hybrid method of ecological habitat survey and mapping is presented, bridging paper-based methods and mobile electronic procedures. The hybrid approach uses a hand-held PDA with real-time dGPS to map habitats and record habitat attributes. It retains paper field maps to facilitate ecological decisions and to overcome the need for field surveyors to operate a fully functional mobile GIS system. The transition from paper records to a full GIS implementation is bridged by secondary digitisation in which a GIS specialist, trained in field survey procedures, interacts routinely with the field surveyors, throughout the field season to assure data quality standards. The methodology is practical and affordable, particularly if there are multiple field surveyors.

An Implementation of Wireless Medical Image Transmission System on Mobile Devices

The advanced technology of computing system was followed by the rapid improvement of medical instrumentation and patient record management system. The typical examples are hospital information system (HIS) and picture archiving and communication system (PACS), which computerized the management procedure of medical records and images in hospital. Because these systems were built and used in hospitals, doctors out of hospital have problems to access them immediately on emergent cases. To solve these problems, this paper addressed the realization of system that could transmit the images acquired by medical imaging systems in hospital to the remote doctors' handheld PDA's using CDMA cellular phone network. The system consists of server and PDA. The server was developed to manage the accounts of doctors and patients and allocate the patient images to each doctor. The PDA was developed to display patient images through remote server connection. To authenticate the personal user, remote data access (RDA) method was used in PDA accessing the server database and file transfer protocol (FTP) was used to download patient images from the remove server. In laboratory experiments, it was calculated to take ninety seconds to transmit thirty images with 832 x 488 resolution and 24 bit depth and 0.37 Mb size. This result showed that the developed system has no problems for remote doctors to receive and review the patient images immediately on emergent cases.

An Indoor Positioning System (IPS) using Grid Model

To date many positioning systems are available to determine or track a user's location; three main categories include Global Positioning System (GPS), wide area location system and indoor positioning system. GPS has its limitation (poor signals) in indoor or urban uses, while wide-area location systems are cellular networks dependent. For indoor positioning system many approaches like infrared sensing, radio frequency, ultrasonic etc. are proposed; each of these methods has their own advantages and disadvantages. Considering cost-effectiveness, speed and accuracy a recent interest is growing on using wireless technology. A Wireless Local-Area Network (WLAN) based positioning system has some distinct advantages like low-cost and wider area coverage. This researrch propose a system to determine the location of a mobile terminal or a handheld PDA in high speed, low-cost wireless networks by using the wireless communications infrastructure. The experimental set up used an indoor wireless facility of an auditorium, where signals from three Access Points (APs) were recorded to train a position determination model to calculate and map a position. Grid model was applied and compare the resulted position of a client. A handheld PDA equipped with application software was the client device. The accuracy assessment has been performed to identify the distance errors and the average distance error was found lowest for the grid model. The results of the experiments reveal that the accuracy of 0.05 m can be achieved.

Feeling emotional: the amygdala links emotional perception and experience

Feeling emotional: the amygdala links emotional perception and experience

Use of Handheld PDA Games to Educate and Challenge Physician Learners

Use of Handheld PDA Games to Educate and Challenge Physician Learners

A selective dynamic compiler for embedded Java virtual machines targeting ARM processors

This paper presents a new selective dynamic compilation technique targeting ARM 16/32-bit embedded system processors. This compiler is built inside the J2ME/CLDC (Java 2 Micro Edition for Connected Limited Device Configuration) platform [Sun MicroSystems, Java 2 Platform, Micro Edition, Version 1.0 Connected, Limited Device Configuration, Specification, Technical Report, Sun Microsystems, CA, USA, May 2000]. The primary objective of this work is to elaborate an efficient, lightweight and low-footprint accelerated Java virtual machine ready to be executed on embedded machines. This is achieved by implementing a selective ARM dynamic compiler called Armed E-Bunny into Sun’s Kilobyte Virtual Machine (KVM) [Sun MicroSystems, KVM porting guide, Technical Report, Sun MicroSystems, CA, USA, September 2001]. In this paper we present the motivations, the architecture, the design and the implementation of Armed E-Bunny. The modified KVM is ported on a handheld PDA that is powered with embedded Linux and is tested using standard J2ME benchmarks. The experimental results demonstrate that a speed-up of 360% over the last version of Sun’s KVM is accomplished with a footprint that does not exceed 119 KB. An important result of this paper is also the proposition of an acceleration technique that leverages Armed E-Bunny by establishing a synergy between efficient interpretation and selective dynamic compilation. The main traits of this technique are: a one-pass compilation by code reuse, an efficient threaded interpretation and a fast switching mechanism between the interpreted and compiled modes.

Accelerating embedded Java for mobile devices

With the proliferation of wireless devices, networks, and systems, the deployment of efficient embedded Java virtual machines is becoming a challenging and important research area. Accordingly, a plethora of acceleration techniques have been proposed. In this article we present a new acceleration technology that we developed for embedded Java virtual machines. Acceleration is achieved by the integration of a new selective dynamic compiler, which we called Armed E-Bunny, into the J2ME/CLDC (Java 2 Micro-Edition for Connected Limited Device Configuration) kilobyte virtual machine (KVM). The modified KVM is ported on a handheld PDA that is powered with embedded Linux. Experimental results demonstrate that we accomplished an important speedup (more than 360 percent) with respect to Sun's latest version of KVM. This experimentation was carried out using standard J2ME benchmarks.

Access and mobility of wireless PDA users

In this paper, we analyze the mobility patterns of users of wireless hand-held PDAs in a campus wireless network using an eleven week trace of wireless network activity. Our study has two goals. First, we characterize the high-level mobility and access patterns of hand-held PDA users and compare these characteristics to previous workload mobility studies focused on laptop users. Second, we develop two wireless network topology models for use in wireless mobility studies: an evolutionary topology model based on user proximity and a campus waypoint model that serves as a trace-based complement to the random waypoint model. We use our evolutionary topology model as a case study for preliminary evaluation of three ad hoc routing algorithms on the network topologies created by the access and mobility patterns of users of modern wireless PDAs. Based upon the mobility characteristics of our trace-based campus waypoint model, we find that commonly parameterized synthetic mobility models have overly aggressive mobility characteristics for scenarios where user movement is limited to walking. Mobility characteristics based on realistic models can have significant implications for evaluating systems designed for mobility. When evaluated using our evolutionary topology model, for example, popular ad hoc routing protocols were very successful at adapting to user mobility, and user mobility was not a key factor in their performance.

NED-2: A decision support system for integrated forest ecosystem management

NED-2 is a Windows-based system designed to improve project-level planning and decision making by providing useful and scientifically sound information to natural resource managers. Resources currently addressed include visual quality, ecology, forest health, timber, water, and wildlife. NED-2 expands on previous versions of NED applications by integrating treatment prescriptions, growth simulation, and alternative comparisons with evaluations of multiple resources across a management unit. The NED-2 system is adaptable for small private holdings, large public properties, or cooperative management across multiple ownerships. NED-2 implements a goal-driven decision process that ensures that all relevant goals are considered; the character and current condition of forestland are known; alternatives to manage the land are designed and tested; the future forest under each alternative is simulated; and the alternative selected achieves the owner's goals. NED-2 is designed to link with the NedLite package for field data collection using a handheld PDA, and is constructed to be easy to link to third-party applications. The NED process is being field tested to demonstrate its utility and identify weaknesses. Results of case studies are summarized for two owners, a private individual and the City of Baltimore, Maryland, and its reservoir lands.

Scientific Visualization in Collaborative Virtual Environment with PDA-Based Control and 3D Annotation

Scientific collaborative visualization based on visual data mining is an efficient approach for facilitating the intellectual discovery and understanditgi the visualization data obtained from large-scale ata sets. We think that Collaborative Virtual Environment (CVE) is one of the efficient method to achieve collaborative works by sharing a virtual reality 3D space among users at remote places, In addition, it would be more useful if we could use virtual 3D annotations during collaborative work. In this paper, therefore, we construct a HybridP2P-based CVE in which as wireless handheld PDA is used for making 3D annotations and changing some visualization parameters when necessary.

Problems For Handheld Computers In Higher Education

One of the latest devices to be utilized in education is the handheld computer or PDA. This paper presents experimental results suggesting problems for the device in higher education. Handhelds have been used successfully in K-12 education; however, student and faculty research presented in this paper shows that the PDA’s small form factor and other characteristics make the device less useful for college students.

In-Process Oven Temperature Monitoring—Quicker, Smaller and Easier

SUMMARYTemperature profiling has been used for basic thermal cure quality assurance purposes n the finishing industry for years'3. The following paper aims to review the use and benefits of such a technique not only for finishing QA but also process control, optimisation and proactive fault finding. Detailed discussion will be given to the changing requirements of such a technique and the innovative developments in data collection, interpretation and reporting being implemented to take the technique into the new millennium. An introduction will be given to new portable units working directly from hand held Palm PDA devices.

MobiMine

This paper describes an experimental mobile data mining system that allows intelligent monitoring of time-critical financial data from a hand-held PDA. It presents the overall system architecture and the philosophy behind the design. It explores one particular aspect of the system---automated construction of personalized focus area that calls for user's attention. This module works using data mining techniques. The paper describes the data mining component of the system that employs a novel Fourier analysis-based approach to efficiently represent, visualize, and communicate decision trees over limited bandwidth wireless networks. The paper also discusses a quadratic programming-based personalization module that runs on the PDAs and the multi-media based user-interfaces. It reports experimental results using an ad hoc peer-to-peer IEEE 802.11 wireless network.