Recent Advances In Digitization Research Articles

Analysis of Opportunistic Relaying and Load Balancing Gains Through V2V Clustering

Recent advances in digitization, artificial intelligence, and wireless networking are revolutionizing the traditional transportation networks and the automotive industry, leading for instance to the widespread adoption of ride-sharing services and the emergence of self-driving vehicles. As a result, a considerable rise in the volume of infotainment data consumed by the vehicles’ passengers is expected. To support such traffic loads, we explore leveraging vehicles as part of the cellular infrastructure. This paper investigates and quantifies the performance gains that using Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication to form relay clusters would enable, including (1) improving opportunistic channel access to the cellular infrastructure by relaying the cluster’s traffic through the vehicle seeing the best channel quality; and (2) balancing traffic loads across cells through cluster multihoming. We introduce a stochastic geometric model allowing us to provide a deeper understanding of the possible gains associated with cluster-based opportunistic relaying and its sensitivity to the system parameters, e.g., base station density, vehicle density on the roads, etc. We develop a natural network utility maximization problem to serve as a baseline to evaluate the performance of a simpler distributed cluster management algorithm which we show to be near-optimal. Overall the results suggest that <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$10-20\times$</tex-math></inline-formula> gains in the vehicles’ shared rate can be achieved along with significant fairness improvements, while other mobile devices also benefit from the proposed network architecture.

EHealth Literacy of German Physicians in the Pre–COVID-19 Era: Questionnaire Study

BackgroundDigitalization is a disruptive technology that changes the way we deliver diagnostic procedures and treatments in medicine. Different stakeholders have varying interests in and expectations of the digitalization of modern medicine. Many recent digital advances in the medical field, such as the implementation of electronic health records, telemedical services, and mobile health apps, are increasingly used by medical professionals and patients. During the current pandemic outbreak of a novel coronavirus-caused respiratory disease (COVID-19), many modern information and communication technologies (ICT) have been used to overcome the physical barriers and limitations caused by government-issued curfews and workforce shortages. Therefore, the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a surge in the usage of modern ICT in medicine. At the same time, the eHealth literacy of physicians working with these technologies has probably not improved since our study.ObjectiveThis paper describes a representative cohort of German physicians before the COVID-19 pandemic and their eHealth literacy and attitude towards modern ICT.MethodsA structured, self-developed questionnaire about user behavior and attitudes towards eHealth applications was administered to a representative cohort of 93 German physicians.ResultsOf the 93 German physicians who participated in the study, 97% (90/93) use a mobile phone. Medical apps are used by 42% (39/93). Half of the surveyed physicians (47/93, 50%) use their private mobile phones for official purposes on a daily basis. Telemedicine is part of the daily routine for more than one-third (31/93, 33%) of all participants. More than 80% (76/93, 82%) of the trial participants state that their knowledge regarding the legal aspects and data safety of medical apps and cloud computing is insufficient.ConclusionsModern ICT is frequently used and mostly welcomed by German physicians. However, there is a tremendous lack of eHealth literacy and knowledge about the safe and secure implementation of these technologies in routine clinical practice.