Paternal and Maternal Information and Communication Technology Usage as Their Very Low Birth Weight Infants Transition Home From the NICU

Little is known about how differently mothers and fathers of very low birth weight (VLBW) infants use information and communication technology (ICT), especially during the vulnerable transition from the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) to home. This study aims to qualitatively compare and contrast the two groups’ usage of technology. In-depth, semistructured phone interviews were conducted with 25 parents of 16 VLBW infants who had been hospitalized in the NICU. Grounded theory facilitated the understanding of interview data. This article discusses the patterns that emerged around the use of ICT between the two groups and discusses the implications for health information seeking, privacy and misinformation, online social networking, learning technology, choosing a health care provider, and health care communication.     

Are Stereotypes Relative to Gender Usage Applicable to Virtual Worlds?

Common stereotypes of virtual game or community users are often portrayed as young and socially inept male addicts. Recent studies, however, defy many of the common prejudices about game or community users. As an extension of recent research, this study looks at gender differences in Virtual Worlds and finds that female users are actually a driving force behind the recent success of online communities. The study results indicate that female users more actively participate in social life, information seeking, and building activities in Virtual Worlds than their male counterparts. Similarly, female users have greater appreciation for the value of Virtual Worlds, although both male and female users recognize Virtual Worlds as a highly useful entertainment tool.     

Fast response fringe‐field switching mode liquid crystal development for shutter glass 3D

A type of fast response time (RT) liquid crystal (LC) was developed to adopt in fringe‐field switching (FFS) mode for shutter glass 3D display device, the average gray to gray level (GTG) RT can reduce from 7.43 ms to 4.48 ms at a refreshing rate of 60 Hz, and the transmittance can increase by 15.4% compared with conventional LC based on the same cell gap. Meanwhile, the correlation among optical efficiency, correlative color temperature (CCT) of module and retardation of LC for FFS mode was studied. Transmittance is proportional to the retardation of LC; however, the CCT is inversely proportional to the retardation. The fast response LC can keep almost the original optical efficiency and CCT.     

Extraction of enhanced evoked potentials using wavelet filtering

In order to remove physiological artefacts and gain the improved evoked potentials, we propose a filtering method using the multi-resolution wavelet transform. The wavelet transform is repeatedly performed until all resolution levels are obtained. It decomposes the measured evoked potentials into scale coefficients corresponding to low frequency components and wavelet coefficients corresponding to high frequency components. In the wavelet domain, artefacts are dispersed mainly at the wavelet coefficients rather than the scaling coefficients. Thus, when the inverse wavelet transform is performed, this method shrinks the wavelet coefficients to reduce artefacts with shrinkage functions. By repeatedly performing the inverse wavelet transform, an evoked potential having the reduced artefacts and background noise is obtained. In this study, quantitative evaluation with simulation data and actual clinical data were conducted. As a result, characteristic peaks of evoked potential could be gained removing background EEG and artefacts using suggested shrinkage function. It was improved more than 0.2–1.6Db compared to the conventional averaging method. Also, the system for measuring and analyzing evoked potentials using DSP is implemented.     

An enhanced motion estimation approach using a genetic trail bounded approximation for H.264/AVC codecs

Genetic algorithm-based motion estimation schemes play a significant role in improving the results of H.264/AVC standardization efforts when addressing conversational and non-conversational video applications. In this paper, we present a robust motion estimation scheme that uses a noble genetic trail bounded approximation (GTBA) approach to speed up the encoding process of H.264/AVC video compression and to reduce the number of bits required to code frame. The proposed algorithm is utilized to enhance the fitness function strength by integrating trail information of motion vector and sum of absolute difference (SAD) information into a fitness function. Experimental results reveal that the proposed GTBA resolves conflict obstacles with respect to both the number of bits required to code frames and the execution time for estimation.     

A hybrid user authentication protocol for mobile IPTV service

IPTV, a technological convergence that combines communication and broadcasting technologies, delivers customized, interactive TV content and other multimedia information over wired and wireless connections. Providing secure access to IPTV services calls for authentication, without proper and secure authentication mechanisms, an individual impersonating a subscriber could steal a service. This paper proposes a new authentication protocol to authenticate IPTV users. The authors based the proposed protocol, a hybrid authentication protocol providing lightweight, personalized user authentication, on RFID (radio-frequency identification) and USIM (Universal Subscriber Identity Module) technologies. In the proposed protocol, USIM performs highly personalized authentication, and the authenticated subscriber’s RFID tags can have a temporary authority to execute authentication. These RFID tags become Agent Tags authorized to authenticate subscribers. Agent Tags identify and authenticate themselves to RFID readers in the set-top box, thus, simplifying the authentication process.     

An ontology-based personalized target advertisement system on interactive TV

We design and implement a personalized target advertisement (PTA) system in IPTV using ontology-based semantic relations between IPTV program and advertisement. In the PTA system, we focus on the development of an ontology reasoning technique of improving advertisement recommendation ability and exploiting efficient information reuse. For this purpose, we first build the IPTV program ontology and viewer profiling ontology based on the IPTV program and viewers’ content consumption behavior, using OWL (Web Ontology Language) standardized by W3C. We then classify each viewer into his/her corresponding reference group using a similarity metric. After that, we define the semantic relations between advertisement and shopping products consumed by the prototype through shopping sites in IPTV. Based on these semantic relations, we infer the preferred advertisements for each viewer through our reasoning process. In the experimental section, we demonstrate a prototype of our system and the algorithm of the PTA system using various cases.     

An enhanced fuzzy c-means algorithm for audio segmentation and classification

Automated audio segmentation and classification play important roles in multimedia content analysis. In this paper, we propose an enhanced approach, called the correlation intensive fuzzy c-means (CIFCM) algorithm, to audio segmentation and classification that is based on audio content analysis. While conventional methods work by considering the attributes of only the current frame or segment, the proposed CIFCM algorithm efficiently incorporates the influence of neighboring frames or segments in the audio stream. With this method, audio-cuts can be detected efficiently even when the signal contains audio effects such as fade-in, fade-out, and cross-fade. A number of audio features are analyzed in this paper to explore the differences between various types of audio data. The proposed CIFCM algorithm works by detecting the boundaries between different kinds of sounds and classifying them into clusters such as silence, speech, music, speech with music, and speech with noise. Our experimental results indicate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art FCM approach in terms of audio segmentation and classification.     

An object-based middleware supporting efficient interoperability on a smart home network

This paper proposes a novel object-based home network middleware for supporting the interoperability among home devices and smart grid devices. This middleware provides various types of abstract objects for flexible representation of heterogeneous home devices, which are classified based on their characteristics. It is also flexible enough to allow addition of new protocols and message conversion between different protocols through an abstraction layer, which are not supported by existing home network middlewares so that various protocols can be supported. As a result, it can be utilized to provide the interoperability among a variety of devices from sensors to typical home appliances as well as smart grid devices such as a home electric generator and a battery, which adopt different protocols. In order to demonstrate that home devices and smart grid devices are interoperable through the proposed middleware, we implement applications based on the middleware on a target platform consisting of embedded boards, sensors and laptops for emulation purposes of a home network. According to our emulation, this middleware can provide efficient interoperability among home devices and smart grid devices for future energy efficient home.