The US health care industry is experiencing a substantial paradigm shift with regard to home care due to the convergence of several technology areas. Increasingly-capable telehealth systems and the internet are not only moving the point of care closer to the patient, but the patient can now assume a more active role in his or her own care. These technologies, coupled with (1) the migration of the health care industry to electronic patient records and (2) the emergence of a growing number of enabling health care technologies (e.g., novel biosensors, wearable devices, and intelligent software agents), demonstrate unprecedented potential for delivering highly automated, intelligent health care in the home. This editorial paper presents a vision for the implementation of intelligent health care technology in the home of the future, focusing on areas of research that have the highest potential payoff given targeted government funding over the next ten years. Here, intelligent health care technology means smart devices and systems that are aware of their context and can therefore assimilate information to support care decisions. A systems perspective is used to describe a framework under which devices can interact with one another in a plug-and-play manner. Within this infrastructure, traditionally passive …

Telemedicine technology is rapidly evolving. Whereas early telemedicine consultations relied primarily on video conferencing, consultations today may utilize video conferencing, medical peripherals, store-and-forward capabilities, electronic patient record management software, and/or a host of other emerging technologies. These remote care systems rely increasingly on distributed, collaborative information technology during the care delivery process, in its many forms. While these leading-edge systems are bellwethers for highly advanced telemedicine, the remote care market today is still immature. Most telemedicine systems are custom-designed and do not interoperate with other commercial offerings. Users are limited to a set of functionality that a single vendor provides and must often pay high prices to obtain this functionality, since vendors in this marketplace must deliver entire systems in order to compete. Besides increasing corporate research and development costs, this inhibits the ability of the user to make intelligent purchasing decisions regarding best-of-breed technologies. We propose a secure, object-oriented information architecture for telemedicine systems that promotes plug-and-play interaction between system components through standardized interfaces, communication protocols, messaging formats, and data definitions. In this architecture, each component functions as a black box, and components plug together in a lego-like fashion to achieve the desired device or system functionality. The architecture …

The Security Specification, Version 1.0 allows security services to be provided by many devices in a network. It correctly presumes that if a virtual circuit needs these security services, then network topology and device policy will act to ensure that the appropriate security services are applied to the virtual circuit. This contribution moves that the Security Service Discovery and Routing function be included in the Security Version 2.0 work scope.

Variable-speed, horizontal axis wind turbines use blade-pitch control to meet specified objectives for three regions of operation. This paper focuses on controller design for the constant power production regime. A simple, rigid, non-linear turbine model was used to systematically perform trade-off studies between two performance metrics. Minimization of both the deviation of the rotor speed from the desired speed and the motion of the actuator is obtained through systematic selection of proportional-integral-derivative controller gain values. The gain design is performed using a non-linear turbine model and two linear models. The linear models differ only in selection of linearization point. The gain combinations resulting from design based upon each of the three models are similar. Performance under each of the three gain combinations is acceptable according to the metrics selected. The importance of operating point selection for linear models is illustrated. Because the simulation runs efficiently, the non-linear model provides the best gain design, but careful selection of the linearization point can produce acceptable gain designs from linear models.

An important component of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory wind resource assessment methodology is the use of available upper-air data to construct detailed vertical profiles for a study region. Currently, the most useful upper-air data for this type of analysis are archived observations from approximately 1800 rawinsonde and pilot balloon stations worldwide. However, significant uncertainty exists in the accuracy of the constructed profiles for many regions. The United States Reanalysis Data Set, recently created by the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, has the potential to improve the quality of the vertical profiles. The initial evaluation of the usefulness of the Reanalysis data for wind resource assessment consisted of contrasting reanalysis-derived vertical profiles of the wind characteristics to those generated from upper-air observations for comparable locations. The results indicate that, while reanalysis data can be substituted for upper-air observation data in the assessment methodology for areas of the world where observation data are limited, enough discrepancies with observation data have been noticed to warrant further studies.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has developed an automated technique for wind resource mapping to aid in the acceleration of wind energy deployment. The new automated mapping system was developed with the following two primary goals: (1) to produce a more consistent and detailed analysis of the wind resource for a variety of physiographic settings, particularly in areas of complex terrain; and (2) to generate high quality map products on a timely basis. Using computer mapping techniques reduces the time it takes to produce a wind map that reflects a consistent analysis of the distribution of the wind resource throughout the region of interest. NREL's mapping system uses commercially available geographic information system software packages. Regional wind resource maps using this new system have been produced for areas of the United States, Mexico, Chile, Indonesia (1), and China. Countrywide wind resource assessments are under way for the Philippines, the Dominican Re public, and Mongolia. Regional assessments in Argentina and Russia are scheduled to begin soon.

We are developing rugged and reliable hydrogen safety sensors that can be easily manufactured. Potential applications also require an inexpensive sensor that can be easily deployed. Automotive applications demand low cost, while personnel safety applications emphasize light-weight, battery-operated, and wearable sensors. Our current efforts involve developing and optimizing sensor materials for stability and compatibility with typical thick-film manufacturing processes. We are also tailoring the sensor design and size along with various packaging and communication schemes for optimal acceptance by end users.