Design of Edge-IoMT Network Architecture with Weight-Based Scheduling.

Population health monitoring based on the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) is becoming an important application trend healthcare improvement. This work aims to develop an autonomous network architecture, collecting sensor data with a cluster topology, forwarding information through relay nodes, and applying edge computing and transmission scheduling for network scalability and operational efficiency. The proposed distributed network architecture incorporates data compression technologies and effective scheduling algorithms for handling the transmission scheduling of various physiological signals. Compared to existing scheduling mechanisms, the experimental results depict the network performance and show that in analyzing the delay and jitter, the proposed WFQ-based algorithms have reduced the delay and jitter ratio by about 40% and 19.47% compared to LLQ with priority queueing scheme, respectively. The experimental results also demonstrate that the proposed network topology is more effective than the direct path transmission approach in terms of energy consumption, which suggests that the proposed network architecture may improve the development of medical applications with body area networks such that the goal of self-organizing population health monitoring can be achieved.

Cochlear dead region and word recognition of Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan.

In a tonal language, the identity of a word depends largely on the tonal identification of the contour of vocal fundamental frequency energy of which usually centers in a low frequency of less than 600 Hz. However, cochlear dead region (DR) is present mostly in the frequency range of 2000 Hz to 4000 Hz, and the effect of DR on a tonal language is worth investigating. Thirty-two native Mandarin speakers with moderate-to-severe degree of sensorineural hearing loss were included in this study. The pure-tone audiometry, speech recognition threshold (SRT) and word recognition score (WRS) were used to evaluate the degree of hearing loss and word recognition. The threshold equalizing noise (TEN) tests were used to identify the presence of DR. The results showed that most DRs were present in high frequencies. The hearing thresholds of the ears with a DR were not significantly different from those without DR. However, the WRS was significantly worse for the DR ears, especially for those whose DR included three or more audiometric frequencies. A DR caused a significantly worse word recognition for the tonal language speakers of Mandarin in Taiwan, although the DR frequency occurred in the high frequency of 2000 Hz to 4000 Hz.