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This paper presents a voltage-scalable digital signal processing system designed for the use in a wireless sensor node (WSN) for ambulatory monitoring of biomedical signals. To fulfill the requirements of ambulatory monitoring, power consumption, which directly translates to the WSN battery lifetime and size, must be kept as low as possible. The proposed processing platform is an event-driven system with resources to run applications with different degrees of complexity in an energy-aware way. The architecture uses effective system partitioning to enable duty cycling, single instruction multiple data (SIMD) instructions, power gating, voltage scaling, multiple clock domains, multiple voltage domains, and extensive clock gating. It provides an alternative processing platform where the power and performance can be scaled to adapt to the application need. A case study on a continuous wavelet transform (CWT)-based heart-beat detection shows that the platform not only preserves the sensitivity and positive predictivity of the algorithm but also achieves the lowest energy/sample for ElectroCardioGram (ECG) heart-beat detection publicly reported today.

A flower specific cDNA, tgas118, has been isolated after differential screening of a gib-1 anther cDNA library of Lycopersicon esculentum. The corresponding mRNA was present in all tissues analysed. Northern blot analysis revealed that in wild-type tomato the gene was predominantly expressed throughout flower development, while in the gibberellin (GA)-deficient mutant of tomato (gib-1) the abundance declined. Treatment of the mutant with GA resulted in an accumulation of the tgas118 mRNA within hours in leaf and bud tissues. In the leaf, GA1, GA3 and GA9 were effective in enhancing the expression while GA4 was not. In addition to GA, wounding and dehydration also increased the accumulation of tgas118 mRNA in leaf tissue. In situ hybridization showed that application of 50 ng GA3 bud(-1) induced a similar spatial expression of the tgas118 mRNA in gib-1 buds 24 h post treatment to that found in wild-type flower buds. The deduced TGAS118 protein displays up to 77% similarity with defensins and as its expression is up-regulated by stimuli such as wounding it is proposed that it may play a role in protection against pathogens.