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Background Digitally enabled rehabilitation may lead to better outcomes but has not been tested in large pragmatic trials. We aimed to evaluate a tailored prescription of affordable digital devices in addition to usual care for people with mobility limitations admitted to aged care and neurological rehabilitation. Methods and findings We conducted a pragmatic, outcome-assessor-blinded, parallel-group randomised trial in 3 Australian hospitals in Sydney and Adelaide recruiting adults 18 to 101 years old with mobility limitations undertaking aged care and neurological inpatient rehabilitation. Both the intervention and control groups received usual multidisciplinary inpatient and post-hospital rehabilitation care as determined by the treating rehabilitation clinicians. In addition to usual care, the intervention group used devices to target mobility and physical activity problems, individually prescribed by a physiotherapist according to an intervention protocol, including virtual reality video games, activity monitors, and handheld computer devices for 6 months in hospital and at home. Co-primary outcomes were mobility (performance-based Short Physical Performance Battery [SPPB]; continuous version; range 0 to 3; higher score indicates better mobility) and upright time as a proxy measure of physical activity (proportion of the day upright measured with activPAL) at 6 months. The dataset was analysed using intention-to-treat principles. The trial was prospectively registered with the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry (ACTRN12614000936628). Between 22 September 2014 and 10 November 2016, 300 patients (mean age 74 years, SD 14; 50% female; 54% neurological condition causing activity limitation) were randomly assigned to intervention (n = 149) or control (n = 151) using a secure online database (REDCap) to achieve allocation concealment. Six-month assessments were completed by 258 participants (129 intervention, 129 control). Intervention participants received on average 12 (SD 11) supervised inpatient sessions using 4 (SD 1) different devices and 15 (SD 5) physiotherapy contacts supporting device use after hospital discharge. Changes in mobility scores were higher in the intervention group compared to the control group from baseline (SPPB [continuous, 0–3] mean [SD]: intervention group, 1.5 [0.7]; control group, 1.5 [0.8]) to 6 months (SPPB [continuous, 0–3] mean [SD]: intervention group, 2.3 [0.6]; control group, 2.1 [0.8]; mean between-group difference 0.2 points, 95% CI 0.1 to 0.3; p = 0.006). However, there was no evidence of a difference between groups for upright time at 6 months (mean [SD] proportion of the day spent upright at 6 months: intervention group, 18.2 [9.8]; control group, 18.4 [10.2]; mean between-group difference −0.2, 95% CI −2.7 to 2.3; p = 0.87). Scores were higher in the intervention group compared to the control group across most secondary mobility outcomes, but there was no evidence of a difference between groups for most other secondary outcomes including self-reported balance confidence and quality of life. No adverse events were reported in the intervention group. Thirteen participants died while in the trial (intervention group: 9; control group: 4) due to unrelated causes, and there was no evidence of a difference between groups in fall rates (unadjusted incidence rate ratio 1.19, 95% CI 0.78 to 1.83; p = 0.43). Study limitations include 15%–19% loss to follow-up at 6 months on the co-primary outcomes, as anticipated; the number of secondary outcome measures in our trial, which may increase the risk of a type I error; and potential low statistical power to demonstrate significant between-group differences on important secondary patient-reported outcomes. Conclusions In this study, we observed improved mobility in people with a wide range of health conditions making use of digitally enabled rehabilitation, whereas time spent upright was not impacted. Trial registration The trial was prospectively registered with the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Register; ACTRN12614000936628, In a randomised controlled trial, Leanne Hassett and colleagues investigate the impact of digitally-enabled aged care and neurological rehabilitation on activity and mobility outcomes in Australia., Author summary Why was this study done? A higher dose of therapy in physical rehabilitation is associated with better outcomes; however, current rehabilitation models deliver low therapy doses. Use of digital devices such as virtual reality video games, activity monitors, and handheld computer devices can be enjoyable, provide feedback on performance, and may enable a greater dose of task-specific therapy to improve outcomes. Current evidence is yet to confidently confirm the effects of rehabilitation using digital devices in addition to usual rehabilitation care on mobility tasks such as walking and other important outcomes such as quality of life. What did the researchers do and find? In a pragmatic, outcome-assessor-blinded randomised controlled trial, 300 people with walking difficulties (age 72 ± 16 years, 50% female) received usual multidisciplinary inpatient and post-hospital aged care and neurological rehabilitation alone, or in addition used a range of affordable devices such as virtual reality video games, activity monitors, and handheld devices to target mobility and physical activity, as individually prescribed by a physiotherapist for 6 months. On average participants in the intervention group used 4 ± 1 devices in the inpatient setting and 2 ± 1 devices in the post-hospital setting. This approach was feasible and enjoyed, and demonstrated it could be provided across care settings including the post-hospital setting with mostly remote support. Clinically important improvement was seen in mobility at 3 weeks and 6 months after baseline, but this was not accompanied by greater time spent upright. No adverse events were reported by participants whilst undertaking rehabilitation using digital devices, and there was no difference in the rate of falls between groups. What do these findings mean? Digitally enabled rehabilitation using a range of devices prescribed by a physiotherapist to target a range of mobility limitations across care settings for adults with mixed health conditions can improve mobility but not time spent upright. These results need to be interpreted in light of study limitations including a 15%–19% loss to follow-up at 6 months on the co-primary outcomes. Future models of rehabilitation should investigate incorporating digital devices to enhance inpatient and post-hospital rehabilitation, but prescription should ensure quality and quantity of practice.

This paper reviews the results of recent researches aimed to extend the standard-cell based digital design flow to analog building blocks, so that to enhance scalability, reconfigurability and portability across technology nodes and to reduce design effort, time-to-market and costs. In this framework, the application of the proposed fully digital design approach to a wake up oscillator and to a Digital-to-Analog Converter, which are two building blocks widely employed in IoT sensor nodes, is illustrated in detail.

The fifth generation of mobile communications (5G) is expected to dramatically improve performance compared to preceding standards by offering very high bandwidths and low latencies. To provide this performance, heavy processing is required and must meet strong timing constraints. Reconfigurable computing, managing processing in software and exploiting reconfigurable hardware acceleration, is an innovative approach that should be considered for 5G for its capacity to combine high throughput and high flexibility. This paper presents a case study for Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) computation reconfigurable offloading onto an Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The implementation is based on Open Computing Language (OpenCL) that represents a versatile solution, as this language can be compiled for several architectures, provided that a Host+Accelerator structure is used. The objective of our study is to demonstrate that, by means of hardware offloading, the 5G architecture resources can reach high computational load, avoiding processing stalls and latency increase. Results show that around 15% of the software processing can be freed through hardware acceleration and reallocated to support other tasks.

The International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) recognizes every year the most influential paper published in this conference 15 years earlier, based on its impact on research, development, products or ideas. This award is sponsored by the IEEEComputer Society Technical Committee on Computer Architecture (IEEE-CS TCCA) and the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Architecture (ACM SIGARCH). In this year’s edition, the candidate papers were those papers published in ISCA 2003 proceedings.The selection process was chaired by Antonio González. Candidate papers for the award were selected by the current year’s ISCA Pro-gram Committee. The final award selection was made by the Award Chair (Antonio González), the IEEE-CS TCCA Chair (Lieven Eeckhout) and the ACM SIGARCH Chair (Sarita Adve). The award includes an honorarium for the authors and a certificate.The 2018 award was presented to “Temperature-Aware Microarchitecture” by Kevin Skadron, Mircea R. Stan, Wei Huang, Sivakumar Velusamy, Karthik Sankaranarayanan and DavidTarjan.

This article discusses the 2017 ACM SIGARCH/IEEE-CS TCCA Influential ISCA Paper Award, which was given to the 2002 ISCA paper, “Drowsy Caches: Simple Techniques for Reducing Leakage Power.”

This column discusses two awards given in 2014: the International Symposium on Computer Architecture Influential Paper Award, which was given to the authors of the paper "PipeRench: A Coprocessor for Streaming Multimedia Acceleration," and the Maurice Wilkes Award, which was given to Ravi Rajwar.

This is the third special issue published in this journal with selected contributions from the VI Southern Conference on Programmable Logic (SPL, www.splconf.org). SPL is one of the first-class conferences on programmable logic around the world. Started in 2005, SPL has since 2007 the technical cosponsorship of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CAS). The conference has been always organized in the south hemisphere. The selection of papers presented in this special issue is coming from the last 6th edition, held in Ipojuca, Brazil, from March 24 to 26, 2010. This issue is focused on speech and video acceleration applications. The first paper by P. Eh Kan et al., “FPGA implementation for GMM-based speaker identification” in the area of biometric-based speaker identification, describes the hardware implementation for classification of a text-independent (Gaussian mixture model) GMMbased speaker identification system. Authors show that the proposed hardware implementation allows simultaneous identification processing for a large number of voice streams in real time. In “FPGA implementation of a pipelined Gaussian calculation for HMM-based large-vocabulary speech recognition,” R. Veitch et al. present several alternatives for a Gaussian core as part of a larger speech recognition system. These cores are developed as an embedded peripheral and as a scalable, parallel hardware accelerator. Next, in “A high throughput hardware architecture for the H.264/AVC half-pixel motion estimation targeting high definition videos,” M. M. Correa et al. present a highperformance hardware implementation for the H.264/AVC half-pixel motion estimation that targets high-definition videos. This design can process very high-definition videos like QHDTV (3840 × 2048) in real time (30 frames per second). E. C. Pedrino et al. in the area of computer vision presented “A genetic programming approach to reconfigure a morphological image processing architecture.” They report the development of a reconfigurable architecture using logical, arithmetic, and morphological instructions generated automatically by a genetic programming approach. Related to cryptographic algorithms, G. Perin et al., in “Montgomery modular multiplication on reconfigurable hardware: systolic versus multiplexed implementation,” develop two Montgomery modular multiplication architectures: a systolic and a multiplexed circuit with competitive results. Finally, A. G. Silva-Filho et al. presented an advanced EDA tool in the paper “An ESL approach for energy consumption analysis of cache memories in SoC platforms” in the area of design space exploration. They propose an electronicsystem-level (ESL) approach for system modeling and cache energy consumption analysis of SoCs.

Scalable Video Coding provides temporal, spatial and quality scalability using layers within the encoded bitstream. This feature allows the encoded bitstream to be adapted to different devices and heterogeneous networks. This paper proposes a technique to convert an H.264/AVC bitstream in Baseline profile to a scalable stream which provides temporal scalability. Applying the presented approach, a reduction of 65% of coding complexity is achieved while maintaining the coding efficiency.

This tutorial paper surveys recent developments in parallel computer architecture, focusing on the field-programmable gate array and the graphics processor. We aim to illustrate the potential of these architectures for the type of high-speed numerical computation required in on-line optimization for model predictive control. While significant performance advantages can be gained by migrating existing control algorithms to these processor architectures, in order to realise their full potential, further research is needed at the boundary of control theory, digital electronics, and computer architecture. We survey some of the open questions in this area.

This column discusses the winner of the 2012 International Symposium on Computer Architecture Influential Paper Award. It describes, from the point of view of the chair of the committee, what makes the paper influential.

Published version

International audience; Book Front Matter of AICT 313

1 Reconfigurable Computing Group, Computer Science Department, National Institute for Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics, 72840 Puebla, PUE, Mexico 2Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Virginia Tech Configurable Computing Laboratory, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA 3 Institute for Information Processing Technology (ITIV), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany

Information technology has only been around for about fifty years. Although the beginnings of automatic calculation date from as early as the 17th century (W. Schickard built the first mechanical calculator in 1623), it took the invention of the transistor by W. Shockley, J. Bardeen and W. Brattain in 1947 to catapult calculators out of the laboratory and produce the omnipresence of information and communication systems in today's world. Computers not only boast very high performance, capable of carrying out billions of operations per second, they are taking over our world, working their way into every last corner of our environment. Microprocessors are in everything, from the quartz watch to the PC via the mobile phone, the television and the credit card. Their continuing spread is very probable, and they will even be able to get into our clothes and newspapers. The incessant search for increasingly powerful, robust and intelligent systems is not only based on the improvement of technologies for the manufacture of electronic chips, but also on finding new computer architectures. One important source of inspiration for the research of new architectures is the biological world. Nature is fascinating for an engineer: what could be more robust, intelligent and able to adapt and evolve than a living organism? Out of a simple cell, equipped with its own blueprint in the form of DNA, develops a complete multi-cellular organism. The characteristics of the natural world have often been studied and imitated in the design of adaptive, robust and fault-tolerant artificial systems. The POE model resumes the three major sources of bio-inspiration: the evolution of species (P: phylogeny), the development of a multi-cellular organism by division and differentiation (O: ontogeny) and learning by interaction with the environment (E: epigenesis). This thesis aims to contribute to the ontogenetic branch of the POE model, through the study of three completely original cellular machines for which the basic element respects the six following characteristics: it is (1) reconfigurable, (2) of minimal complexity, (3) present in large numbers, (4) interconnected locally with its neighboring elements, (5) equipped with a display capacity and (6) with sensor allowing minimal interaction. Our first realization, the BioWall, is made up of a surface of 4,000 basic elements or molecules, capable of creating all cellular systems with a maximum of 160 × 25 elements. The second realization, the BioCube, transposes the two-dimensional architecture of the BioWall into a two-dimensional space, limited to 4 × 4 × 4 = 64 basic elements or spheres. It prefigures a three-dimensional computer built using nanotechnologies. The third machine, named BioTissue, uses the same hypothesis as the BioWall while pushing its performance to the limits of current technical possibilities and offering the benefits of an autonomous system. The convergence of these three realizations, studied in the context of emerging technologies, has allowed us to propose and define the computer architecture of the future: the electronic paper.

A data processing system for paper testing utilising local area network (LAN) has beendeveloped as a part of laboratory automation program. The system consists of paper testinginstruments, personal computers, and a LAN network. Testing results are made into a reportby communicating data between instruments and computers, and between computers.

Tremendous progress has been made in the design and implementation of synthetic gene circuits, but real-world applications of such circuits have been limited. Cell-free circuits embedded on paper developed by Pardee et al. promise to deliver specific and rapid diagnostics on a low-cost, highly scalable platform.