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The demographic change and ageing in Europe will lead to a growing number of people suffering from dementia. Consequently, costs for public health will increase because people become more and more reliant on care and gradually lose their independence and mobility. In the case of dementia, remedial measures could be provided by assistive technology to support independent living at home for as long as possible. Current assistance systems are often limited to actively raising an alert (i.e., electronic panic buttons) or location tracking. Due to this small range of functions these systems are poorly accepted by the target group. Thus, this paper reports on a selection process for a spatial data collection device allowing the development of a new so-called mobility safeguarding assistance system for people with dementia which combines features of different systems. In particular, the wearability as an everyday object is a key issue when it comes to identifying an adequate gadget for elderly people. The proposed methodology considers user requirements as well as technical requirements when it comes to finding a suitable device. Based on these requirements, several different devices were reviewed and tested in order to find most suitable potential device as part of the selection process. The device selected shows that the proposed process on how to choose the right device performed well.

This paper presents a specific approach to the design of a mobile measurement station (MMS) that will operate in a harsh environment. This paper also presents a selection process for the hardware of the MMS. The work is based on a quality engineering method called the quality function deployment and on an operations research tool called the analytic hierarchy process. These approaches have not found a widespread application in the design of measurement systems. An important part of this paper is the selection of a controller for the MMS, for which the authors describe two engineering tools for the selection procedure. Most engineering designs can benefit from using these two engineering tools for selecting components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is my seventh annual April Fool's essay. I take this yearly opportunity to assail some aspect of our business that I consider sufficiently infected with folly to warrant a […]

I finally installed a network at home. I've put that exercise off repeatedly. You can only deal with so many pockets of complexity at any one time- no point in […]

The aspects to consider when choosing an IBM PC AT-class microcomputer have increased tremendously in complexity as more choices become available. The first rule to follow in making a purchase decision is to define the computer requirements and intended uses of the system carefully; this includes the applications (word processing, spreadsheet, etc.), whether a single-user system or a LAN is required, and the peripherals needed. Users should avoid false economies: an 80286 with 1Mbyte of RAM is much less expensive than an 80386 with 4Mbytes of RAM, and both systems will run the same applications, but multitasking applications will require the more powerful system. Other rules to follow are to remember that most of the cost of a computer system is in peripherals and software; to buy a high-quality human interface; to keep compatibility in mind; and to consider software support.

The portable computer market is now a segment of its own in the computer industry, and as such it deserves its own testing methodology addressing functions in comparison to desktop computers as well as to other portables. Users buying a portable computer must consider the difficulty of adding in and on devices that are not in the basic configuration and the size and weight limitations of the machines that make it more difficult to personalize the systems. Among the portable market subclasses are transportables (powered by AC only), laptops (may use a combination of AC and battery power), notebook computers (battery powered and weighing less than five pounds), pocket computers (non-standard mass storage and keyboard but DOS compatible) and self-contained remote computers (with cellular radios or transmitters and receivers for non-wire remote operations). The testing process, including the development of the portability quotient, is described.

The execution of a quantum algorithm typically requires various classical pre- and post-processing tasks. Hence, workflows are a promising means to orchestrate these tasks, benefiting from their reliability, robustness, and features, such as transactional processing. However, the implementations of the tasks may be very heterogeneous and they depend on the quantum hardware used to execute the quantum circuits of the algorithm. Additionally, today's quantum computers are still restricted, which limits the size of the quantum circuits that can be executed. As the circuit size often depends on the input data of the algorithm, the selection of quantum hardware to execute a quantum circuit must be done at workflow runtime. However, modeling all possible alternative tasks would clutter the workflow model and require its adaptation whenever a new quantum computer or software tool is released. To overcome this problem, we introduce an approach to automatically select suitable quantum hardware for the execution of quantum circuits in workflows. Furthermore, it enables the dynamic adaptation of the workflows, depending on the selection at runtime based on reusable workflow fragments. We validate our approach with a prototypical implementation and a case study demonstrating the hardware selection for Simon's algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]