Be first to hear the latest - subscribe to our eNewsletter  

• About Us
• Programs
• Services
• Technology
• Membership

Technology Bulletins

Research Focus Filters: eHealth| eHome| Connected Media

Sep 30, 2010: Passive Wireless Nodes for Transparent eHome Services

It is envisioned that the future smart home will have many 10’s or 100’s of wireless devices. Many of these devices will be low power, low complexity nodes to monitor security or environmental parameters. Changing the batteries in these devices or replacing them will be tedious and inconvenient. One solution is to use passive nodes, powered using energy scavenged from the wireless signal they receive from an access point designed to query the passive nodes. TRLabs has developed a passive node prototype for home security applications employing smart antenna beam-forming techniques.

Sep 15, 2010: GIS and Multi-Touch Surfaces

Most GIS applications used by utility companies are single user and runs on a regular PC. This makes paper based maps still a convenient alternative owing to its large size and ease of use in team collaboration scenarios. With the advent of Surface Computing technologies, the GIS data can now be viewed on a multi-touch surface. Multi-touch surfaces facilitates multi-user interaction and thus combines the benefits of GIS systems and paper maps. TRLabs has innovated a surface computing platform that is built on top of ArcGIS and Microsoft Silverlight/WPF with concurrency and convenience of use in mind.

May 28, 2010: Changing the Landscape of Digital Video: Real Time Segmentation

Real-time video segmentation of foreground and background images is possible through the use of infrared (IR) images in conjunction with standard multi-spectral color images. To acquire IR images, a novel color field array (CFA) that incorporates IR filters and sensors is proposed. To separate foreground and background images, the IR images are used to create a mask that predicts the threshold between the foreground and background images. TRLabs has two patent applications for the technology in question: Auto Real-Time Bi-Layer Segmentation using Color and Infrared Images, and Multi-Spectral Color and IR Camera Based on Multi-Filter Array.

May 28, 2010: Agent-Based Modeling for Type-II Diabetes

TRLabs has recently completed a study that modeled the inter-actions between Type-II diabetic patients and their physicians using software agent technology. This study will provide healthcare professionals with the tools to evaluate the short and long term effects of various medical interventions, lifestyles, and frequency of blood sugar testing on the health of patients. Furthermore, this study will allow healthcare professionals to predict the financial cost of the various interventions. With a better understand-ing of the cost and effectiveness of interventions, it is anticipated that healthcare practitioners will be able to reduce cost and improve quality of diabetic treatments.

Dec 15, 2009: Fault Tolerant Schemes for Cryptography

Nowadays, cryptography involves a large a m o u n t o f d a t a computations and these computation intensive tasks require a high level of accuracy. There are two potential risks in the conventional cryptosystem which are unreliable computations and active attackers along the communication channel. Because of these risks, efficient and light-weight fault tolerant schemes for error detection and correction are crucial and indispensible. The Algorithm Based Fault Tolerant (ABFT) technique has been applied to computation intensive tasks in a variety of fields for several years. This project applies the ABFT concept to cryptosystems so the cryptographic ABFT are capable of using the existing arithemetic logic units (ALUs) embedded in the original algorithms and can be performed concurrently with the cryptographic process without exerting much influence on the original performances. Due to this superiority over the other cryptographic fault tolerant strategies, overhead can be significantly reduced.

Dec 15, 2009: Wimax for Telemedicine and Mobile Health Service

In an emergency in an emergency situation situation, how quickly a patient reaches a medical professional can determine the well being of the patient. In some cases, just an assessment of the situation by a medical professional could greatly improve the well being of the patient. Having a way for a patient to be in contact with their doctor over long distances, with the inclusion of all the medical information of the patient available to the doctor in real time could greatly improve medical practice. To solve the problem of the disconnect between doctors and patients in certain situations, TRLabs researchers have introduced the idea of using Wimax to keep patients in touch with their doctors. The proposed idea would keep ambulances, and rural medical offices connected to a central hospital in a metropolitan area. Medical information, and patient contact could all be done using IEEE 802.16-based technology. This would greatly improve the survival rate of a patient in an emergency situation.

Jul 31, 2009: Archive Planning for a Distributed PACS

In the health industry, digital imaging data are stored and processed by a system called Picture Archive and Communication System (PACS). There are two types of architectures that can be chosen to implement a PACS: centralized and distributed. The centralized system is the most common today. Our challenge is to create an architecture that uses the distributed design that is more efficient for new and current PACS.

Jul 27, 2009: An Efficient Wireless Receiver Design

The employment of transmit diversity schemes has great significance in the context of future wideband wireless communication systems since they enhance transmission reliability with no additional power bandwidth requirements. In broadband data transmissions, however, the channel fades are frequency-selective in nature, which in turn, cause severe inter-symbol interference (ISI) at the receiver. The challenge is to apply space-time block codes (STBC) in the situation where the channel is experiencing doubly dispersive fading.

May 21, 2009: 4D Screening and Digital Image Reconstruction

TRLab’s researchers have developed new algorithms for calculating PET images that can provide significant cost reduction and improvement in safety.

Apr 30, 2009: Robotic Tangible User Interface

TRLab’s researchers have developed a tangible user interface (TUI) which allows for the control of the iRobot Roomba 530 using different hand gestures while holding a Nintendo Wii Remote.

Aug 20, 2008: Trusted Gossip for Peer-to-Peer Information Sharing

TRLabs' researchers are proposing a trusted gossip protocol for rumor resistant information sharing in peer-to-peer networks.

Aug 20, 2008: Web Based Program Guide for Digital Video Broadcasts

TRLabs’ researchers have developed a system to parse information from DVB signals for use in an interactive web based program guide.

Aug 20, 2008: MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 AVC Real-time Software Trans-coding

TRLabs’ researchers have created software to trans-code MPEG-2 videos to MPEG-4 AVC in real time on a PC workstation.

Jul 09, 2008: Acoustical Sleep Apnea Diagnosis

TRLabs’ researchers propose to design and build an integrated system to detect apnea episodes and estimate airflow acoustically.

Mar 27, 2008: Self-Fault Isolation in Transparent p-Cycle Networks: p-Cycles as Their Own m-Cycles

Researchers at TRLabs have proposed a novel idea to add rapid fault-localization in optical transparent networks by using a network’s p-cycles as m-cycles.

Oct 17, 2007: Globally Optimal Distributed Synchronous Batch Reconfiguration

Researchers at TRLabs have proposed a novel alternative concept for handling dynamic provisioning changes and ongoing network reconfiguration and reoptimization in general.

Sep 06, 2007: LDPC Encoder

Researchers at TRLabs and the University of Alberta have designed and implemented a low-density parity check (LDPC) encoder that conforms to the IEEE 802.16e-2005 standard.

Sep 06, 2007: Flexible Quantization of Channel State Information Feedback in Multiple Antenna Systems

Flexible Quantization of Channel State Information Feedback is the first in the planned suite of solutions for feeding back channel state information in multiple antenna systems, including compression of channel information, mitigation of the feedback channel delay and errors, and MIMO channel prediction.

May 29, 2007: Video Quality System

Researchers at TRLabs have developed a prototype no-reference video quality system to locate and measure the impact of three types of common impairments that influence the quality of television and video signals.

Apr 18, 2007: Wireless Interfacing For Industrial Machinery

Researchers at TRLabs are currently working to analyze the performance of the ZigBee wireless protocol under the influence of noise with the objective to establish design rules for wireless systems in industrial applications.

Feb 26, 2007: Web-Based Remote Respiratory and Swallowing Sound Monitoring

Researchers at TRLabs are developing a method for extracting and classifying swallowing sounds through digital signal processes.

Feb 08, 2007: Adaptive Antenna in Wireless Indoor Networks

TRLabs has created an electronically steerable passive array radiator (ESPAR) antenna that has been shown to enhance the performance of 802.11 networks.

Jan 22, 2007: Robust Data Hiding With Image Invariants

TRLabs has developed a new technique for digital watermarking that has been shown to be more robust against geometric distortions.

Jan 16, 2007: Quality of Service Controls in Web Servers

TRLabs has developed a novel service differentiation policy that allows for a server to guarantee a certain Quality of Service (QoS).

Mar 07, 2006: Logarithmic Amplifier and Hilbert Transformer

TRLabs has developed the highest bandwidth Logarithmic Amplifier ever built as well as the first integrated 10 Gb/s Hilbert Transformer.