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This Special Issue takes an in-depth look into the recent developments in consumer technology that blend into everyone's health and safety in a smart city environment. Smart wearables, such as watches and wristbands, have been widely used in health monitoring in recent years. These connected consumer electronics devices not only provide indicative information for consumers’ health management, but also play a vital role in communicable disease management and prevention. In the context of consumer technology as part of a smart city infrastructure, wireless communication and sensing technologies have evolved substantially over the past decade and have seen an accelerating trend of technical advances, particularly in the consumer healthcare sector. Optimization techniques have been developed significantly and smart devices have become more efficiently designed and implemented both for the betterment of individual consumers and health service providers.

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The proposed novel hybrid image hiding techniques uses the security features of ECC for encrypting the secret image before embedding with cover image and also map the secret image with DNA nucleotide to improve the level of security with high embedding capacity. In the proposed image steganography, the secret image is fed as input to the ECC encryption algorithm and the resultant ciphertext point is mapped with DNA nucleotide, and then converts it into binary digits. Second, the cover image is compressed by using DWT compression techniques. The compressed image is used as a cover image to embed the secret image by using a singular value decomposition algorithm. The resultant stego image will have high PSNR and less MSE. Results show that 36.23% decreased value of MSE value and 5.6% increased value of PSNR for 512 × 512 image size.

The Design and Implementation of Devices, Circuits, and Systems Series is of utmost importance in the context of today's communication systems as technological advancements across multiple application areas have resulted in larger design sizes and increased complexity of communication circuits and devices. This series aims to provide insights into the issues, challenges, and requirements related to the design and implementation concerning the upcoming communication systems. Information and communication technologies (ICT) has come a long way in the last few decades, maintaining a consistent upward curve in providing smart environments for a variety of applications. This August issue of the Design and Implementation of Devices, Circuits, and Systems Series features three articles that focus on the design and implementation of circuits and systems, specific to the development of wireless communications systems for better performance, and enabling efficient designs and technologies as primary goals, along with highlighting future directions in communication systems.

Wireless multimedia communication (WMC) is an emerging service that integrates voice, video, and data in the same service. The wireless handheld device used to provide multimedia communication such as PDA, Sensor, Mobile phones etc., are resource constrained and also need security protocol for successful multimedia communication between server and user. Many researchers are put their effort to develop secure cryptography algorithms and protocol to allow the user to access the data securely in telemedicine, surveillance system, and video on demand, digital cash, online shopping, digital content delivery and video conferencing technology. This paper focuses on security analysis of different encryption algorithm, secure architecture, encoding algorithm, authentication protocol and video encoding method. It also discuss about security multimedia challenges, characteristics, multimedia services, different attacks, software information and forecasts future perspectives of wireless multimedia technology.

Surgeons in training must be able to accurately gauge their own ability and performance to better understand where additional practice is needed and can help inform self-directed learning endeavors. This study had the following 3 goals: (1) to examine the accuracy of residents’ assessments of their endoscopic skills, (2) to investigate if accuracy improves over time and practice, and (3) to compare the efficacy of 3 interventions—practice only (PO), self-observation (SO), or expert observation (EO)—on self-assessment accuracy.

Technological advancements for diverse applications have led to an increase in the design size and complexity of devices and circuits within communications systems, emphasizing the significance of the Design and Implementation of Devices, Circuits, and Systems Series. This series aims to provide insights into the issues, challenges, and requirements related to the design and implementation of future communication systems. In the last few decades, Information and communication technologies (ICT) have gone a long way, maintaining a consistent upward curve in providing smart environments for a wide range of applications. These technologies not only improve operational efficiency but also enabled users to interact with their surroundings in innovative ways. This November issue of the Design and Implementation of Devices, Circuits, and Systems Series features five articles that focus on the smart design and implementation of circuits and systems specific to wireless communications, highlighting better performance, smart applications, and sustainable future as primary goals along with providing rich insights into vital aspects of future communication systems.

In response to the need for sustainable urban development as populations rise and cities draw ever-larger populations, smart cities are sprouting across the globe. The technologies that appear to be essential to a vision for smart cities are embedded and cyber physical systems, the Internet of everything (IoE), including Industrial Internet and Internet of Vehicles, smart energy systems, building management systems, cyber security and so on. It is anticipated that the services offered by smart city initiatives will vertically balance growth with improved and effective resource management and systems. The most recent development of ICT for Smart Cities addresses technologies, circuits, devices, systems, implementation, deployment, and applications. Like the studies/research on smart cities, the smart villages have also been attracted by the topic of how and in which way ICT can improve well-being in rural areas. By bringing these together, the aim of this Feature Topic is to present the technological advancement and challenges of smart cities and smart villages from the system design and implementation point of view. In this context, the Design and Implementation of Devices, Circuits, and Systems August Feature Topic on smart cities and smart villages consists of four articles that cover application of communication systems in different domains such as localization, sensing, urban air mobility, vehicle-to-infrastructure systems and interactive user experiences.

Energy management at passive terminal nodes is a critical design goal in the industrial internet of things (IoT) network. This article introduces a programmable low power remote execution unit (REU) based on an 8051 instruction set architecture (ISA) for passive radio frequency identification (RFID) applications in industrial IoT. The REU acts as a passive device processor requiring the interrogator to transmit instructions to be executed over a wireless link. This paper investigates the proposed asynchronous REU implementation with respect to the power consumption, area and speed and also provides a performance comparison to an existing clocked REU implementation. Based on the post-layout simulation results, the proposed asynchronous REU has lower power consumption when compared to the clocked REU operating at higher frequencies. Such a low power REU in the context of passive processing has a significant impact on IoT, a ubiquitous industrial application of RFID technology.

Using the existing microcontrollers in radio frequency identification (RFID)-based passive nodes requires too much power. There is a need to explore specific instruction sets of such microcontrollers based on target applications for low power. In this context, this paper describes a low-power wireless distributed single instruction multiple data (SIMD) architecture concept. This concept involves having the data and program instructions stored on a powered interrogator providing wireless supervisory control for the passive node that has a basic processing core called the remote execution unit (REU). This paper also proposes a novel REU architecture using a minimal instruction set architecture (MISA) based on 8051 µC with the goal of reducing power consumption of a wireless passive node. Post-layout simulation results indicate significant reduction in power consumption and the area occupied by REU when compared to an existing 8051 core design. This low-power programmable REU architecture targets internet of things (IoT) and passive RFID applications.

Parotid gland swelling is a less frequently reported side effect of clozapine and has no licensed treatment. A 58-year-old man treated with clozapine for treatment-resistant schizophrenia developed bilateral painful parotid swellings and hypersalivation. Initial trials of dose alteration and antihypersalivatory medication had limited success. A combination of benzatropine and terazosin was successful in treating the parotid hyperplasia. Clozapine was the probable cause of parotid swelling in our case, as established using the Naranjo adverse drug reaction probability scale and World Health Organization causality categories. Literature for treatments of clozapine-induced parotid gland swellings was reviewed. None of the published articles suggested a treatment regimen for clozapine-induced parotid hyperplasia. Most reports only highlighted the occurrence of salivary gland swelling with clozapine. Others mentioned management strategies, which included spontaneous resolution, or resolution on discontinuing clozapine. One report, a trial with benzatropine and ipratropium, had variable success. In this case the re-emergence of parotid swelling when terazosin and benzatropine doses were missed followed by a quick resolution upon recompliance, goes some way in proving that this combination is indeed effective. The combination of terazosin and benzatropine appears to have a role in treating parotid gland swellings induced by clozapine.

AbstractIn modern electronics, communication between systems is progressing towards wireless technology [1]. The rapid adaptation of the Wi-Fi technology across the world is a good example of the trends to come [2]. The IEEE 802.11 protocol [3], with its different layers of communication (information transfer), is obviously not ideal for applications that are time and energy sensitive. The EPCglobal Class-1 Generation-2 Protocol [4] (adapted by the International Organization for standards as the ISO 18000-6 [5]) is an impressive alternative that is slowly gaining global recognition as not just an RFID protocol, as it was primarily intended for, but as a front-end (communication link) for several identification and sensor applications [6]. This paper reports the design of a low-power processor specific for the Gen-2 instruction set with high emphasis on speed optimization at low power consumption. A novel approach in processor design as an asynchronous state machine is introduced, making the architecture extremely flexible and adaptable to changes in the protocol. Given that the full Gen-2 state transition matrix is available with direct linkage to the published standard, changes in the protocol can be directly effected through this matrix. Thus, the generation or the original and updated VLSI chips with the design flow disclosed is simply a matter of using the original or updated matrix. The design of the processor from a hardware description language (VHDL) level makes the final implementation possible either as an ASIC or on a suitable FPGA. The ASIC design flow is considered in this paper reporting the three fundamental characteristics—speed, power and area, of the post layout design. Industry standard Mentor Graphics ModelSim SE, Synopsys Design Compiler and Cadence Encounter are used in this research.