The discovery of novel gene regulatory processes improves the understanding of cell phenotypic responses to external stimuli for many biological applications, such as medicine, environment or biotechnologies. To this purpose, transcriptomic data are generated and analyzed from DNA microarrays or more recently RNAseq experiments. They consist in genetic expression level sequences obtained for all genes…
Advances in wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring devices have allowed for new cardiovascular applications to emerge beyond diagnostics, such as stress and fatigue detection, athletic performance assessment, sleep disorder characterization, mood recognition, activity surveillance, biometrics, and fitness tracking, to name a few. Such devices, however, are prone to artifacts, particularly due to movement, thus hampering heart…
When listening to music, some humans can easily recognize which instruments play at what time or when a new musical segment starts, but cannot describe exactly how they do this. To automatically describe particular aspects of a music piece ? be it for an academic interest in emulating human perception, or for practical applications ?,…
When providing the necessary amplification in hearing aids, the risk of acoustic feedback is increased due to the coupling between the hearing aid loudspeaker and the hearing aid microphone(s). This acoustic feedback is often perceived as an annoying whistling or howling. Thus, to reduce the occurrence of acoustic feedback, robust and fast-acting feedback suppression algorithms…
Monitoring of vital signs is a key tool in medical diagnostics to asses the onset and the evolution of several diseases. Among fundamental vital parameters, such as the hearth rate, blood pressure and body temperature, the Respiratory Rate (RR) plays an important role. For this reason, respiration needs to be carefully monitored in order to…
Over the last decade there has been an increasing interest in solutions for the continuous monitoring of health status with wireless, and in particular, wearable devices that provide remote analysis of physiological data. The use of wireless technologies have introduced new problems such as the transmission of a huge amount of data within the constraint…
In the modern world, we are increasingly surrounded by computation devices with communication links and one or more microphones. Such devices are, for example, smartphones, tablets, laptops or hearing aids. These devices can work together as nodes in an acoustic sensor network (ASN). Such networks are a growing platform that opens the possibility for many…
The error vector magnitude (EVM) is a standard metric to quantify the performance of digital communication systems and related building blocks. Regular EVM measurements require expensive equipment featuring inphase and quadrature (IQ) demodulation, wideband analog-to-digital converters (ADCs and dedicated receiver algorithms to demodulate the data symbols. With modern high data rate communication standards that require…
Future wireless systems will be characterized by a large range of possible use cases. This requires a flexible allocation of the available time-frequency resources, which is difficult in conventional Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM). Thus, modifications of OFDM, such as windowing or filtering, become necessary. Alternatively, one can employ a different modulation scheme, such as…
It is save to say that there is no such thing as the direction finding (DF) algorithm. Rather, there are algorithms that are tuned to resolve hundreds of paths, algorithms that are designed for uniform linear arrays or uniform circular arrays, and algorithms that strive for efficiency. The doctoral thesis at hand deals with the…
