Forgetting to take your meds or not having time to get to the gym no longer cut it as excuses for not maintaining your health. With all the mobile health (mHealth) products available today – from wearable devices that measure vital signs to pills that send texts about missed doses to a host of gaming apps to track fitness or disease management activities – consumers have an arsenal of resources for promoting their well-being.   It’s a lack of motivation, not informa...Read More

Performance and power-efficiency are more important than ever for network infrastructure. Traffic is exploding and becoming more complex as video and web traffic increasingly dominate the network. Meanwhile, the increasing cloud connectivity of everything from enterprises source to consumer devices is creating a tempting target for hackers. At the same time, cost pressures are causing customers to make ever-greater demands on energy efficiency.   The Intel® Xeon® processors pro...Read More

Communications and networking equipment often employ multi-architecture designs that combine network processors (NPUs), digital signal processors (DSPs), and general purpose processors (GPUs). From a workload perspective, this approach makes sense because telecom equipment handles highly diverse workloads – namely applications , control plane , packet processing , and signal processing . However, the multi-architecture approach makes development more complicated and increases th...Read More

There’s a ground swell of “green” requirements taking a prominent position in modern electronics design. But there are some substantial benefits that can be obtained from improving energy efficiency that’s all wrapped up in the green part of the design. By selecting the right processor and systems software you can eliminate active cooling devices, reduce power supply needs, and reduce real estate requirements.   There are many applications that benefit from fan-less...Read More

Earlier this month industry group CompTIA reported that one in four doctors will buy a tablet PC in the next year. As shown in Figure 1, doctors are looking to improve care and their cost/revenue balance, and medical tablets can help on both fronts. The growing interest in tablets is also motivated by the arrival of low-cost hardware and tablet-friendly operating systems like Microsoft* Windows* 7 .   Figure 1. Top priorities of doctors and health care provider (Source: CompTIA , v...Read More

Outdoor advertizing signs, also called billboards, are ubiquitous in many countries. The United States has more than 500,000 billboards in place along the nation’s highways. Historically, outdoor and indoor advertising in commercial settings has been updated and maintained by sign painters and sign installers. Now improvements in electronics hardware technology and software have improved the capabilities of the traditional signage application, and added creative new opportunities in the d...Read More

Ultrasound is one of the most widely used diagnostic tools in modern medicine. In the late 1970s ultrasound required specially trained physicians to interpret the results from technically driven analog equipment. Some research equipment featured realistic two dimensional grey scale images, but the complexity and excessive tuning requirements to keep the equipment functioning correctly restricted its use to very specialized applications. Nevertheless, the benefits in diagnostics, especially in g...Read More

The digital signage market is constantly pushing for solutions with lower cost.  Today the focus of cost-reduction efforts focuses heavily on up-front hardware costs.  While up-front costs are certainly important, they represent only a portion of a system’s total cost of ownership (TCO).  To minimize TCO, signage developers and end customers alike must consider a system’s reliability, longevity, and manageability.  In this blog we’ll explain how these facto...Read More