OBJECTIVE Intraosseous access is a rapid and safe alternative when peripheral vascular access is difficult. Our aim was to assess the safety and efficacy of a semi-automatic intraosseous infusion device (EZ-IO) when using a management algorithm for difficult vascular access in an out-of-hospital setting. METHODS This was a one-year prospective, observational study by mobile intensive care uni...

Although peripheral devices come out at a frantic pace and require fast releases of drivers, little progress has been made to improve the development of drivers. Too often, this development consists of decoding hardware intricacies, based on ambiguous or incomplete documentation , to determine how to operate a device. Then, assembly-level operations need to be used to interact with the device. ...

This paper presents a low-cost microcontroller-based data acquisition device. The key component of the presented solution is a configurable microcontroller-based device with an integrated USB transceiver and a 12-bit analogue-to-digital converter (ADC). The presented embedded DAQ device contains a preloaded program (firmware) that enables easy acquisition and generation of analogue and digital ...

This work presents a flexible development and testing environment, created for evaluating the performance and analyzing the characteristics of interfaces used by peripheral devices. The versatility of the presented instrument is due to the integration of the Matlab/Simulink tools with a custom reconfigurable hardware platform using the PCMCIA bus of conventional laptop computers. The hardware p...

BACKGROUND Forced-air warming is sometimes unable to maintain perioperative normothermia. Therefore, the authors compared heat transfer, regional heat distribution, and core rewarming of forced-air warming with a novel circulating-water garment. METHODS Nine volunteers were each evaluated on two randomly ordered study days. They were anesthetized and cooled to a core temperature near 34 degre...

Ambient information systems have been an active research area since the 1990s. However, most of these ambient systems let the user only passively consume information, and do not provide a way to interact with it. In this paper, we offer a view beyond just representing information. We propose to engage the user in a peripheral interaction with the ambient device. By keeping it peripheral, all ad...

Behavior emerges as the interaction between a nervous system, a peripheral biomechanical device and the environment. In birdsong production, this observation is particularly important: songbirds are an adequate animal model to unveil how brain structures reconfigure themselves during learning of a complex behavior as song. Therefore, it is important to understand which features of behavior are ...

This paper introduces a new type of parallel robot control based on standard hardware and software. HIGHROBOT is a universal control for robot arms as well as peripheral devices. The control hardware is a multiprocessor SPARCstation running Solaris 2.x with soft real-time features compliant to POSIX.4. The software of the HIGHROBOT control has an object-oriented design. Both hardware and softwa...