Introduction Medical equipment is an essential health intervention tool used by nurses for prevention, diagnosis and treatment of disease and for rehabilitation of patients. However, access to functioning medical equipment is a challenge in low- and middle-income countries. The World Health Organization estimated that 50 to 80 percent of medical equipment in developing countries is not working,...

Hours spent in the lab measuring connect latency, packet loss, or call completion rates are justified by the high-stakes nature of the game and the importance of quality. Evidence of this is in a recent lawsuit in which a large CLEC is refusing to pay for over $60 million worth of equipment from a major manufacturer, essentially on the basis that the next generation equipment doesn't work as we...

The present study explored the intensity level of authorial voice in relation to the quality of argumentative writing. 42 undergraduate learners of English as a foreign language (36 girls and 6 boys) spent 45 minutes to individually complete in-class position-taking writing tasks for three weeks. Their overall academic writing quality scores assigned based on portfolio assessment were studied i...

The classification of voice diseases has many applications in health, in diseases treatment, and in the design of new medical equipment for helping doctors in diagnosing pathologies related to the voice. This work uses the parameters of the glottal signal to help the identification of two types of voice disorders related to the pathologies of the vocal folds: nodule and unilateral paralysis. Th...

The performance of unreliable voice transmission (Voice over IP) over wireless links is measured not by the throughput but by the perceptual speech quality. The speech quality is impaired by packet losses, which are common on wireless links, and by high transmission delays. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a novel Speech Property Based Booster that improves the qualit...

The VoIP quality of service can be either estimated by analyzing the voice data flow characteristics, or by recording a transmitted voice probe over the whole VoIP transport chain and comparing it to the original. When the quality estimation by the voice data flow characteristics is deployed, the three most prominent degradation factors are observed – the packet loss, the packet delay and the d...

growing and commercially most promising applications of natural language technology. The technology has achieved a point where carefully designed systems for suitably constrained applications are a reality. Commercial systems are available today for such tasks as large-vocabulary dictation and voice control of medical equipment. This article reviews how state-of-the-art speech-recognition syste...