The development of ambulatory voice monitoring devices has the potential to improve the diagnosis and treatment of voice disorders. In this proof-of-concept study, real-time biofeedback is incorporated into a smartphone-based platform that records and processes neck surface acceleration. The focus is on utilizing aerodynamic measures of vocal function as a basis for biofeedback. This is done using regressed Z-scores to compare recorded values to normative estimates based on sound pressure level and fundamental frequency. Initial results from the analysis of different voice qualities suggest that accelerometer-based estimates of aerodynamic parameters can be used for real-time ambulatory biofeedback.
We used our original Interactive Remote Instruction (IRI) system to teach scores of university classes over the past five years at sites up to 300 km apart. While this system is a prototype, its use in real classes allows us to deal with crucial issues in distributed education instruction systems. We describe our motivation and vision for a reimplementation of IRI that supports synchronous and asynchronous distance education. This new version, called IRI-h (h for heterogeneous), is coded in Java and executes on several different platforms. IRI-h extends IRI both to multiple platforms and heterogeneous network infrastructures, including delivery to home users. In this article we describe IRI-h's architectural experiences with the developing prototype, including preliminary performance evaluation, and also unresolved issues still to be addressed.
The Internet and computer's multimedia support have enabled geographically distributed multimedia applications. Today's Internet best-effort services introduce unavoidable uncertainties in the data transfer delay and create the need for synchronization mechanisms that preserve the temporal relationship among streams. We present algorithms for stream synchronization that are immune to moderate clock drifting between sender and receivers and take into account the different time constraints of each media. In our time model we include delays outside the computer and network boundary, and we introduce the idea of virtual observer, which perceives the session as being in the same room with a sender. Specific media temporal requirements are fulfilled through a number of policies for delay management and special consideration is given to the time the algorithms take to reach steady state, which is crucial in interactive applications. We avoid the need for globally synchronized clocks for media synchronization by introducing the concept of user's multimedia presence, which defines a new manner for combining streams coming from multiple sites. Finally, we implement and evaluate this framework with traces collected from the Internet.
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