A major societal challenge for the decades to come will be the delivery of effective
medical services while at the same time curbing the growing cost of healthcare.
It is expected that new concepts-particularly electronically assisted healthcare will
provide an answer. This will include new devices, new medical services as well
as networking. On the device side, impressive innovation has been made possible
by micro- and nanoelectronics or CMOS Integrated Circuits. Even higher accuracy
and smaller Form factor combined with reduced cost and increased convenience
of use are enabled by incorporation of CMOS IC design in the realization of biomedical
systems. The compact hearing aid devices and current pacemakers are
good examples of how CMOS ICs bring about these new functionalities and services
in the medical field. Apart from these existing applications, many researchers
are trying to develop new bio-medical solutions such as Artificial Retina, Deep
Brain Stimulation, and Wearable Healthcare Systems. These are possible by combining
the recent advances of bio-medical technology with low power CMOS IC
technology.
The contemporary view of the Smart City is very much static and infrastructure-
centric, focusing on installation and subsequent management of Edge devices and
analytics of data provided by these devices. While this still allows a more efficient
management of the city’s infrastructure, optimizations and savings in different do-
mains, the existing architectures are currently designed as single-purpose, vertically
siloed solutions. This hinders active involvement of a variety of stakeholders (e.g.,
citizens and businesses) who naturally Form part of the city’s ecosystem and have an
inherent interest in jointly coordinating and influencing city-level activities.
Regardless of the branch of science or engineering, theoreticians have always
been enamored with the notion of expressing their results in the Form of
closed-Form expressions. Quite often, the elegance of the closed-Form solution
is overshadowed by the complexity of its Form and the difficulty in evaluating
it numerically. In such instances, one becomes motivated to search instead for
a solution that is simple in Form and simple to evaluate.
Regardless of the branch of science or engineering, theoreticians have always been
enamored with the notion of expressing their results in the Form of closed-Form
expressions. Quite often the elegance of the closed-Form solution is overshadowed
by the complexity of its Form and the difficulty in evaluating it numerically. In
such instances, one becomes motivated to search instead for a solution that is
simple in Form and likewise simple to evaluate.
Our original effort in writing this book was to create a starting point for those in
the business community who did not have a high level of technical expertise but
needed to have some understanding of the technical functions of their inFormation
and communication technologies (ICT) in a corporate environment. As was true
with the first edition of this book, if you are already an engineer, find some other
Form of pleasure reading—this text is not designed for you!
In this book, we present the basic pinciples that underlie the analysis and design of digital communication system.The subject of digital communications involves the transmission of inFormation in digital Form from a source that generates the inFormation to one or more destinations.
