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CareNet is an integrated wireless sensor environment for remote healthcare that uses a two-tier wireless network and an extensible software platform. CareNet provides both highly reliable and privacy-aware patient data collection, transmission and access. This paper describes our system architecture, software development, and the results of our field studies.

Much attention has been paid to the application of low temperature thermal resources, especially for power generation in recent years. Most of the current commercialized thermal (including geothermal) power-generation technologies convert thermal energy to electric energy indirectly, that is, making mechanical work before producing electricity. Technology using a thermoelectric generator (TEG), however, can directly transform thermal energy into electricity through the Seebeck effect. TEG technology has many advantages such as compactness, quietness, and reliability because there are no moving parts. One of the biggest disadvantages of TEGs is the low efficiency from thermal to electric energy. For this reason, we redesigned and modified our previous 1 KW (at a temperature difference of around 120 • C) TEG system. The output power of the system was improved significantly, about 34.6% greater; the instantaneous efficiency of the TEG system could reach about 6.5%. Laboratory experiments have been conducted to measure the output power at different conditions: different connection modes between TEG modules, different mechanical structures, and different temperature differences between hot and cold sides. The TEG apparatus has been tested and the data have been presented. This kind of TEG power system can be applied in many thermal and geothermal sites with low temperature resources, including oil fields where fossil and geothermal energies are coproduced.

Places we walk through every day often have cultural heritage stories connected to them, but many stories remain unknown and many get lost. Storytelling for cultural heritage discovery has long been used, mostly in cultural institutions. The documentation and dissemination of cultural heritage stories related to the landscape is challenging. There are countless places, and many of them lie outside the responsibility of cultural institutions. Associations and enthusiasts contribute to gather memories and tell about places, but the information is often fragmented and not always available in a digital form. Thus stories are difficult to retrieve. Can we exploit the popularity of a mobile participatory culture in order to engage people to tell about the places around them and to boost the exploration of cultural heritage in the landscape? This paper presents the design and evaluation of the mobile and social storytelling application "stedr". As young people are under-represented among users of traditional culture, we have chosen them as a target group in our study. Young people have contributed to elicitation of requirements, to the development of the application, and finally to its evaluation. Our contribution is a revisited digital storytelling approach for engaging in the discovery of cultural heritage in the landscape and the evaluation of the approach.