Study guide for the exam

Study guide for the exam#

Only studying with a list of exam questions can become a hit or miss game for preparation. You may get a good grade because the questions you studied for also appeared in the exam (hit). However, you may also get a bad grade even you studied hard, because in the exam different set of questions may have appeared than you prepared for (miss). Then you may push the responsibility on the instructor, because they did not list the relevant questions.

Listing all the questions you may get is difficult, even impossible. Using a list of what you should do in the exam may be better for you to avoid the hit or miss game.

To do well on the exam, you should be able to do the following:

  1. Section Introduction to telemedicine:

    • Explain to someone without university education the following in simple words:

      • Telemedicine

      • Role of IT and wireless telecommunication (as an enabler for telemedicine)

    • Identify a telemedicine solution and analyze its sensor & data components

  2. Problem The lost emergency signal:

    • Explain the role of frequency regulation in wireless communication and for a telemedicine application

    • Apply a spectrum analyzer to locate and identify wireless signals based on carrier frequency, signal strength, and duty cycle

    • Analyze the tradeoffs between transmit power, duty cycle, and bandwidth in the context of SRD regulations

    • Explain how amplitude modulation encodes information on a carrier signal

  3. Problem Generating an emergency signal:

    • Apply gain control to optimize signal transmission over cable and antenna media

      • Explain how transmission medium affects signal strength and range

    • Explain the effect of noise on digital modulation and where noise comes from

    • Describe letters are sent over a digital channel

    • Explain how packet-based communication works including destination address and redundancy check

  4. Problem Analyzing link budget for a medical body area network:

    • examine the effect of data rate, packet size, duty cycle to the energy consumption

    • calculate the maximum transmission power and battery lifetime for a scenario

    • propose improvements to decrease energy consumption

  5. Problem Analyzing the battery lifetime of a remote pain monitoring system is similar to Analyzing link budget for a medical body area network but additionally expects (that you are able to):

    • organize many scenarios in a conveniently readable structure

    • compare different scenarios and evaluate whether the calculated numbers make sense

  6. Section Telecommunication:

    • explain fundamental concepts of telecommunication, e.g., transceiver, noise, modulation, EMI; and calculate Shannon-Hartley theorem, bandwidth, spectral efficiency

    • explain the significance of OSI layers in telecommunication

    • analyze the fitness of wired or wireless telecommunication to a given scenario

  7. Section Wireless communication:

    • evaluate the fitness of a common wireless protocol to a given telemedicine scenario

    • compare and explain ad-hoc network types

    • draw how wireless signals propagate and explain its consequences, e.g., received signal energy, degradation

  8. Section Digital modulation:

    • explain to a Bachelor student how information can be applied to a wireless signal

    • draw a constellation diagram for a given modulation scheme

    • calculate the bit rate for a given symbol rate and modulation scheme

  9. Section Noise and dB:

    • draw how noise with a specific mean and variance affects a signal

    • calculate the operation lifetime using duty cycle, power and available energy

    • explain to a Bachelor student the significance of dB in wireless telecommunication and calculate dB to linear quantities and vice-versa

    • calculate SNR for a given signal and noise

  10. Section Link budget:

    • understand the significance of link budget and its components

    • calculate the link budget and minimum transmission power for a given scenario

    • evaluate the applicability of a path loss model to a given scenario

  11. Section Technical requirements for wireless body area networks (WBANs):

    • evaluate technical parameters like data rate, battery lifetime, error rate for a given WBAN scenario

    • draw and explain components of an end-to-end WBAN solution

    • explain the significance of energy harvesting and chips (ASICs)