Due to the appearance of COVID-19 in 2019, person-to-person interactions were drastically reduced. The impact of these restrictions on the economic environment was significant. For example, technical assistance for commissioning or adjusting the parameters of some complex machines/installations had to be postponed. Economic operators became interested in the possibility of remote collaboration, depending on the manufactured products and the performance of the production lines that they owned. This bibliographic research was undertaken to address these needs. The purpose of this review was to analyze the current solutions, approaches, and technologies that workers and specialists can implement to obtain a reliable remote collaboration system. This survey focuses on techniques, devices, and tools that are being used in different contexts to provide remote guidance. We present communication cues and methods being employed, the implemented technological support, and the areas that benefit from remote collaboration. We hope that our effort will be useful to those who develop such systems and people who want to learn about the existence of collaborative solutions, and that it will increase awareness about the applications and the importance of the domain. We are convinced that, with the development of communication systems, the advancement of remote support systems will be a goal for many economic operators.

Image compression is a vital component for domains in which the computational resources are usually scarce such as automotive or telemedicine fields. Also, when discussing real-time systems, the large amount of data that must flow through the system can represent a bottleneck. Therefore, the storage of images, alongside the compression, transmission, and decompression procedures, becomes vital. In recent years, many compression techniques that only preserve the quality of the region of interest of an image have been developed, the other parts being either discarded or compressed with major quality loss. This paper proposes a study of relevant papers from the last decade which are focused on the selection of a region of interest of an image and on the compression techniques that can be applied to that area. To better highlight the novelty of the hybrid methods, classical state-of-the-art approaches are also analyzed. The current work will provide an overview of classical and hybrid compression methods alongside a categorization based on compression ratio and other quality factors such as mean-square error and peak signal-to-noise ratio, structural similarity index measure, and so on. This overview can help researchers to develop a better idea of what compression algorithms are used in certain domains and to find out if the presented performance parameters are of interest for the intended purpose.

An electrical power grid, is an interconnected network for delivering electricity from producers to consumers. Electrical grids vary in size from covering a single building through national grids (which cover whole countries) to transnational grids (which can cross continents). As the rollout of smart meters continues worldwide, there are use-cases where common solutions fail and the network availability of certain meters is very low due to poor communication conditions. This paper proposes a data slicing model for large data files which have to travel securely and reliably throughout the Smart Grid. The manuscript addresses improvements for PRIME PLC network availability by using correct data slicing at the application level along a tuned transmission rate in accordance with the noise levels of the power grid. Successful communications, even at low rates, mean that no manual interaction from energy supplier operators is needed reducing the maintenance costs for both the energy companies as well as for the end user. Experiments on a low power electrical grid setup have been performed in order to evaluate availability improvements through the proposed method as well as the feasibility of remote firmware upgrades. The results have shown that the current approach has similar upgrade time results with a manual firmware upgrade performed through an optical probe. Moreover, the results show that the presented remote firmware upgrade method is reliable and practical.