Advanced Knowledge Application in Practice

The integration and interdependency of the world economy leads towards the creation of a global market that offers more opportunities, but is also more complex and competitive than ever before. Therefore widespread research activity is necessary if one is to remain successful on the market. This book is the result of research and development activities from a number of researchers worldwide, covering concrete fields of research

Low-power Wearable Healthcare Sensors

Advances in technology have produced a range of on-body sensors and smartwatches that can be used to monitor a wearer’s health with the objective to keep the user healthy. However, the real potential of such devices not only lies in monitoring but also in interactive communication with expert-system-based cloud services to offer personalized and real-time healthcare advice that will enable the user to manage their health and, over time, to reduce expensive hospital admissions. To meet this goal, the research challenges for the next generation of wearable healthcare devices include the need to offer a wide range of sensing, computing, communication, and human–computer interaction methods, all within a tiny device with limited resources and electrical power. This Special Issue presents a collection of six papers on a wide range of research developments that highlight the specific challenges in creating the next generation of low-power wearable healthcare sensors

Smart Sensors for Healthcare and Medical Applications

This book focuses on new sensing technologies, measurement techniques, and their applications in medicine and healthcare. Specifically, the book briefly describes the potential of smart sensors in the aforementioned applications, collecting 24 articles selected and published in the Special Issue “Smart Sensors for Healthcare and Medical Applications”. We proposed this topic, being aware of the pivotal role that smart sensors can play in the improvement of healthcare services in both acute and chronic conditions as well as in prevention for a healthy life and active aging. The articles selected in this book cover a variety of topics related to the design, validation, and application of smart sensors to healthcare

Neurophysiological mechanisms of sensorimotor recovery from stroke

Ischemic stroke often results in the devastating loss of nervous tissue in the cerebral cortex, leading to profound motor deficits when motor territory is lost, and ultimately resulting in a substantial reduction in quality of life for the stroke survivor. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) was developed in 2002 by the World Health Organization (WHO) and provides a framework for clinically defining impairment after stroke. While the reduction of burdens due to neurological disease is stated as a mission objective of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), recent clinical trials have been unsuccessful in translating preclinical research breakthroughs into actionable therapeutic treatment strategies with meaningful progress towards this goal. This means that research expanding another NINDS mission is now more important than ever: improving fundamental knowledge about the brain and nervous system in order to illuminate the way forward. Past work in the monkey model of ischemic stroke has suggested there may be a relationship between motor improvements after injury and the ability of the animal to reintegrate sensory and motor information during behavior. This relationship may be subserved by sprouting cortical axonal processes that originate in the spared premotor cortex after motor cortical injury in squirrel monkeys. The axons were observed to grow for relatively long distances (millimeters), significantly changing direction so that it appears that they specifically navigate around the injury site and reorient toward the spared sensory cortex. Critically, it remains unknown whether such processes ever form functional synapses, and if they do, whether such synapses perform meaningful calculations or other functions during behavior. The intent of this dissertation was to study this phenomenon in both intact rats and rats with a focal ischemia in primary motor cortex (M1) contralateral to the preferred forelimb during a pellet retrieval task. As this proved to be a challenging and resource-intensive endeavor, a primary objective of the dissertation became to provide the tools to facilitate such a project to begin with. This includes the creation of software, hardware, and novel training and behavioral paradigms for the rat model. At the same time, analysis of previous experimental data suggested that plasticity in the neural activity of the bilateral motor cortices of rats performing pellet retrievals after focal M1 ischemia may exhibit its most salient changes with respect to functional changes in behavior via mechanisms that were different than initially hypothesized. Specifically, a major finding of this dissertation is the finding that evidence of plasticity in the unit activity of bilateral motor cortical areas of the reaching rat is much stronger at the level of population features. These features exhibit changes in dynamics that suggest a shift in network fixed points, which may relate to the stability of filtering performed during behavior. It is therefore predicted that in order to define recovery by comparison to restitution, a specific type of fixed point dynamics must be present in the cortical population state. A final suggestion is that the stability or presence of these dynamics is related to the reintegration of sensory information to the cortex, which may relate to the positive impact of physical therapy during rehabilitation in the postacute window. Although many more rats will be needed to state any of these findings as a definitive fact, this line of inquiry appears to be productive for identifying targets related to sensorimotor integration which may enhance the efficacy of future therapeutic strategies

A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Incidence of Injury in Professional Female Soccer

The epidemiology of injury in male professional football is well documented and has been used as a basis to monitor injury trends and implement injury prevention strategies. There are no systematic reviews that have investigated injury incidence in women’s professional football. Therefore, the extent of injury burden in women’s professional football remains unknown. PURPOSE: The primary aim of this study was to calculate an overall incidence rate of injury in senior female professional soccer. The secondary aims were to provide an incidence rate for training and match play. METHODS: PubMed, Discover, EBSCO, Embase and ScienceDirect electronic databases were searched from inception to September 2018. Two reviewers independently assessed study quality using the Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology statement using a 22-item STROBE checklist. Seven prospective studies (n=1137 professional players) were combined in a pooled analysis of injury incidence using a mixed effects model. Heterogeneity was evaluated using the Cochrane Q statistic and I2. RESULTS: The epidemiological incidence proportion over one season was 0.62 (95% CI 0.59 - 0.64). Mean total incidence of injury was 3.15 (95% CI 1.54 - 4.75) injuries per 1000 hours. The mean incidence of injury during match play was 10.72 (95% CI 9.11 - 12.33) and during training was 2.21 (95% CI 0.96 - 3.45). Data analysis found a significant level of heterogeneity (total Incidence, X2 = 16.57 P < 0.05; I2 = 63.8%) and during subsequent sub group analyses in those studies reviewed (match incidence, X2 = 76.4 (d.f. = 7), P <0.05; I2 = 90.8%, training incidence, X2 = 16.97 (d.f. = 7), P < 0.05; I2 = 58.8%). Appraisal of the study methodologies revealed inconsistency in the use of injury terminology, data collection procedures and calculation of exposure by researchers. Such inconsistencies likely contribute to the large variance in the incidence and prevalence of injury reported. CONCLUSIONS: The estimated risk of sustaining at least one injury over one football season is 62%. Continued reporting of heterogeneous results in population samples limits meaningful comparison of studies. Standardising the criteria used to attribute injury and activity coupled with more accurate methods of calculating exposure will overcome such limitations

Using MapReduce Streaming for Distributed Life Simulation on the Cloud

Distributed software simulations are indispensable in the study of large-scale life models but often require the use of technically complex lower-level distributed computing frameworks, such as MPI. We propose to overcome the complexity challenge by applying the emerging MapReduce (MR) model to distributed life simulations and by running such simulations on the cloud. Technically, we design optimized MR streaming algorithms for discrete and continuous versions of Conway’s life according to a general MR streaming pattern. We chose life because it is simple enough as a testbed for MR’s applicability to a-life simulations and general enough to make our results applicable to various lattice-based a-life models. We implement and empirically evaluate our algorithms’ performance on Amazon’s Elastic MR cloud. Our experiments demonstrate that a single MR optimization technique called strip partitioning can reduce the execution time of continuous life simulations by 64%. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose and evaluate MR streaming algorithms for lattice-based simulations. Our algorithms can serve as prototypes in the development of novel MR simulation algorithms for large-scale lattice-based a-life models.https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/scs_books/1014/thumbnail.jp

Shortest Route at Dynamic Location with Node Combination-Dijkstra Algorithm

Abstract— Online transportation has become a basic requirement of the general public in support of all activities to go to work, school or vacation to the sights. Public transportation services compete to provide the best service so that consumers feel comfortable using the services offered, so that all activities are noticed, one of them is the search for the shortest route in picking the buyer or delivering to the destination. Node Combination method can minimize memory usage and this methode is more optimal when compared to A* and Ant Colony in the shortest route search like Dijkstra algorithm, but can’t store the history node that has been passed. Therefore, using node combination algorithm is very good in searching the shortest distance is not the shortest route. This paper is structured to modify the node combination algorithm to solve the problem of finding the shortest route at the dynamic location obtained from the transport fleet by displaying the nodes that have the shortest distance and will be implemented in the geographic information system in the form of map to facilitate the use of the system. Keywords— Shortest Path, Algorithm Dijkstra, Node Combination, Dynamic Location (key words