A protected discharge facility for the elderly: design and validation of a working proof-of-concept

With the increasing share of elderly population worldwide, the need for assistive technologies to support clinicians in monitoring their health conditions is becoming more and more relevant. As a quantitative tool, geriatricians recently proposed the notion of frail elderly, which rapidly became a key element of clinical practices for the estimation of well-being in aging population. The evaluation of frailty is commonly based on self-reported outcomes and occasional physicians evaluations, and may therefore contain biased results. Another important aspect in the elderly population is hospitalization as a risk factor for patient\u2019s well being and public costs. Hospitalization is the main cause of functional decline, especially in older adults. The reduction of hospitalization time may allow an improvement of elderly health conditions and a reduction of hospital costs. Furthermore, a gradual transition from a hospital environment to a home-like one, can contribute to the weaning of the patient from a condition of hospitalization to a condition of discharge to his home. The advent of new technologies allows for the design and implementation of smart environments to monitor elderly health status and activities, fulfilling all the requirements of health and safety of the patients. From these starting points, in this thesis I present data-driven methodologies to automatically evaluate one of the main aspects contributing to the frailty estimation, i.e., the motility of the subject. First I will describe a model of protected discharge facility, realized in collaboration and within the E.O. Ospedali Galliera (Genoa, Italy), where patients can be monitored by a system of sensors while physicians and nurses have the opportunity to monitor them remotely. This sensorised facility is being developed to assist elderly users after they have been dismissed from the hospital and before they are ready to go back home, with the perspective of coaching them towards a healthy lifestyle. The facility is equipped with a variety of sensors (vision, depth, ambient and wearable sensors and medical devices), but in my thesis I primarily focus on RGB-D sensors and present visual computing tools to automatically estimate motility features. I provide an extensive system assessment I carried out onthree different experimental sessions with help of young as well as healthy aging volunteers. The results I present are in agreement with the assessment manually performed by physicians, showing the potential capability of my approach to complement current protocols of evaluation

A review of High Performance Computing foundations for scientists

The increase of existing computational capabilities has made simulation emerge as a third discipline of Science, lying midway between experimental and purely theoretical branches [1, 2]. Simulation enables the evaluation of quantities which otherwise would not be accessible, helps to improve experiments and provides new insights on systems which are analysed [3-6]. Knowing the fundamentals of computation can be very useful for scientists, for it can help them to improve the performance of their theoretical models and simulations. This review includes some technical essentials that can be useful to this end, and it is devised as a complement for researchers whose education is focused on scientific issues and not on technological respects. In this document we attempt to discuss the fundamentals of High Performance Computing (HPC) [7] in a way which is easy to understand without much previous background. We sketch the way standard computers and supercomputers work, as well as discuss distributed computing and discuss essential aspects to take into account when running scientific calculations in computers.Comment: 33 page

Distributed Parallel Computing for Visual Cryptography Algorithms

Proceedings of: Second International Workshop on Sustainable Ultrascale Computing Systems (NESUS 2015). Krakow (Poland), September 10-11, 2015.The recent activities to construct exascale and ultrascale distributed computational systems are opening a possibility to apply parallel and distributed computing techniques for applied problems which previously were considered as not solvable with the standard computational resources. In this paper we consider one global optimization problem where a set of feasible solutions is discrete and very large. There is no possibility to apply some apriori estimation techniques to exclude an essential part of these elements from the computational analysis, e.g. applying branch and bound type methods. Thus a full search is required in order to solve such global optimization problems. The considered problem describes visual cryptography algorithms. The main goal is to find optimal perfect gratings, which can guarantee high quality and security of the visual cryptography method. The full search parallel algorithm is based on master-slave paradigm. We present a library of C++ templates that allow the developer to implement parallel master-slave algorithms for his application without any parallel programming and knowledge of parallel programming API. These templates automatically give parallel solvers tailored for clusters of computers using MPI API and distributed computing applications using BOINC API. Results of some computational experiments are presented.The work presented in this paper has been partially supported by EU under the COST programme Action IC1305, ’Network for Sustainable Ultrascale Computing (NESUS)’

Towards Distributed Mobile Computing

In the latest years, we observed an exponential growth of the market of the mobile devices. In this scenario, it assumes a particular relevance the rate at which mobile devices are replaced. According to the International Telecommunicaton Union in fact, smart-phone owners replace their device every 20 months, on average. The side effect of this trend is to deal with the disposal of an increasing amount of electronic devices which, in many cases, arestill working. We believe that it is feasible to recover such an unexploited computational power. Through a change of paradigm in fact, it is possible to achieve a two-fold objective: 1) extend the mobile devices lifetime, 2) enable a new opportunity to speed up mobile applications. In this paper we aim at providing a survey of state-of-art solutions aim at going in the direction of a Distributed Mobile Computing paradigm. We put in evidence the challenges to be addressed in order to implement this paradigm and we propose some possible future improvements

A complete simulator for volunteer computing environments

Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which ordinary people donate their idle computer time to science projects like SETI@home, Climateprediction.net and many others. BOINC provides a complete middleware system for volunteer computing, and it became generalized as a platform for distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, environmental science, and astrophysics. In this document we present the whole development process of ComBoS, a complete simulator of the BOINC infrastructure. Although there are other BOINC simulators, our intention was to create a complete simulator that, unlike the existing ones, could simulate realistic scenarios taking into account the whole BOINC infrastructure, that other simulators do not consider: projects, servers, network, redundant computing, scheduling, and volunteer nodes. The output of the simulations allows us to analyze a wide range of statistical results, such as the throughput of each project, the number of jobs executed by the clients, the total credit granted and the average occupation of the BOINC servers. This bachelor thesis describes the design of ComBoS and the results of the validation performed. This validation compares the results obtained in ComBoS with the real ones of three different BOINC projects (Einstein@home, SETI@home and LHC@home). Besides, we analyze the performance of the simulator in terms of memory usage and execution time. This document also shows that our simulator can guide the design of BOINC projects, describing some case studies using ComBoS that could help designers verify the feasibility of BOINC projects.Ingeniería Informátic