Sensor Technologies to Manage the Physiological Traits of Chronic Pain: A Review

Non-oncologic chronic pain is a common high-morbidity impairment worldwide and acknowledged as a condition with significant incidence on quality of life. Pain intensity is largely perceived as a subjective experience, what makes challenging its objective measurement. However, the physiological traces of pain make possible its correlation with vital signs, such as heart rate variability, skin conductance, electromyogram, etc., or health performance metrics derived from daily activity monitoring or facial expressions, which can be acquired with diverse sensor technologies and multisensory approaches. As the assessment and management of pain are essential issues for a wide range of clinical disorders and treatments, this paper reviews different sensor-based approaches applied to the objective evaluation of non-oncological chronic pain. The space of available technologies and resources aimed at pain assessment represent a diversified set of alternatives that can be exploited to address the multidimensional nature of pain.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Instituto de Salud Carlos III) PI15/00306Junta de Andalucía PIN-0394-2017Unión Europea "FRAIL

Measuring Behavior 2018 Conference Proceedings

These proceedings contain the papers presented at Measuring Behavior 2018, the 11th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research. The conference was organised by Manchester Metropolitan University, in collaboration with Noldus Information Technology. The conference was held during June 5th – 8th, 2018 in Manchester, UK. Building on the format that has emerged from previous meetings, we hosted a fascinating program about a wide variety of methodological aspects of the behavioral sciences. We had scientific presentations scheduled into seven general oral sessions and fifteen symposia, which covered a topical spread from rodent to human behavior. We had fourteen demonstrations, in which academics and companies demonstrated their latest prototypes. The scientific program also contained three workshops, one tutorial and a number of scientific discussion sessions. We also had scientific tours of our facilities at Manchester Metropolitan Univeristy, and the nearby British Cycling Velodrome. We hope this proceedings caters for many of your interests and we look forward to seeing and hearing more of your contributions

Front-Line Physicians' Satisfaction with Information Systems in Hospitals

Day-to-day operations management in hospital units is difficult due to continuously varying situations, several actors involved and a vast number of information systems in use. The aim of this study was to describe front-line physicians' satisfaction with existing information systems needed to support the day-to-day operations management in hospitals. A cross-sectional survey was used and data chosen with stratified random sampling were collected in nine hospitals. Data were analyzed with descriptive and inferential statistical methods. The response rate was 65 % (n = 111). The physicians reported that information systems support their decision making to some extent, but they do not improve access to information nor are they tailored for physicians. The respondents also reported that they need to use several information systems to support decision making and that they would prefer one information system to access important information. Improved information access would better support physicians' decision making and has the potential to improve the quality of decisions and speed up the decision making process.Peer reviewe

Applications and Experiences of Quality Control

The rich palette of topics set out in this book provides a sufficiently broad overview of the developments in the field of quality control. By providing detailed information on various aspects of quality control, this book can serve as a basis for starting interdisciplinary cooperation, which has increasingly become an integral part of scientific and applied research

Deep Learning for Electrophysiological Investigation and Estimation of Anesthetic-Induced Unconsciousness

Neuroscience has made a number of advances in the search for the neural correlates of consciousness, but our understanding of the neurophysiological markers remains incomplete. In this work, we apply deep learning techniques to resting-state electroencephalographic (EEG) measures of healthy participants under general anesthesia, for the investigation and estimation of altered states of consciousness. Specifically, we focus on states characterized by different levels of unconsciousness and anesthetic depths, based on definitions and metrics from contemporary clinical practice. Our experiments begin by exploring the ability of deep learning to extract relevant electrophysiological features, under a cross-subject decoding task. As there is no state-of-theart model for EEG analysis, we compare two widely used deep learning architectures - convolutional neural networks (cNNs) and multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) - and show that cNNs perform effectively, using only one second of the raw EEG signals. Relying on cNNs, we derive a novel 3D architecture design and a standard preprocessing pipeline, which allows us to exploit the spatio-temporal structure of the EEG, as well as to integrate different acquisition systems and datasets under a common methodology. We then focus on the nature of different predictive tasks, by investigating classification and regression algorithms under a variety of clinical ground-truths, based on behavioral, pharmacological, and psychometrical evidence for consciousness. Our findings provide several insights regarding the interaction across the anesthetic states, the electrophysiological signatures, and the temporal dynamics of the models. We also reveal an optimal training strategy, based on which we can detect progressive changes in levels of unconsciousness, with higher granularity than current clinical methods. Finally, we test the generalizability of our deep learning-based EEG framework, across subjects, experimental designs, and anesthetic agents (propofol, ketamine and xenon). Our results highlight the capacity of our model to acquire appropriate, task-related, cross-study features, and the potential to discover common cross-drug features of unconsciousness. This work has broader significance for discovering generalized electrophysiological markers that index states of consciousness, using a data-driven analysis approach. It also provides a basis for the development of automated, machine-learning driven, non-invasive EEG systems for real-time monitoring of the depth of anesthesia, which can advance patients' comfort and safety

The Largest Unethical Medical Experiment in Human History

This monograph describes the largest unethical medical experiment in human history: the implementation and operation of non-ionizing non-visible EMF radiation (hereafter called wireless radiation) infrastructure for communications, surveillance, weaponry, and other applications. It is unethical because it violates the key ethical medical experiment requirement for “informed consent” by the overwhelming majority of the participants. The monograph provides background on unethical medical research/experimentation, and frames the implementation of wireless radiation within that context. The monograph then identifies a wide spectrum of adverse effects of wireless radiation as reported in the premier biomedical literature for over seven decades. Even though many of these reported adverse effects are extremely severe, the true extent of their severity has been grossly underestimated. Most of the reported laboratory experiments that produced these effects are not reflective of the real-life environment in which wireless radiation operates. Many experiments do not include pulsing and modulation of the carrier signal, and most do not account for synergistic effects of other toxic stimuli acting in concert with the wireless radiation. These two additions greatly exacerbate the severity of the adverse effects from wireless radiation, and their neglect in current (and past) experimentation results in substantial under-estimation of the breadth and severity of adverse effects to be expected in a real-life situation. This lack of credible safety testing, combined with depriving the public of the opportunity to provide informed consent, contextualizes the wireless radiation infrastructure operation as an unethical medical experiment