PRESENT AND FUTURE PERVASIVE HEALTHCARE METHODOLOGIES: INTELLIGENT BODY DEVICES, PROCESSING AND MODELING TO SEARCH FOR NEW CARDIOVASCULAR AND PHYSIOLOGICAL BIOMARKERS

The motivation behind this work comes from the area of pervasive computing technologies for healthcare and wearable healthcare IT systems, an emerging field of research that brings in revolutionary paradigms for computing models in the 21st century. The aim of this thesis is focused on emerging personal health technologies and pattern recognition strategies for early diagnosis and personalized treatment and rehabilitation for individuals with cardiovascular and neurophysiological diseases. Attention was paid to the development of an intelligent system for the automatic classification of cardiac valve disease for screening purposes. Promising results were reported with the possibility to implement a new screening strategy for the diagnosis of cardiac valve disease in developing countries. A novel assistive architecture for the elderly able to non-invasively assess muscle fatigue by surface electromyography using wireless platform during exercise with an ergonomic platform was presented. Finally a wearable chest belt for ECG monitoring to investigate the psycho-physiological effects of the autonomic system and a wearable technology for monitoring of knee kinematics and recognition of ambulatory activities were characterized to evaluate the reliability for clinical purposes of collected data. The potential impact in the clinical arena of this research would be extremely important, since promising data show how such emerging personal technologies and methodologies are effective in several scenarios to early screening and discovery of novel diagnostic and prognostic biomarkers

Scientific Advances in STEM: From Professor to Students

This book collects the publications of the special Topic Scientific advances in STEM: from Professor to students. The aim is to contribute to the advancement of the Science and Engineering fields and their impact on the industrial sector, which requires a multidisciplinary approach. University generates and transmits knowledge to serve society. Social demands continuously evolve, mainly because of cultural, scientific, and technological development. Researchers must contextualize the subjects they investigate to their application to the local industry and community organizations, frequently using a multidisciplinary point of view, to enhance the progress in a wide variety of fields (aeronautics, automotive, biomedical, electrical and renewable energy, communications, environmental, electronic components, etc.). Most investigations in the fields of science and engineering require the work of multidisciplinary teams, representing a stockpile of research projects in different stages (final year projects, master’s or doctoral studies). In this context, this Topic offers a framework for integrating interdisciplinary research, drawing together experimental and theoretical contributions in a wide variety of fields

Identification of Health Promotion Practices and efficacy of a multi-component intervention strategy on the Quality of Life among rural elderly

Health Promotion is an essential component in influencing quality of life especially among the elderly. The number of elderly in Indian population has dramatically risen over the past decades. The main aims of the study were to assess the existing health promotion practices among the rural elderly and to evaluate the efficacy of a multi-component intervention strategy on the quality of life of the elderly. The design chosen was Community Randomized Trial where the villages (clusters) were randomized into experiment and control groups. The study was carried out in Kaniyambadi Block of Vellore District. The total sample size was 146 elders of which 73 belonged to each group. Health promotion practices were assessed using a questionnaire prepared by the investigator and quality of life was measured using the Ferrans’ and Powers’ Quality of Life Index Generic Version 3. The subjects in the experiment group received the multi -component intervention strategy which was a set of independent nursing interventions that were conducted every day of the week except Sunday, from 9.30 – 12.30 p.m. for a period of 6 months. The control group did not receive the intervention. Pre and post intervention quality of life was assessed. Findings revealed the two groups of subjects were homogenous in their demography and socio-economic characteristics. The overall prevalence of health promotion practices indicated that 39.9% of subjects were in poor category, 37.4% in moderate and 22.7% scored good. Quality of life scores between the subjects were experiment and control groups were found significant in all four domains (health and functioning, social/economic, psychological and spiritual and family) after the interventions, which proved the efficacy of the multi-component intervention. This thesis provides crucial information on the prevalence of health promotion practices among the rural elderly, of which very little data is known in the Indian setting. Quality of life scores are encouraging after the intervention, which is a sustainable measure that can be easily implemented in the rural setting. Implications for nursing education, practice and research are explained. Above all it sensitizes nurses to the needs of this revered group, and provides evidence that health promotion practices in the form of simple nursing interventions has a positive influence on how the elderly perceive their quality of life

Machine Medical Ethics

In medical settings, machines are in close proximity with human beings: with patients who are in vulnerable states of health, who have disabilities of various kinds, with the very young or very old, and with medical professionals. Machines in these contexts are undertaking important medical tasks that require emotional sensitivity, knowledge of medical codes, human dignity, and privacy. As machine technology advances, ethical concerns become more urgent: should medical machines be programmed to follow a code of medical ethics? What theory or theories should constrain medical machine conduct? What design features are required? Should machines share responsibility with humans for the ethical consequences of medical actions? How ought clinical relationships involving machines to be modeled? Is a capacity for empathy and emotion detection necessary? What about consciousness? The essays in this collection by researchers from both humanities and science describe various theoretical and experimental approaches to adding medical ethics to a machine, what design features are necessary in order to achieve this, philosophical and practical questions concerning justice, rights, decision-making and responsibility, and accurately modeling essential physician-machine-patient relationships. This collection is the first book to address these 21st-century concerns

Ceasing to Run Underground: 20th-Century Women Writers and Hydro-Logical Thought

Starting from two central ecopoetic convictions—the constitutive role of environment in human experience (and vice versa), and text’s ability to connect with the world—this dissertation then moves in a different direction from most ecocritical projects. Instead of looking at the ways literary representation flows back into nature in the forms of attitude, praxis, and policy, this study focuses on the earlier part of the loop: the emergence of text from environment, particularly its aquatic parts, via the faculty of the imagination. In its scrutiny of images that spring directly from matter and its faith in the concept of a personal element that governs the reveries, beliefs, passions, ideals, and philosophies of an entire life, it recalls Water and Dreams, Gaston Bachelard’s 1942 phenomenological study of the “material imagination.” Only, whereas Bachelard’s main investments are poetry, the masculine point of view, isolated waters (particularly small, smooth, mirror-like bodies of water that call up, through the myth of narcissus, the individual self), and limpid waters that serve the material imagination as a pure matter par excellence, “an example of the kind of natural morality learned through meditation on a fundamental substance,” my own are: prose (the novel in particular); the female (feminist) point of view; waters that are indivisibly, manifestly systemic; and a hydrosphere that is decidedly degraded, a “tragic commons” (à la Garrett Hardin) calling for the very different sort of “natural morality” that is rigorous stewardship. I approach these through the writings of seven 20th-century woman writers who have written so relentlessly and richly about water that they must be called “hydro-logical”: Britons Virginia Woolf and Penelope Fitzgerald; Anglo-Caribbean Jean Rhys; North Americans Rachel Carson and Joan Didion; Native American (Chickasaw) Linda Hogan; and East Indian Arundhati Roy. While most broadly “hydro-logic” denotes a general thinking-through-water, it entails several specific habits of mind: 1) a privileging of the water element in one’s imaginative landscapes, and an attraction to thalassic and/or riparian settings, as well as the smaller or more hidden parts of the hydrosphere (springs, ponds, groundwater, etc.); 2) a particular susceptibility to the metaphoric/symbolic potential of planetary waters, and an especial faculty for transubstantiating conventional associations (e.g. river = flow; sea = masculine adventure) into more private equivalences (the river = androgyny, moral imagination, oral tradition; groundwater = untold stories); and 3) a deep allegiance to the intuited fact that the hydrologic cycle is a cycle, and one whose central dynamic is also that of creative and particularly literary endeavor (with the inflow of reading and the outflow or writing), human relationship (give and take), and ecology itself, with its “endless cyclic transfer of materials from life to life” (Carson, Silent Spring). These authors’ appreciation of water’s universal seaward movement and its ultimate indivisibility manifests socially and spiritually as a longing for the state of mind Freud called “oceanic”—“a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole”—and literarily as a tact for Unanimism (from the French Unanimisme), with its emphasis on group consciousness, collective emotion, and the writer’s need to merge with the larger cycles of life, nature, and art. This essentially ethical view of life explains the natural instinct that all my authors, even those working before or outside of mainstream environmentalism (Woolf, Rhys, and Fitzgerald) have for conservation. How, they ask, can we ravage the element that makes up over two-thirds of our very selves? How does environmental despoliation affect the stories we tell? And if, as Joan Didion has famously asserted, “we tell ourselves stories in order to live,” can we not tell stories in order to protect the life that began, in our planet’s waters, over 3 billion years ago