The “Hypertension Approaches in the Elderly: a Lifestyle study” multicenter, randomized trial (HAEL Study): rationale and methodological protocol

Background: Hypertension is a clinical condition highly prevalent in the elderly, imposing great risks to cardiovascular diseases and loss of quality of life. Current guidelines emphasize the importance of nonpharmacological strategies as a first-line approach to lower blood pressure. Exercise is an efficient lifestyle tool that can benefit a myriad of health-related outcomes, including blood pressure control, in older adults. We herein report the protocol of the HAEL Study, which aims to evaluate the efficacy of a pragmatic combined exercise training compared with a health education program on ambulatory blood pressure and other health-related outcomes in older individuals. Methods: Randomized, single-blinded, multicenter, two-arm, parallel, superiority trial. A total of 184 subjects (92/center), ≥60 years of age, with no recent history of cardiovascular events, will be randomized on a 1:1 ratio to 12-week interventions consisting either of a combined exercise (aerobic and strength) training, three times per week, or an active-control group receiving health education intervention, once a week. Ambulatory (primary outcome) and office blood pressures, cardiorespiratory fitness and endothelial function, together with quality of life, functional fitness and autonomic control will be measured in before and after intervention. Discussion: Our conceptual hypothesis is that combined training intervention will reduce ambulatory blood pressure in comparison with health education group. Using a superiority framework, analysis plan prespecifies an intention-to-treat approach, per protocol criteria, subgroups analysis, and handling of missing data. The trial is recruiting since September 2017. Finally, this study was designed to adhere to data sharing practices. Trial registration: NCT03264443. Registered on 29 August, 2017

A Model-Based Holistic Power Management Framework: A Study on Shipboard Power Systems for Navy Applications

The recent development of Integrated Power Systems (IPS) for shipboard application has opened the horizon to introduce new technologies that address the increasing power demand along with the associated performance specifications. Similarly, the Shipboard Power System (SPS) features system components with multiple dynamic characteristics and require stringent regulations, leveraging a challenge for an efficient system level management. The shipboard power management needs to support the survivability, reliability, autonomy, and economy as the key features for design consideration. To address these multiple issues for an increasing system load and to embrace future technologies, an autonomic power management framework is required to maintain the system level objectives. To address the lack of the efficient management scheme, a generic model-based holistic power management framework is developed for naval SPS applications. The relationship between the system parameters are introduced in the form of models to be used by the model-based predictive controller for achieving the various power management goals. An intelligent diagnostic support system is developed to support the decision making capabilities of the main framework. Naïve Bayes’ theorem is used to classify the status of SPS to help dispatch the appropriate controls. A voltage control module is developed and implemented on a real-time test bed to verify the computation time. Variants of the limited look-ahead controls (LLC) are used throughout the dissertation to support the management framework design. Additionally, the ARIMA prediction is embedded in the approach to forecast the environmental variables in the system design. The developed generic framework binds the multiple functionalities in the form of overall system modules. Finally, the dissertation develops the distributed controller using the Interaction Balance Principle to solve the interconnected subsystem optimization problem. The LLC approach is used at the local level, and the conjugate gradient method coordinates all the lower level controllers to achieve the overall optimal solution. This novel approach provides better computing performance, more flexibility in design, and improved fault handling. The case-study demonstrates the applicability of the method and compares with the centralized approach. In addition, several measures to characterize the performance of the distributed controls approach are studied

The "Hypertension approaches in the elderly: a lifestyle study" multicenter, randomized trial (HAEL Study) : rationale and methodological protocol

Background: Hypertension is a clinical condition highly prevalent in the elderly, imposing great risks to cardiovascular diseases and loss of quality of life. Current guidelines emphasize the importance of nonpharmacological strategies as a first-line approach to lower blood pressure. Exercise is an efficient lifestyle tool that can benefit a myriad of health-related outcomes, including blood pressure control, in older adults. We herein report the protocol of the HAEL Study, which aims to evaluate the efficacy of a pragmatic combined exercise training compared with a health education program on ambulatory blood pressure and other health-related outcomes in older individuals. Methods: Randomized, single-blinded, multicenter, two-arm, parallel, superiority trial. A total of 184 subjects (92/center), ≥60 years of age, with no recent history of cardiovascular events, will be randomized on a 1:1 ratio to 12-week interventions consisting either of a combined exercise (aerobic and strength) training, three times per week, or an active-control group receiving health education intervention, once a week. Ambulatory (primary outcome) and office blood pressures, cardiorespiratory fitness and endothelial function, together with quality of life, functional fitness and autonomic control will be measured in before and after intervention. Discussion: Our conceptual hypothesis is that combined training intervention will reduce ambulatory blood pressure in comparison with health education group. Using a superiority framework, analysis plan prespecifies an intention-to-treat approach, per protocol criteria, subgroups analysis, and handling of missing data. The trial is recruiting since September 2017. Finally, this study was designed to adhere to data sharing practices

A survey of self organisation in future cellular networks

This article surveys the literature over the period of the last decade on the emerging field of self organisation as applied to wireless cellular communication networks. Self organisation has been extensively studied and applied in adhoc networks, wireless sensor networks and autonomic computer networks; however in the context of wireless cellular networks, this is the first attempt to put in perspective the various efforts in form of a tutorial/survey. We provide a comprehensive survey of the existing literature, projects and standards in self organising cellular networks. Additionally, we also aim to present a clear understanding of this active research area, identifying a clear taxonomy and guidelines for design of self organising mechanisms. We compare strength and weakness of existing solutions and highlight the key research areas for further development. This paper serves as a guide and a starting point for anyone willing to delve into research on self organisation in wireless cellular communication networks

A Generic API for Load Balancing in Structured P2P Systems

International audienceReal world datasets are known to be highly skewed, often leading to an important load imbalance issue for distributed systems managing them. To address this issue, there exist almost as many load balancing strategies as there are different systems. When designing a scalable distributed system geared towards handling large amounts of information, it is often not so easy to anticipate which kind of strategy will be the most efficient to maintain adequate performance regarding response time, scalability and reliability at any time. Based on this observation, we describe the methodology behind the building of a generic API to implement and experiment any strategy independently from the rest of the code, prior to a definitive choice for instance. We then show how this API is compatible with famous existing systems and their load balancing scheme. We also present results from our own distributed system which targets the continuous storage of events structured according to the Semantic Web standards, further retrieved by interested parties. As such, our system constitutes a typical example of a Big Data environment

Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud

With the advent of cloud computing, organizations are nowadays able to react rapidly to changing demands for computational resources. Not only individual applications can be hosted on virtual cloud infrastructures, but also complete business processes. This allows the realization of so-called elastic processes, i.e., processes which are carried out using elastic cloud resources. Despite the manifold benefits of elastic processes, there is still a lack of solutions supporting them. In this paper, we identify the state of the art of elastic Business Process Management with a focus on infrastructural challenges. We conceptualize an architecture for an elastic Business Process Management System and discuss existing work on scheduling, resource allocation, monitoring, decentralized coordination, and state management for elastic processes. Furthermore, we present two representative elastic Business Process Management Systems which are intended to counter these challenges. Based on our findings, we identify open issues and outline possible research directions for the realization of elastic processes and elastic Business Process Management.Comment: Please cite as: S. Schulte, C. Janiesch, S. Venugopal, I. Weber, and P. Hoenisch (2015). Elastic Business Process Management: State of the Art and Open Challenges for BPM in the Cloud. Future Generation Computer Systems, Volume NN, Number N, NN-NN., http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2014.09.00