61 research outputs found
0074: The stress test as a diagnostic toolfor coronary artery disease in hypertensive patients
IntroductionIn hypertensive patients, there are multiplecauses of error in the diagnosis of coronary artery disease: The objective of this study was to evaluate the sensitivity of the positive electrical criteria in the stress test in diagnosing coronary artery disease within the hypertensive patients.Materials/Methods120 hypertensive patients with positive stress test underwent coronary angiography.Results33 % of patients had significant coronary lesions and 67% had normal coronary angiography. Two groups of patients were identified: group A (77 patients) withST segment depression in DII, DIII, aVF and V6 with maximal effort and group B (43 patients) with a ST segment depression in DII, DIII, aVF and/or V4, V5, V6 with maximal effort. In group A, 65 patients (84.4%) had normal coronary angiography. In group B, 31 patients (72%) had significant coronary lesions. In a subgroup of 46 patients in group A with persistent ST segment depression in V4 to V6 and recovering for 4 to 6 minutes, 93% of coronary angiograms were normal. In another subgroup of 19 patients in group B with persistent ST segment depressionin V4 to V6 and recovering for 4 to 8 minutes, 16 patients (86%) had significant lesions on coronary angiograms.Conclusionhypertensive patients with stress test showing ST segment depression in DII, DIII, aVF and/or V4, V5, V6 on maximum effort and persisting for 4-8 minutes recovering have a high probability of significant coronary artery disease
A Comparative Study of Metakaolin/Slag-Based Geopolymer Mortars Incorporating Natural and Recycled Sands
Great efforts are being made to minimize the negative impact of the Portland cement industry on the environment by using industrial by-products during the manufacture of clinker or by the partial replacement of cement during the preparation of concrete. However, the carbon footprint remains relatively high in addition to the large consumption of natural resources such as sand and other aggregates. A solution to these problems is to completely replace Portland cement with a new generation of mineral binders, commonly known as geopolymers, which have properties similar to those of Portland cement. These binders can be obtained by the alkali-activation of siliceous or aluminosilicate materials. This study aims to develop pozzolanic type binders at room temperature (20°C) from the alkali-activation of aluminosilicate materials based on metakaolin and blast furnace slag at different percentages. Different activators were employed, including solid (NaOH) and liquid (Na2SiO3.nH2O). The optimal mixtures were used for making mortars based on natural sand (NS) and concrete recycled sand (CRS). A comparative experimental study of the physical, mechanical, and microstructural characteristics of the two types of mortars was conducted. Cement mixtures with a high amount of slag and an association of sodium hydroxide and sodium silicate gave the best physico-mechanical properties. A drop in the compressive strength of mortars prepared with CRS was observed after 365 days, but it was still higher than those with NS. The obtained results show the possibility of designing an eco-friendly CRS-based geopolymer mortar that is more resistant than NS-based mortar with a homogeneous and integrated microstructure. Doi: 10.28991/CEJ-2022-08-08-07 Full Text: PD
Coordination of Speech Recognition Devices in Intelligent Environments with Multiple Responsive Devices
Devices with oral interfaces are enabling new interesting interaction scenarios and ways of interaction in ambient intelligence settings. The use of several of such devices in the same environment opens up the possibility to compare the inputs gathered from each one of them and perform a more accurate recognition and processing of user speech. However, the combination of multiple devices presents coordination challenges, as the processing of one voice signal by different speech processing units may result in conflicting outputs and it is necessary to decide which is the most reliable source. This paper presents an approach to rank several sources of spoken input in multi-device environments in order to give preference to the input with the highest estimated quality. The voice signals received by the multiple devices are assessed in terms of their calculated acoustic quality and the reliability of the speech recognition hypotheses produced. After this assessment, each input is assigned a unique score that allows the audio sources to be ranked so as to pick the best to be processed by the system. In order to validate this approach, we have performed an evaluation using a corpus of 4608 audios recorded in a two-room intelligent environment with 24 microphones. The experimental results show that our ranking approach makes it possible to successfully orchestrate an increasing number of acoustic inputs, obtaining better recognition rates than considering a single input, both in clear and noisy settings.This research has received funding by the project DEP2015-70980-R of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO) and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 823907 (‘Mental health monitoring through interactive conversations’, MENHIR Project), as well as, received inputs from the COST Action IC1303 AAPEL
A Model-Driven Approach for Wearable Systems Developments
This paper proposes a model-driven approach for developing high-level software interfaces that allow developers to interact with wearable devices easily. These components hide the heterogeneity of the devices interfaces and provide developers with a simple and homogeneous way to interoperate with these digital peripherals. The use of this approach also allows reducing risks and development efforts.This work has been partially funded by the Facultad de Educación, Economía y Tecnología de Ceuta under the “Contrato-Programa” of research for the period 2013–2015. This work has also been supported by Fondecyt (Chile), Grant no. 1150252. The authors would also like to acknowledge input from COST Action AAPELE (IC1303)
General Architecture for Development of Virtual Coaches for Healthy Habits Monitoring and Encouragement
Good health is the result of a healthy lifestyle, where caring about physical activity
and nutrition are key concerns. However, in today’s society, nutritional disorders are becoming
increasingly frequent, affecting children, adults, and elderly people, mainly due to limited nutrition
knowledge and the lack of a healthy lifestyle. A commonly adopted therapy to these imbalances
is to monitor physical activity and daily habits, such as recording exercise or creating custom meal
plans to count the amount of macronutrients and micronutrients acquired in each meal. Nowadays,
many health tracking applications (HTA) have been developed that, for instance, record energy
intake as well as users’ physiological parameters, or measure the physical activity during the day.
However, most existing HTA do not have a uniform architectural design on top of which to build
other applications and services. In this manuscript, we present system architecture intended to serve
as a reference architecture for building HTA solutions. In order to validate the proposed architecture,
we performed a preliminary evaluation with 15 well recognized experts in systems and software
architecture from different entities around world and who have estimated that our proposal can
generate architecture for HTA that is adequate, reliable, secure, modifiable, portable, functional, and
with high conceptual integrity. In order to show the applicability of the architecture in different
HTA, we developed two telemonitoring systems based on it, targeted to different tasks: nutritional
coaching (Food4Living) and physical exercise coaching (TrainME). The purpose was to illustrate the
kind of end-user monitoring applications that could be developed.
Keywords: telemonitoring; healthy habits; virtual coaches; system
Technical note: A mobile collaborative workspace to assist forensic experts in disaster victim identification scenarios
Integrated approaches to disaster victim identification (DVI) management have led to a need for technologies to improve interaction among parties involved in post-mortem (PM) and ante-mortem (AM) data collection through better communication and coordination. Mobile Forensic Workspace© (MFW) is a collaborative mobile system that not only facilitates the systematic collection of high-quality data, but also allows DVI professionals to coordinate activities and exchange data through secure real-time communication at major disaster scenarios in accordance with security, privacy and legal protocols. MFW is adaptable to any communication format (text, voice calls, photographs, etc.) and is dynamically self-reconfigurable when connectivity problems arise. It also allows data integration and backup through secure communication channels between local and remote servers. The feasibility of the system has been demonstrated through implementation of MFW on the iOS platform for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad terminals. A further strength of MFW is that it provides out-of-the-box support for INTERPOL DVI forms. The application of information and communication technologies for DVI was shown to be useful in improving DVI management by enhancing the quality of data collection and enabling non-Internet dependent real-time data sharing and communication
A Communication Model to Integrate the Request-Response and the Publish-Subscribe Paradigms into Ubiquitous Systems
The Request-Response (RR) paradigm is widely used in ubiquitous systems to exchange information in a secure, reliable and timely manner. Nonetheless, there is also an emerging need for adopting the Publish-Subscribe (PubSub) paradigm in this kind of systems, due to the advantages that this paradigm offers in supporting mobility by means of asynchronous, non-blocking and one-to-many message distribution semantics for event notification. This paper analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of both the RR and PubSub paradigms to support communications in ubiquitous systems and proposes an abstract communication model in order to enable their seamless integration. Thus, developers will be focused on communication semantics and the required quality properties, rather than be concerned about specific communication mechanisms. The aim is to provide developers with abstractions intended to decrease the complexity of integrating different communication paradigms commonly needed in ubiquitous systems. The proposal has been applied to implement a middleware and a real home automation system to show its applicability and benefits.This research work is funded by the Project P10-TIC-6600 granted by the Andalusian Regional
Government, and the Project 20F2/36 granted by CEI-BioTIC Granada. This work has also been partially
supported by the “Contrato-Programa, Facultad de Educacin y Humanidades de Ceuta 2010-2012” of the
University of Granada
A Comparative Study on the Suitability of Smartphones and IMU for Mobile, Unsupervised Energy Expenditure Calculi
The metabolic equivalent of task (MET) is currently the most used indicator for measuring the energy expenditure (EE) of a physical activity (PA) and has become an important measure for determining and supervising a person’s state of health. The use of new devices which are capable of measuring inertial movements by means of built-in accelerometers enable the PA to be measured objectively on the basis of the reckoning of “counts”. These devices are also known as inertial measurement units (IMUs) and each count is an aggregated value indicating the intensity of a movement and can be used in conjunction with other parameters to determine the MET rate of a particular physical activity and thus it’s associated EE. Various types of inertial devices currently exist that enable count calculus and physical activity to be monitored. The advent of mobile devices, such as smartphones, with empowered computation capabilities and integrated inertial sensors, has enabled EE to be measure in a distributed, ubiquitous and natural way, thereby overcoming the reluctance of users and practitioners associated with in-lab studies. From the point of view of the process analysis and infrastructure needed to manage data from inertial devices, there are also various differences in count computing: extra devices are required, out-of-device processing, etc. This paper presents a study to discover whether the estimation of energy expenditure is dependent on the accelerometer of the device used in measurements and to discover the suitability of each device for performing certain physical activities. In order to achieve this objective, we have conducted several experiments with different subjects on the basis of the performance of various daily activities with different smartphones and IMUs.This research work was partially supported by the project ‘Sistema Ergonómico Integral para la evaluación de la locomoción como predictor de la calidad de vida relacionada con la salud en Mayores (Ergoloc)’, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under the project DEP2012-40069; Facultad de Educación, Economía y Tecnología de Ceuta under the “Contrato-programa” of research for the period 2013–2015 and by the Programa de Fortalecimiento de I+D+i de la Universidad de Granada 2014-15. The Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports of Spain supported the work of Orantes-González, E. (ref. FPU13/00162). The authors would also like to acknowledge contribution from COST Action IC1303
Towards conversational technology to promote, monitor and protect mental health
This paper presents a general overview of the H2020-MSCA-RISE project MENHIR (Mental health monitoring through interactive conversations), which aim is to explore the possibilities of conversational technologies (chatbots) to understand, promote and protect mental health and assist people with anxiety and mild depression manage their conditions. MENHIR started on February 2019 and will have a duration of 4 years. Its consortium brings together 8 partners including universities, anon-profit organization and companies
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