On the Anatomy of Health-related Actions for Which People Could Reasonably be Held Responsible: A Framework

Should we let personal responsibility for health-related behavior influence the allocation of healthcare resources? In this paper, we clarify what it means to be responsible for an action. We rely on a crucial conceptual distinction between being responsible and holding someone responsible, and show that even though we might be considered responsible and blameworthy for our health-related actions, there could still be well-justified reasons for not considering it reasonable to hold us responsible by giving us lower priority. We transform these philosophical considerations into analytical use first by assessing the general features of health-related actions and the corresponding healthcare needs. Then, we identify clusters of structural features that even adversely affected people cannot reasonably deny constitute actions for which they should be held responsible. We summarize the results in an analytical framework that can be used by decision-makers when considering personal responsibility for health as a criterion for setting priorities.publishedVersio

Monitoring and Control of Temperature in Networks-on-Chip

Increasing integration densities and the emergence of nanotechnology cause issues related to reliability and power consumption to become dominant factors for the design of modern multi-core systems. Since the arising problems are enforced by high circuit temperatures, monitoring and control of on-chip temperature profiles need to be considered during design phase as well as during system operation. Hence, in this paper different approaches for the realization and integration of a monitoring system for temperature in multi-core systems based on Networks-on-Chip (NoCs) in combination with Dynamic Frequency Scaling (DFS) are investigated. Results show that both combinations using event-driven and time-driven forwarding more than double overall execution time and considerably reduce throughput of application data. Regarding performance of notification and reaction to temperature development event-driven forwarding clearly outperforms time-driven forwarding

Tow-Photon Polymerization (2PP) enables 3D microsystems for Pharmatechnology

Two-photon polymerization(2PP) is a process for three-dimensional (3D) micro-and Nano structuring based on the locally controlled curing of liquid precursors (light-sensitive resins) by photochemical triggered polymerization. In this decade, will be hearing a lot about this technic being applied to pharmaceutical applications like fabricating 3D microchannels for nanoparticle precipitation, nano-porous membranes and scaffolds for cell culturing, biomimetic organ-on-chip systems. This paper presents 2pp applied microsystems for continuously generating lipid nanoparticles which are one of the most important drug carrier system. The most important advantages of 2pp is manufacturing 3D shapes that is not possible with lithographic micro and nano fabrication technologies. Also, it will be shown how 2pp fabricated microchannel can be integrated with continuous size measurement by flowDLS for the feed-back controlled generation of nanoparticles