D-ECG: A Dynamic Framework for Cardiac Arrhythmia Detection from IoT-Based ECGs

Cardiac arrhythmia has been identified as a type of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) that causes approximately 12 % of all deaths globally. The current progress on arrhythmia detection based on ECG recordings is facing a bottleneck for adopting single classifier and static ensemble methods. Besides, most of the work tend to use a static feature set for characterizing all types of heartbeats, which may limit the classification performance. To fill in the gap, a novel framework called D-ECG is proposed to introduce dynamic ensemble selection (DES) technique to provide accurate detection of cardiac arrhythmia. In addition, the proposed D-ECG develops a result regulator that use different features to refine the classification result from the DES technique. The results reported in this paper have shown visible improvement on the overall heartbeat classification accuracy as well as the sensitivity of disease heartbeats

Good Vibrations – Effects of Whole Body Vibration on Attention in Healthy Individuals and Individuals with ADHD

Objectives: Most of the current treatment strategies of ADHD are associated with a number of disadvantages which strengthen the need for alternative or additional approaches for the reatment of ADHD. In this respect, Whole Body Vibration (WBV) might be interesting as it was found to have beneficial effects on a variety of physiological measures. The present study explored the effects of WBV on attention of healthy individuals and adults diagnosed with ADHD. Methods: Eighty-three healthy individuals and seventeen adults diagnosed with ADHD participated in the study. WBV treatment was applied passively, while participants were sitting on a chair which was mounted on a vibrating platform. A repeated measure design was employed in order to explore potential effects of WBV treatment on attention within subjects. Attention (i.e. inhibitory control) was measured with a color-word interference paradigm. Results: A period of two minutes of WBV treatment had significant beneficial effects of small to medium size on attention of both healthy individuals and adults with ADHD. The effect of WBV treatment on attention did not differ significantly between groups. Conclusions: WBV was demonstrated to improve cognitive performance of healthy individuals as well as of individuals with ADHD. WBV treatment is relatively inexpensive and easy to apply and might therefore be of potential relevance for clinical use. The application of WBV treatment as a cognitive enhancement strategy and as a potential treatment of cognitive impairments is discussed