Consequences of chronic diseases and other limitations associated with old age - A scoping review

Funding Information: This work supported in part by the LTC INTER COST, Evaluation of the Potential for Reducing Health and Social Expenses for Elderly People Using the Smart Environment, through the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports, Czech Republic, under Project LTC18035; and in part by the project of Excellence, University of Hradec Kralove, FIM, Czech Republic (ID: 2205–2019). First author – Petra Maresova is principle investigator of LTC18035 INTER COST project, from which Petra Maresova, Ondrej Krejcar and Kamil Kuca are funded for all expenses including personal costs. Ehsan Javanmardi is funded from project of Excellence ID: 2205–2019 for personal costs. Sabina Barakovic, Jasmina Barakovic Husic and Signe Tomsone are members of COST ACTION 16226 of which also Petra Maresova and Ondrej Krejcar are paticipants, while this article also ACKnowledge this project CA16226. Funding Information: The authors would like to hereby acknowledge COST Action CA16226 for their networking support. The Indoor Living Space Improvement: Smart Habitat for the Elderly played a role of networking platform for knowledge sharing and interchanging ideas for joint research and publication, what was the base for creating this study. Based on CA16226 project LTC18035 INTER COST was proposed for national funding support of COST ACTION Framework. COST is a funding agency that helps innovation and research networks. Our Action was instrumental in connecting research programmes throughout the EU region. Their contribution has made it possible for scientists to connect with each other and share their ideas and findings. This allows for more research and better innovation. More information can be found at www.cost.eu. The authors would also like to acknowledge the Excellence 2019 internal research project, Faculty of Informatics and Management, University of Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic. Publisher Copyright: © 2019 The Author(s).Background: The phenomenon of the increasing number of ageing people in the world is arguably the most significant economic, health and social challenge that we face today. Additionally, one of the major epidemiologic trends of current times is the increase in chronic and degenerative diseases. This paper tries to deliver a more up to date overview of chronic diseases and other limitations associated with old age and provide a more detailed outlook on the research that has gone into this field. Methods: First, challenges for seniors, including chronic diseases and other limitations associated with old age, are specified. Second, a review of seniors' needs and concerns is performed. Finally, solutions that can improve seniors' quality of life are discussed. Publications obtained from the following databases are used in this scoping review: Web of Science, PubMed, and Science Direct. Four independent reviewers screened the identified records and selected relevant publications published from 2010 to 2017. A total of 1916 publications were selected. In all, 52 papers were selected based on abstract content. For further processing, 21 full papers were screened." Results: The results indicate disabilities as a major problem associated with seniors' activities of daily living dependence. We founded seven categories of different conditions - psychological problems, difficulties in mobility, poor cognitive function, falls and incidents, wounds and injuries, undernutrition, and communication problems. In order to minimize ageing consequences, some areas require more attention, such as education and training; technological tools; government support and welfare systems; early diagnosis of undernutrition, cognitive impairment, and other diseases; communication solutions; mobility solutions; and social contributions. Conclusions: This scoping review supports the view on chronic diseases in old age as a complex issue. To prevent the consequences of chronic diseases and other limitations associated with old age related problems demands multicomponent interventions. Early recognition of problems leading to disability and activities of daily living (ADL) dependence should be one of essential components of such interventions.publishersversionPeer reviewe

Modified frequency-based term weighting schemes for text classification

With the rapid growth of textual content on the Internet, automatic text categorization is a comparatively more effective solution in information organization and knowledge management. Feature selection, one of the basic phases in statistical-based text categorization, crucially depends on the term weighting methods In order to improve the performance of text categorization, this paper proposes four modified frequency-based term weighting schemes namely; mTF, mTFIDF, TFmIDF, and mTFmIDF. The proposed term weighting schemes take the amount of missing terms into account calculating the weight of existing terms. The proposed schemes show the highest performance for a SVM classifier with a micro-average F1 classification performance value of 97%. Moreover, benchmarking results on Reuters-21578, 20Newsgroups, and WebKB text-classification datasets, using different classifying algorithms such as SVM and KNN show that the proposed schemes mTF, mTFIDF, and mTFmIDF outperform other weighting schemes such as TF, TFIDF, and Entropy. Additionally, the statistical significance tests show a significant enhancement of the classification performance based on the modified schemes

A smart Arduino alarm clock using Hypnagogia detection during night

This project describes hardware design and implementation of low-cost smart alarm clock based on Arduino platform, which uses passive infrared sensor (PIR) to detect sleep states of users. Sleep is not just a passive process. People can achieve different states during the night, which are known as Hypnagogia (state from wakefulness to sleep), NREM (non-rapid eye movement), REM (rapid eye movement), Hypnexagogium (awakening state) and dreaming. The main goal for this developed smart alarm clock is to detect these states and adjust alarm time to the best possible moment, when people are in awaking state or in light sleep. Awaking in these states is quite better and people feel much more refreshed. Hardware of this developed alarm clock is composed from LCD LED display, real-time (RTC) clock unit, temperature and humidity sensor, photosensitive module for detection of daytime, touch sensor and WiFi module for time synchronization from NTP (Network Time Protocol) servers. This Smart alarm clock could be used for better and more effective awakening for users