Continuous Forest Fire Propagation in a Local Small World Network Model

This paper presents the development of a new continuous forest fire model implemented as a weighted local small-world network approach. This new approach was designed to simulate fire patterns in real, heterogeneous landscapes. The wildland fire spread is simulated on a square lattice in which each cell represents an area of the land's surface. The interaction between burning and non-burning cells, in the present work induced by flame radiation, may be extended well beyond nearest neighbors. It depends on local conditions of topography and vegetation types. An approach based on a solid flame model is used to predict the radiative heat flux from the flame generated by the burning of each site towards its neighbors. The weighting procedure takes into account the self-degradation of the tree and the ignition processes of a combustible cell through time. The model is tested on a field presenting a range of slopes and with data collected from a real wildfire scenario. The critical behavior of the spreading process is investigated

SAMPLING SEGMENTS IN AN AREA FRAME WITH A DISTANCE THRESHOLD

A simple random sample in an area frame usually gives a number of pairs of elements that are close to each other. These elements give redundant information since there is usually a high spatial autocorrelation at short distances. The efficiency of sampling is generally improved if we impose that the distance between two elements of the sample cannot be less than a certain threshold. However applying this restriction can introduce a significant perturbation of the sampling probability. Elements near the borders of the region are more likely to be selected. In the case of aligned sampling by repetition of a pattern in a square block, a distance threshold does not modify the marginal probability of each element of the population, although crossed probabilities are slightly changed

STRATIFICATION AND CLUSTER ESTIMATOR ON AN AREA FRAME BY SQUARED SEGMENTS WITH AN ALIGNED SAMPLE

Several European countries (Portugal, Spain, Greece, Rumania, and the Czech Republic) make crop surveys on area frame with an aligned systematic sampling of squared segments. So far crop area estimates are obtained with standard formulae for random sampling, without using the spatial structure of the sample. This is in general conservative, the estimated standard error is larger than the error actually made. Taking as clusters the set of segments with the same relative position in a block, gives often lower but very unstable variances. A more stable variance estimate is computed by repeated random permutations of the sample segments in each block before building up the clusters. There is most often a moderate variance reduction when no stratification has been performed. If the sample is stratified and the cluster estimator is applied in each stratum, the variances seem to be less unstable. In this case permutations in each block seem not to be very useful

A Novel Low-Cost Sensor Prototype for Nocturia Monitoring in Older People

Indexación: Scopus.This work was supported in part by CORFO - CENS 16CTTS-66390 through the National Center on Health Information Systems, in part by the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT) through the program STIC-AMSUD 17STIC-03: ‘‘e-MONITOR âĂŞ Chronic Disease: Ambient Assisted Living and vital teleMONOTORing for e-health,’’ FONDEF ID16I10449 ‘‘Sistema inteligente para la gestión y análisis de la dotación de camas en la red asistencial del sector público,’’ and MEC80170097 ‘‘Red de colaboración científica entre universidades nacionales e internacionales para la estructuración del doctorado y magister en informática médica en la Universidad de Valparaíso.’’ The work of V. H. C. de Albuquerque was supported by the Brazilian National Council for Research and Development (CNPq) under Grant #304315/2017-6.Nocturia is frequently defined as the necessity to get out of bed at least one time during the night to urinate, with each of these episodes being preceded and continued by sleep. Several studies suggest that an increase of nocturia is seen with the onset of age, occurring in around 70% of adults over the age of 70. Its appearance is associated with detrimental quality of life for those who present nocturia, since it leads to daytime sleepiness, cognitive dysfunction, among others. Currently, a voiding diary is necessary for nocturia assessment; these are prone to bias due to their inherent subjectivity. In this paper, we present the design of a low-cost device that automatically detects micturition events. The device obtained 73% in sensibility and 81% in specificity; these results show that systems such as the proposed one can be a valuable tool for the medical team when evaluating nocturia. © 2013 IEEE.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/845445

A novel monitoring system for fall detection in older people

Indexación: Scopus.This work was supported in part by CORFO - CENS 16CTTS-66390 through the National Center on Health Information Systems, in part by the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT) through the Program STIC-AMSUD 17STIC-03: ‘‘MONITORing for ehealth," FONDEF ID16I10449 ‘‘Sistema inteligente para la gestión y análisis de la dotación de camas en la red asistencial del sector público’’, and in part by MEC80170097 ‘‘Red de colaboración científica entre universidades nacionales e internacionales para la estructuración del doctorado y magister en informática médica en la Universidad de Valparaíso’’. The work of V. H. C. De Albuquerque was supported by the Brazilian National Council for Research and Development (CNPq), under Grant 304315/2017-6.Each year, more than 30% of people over 65 years-old suffer some fall. Unfortunately, this can generate physical and psychological damage, especially if they live alone and they are unable to get help. In this field, several studies have been performed aiming to alert potential falls of the older people by using different types of sensors and algorithms. In this paper, we present a novel non-invasive monitoring system for fall detection in older people who live alone. Our proposal is using very-low-resolution thermal sensors for classifying a fall and then alerting to the care staff. Also, we analyze the performance of three recurrent neural networks for fall detections: Long short-term memory (LSTM), gated recurrent unit, and Bi-LSTM. As many learning algorithms, we have performed a training phase using different test subjects. After several tests, we can observe that the Bi-LSTM approach overcome the others techniques reaching a 93% of accuracy in fall detection. We believe that the bidirectional way of the Bi-LSTM algorithm gives excellent results because the use of their data is influenced by prior and new information, which compares to LSTM and GRU. Information obtained using this system did not compromise the user's privacy, which constitutes an additional advantage of this alternative. © 2013 IEEE.https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=842305

The Magnetic Electron Ion Spectrometer (MagEIS) Instruments Aboard the Radiation Belt Storm Probes (RBSP) Spacecraft

This paper describes the Magnetic Electron Ion Spectrometer (MagEIS) instruments aboard the RBSP spacecraft from an instrumentation and engineering point of view. There are four magnetic spectrometers aboard each of the two spacecraft, one low-energy unit (20–240 keV), two medium-energy units (80–1200 keV), and a high-energy unit (800–4800 keV). The high unit also contains a proton telescope (55 keV–20 MeV). The magnetic spectrometers focus electrons within a selected energy pass band upon a focal plane of several silicon detectors where pulse-height analysis is used to determine if the energy of the incident electron is appropriate for the electron momentum selected by the magnet. Thus each event is a two-parameter analysis, an approach leading to a greatly reduced background. The physics of these instruments are described in detail followed by the engineering implementation. The data outputs are described, and examples of the calibration results and early flight data presented