The use of walking sounds in supporting awareness

Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), Boston, MA, July 7-9, 2003.There is need for applications that keep the users aware of various things happening around them. One of such things is the presence of co-workers in office environments. Playing people's walking sounds in the background as cues of their presence came up as one way to provide such information. The walking sounds have very favorable properties; as a part of the normal sound ecology in an office environment they are non-obtrusive. In addition, they have a natural association to the person they present. To study how well people can identify recorded walking sounds of their co-workers we organized a listening experiment. Without any learning the identification rates were 13%, however after short teaching session rates increased to 66%. The results show that walking sounds do contain enough information to convey the identity of the person but careful design of the sounds is necessary. In this paper we also present how walking sounds can be used as a part of a ubiquitous computing system

Genetic architecture of human plasma lipidome and its link to cardiovascular disease

Abstract Understanding genetic architecture of plasma lipidome could provide better insights into lipid metabolism and its link to cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). Here, we perform genome-wide association analyses of 141 lipid species (n = 2,181 individuals), followed by phenome-wide scans with 25 CVD related phenotypes (n = 511,700 individuals). We identify 35 lipid-species-associated loci (P <5 ×10−8), 10 of which associate with CVD risk including five new loci-COL5A1, GLTPD2, SPTLC3, MBOAT7 and GALNT16 (false discovery rate<0.05). We identify loci for lipid species that are shown to predict CVD e.g., SPTLC3 for CER(d18:1/24:1). We show that lipoprotein lipase (LPL) may more efficiently hydrolyze medium length triacylglycerides (TAGs) than others. Polyunsaturated lipids have highest heritability and genetic correlations, suggesting considerable genetic regulation at fatty acids levels. We find low genetic correlations between traditional lipids and lipid species. Our results show that lipidomic profiles capture information beyond traditional lipids and identify genetic variants modifying lipid levels and risk of CVD