Predicting risk of severe hypoglycaemia in type 2 diabetes.

For many, the extent to which blood glucose control can be lowered is limited by risk of hypoglycaemia. Hypoglycaemia is feared and carries fiscal, social and medical costs, with risk of death being associated with severe hypoglycaemia in patients with type 2 diabetes at high cardiovascular risk. In this issue of Diabetologia, Chow et al (DOI: 10.1007/s00125-015-3512-0 ) report that patients with type 2 diabetes who suffered severe hypoglycaemia during attempts to lower blood glucose intensively were more likely to be insulin deficient and/or carry markers of autoimmunity more usually associated with type 1 diabetes. This opens the question of whether biomarkers might help clinicians identify those patients at greater or lower risk of treatment-induced hypoglycaemia, allowing therapeutic targets to be modified accordingly.SN is supported by the NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Centre.This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00125-015-3550-

The Practitioner\u27s Corner: An exploration of municipal active living charter development and advocacy

Background: Numerous municipal active living-­‐related charters have been adopted to promote physical activity in Canada throughout the past decade. Despite this trend, there are few published critical examinations of the process through which charters are developed and used. Purpose: Thus, the purpose of this study was to establish greater understanding of active living charter development and advocacy. Methods: Semi-­‐structured interviews were conducted with eight primary contributors to different active living-­‐related charters across Ontario, Canada. Interview questions explored participants’ experiences developing and advocating for an active living charter. Interviews were analyzed using open, axial, and selective coding. Results and Conclusions: Participants consistently described a process whereby an impetus triggered the development of a charter, which was subsequently adopted by regional or municipal council. Continued advocacy to develop awareness of the charter and to promote desired outcomes in the community was valued and the capacity of the working group as well as the local political context played pivotal roles in determining how the charter was implemented. Outcomes were, however, only objectively evaluated in one case that was described – evaluation being a process that many participants thought was omitted in regard to their own charter. This work provides practical guidance for health professionals developing regional active living charters as a component of broader advocacy efforts

Design tools for rapid multidomain prototyping of power electronic systems

The need for multidisciplinary virtual prototyping in power electronics has been well established however design tools capable of facilitating a rapid, iterative virtual design process do not exist. A key challenge in developing such tools is identifying and developing modelling techniques which can account for 3D, geometrical design choices without unduly affecting simulation speed. This challenge has been addressed in this work using model order reduction techniques and a prototype power electronic design tool incorporating these techniques is presented. A relevant electro-thermal power module design example is then used to demonstrate the performance of the software and model order reduction techniques. Five design iterations can be evaluated, using 3D inductive and thermal models, under typical operating and startup conditions on a desktop PC in less than 15 minutes. The results are validated experimentally for both thermal and electrical domains

Multi‐frequency averaging (MFA) model of a generic electric vehicle powertrain suitable under variable frequency of averaging developed for remote operability

© The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2020. Geographically distributed hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing has the potential to allow hybrid vehicle powertrain components (battery, motor drive, and engine) to be developed at geographically remote locations but tested concurrently and coupled. Inter-location internet communication links can allow non-ideal behaviour observed in a physical component in one location (e.g. an electrical drive) to be imposed on another physical component elsewhere (e.g. an ICE), and vice-versa. A key challenge is how to represent the behaviour of a remote, physical component under testing in a local HIL environment. Internet communications are too slow and unreliable to transmit waveforms in real-time and so one solution is to use a local 'slave' model whose behaviour and parameters are tuned based on observations at the remote location. This study proposes a multifrequency averaging (MFA) slave model of an electric motor drive system for use in this application; it addresses a weakness in previously published work by extending the MFA model to variable frequency operation. The model was benchmarked against experimental operation (and its equivalent simulation model) in open-loop and closed-loop space vector pulse-width modulation control strategy, fixed and variable frequency operation. Results show significant reconciliation of model and experiment