Big data analytics and modeling for Human Mobility

The fast development of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) offers new opportunities to realize future smart cities. To understand, manage and forecast the city's behavior, it is necessary the analysis of different kinds of data from the most varied dataset acquisition systems. The aim of this research activity in the framework of Data Science and Complex Systems Physics is to provide stakeholders with new knowledge tools to improve the sustainability of mobility demand in future cities. Under this perspective, the governance of mobility demand generated by large tourist flows is becoming a vital issue for the quality of life in Italian cities' historical centers, which will worsen in the next future due to the continuous globalization process. Another critical theme is sustainable mobility, which aims to reduce private transportation means in the cities and improve multimodal mobility. We analyze the statistical properties of urban mobility of Venice, Rimini, and Bologna by using different datasets provided by companies and local authorities. We develop algorithms and tools for cartography extraction, trips reconstruction, multimodality classification, and mobility simulation. We show the existence of characteristic mobility paths and statistical properties depending on transport means and user's kinds. Finally, we use our results to model and simulate the overall behavior of the cars moving in the Emilia Romagna Region and the pedestrians moving in Venice with software able to replicate in silico the demand for mobility and its dynamic

The influence of blood flow on skin surface temperature in the lower-limbs : a research article

Background: Peripheral arterial disease (PAD) tends to be associated with lower foot skin temperatures, however it is dubious whether there is enough evidence to support this claim. Skin temperature monitoring, and its ability to be an independent diagnostic modality for PAD, particularly in diabetes, has gained remarkable interest in recent years, but its ability to detect and diagnose PAD is not yet clear.Methods: A systematic literature search was conducted in: Academic Search Ultimate, CINAHL, Cochrane Library, LISTA, and MEDLINE Complete until February 2022.Results: A total of nine studies were eligible for review. For the purpose of this review, the inclusion studies were grouped according to the type of investigation analysed: those investigating lower-limb thermal patterns in various populations and those investigating comparisons between various outcome measures to assess blood flow to the feet, including skin temperature measurement. Findings suggest that higher foot skin temperatures were found in PAD patients with Diabetes Mellitus (DM). Foot skin temperature measurements also showed a clear correlation with blood flow to the feet, evaluated by ABI.Conclusions: Variations in foot skin temperature play an important role in the diagnosis of PAD. Current evidence shows that the influence of blood flow on surface skin temperature is complex. The interpretation of thermography as a diagnostic modality for PAD and its severity needs to be considered within the context of the overall medical condition of the individual patient.peer-reviewe

The effects of skin temperature changes on the integrity of skin tissue : a systematic review

OBJECTIVE To determine whether changes in skin temperature can affect the integrity of skin.METHODOLOGY The authors conducted a systematic literature search as per the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses) guidelines. They searched the CINAHL (Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature), Cochrane, MEDLINE Complete, Academic Search Ultimate, and HyDi databases for articles examining the effects of skin temperature on skin integrity published through April 2020. Two independent reviewers scored the methodologic quality of the 13 included studies.RESULTS Only 11 studies were included in the qualitative analysis, as the other two articles had a critical risk of bias. There is strong evidence to indicate that an increase in skin temperature leads to changes in skin structure and function. However, ulcer formation was more affected by intrinsic and extrinsic factors, rather than by temperature alone.CONCLUSION Further high-quality randomized controlled trials are required to investigate the direct effect of skin temperature on ulceration.peer-reviewe

Unraveling pedestrian mobility on a road network using ICTs data during great tourist events

Tourist flows in historical cities are continuously growing in a globalized world and adequate governance processes, politics and tools are necessary in order to reduce impacts on the urban livability and to guarantee the preservation of cultural heritage. The ICTs offer the possibility of collecting large amount of data that can point out and quantify some statistical and dynamic properties of human mobility emerging from the individual behavior and referring to a whole road network. In this paper we analyze a new dataset that has been collected by the Italian mobile phone company TIM, which contains the GPS positions of a relevant sample of mobile devices when they actively connected to the cell phone network. Our aim is to propose innovative tools allowing to study properties of pedestrian mobility on the whole road network. Venice is a paradigmatic example for the impact of tourist flows on the resident life quality and on the preservation of cultural heritage. The GPS data provide anonymized georeferenced information on the displacements of the devices. After a filtering procedure, we develop specific algorithms able to reconstruct the daily mobility paths on the whole Venice road network. The statistical analysis of the mobility paths suggests the existence of a travel time budget for the mobility and points out the role of the rest times in the empirical relation between the mobility time and the corresponding path length. We succeed to highlight two connected mobility subnetworks extracted from the whole road network, that are able to explain the majority of the observed mobility. Our approach shows the existence of characteristic mobility paths in Venice for the tourists and for the residents. Moreover the data analysis highlights the different mobility features of the considered case studies and it allows to detect the mobility paths associated to different points of interest. Finally we have disaggregated the Italian and foreigner categories to study their different mobility behaviors

Proprieta statistiche di dinamica veicolare su una rete stradale utilizzando dati GPS

Il problema del traffico, dovuto alla crescente domanda di mobilità, nonostante lo sviluppo delle infrastrutture stradali sta assumendo dimensioni sempre più rilevanti condizionando la nostra esistenza ed il nostro stile di vita. Per affrontare tale problema è necessario comprendere sia la natura della domanda di mobilità individuale alla base dell’uso dell’auto in città, che le proprietà dinamiche del traffico su una rete stradale complessa. Il fenomeno più rilevante della dinamica del traffico è l’insorgere della congestione, studiato da vari autori utilizzando modelli fisico-matematici. Solo recentemente si è considerato il problema dell’insorgere della congestione su una rete stradale urbana come transizione di fase dovuta alla capacità di trasporto finita del sistema. In questo lavoro, grazie all’ausilio di un grande database contenente dati GPS relativi allo spostamento dei veicoli sulla rete stradale di Bologna e di un software di elaborazione, è stato possibile studiare le proprietà statistiche della dinamica veicolare in diverse condizioni di traffico per evidenziare osservabili correlate con la presenza di congestione. In particolare si sono studiate le proprietà della distribuzione della velocità di percorrenza per viaggi a lunghezza variabile a Bologna. Inoltre, avvalendosi di una descrizione macroscopica della città si sono cercate le relazioni tra grandezze macroscopiche come velocità, flusso e densità; ciò ha permesso di stimare il tempo speso in media da un individuo nel traffico. Infine è stato sviluppato un software che permette un calcolo del percorso migliore per spostarsi tra due punti della città una volta noti i valori di velocità media per ogni strada della rete

The effects of minimalist shoes on the general endurance in long-distance recreational runners

Background: The difference in general endurance between running with a minimalist shoe versus structured footwear is a topic of debate amongst both runners and researchers. Studies investigating the effect of structured and minimalist footwear on general endurance are still lacking. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore the difference between running in minimal versus structured footwear on endurance amongst long distance recreational runners.Methods: Thirty healthy long distance recreational runners were recruited for this study. Treadmill running in two different shod conditions: ‘Trial 1’ with structured footwear and ‘Trial 2’ with minimalist footwear was conducted. The Bruce Treadmill Protocol was used to estimate the VO2 max of each athlete were the time taken to reach volitional exhaustion was recorded and interpreted via two equations depending on whether the participant was male or female. The results of the equations estimating the participants' VO2 max were compared between the two types of footwear.Results: The results of this study found a significant difference in general endurance when wearing minimalist footwear versus structured footwear (p = 0.038), indicating a higher efficiency when running with minimalist footwear. No significant difference was found in the mean Borg 6-20 RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion rating scores) between structured and minimalist footwear (p = 0.32). However, although no significant difference was found, it is important to note that whilst all the participants wearing both structured and minimalist footwear reached stage 7 on the BTP protocol, in stages 8 and 9 the number of participants in minimalist footwear exceeded those in structured footwear implying better endurance when using minimalist footwear.Conclusion: This finding provides important information to the running community, clinicians and researchers alike with regards to the efficacy when using minimalist shoes in long distance running. Since physical exercise and sports are today being advocated as important elements to improve general health status and weight loss, with recreational running being picked up by many individuals, it is of utmost importance to provide recreational runners and their coaches with evidence-based information regarding potential implications when choosing the appropriate footwear for distance running.peer-reviewe

Individual mobility deep insight using mobile phones data

Abstract The data sets provided by Information and Communication Technologies have been extensively used to study the human mobility in the framework of complex systems. The possibility of detecting the behavior of individuals performing the urban mobility may offer the possibility of understanding how to realize a transition to a sustainable mobility in future smart cities. The Statistical Physics approach considers the statistical distributions of human mobility to discover universal features. Under this point of view the power laws distributions has been extensively studied to propose model of human mobility. In this paper we show that using a GPS data set containing the displacements of mobile devices in an area around the city Rimini (Italy), it is possible to reconstruct a sample of mobility paths and to study the statistical properties of urban mobility. Applying a fuzzy c-means clustering algorithm, we succeed to detect different mobility types that highlight the multilayer structure of the road network. The disaggregation into homogeneous mobility classes explains the power law distributions for the path lengths and the travel times as an overlapping of exponential distributions, that are consistent with a maximum entropy Principle. Under this point of view it is not possible to infer other dynamical properties on the individual mobility, except for the average values of the different classes. We also study the role of the mobility types, when one restricts the analysis to the an origin-destination framework, by analyzing the daily evolution of the mobility flows

Reducing Mortality in Cardiac Surgery With Levosimendan: A Meta-analysis of Randomized Controlled Trials

Objectives: The authors performed a meta-analysis to evaluate whether levosimendan is associated with improved survival in patients undergoing cardiac surgery. Design: A meta-analysis. Setting: Hospitals. Participants: A total of 440 patients from 10 randomized controlled studies were included in the analysis. Interventions: None. Measurments and Main Results: Four investigators independently searched BioMedCentral and PubMed. Inclusion criteria were random allocation to treatment, comparison of levosimendan versus control, and cardiac surgery patients. Exclusion criteria were duplicate publications, nonhuman experimental studies, and no mortality data. The primary endpoint was postoperative mortality. Levosimendan was associated with a significant reduction in postoperative mortality (11/235 [4.7%] in the levosimendan group v 26/205 [12.7%] in the control arm, odds ratio = 0.35 [0.18-0.71], p for effect = 0.003, p for heterogeneity = 0.22, I2 = 27.4% with 440 patients included), cardiac troponin release, and atrial fibrillation. No difference was found in terms of myocardial infarction, acute renal failure, time on mechanical ventilation, intensive care unit, and hospital stay. Conclusions: Levosimendan has cardioprotective effects that could result in a reduced postoperative mortality. A large randomized controlled study is warranted in this setting. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Preoperative endogenous ouabain predicts acute kidney injury in cardiac surgery patients

OBJECTIVES: Acute kidney injury is a frequent complication of cardiac surgery and increases morbidity and mortality. As preoperative biomarkers predicting the development of acute kidney injury are not available, we have tested the hypothesis that preoperative plasma levels of endogenous ouabain may function as this type of biomarker. RATIONALE AND DESIGN: Endogenous ouabain is an adrenal stress hormone associated with adverse cardiovascular outcomes. Its involvement in acute kidney injury is unknown. With studies in patients and animal settings, including isolated podocytes, we tested the above mentioned hypothesis. PATIENTS: Preoperative endogenous ouabain was measured in 407 patients admitted for elective cardiac surgery and in a validation population of 219 other patients. We also studied the effect of prolonged elevations of circulating exogenous ouabain on renal parameters in rats and the influence of ouabain on podocyte proteins both "in vivo" and "in vitro." MAIN RESULTS: In the first group of patients, acute kidney injury (2.8%, 8.3%, 20.3%, p < 0.001) and ICU stay (1.4±0.38, 1.7±0.41, 2.4±0.59 days, p = 0.014) increased with each incremental preoperative endogenous ouabain tertile. In a linear regression analysis, the circulating endogenous ouabain value before surgery was the strongest predictor of acute kidney injury. In the validation cohort, acute kidney injury (0%, 5.9%, 8.2%, p < 0.0001) and ICU stay (1.2±0.09, 1.4±0.23, 2.2±0.77 days, p = 0.003) increased with the preoperative endogenous ouabain tertile. Values for preoperative endogenous ouabain significantly improved (area under curve: 0.85) risk prediction over the clinical score alone as measured by integrate discrimination improvement and net reclassification improvement. Finally, in the rat model, elevated circulating ouabain reduced creatinine clearance (-18%, p < 0.05), increased urinary protein excretion (+ 54%, p < 0.05), and reduced expression of podocyte nephrin (-29%, p < 0.01). This last finding was replicated ex vivo by incubating podocyte primary cell cultures with low-dose ouabain. CONCLUSIONS: Preoperative plasma endogenous ouabain levels are powerful biomarkers of acute kidney injury and postoperative complications and may be a direct cause of podocyte damage. Copyright © 2013 by the Society of Critical Care Medicine and Lippincott Williams & Wilkins