an introduction to personalized ehealth

Personalized medicine can be defined as the adaptation of medical treatments to the specific characteristics of patients. This approach allows health providers to develop therapies and interventions by taking into account the heterogeneity of illnesses and external factors such as the environment, patients' needs, and lifestyle. Technology could play an important role to achieve this new approach to medicine. An example of technology's utility regards real-time monitoring of individual well-being (subjective and objective), in order to improve disease management through data-driven personalized treatment recommendations. Another important example is an interface designed based on patient's capabilities and preferences. These could improve patient-doctor communication: on one hand, patients have the possibility to improve health decision-making; on the other hand, health providers could coordinate care services more easily, because of continual access to patient's data. This contribution deepens these technologies and related opportunities for health, as well as recommendation for successful development and implementation

Bernard de Gordon (fl. 1270-1330): medieval physician and teacher

The Montpellier physician Bernard de Gordon flourished in the late Middle Ages in the era when university education first evolved in the training of European physicians. Fragmentary details of his life and medical influence are known from seven books, particularly his extensive (163 chapters) text Lilium Medicine and from Chaucer's reference to him in the Canterbury Tales. Chaucer lists Bernard de Gordon as one whose writings were part of the core curriculum of the best-trained European doctors of medieval Europe. Bernard de Gordon was one of that small group of medieval physicians who reverently followed Galenic lore which had endured for a thousand years yet who began to challenge its details and to experiment clinically with new methods of treatment. In his writings, Bernard de Gordon made the first reference to spectacles and to the hernial truss. His writings also contained detailed desiderata for the ethical best practice of medicine of his day, extending the principles of both Hippocrates and Haly ibn Abbas. Unlike many of the surviving writings of other medieval medical teachers, his texts have within them a tone of humility and acknowledged fallibility. Bernard de Gordon holds a small but significant place in the evolving pre-Renaissance chronology of medical professionalism

(Bio)electrochemical ammonia recovery: progress and perspectives

In recent years, (bio)electrochemical systems (B)ES have emerged as an energy efficient alternative for the recovery of TAN (total ammonia nitrogen, including ammonia and ammonium) from wastewater. In these systems, TAN is removed or concentrated from the wastewater under the influence of an electrical current and transported to the cathode. Subsequently, it can be removed or recovered through stripping, chemisorption, or forward osmosis. A crucial parameter that determines the energy required to recover TAN is the load ratio: the ratio between TAN loading and applied current. For electrochemical TAN recovery, an energy input is required, while in bioelectrochemical recovery, electric energy can be recovered together with TAN. Bioelectrochemical recovery relies on the microbial oxidation of COD for the production of electrons, which drives TAN transport. Here, the state-of-the-art of (bio)electrochemical TAN recovery is described, the performance of (B)ES for TAN recovery is analyzed, the potential of different wastewaters for BES-based TAN recovery is evaluated, the microorganisms found on bioanodes that treat wastewater high in TAN are reported, and the toxic effect of the typical conditions in such systems (e.g., high pH, TAN, and salt concentrations) are described. For future application, toxicity effects for electrochemically active bacteria need better understanding, and the technologies need to be demonstrated on larger scale.This study was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 665874.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The stiffness of living tissues and its implications for tissue engineering

The past 20 years have witnessed ever- growing evidence that the mechanical properties of biological tissues, from nanoscale to macroscale dimensions, are fundamental for cellular behaviour and consequent tissue functionality. This knowledge, combined with previously known biochemical cues, has greatly advanced the field of biomaterial development, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. It is now established that approaches to engineer biological tissues must integrate and approximate the mechanics, both static and dynamic, of native tissues. Nevertheless, the literature on the mechanical properties of biological tissues differs greatly in methodology, and the available data are widely dispersed. This Review gathers together the most important data on the stiffness of living tissues and discusses the intricacies of tissue stiffness from a materials perspective, highlighting the main challenges associated with engineering lifelike tissues and proposing a unified view of this as yet unreported topic. Emerging advances that might pave the way for the next decadeâ s take on bioengineered tissue stiffness are also presented, and differences and similarities between tissues in health and disease are discussed, along with various techniques for characterizing tissue stiffness at various dimensions from individual cells to organs.The authors would like to acknowledge financial support from the European Research Council, grant agreement ERC-2012-ADG 20120216-321266 (project ComplexiTE). C.F.G. acknowledges scholarship grant no. PD/BD/135253/2017 from Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT). The authors also thank the peer-reviewers for the constructive comments and suggestions that helped to shape this manuscript