Body movement activity recognition for ambulatory cardiac monitoring

Wearable electrocardiogram (W-ECG) recorders are increasingly in use by people suffering from cardiac abnormalities who also choose to lead an active lifestyle. The challenge presently is that the ECG signal is influenced by motion artifacts induced by body movement activity (BMA) of the wearer. The usual practice is to develop effective filtering algorithms which will eliminate artifacts. Instead, our goal is to detect the motion artifacts and classify the type of BMA from the ECG signal itself. We have recorded the ECG signals during specified BMAs, e.g., sitting still, walking, movements of arms and climbing stairs, etc. with a single-lead system. The collected ECG signal during BMA is presumed to be an additive mix of signals due to cardiac activities, motion artifacts and sensor noise. A particular class of BMA is characterized by applying eigen decomposition on the corresponding ECG data. The classification accuracies range from 70% to 98% for various class combinations of BMAs depending on their uniqueness based on this technique. The above classification is also useful for analysis of P and T waves in the presence of BMA

PHYTOCHEMICAL AND PHARMACOLOGICAL PROFILE OF BIOPHYTUM SENSITIVUM (L) DC

Biophytum sensitivum (L.) DC (Family: Oxalidaceae) is a medicinal plant widely used in the treatment of various health aliments throughout the world. The plant extract showed the presence of flavonoids, saponins, tannins, terpenes, steroids, amino acids, essential oil, polysaccharides and pectin. The plant has been extensively studied by various researchers for its biological activities and therapeutic potentials such as analgesic, anti-pyretic, anti-inflammatory, immunomodulatory, antitumor, antidiabetic, antioxidant, antibacterial, antihypertensive, chemoprotective, radioprotective and antifertility. The present review is an effort to provide detailed information on folkloric uses, chemical compositions, pharmacological activities of the extracts and isolated compounds and safety profile of Biophytum sensitivum for further research studies

Transition detection in body movement activities for wearable ECG

It has been shown by Pawar (2007) that the motion artifacts induced by body movement activity (BMA) in a single-lead wearable electrocardiogram (ECG) signal recorder, while monitoring an ambulatory patient, can be detected and removed by using a principal component analysis (PCA)-based classification technique. However, this requires the ECG signal to be temporally segmented so that each segment comprises of artifacts due to a single type of body movement activity. In this paper, we propose a simple, recursively updated PCA-based technique to detect transitions wherever the type of body movement is changed

Latent functional diversity may accelerate microbial community responses to temperature fluctuations

How complex microbial communities respond to climatic fluctuations remains an open question. Due to their relatively short generation times and high functional diversity, microbial populations harbor great potential to respond as a community through a combination of strain-level phenotypic plasticity, adaptation, and species sorting. However, the relative importance of these mechanisms remains unclear. We conducted a laboratory experiment to investigate the degree to which bacterial communities can respond to changes in environmental temperature through a combination of phenotypic plasticity and species sorting alone. We grew replicate soil communities from a single location at six temperatures between 4°C and 50°C. We found that phylogenetically and functionally distinct communities emerge at each of these temperatures, with K-strategist taxa favored under cooler conditions and r-strategist taxa under warmer conditions. We show that this dynamic emergence of distinct communities across a wide range of temperatures (in essence, community-level adaptation) is driven by the resuscitation of latent functional diversity: the parent community harbors multiple strains pre-adapted to different temperatures that are able to ‘switch on’ at their preferred temperature without immigration or adaptation. Our findings suggest that microbial community function in nature is likely to respond rapidly to climatic temperature fluctuations through shifts in species composition by resuscitation of latent functional diversity

Prediction of open-hole tensile strength of unidirectional flax yarn reinforced polypropylene composite by analytical and numerical models

Open-hole tensile strength of unidirectional flax yarn reinforced polypropylene composites has been predicted fordifferent laminates with varying lay-up through analytical and numerical models. Point stress criterion (PSC), modified PSCand finite element modeling (FEM) have been applied to examine the effect of different open-hole sizes on the stressbearing capacity. The characteristic length (d0) of the composites has been confirmed by PSC which depends on thespecimen geometry. The modified PSC has been used with stress concentration factor, notch sensitivity factor, andexponential parameter for evaluating the open-hole tensile strength. The stress distribution and the open-hole tensile strengthhave also been obtained by finite element simulation. The best correlations between the experimental and predicted resultshave been achieved from modified PSC model than with traditional PSC and FEM models

Mass mortality of gorgonians: A catastrophic phenomena in the marine national park and sanctuary, Gulf of Kachchh, India

1079-1081This study records the mass mortality of gorgonids, a Schedule I species at the Mundeka Island, Gulf of Kachchh, marine national park and sanctuary. This event coincided with unusually heavy rains and storm surge associated with the cyclone 'HIKAA' which led to the conclusion that a strong storm surge coupled with heavy rainfall might have caused the mortality

Mass mortality of gorgonians: A catastrophic phenomena in the marine national park and sanctuary, Gulf of Kachchh, India

This study records the mass mortality of gorgonids, a Schedule I species at the Mundeka Island, Gulf of Kachchh, marine national park and sanctuary. This event coincided with unusually heavy rains and storm surge associated with the cyclone 'HIKAA' which led to the conclusion that a strong storm surge coupled with heavy rainfall might have caused the mortality

Community-level respiration of prokaryotic microbes may rise with global warming

Understanding how the metabolic rates of prokaryotes respond to temperature is fun-damental to our understanding of how ecosystem functioning will be altered by climatechange, as these micro-organisms are major contributors to global carbon efflux. Ecologicalmetabolic theory suggests that species living at higher temperatures evolve higher growthrates than those in cooler niches due to thermodynamic constraints. Here, using a globalprokaryotic dataset, we find that maximal growth rate at thermal optimum increases withtemperature for mesophiles (temperature optima.45◦C), but not thermophiles (&45◦C).Furthermore, short-term (within-day) thermal responses of prokaryotic metabolic rates aretypically more sensitive to warming than those of eukaryotes. Because climatic warmingwill mostly impact ecosystems in the mesophilic temperature range, we conclude that asmicrobial communities adapt to higher temperatures, their metabolic rates and therefore,biomass-specific CO2production, will inevitably rise. Using a mathematical model, weillustrate the potential global impacts of these findings