Bioethics and health law: the living will. Proposal to create a living will record in Europe

In this piece of work, we present a proposal to create a living will record in Europe that will allow people to have the same rights wherever they are. Therefore, this article will be studied from the bioethics and health law theory

Preliminary study of the atmospheric pollen in "Sierra de las Nieves" Natural Park (Southern Spain)

‘Sierra de las Nieves’ is a Natural Park and a Biosphere Reserve located in the south of Spain. This protected area has a high diversity of ecosystems with abundant endangered species which have led it to be in ways to become a National Park. Some of those species have anemophilous pollination strategies. Since 1991, the Aerobiology research team of the University of Malaga has been sampling and studying airborne pollen in different cities of Malaga province. Nevertheless, a pollen trap has never been installed inside a Natural Park for a continuous sampling process. The objectives of this study were to determinate the atmospheric pollen behaviour of the main taxa registered during winter and spring months in this protected area, as well as compare the results with the data obtained in urban stations during the same period searching for significant differences. The pollen samplings were made by means of a Hirst-type volumetric pollen trap inside the protected area of the Natural Park. The samples obtained were mounted and counted according to the methodology proposed by the Spanish Aerobiology Network (REA). The high vegetal diversity of ‘Sierra de las Nieves’ are reflected in the pollen counts. Significant differences between the sampligs obtained at ‘Sierra de las Nieves’, Malaga and the neraby city of Ronda stations were found regarding to the daily pollen concentration. The qualitative and quantitative differences can be explained by the different land use, altitude, climatic characteristics and by the distance between aerobiological stations and pollen emission sources. There is an important influence of wind dymanic and others meteorological factors.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Backward air trajectory models for detecting pollen airborne sources of Castanea in Ronda (South Spain)

Ronda is located in a rural area close to the natural Parks Sierra de Grazalema and Sierra de las Nieves, surrounded by crops, natural and seminatural vegetation. The Genal Valley, which is located at the southwest of Ronda, is the biggest Castanea sativa Mill. crop area in Andalusia (South Spain) but there are also others C. sativa crops in different areas close to Ronda. This increases the Castanea atmospheric pollen levels in Ronda, the highest of Malaga province. Castanea pollen has been cited by different authors as potentially allergenic. The objective of this preliminary study was to determine the main sources of Castanea pollen detected in Ronda during the period in which the highest concentrations were detected along the year 2017. The pollen samplings were made by means of a Hirst-type volumetric pollen trap. The samples obtained were mounted and counted according to the methodology proposed by the Spanish Aerobiology Network (REA). Backward air trajectories were calculated according to HYSPLIT 4 model. Models were run five times a day by using R software for the whole month of June 2017. Due to the wind dynamics in Ronda, the main source of Castanea airborne pollen was not the expected (the Genal Valley). The dominant winds in June 2017 came from the southeast of Ronda and brought Castanea pollen from the crops of two nearby localities, Istan and Ojen, which are widely smaller than those situated in the Genal Valley. Therefore, due to the high pollen production of these crops, predictive models for the Castanea airborne pollen in Ronda should be done in future researches in order to prevent allergic diseases in the population. Additionally, by studing air trajectory models, the cross pollination between Castanea populations in the area can be estimated.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Preliminary study of the airborne pollen in the atmosphere of Puerto Ayora (Galapagos Islands, Ecuador)

Galapagos is an archipelago of volcanic islands located 972 km west from the continental Ecuador. They were declared by the UNESCO as a World Heritage Site and Biosphere Reserve due to their singular environmental value, where a third part of the native plants are endemic to this archipelago (Jaramillo et al., 2011). In spite of the numerous scientific studies carried out in Galapagos, there are not any aerobiological samplings being performed currently. The main objectives of this study were to install a pollen trap for detecting the presence of pollen in the atmosphere of Puerto Ayora (Santa Cruz, Galapagos Islands) and qualitatively identify the different pollen types detected during the studied period. A Durham (1946) gravimetric pollen trap was modified to turn it into a passive impact pollen trap based on Pla Dalmau (1957) modifications. It was placed on the roof of the Galapagos National School (Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz Island) at a height of 15m above ground level. The samples were obtained by using silicone fluid as adhesive substance and glycerine gelatine as mounting mean. The pollen grains were counted in a surface of 14 x 48 mm in each sample. The pollen types were identified with the aid of the pollen guide of the Galapagos Island by Jaramillo & Trigo (2011) and the Charles Darwin Foundation pollen bank. Pollen types of endemic plants such as Darwiniothamnus sp., Passiflora foetida var. galapagensis Killip, Justicia galapagana Lindau and Castela galapageia Hook. f. were detected together with those of other native and introduced species. A high diversity of pollen types was detected, reflecting the particular vegetation of the island. This preliminary aerobiological information can be used as precedent for further studies on the pollination of native and introduced species of the Galapagos Islands, as well as for detecting possible allergic diseases in the population.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

A review of lower-limb wearable exoskeletons for overground rehabilitation

Gait disorders are common among people with neuromuscular impairments –60% of the patients– and generally have a high impact on their quality of life . Lack of physical activity increases the risk of secondary health conditions such as respiratory and cardiovascular complications, bowel/bladder dysfunction, obesity, osteoporosis and ulcers; which can further diminish life expectancy. Therefore, walking recovery is one of the main rehabilitation priorities for patients with a neuromuscular impairment. Wearable exoskeletons are emerging as a revolutionary device for gait rehabilitation, mainly due to both the active participation required from the user promoting physical activity10 and the possibility to work as an assistive device in the community. In fact, the number of research studies during the past 10 years has shown a large increase following the general tendency of rehabilitation robotics . Although wearable exoskeletons are starting to be used in clinical practice, their efficacy is still not clear. This study provides a comprehensive overview on wearable powered exoskeletons for overground rehabilitation without body weight support in people with neuromuscular impairments.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Assessment of coercive persuasion: the Scale of Detection of Coercive Persuasion in Group Contexts (EDPC)

Comunicación presentada en las Jornadas Internacionales ICSA 2017 sobre Dinámicas sectarias y radicalizaciónCoercive persuasion refers to the control and manipulation developed by abusive groups, through different aggressive strategies that influence changes in the environment of its members, distorting cognition, altering emotions and generating significant psychosocial damage. It is a subtle, gradual and powerful force that affects around 500,000 Spanish victims of cultic groups (Cuevas & Perlado, 2011; Cuevas, 2012). Attaining power is one of the main goals of these groups, being the control and exploitation of the individual a part of the process. This derives to individuals giving up their own goals, freedom, material possessions, family and social networks, health or even life itself (Rodríguez-Carballeira, Saldaña, Almendros, Martin-Peña, Escartín, & Porrúa-Garcia, 2015). Such strategies are often implemented in a planned, graduate way and using deceit, difficulting that people who targeted are able to detect their evident aggressiveness and the generated damage. If there is an obvious shortage of instruments measuring psychological abuse in different fields (partner violence, harassment, bullying, etc.), the development of tools to assess the presence of such strategies in group contexts is even more scarce (Almendros, Gámez-Guadix, Carrobles & Rodríguez Carballeira, 2011). One of those assessment tools, the Interview for Detection of Coercive Persuasion (Cuevas & Canto, 2006) contains a wide range of coercive and abusive practises taking place within manipulative group. It has been applied in Spain in the forensic field in prosecutions of abusive groups (Dharma Tradición, Casa Yoga, Miguelianos, Revelance, etc.). The main objective of this recently validated tool (Cuevas, 2016) was to identify and provide evidences of the systematic application of coercive persuasion techniques on victims of abusive groups (Cuevas, 2012, 2016). Deriving from this instrument, sharing objectives, a new scale of 40 items and validated in Spanish population: the Scale of Detection of Coercive Persuasion in Group Contexts, or EDPC (Cuevas, 2016 ). To validate the EDPC, a Spanish sample of 134 people who identified themselves as having been abused or having been overly controlled by a group was selected. To assess criterion validity of the instrument, other different instruments (BSI MOS-SSS, RSE, SLEQ, ICP and EDS) were used. The group psychological abuse scale GPA (Chambers, Langone, Dole, & Grice, 1994), Spanish modified version (Almendros et al.,2004; Almendros et al., 2009) was used to assess the convergent validity of the instrument. The EDPC showed appropriate psychometric properties. In respect to reliability, the standardized Cronbach alpha coefficient reached a value of 0.97. The exploratory factorial analysis indicated the presence of a factor (coercive persuasion), establishing the suitability of a one-dimensional model. This scale aims to be useful in clinical and forensic fields, in order to assess the control and manipulation exercised in group contexts. Using it could be relevant to provide evidences of coercive groups practises, helping at trying to determinate the relationship between damage on the victims and the specific actions taken by groups or individuals who perform the abusive behaviors.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

The stratified p-center problem

This work presents an extension of the p-center problem. In this new model, called Stratified p-Center Problem (SpCP), the demand is concentrated in a set of sites and the population of these sites is divided into different strata depending on the kind of service that they require. The aim is to locate p centers to cover the different types of services demanded minimizing the weighted average of the largest distances associated with each of the different strata. In addition, it is considered that more than one stratum can be present at each site. Different formulations, valid inequalities and preprocessings are developed and compared for this problem. An application of this model is presented in order to implement a heuristic approach based on the Sample Average Approximation method (SAA) for solving the probabilistic p-center problem in an efficient way.Comment: 32 pages, 1 pictur

Energy efficiency and integration of urban electrical transport systems: EVS and metro-trains of two real European lines

Transport is a main source of pollutants in cities, where air quality is a major concern. New transport technologies, such as electric vehicles, and public transport modalities, such as urban railways, have arisen as solutions to this important problem. One of the main difficulties for the adoption of electric vehicles by consumers is the scarcity of a suitable charging infrastructure. The use of the railway power supplies to charge electric vehicle batteries could facilitate the deployment of charging infrastructure in cities. It would reduce the cost because of the use of an existing installation. Furthermore, electric vehicles can use braking energy from trains that was previously wasted in rheostats. This paper presents the results of a collaboration between research teams from University of Rome Sapienza and Comillas Pontifical University. In this work, two real European cases are studied: an Italian metro line and a Spanish metro line. The energy performance of these metro lines and their capacity to charge electric vehicles have been studied by means of detailed simulation tools. Their results have shown that the use of regenerated energy is 98% for short interval of trains in both cases. However, the use of regenerated energy decreases as the train intervals grow. In a daily operation, an important amount of regenerated energy is wasted in the Italian and Spanish case. Using this energy, a significant number of electric vehicles could be charged every day

Compressive Imaging Using RIP-Compliant CMOS Imager Architecture and Landweber Reconstruction

In this paper, we present a new image sensor architecture for fast and accurate compressive sensing (CS) of natural images. Measurement matrices usually employed in CS CMOS image sensors are recursive pseudo-random binary matrices. We have proved that the restricted isometry property of these matrices is limited by a low sparsity constant. The quality of these matrices is also affected by the non-idealities of pseudo-random number generators (PRNG). To overcome these limitations, we propose a hardware-friendly pseudo-random ternary measurement matrix generated on-chip by means of class III elementary cellular automata (ECA). These ECA present a chaotic behavior that emulates random CS measurement matrices better than other PRNG. We have combined this new architecture with a block-based CS smoothed-projected Landweber reconstruction algorithm. By means of single value decomposition, we have adapted this algorithm to perform fast and precise reconstruction while operating with binary and ternary matrices. Simulations are provided to qualify the approach.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2015-66878-C3-1-RJunta de Andalucía TIC 2338-2013Office of Naval Research (USA) N000141410355European Union H2020 76586

Uncertainty in electric bus mass and its influence in energy consumption

Throughout recent years, a public awareness of climate change and a social trend for preserving the environment have emerged. Transport sector is the principal contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, consequently electric buses are a great opportunity to reduce these emissions and fossil fuel dependence. To increase the competitiveness of electric buses, batteries with an accurate size are needed in order to optimize the charging infrastructure and reduce the total costs. Therefore, it is necessary to analyse the influence of certain parameters on electrical consumption. This thesis evaluates the impact of passenger loads on the electrical consumption of an electric city bus and provides a reliable energy consumption forecast. An electrical consumption sensitivity analysis was created with the number of passengers in the bus as uncertainty. This uncertainty is stochastically modelled for each stop in the bus route based on actual data and it is evaluated with the Monte Carlo method. In addition, the uncertainty in the number of stops is also considered. An algorithm for passenger load calculation was created in Matlab, based on driving cycles generated randomly (with a random number of stops and different speed profiles). Passenger data for each bus stop were represented by a normal probability distribution and they were related to each other using a multivariate normal distribution. These are the uncertain inputs of the model, as well as the number of stops which was modelled previously by another normal distribution. A validated electric bus model created in Simulink was simulated by means of the Monte Carlo sampling method, varying in each iteration the driving cycle and passenger flow introduced. The results obtained for a particular bus route, described as a probability distribution, define an electrical consumption with an average of 0.549 kWh/km. It is also possible to assure with an 80% of probability that the electrical consumption in this route will be between 0.485 kWh/km and 0.613 kWh/km. These results represent an electrical consumption forecast for the route, including all the possible outcomes taking into account the uncertainties of the model. Moreover, the analysis of the results indicates that the passenger load has a clear influence on the bus electrical consumption that increases with the number of passengers. In addition, the results show a clear influence of driving cycle average speed and number of stops on the consumption. Electrical consumption increases as the number of stops increases and as the average speed decreases. The results also confirm that Monte Carlo method provides an efficient tool for estimating the consumption of an electric city bus since it enables to obtain results for the different possible scenarios and cover all the variations