Enabling micro-entertainment in vehicles based on context information

People spend a significant amount of time in their cars (US: 86 minutes/day, Europe: 43 minutes/day) while commuting, shop-ping, or traveling. Hence, the variety of entertainment in the car increases, and many vehicles are already equipped with displays, allowing for watching news, videos, accessing the Internet, or playing games. At the same time, the urbanization caused a mas-sive increase of traffic volume, which led to people spending an ever-increasing amount of their time in front of red traffic lights. An observation of the prevailing forms of entertainment in the car reveals that content such as text, videos, or games are often a mere adaptation of content produced for television, public displays, PCs, or mobile phones and do not adapt to the situation in the car. In this paper we report on a web survey assessing which forms of entertainment and which types of content are considered to be useful for in-car entertainment by drivers. We then introduce an algorithm, which is capable of learning standing times in front of traffic lights based on GPS information only. This, on one hand, allows for providing content of appropriate length, on the other hand, for directing the attention of the driver back to-wards the street at the right time. Finally, we present a prototype implemen-tation and a qualitative evaluation

Die Idee dahinter ... : Aspekte zur Gestaltung lernreicher Lehre

Der Band umfasst zahlreiche Beispiele von Lehrenden, die ihre Veranstaltungen in mehreren Aspekten ‚lernreich(er)’ gestaltet haben. Die Konzepte wurden alle im Rahmen des Vertiefungsmoduls des Programms „Professionelle Lehrkompetenz für die Hochschule“ des Netzwerks "hochschuldidaktik nrw" an der Universität Siegen entwickelt oder weiterentwickelt. Die elf Beiträge umfassen ein breites Spektrum an Veranstaltungsformaten und Fächern: Natur- und Ingenieurwissenschaften sind ebenso vertreten wie Architektur, Pädagogik, Soziale Arbeit und Literaturwissenschaft. Bei den Veranstaltungen handelt es sich um Praktika, Seminare, Übungen usw., oft mit Projektcharakter bzw. -elementen, häufig auch mit wechselnden Lernorten, semester-begleitend oder kompakt

Comparable Autoantibody Serum Levels against Amyloid- and Inflammation-Associated Proteins in Parkinson’s Disease Patients and Controls

Naturally occurring autoantibodies (NAbs) against a number of potentially disease-associated cellular proteins, including Amyloid-beta1-42 (Abeta1-42), Alpha-synuclein (Asyn), myelin basic protein (MBP), myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein (MOG), and S100 calcium binding protein B (S100B) have been suggested to be associated with neurodegenerative disorders, in particular Alzheimer's (AD) and Parkinson's disease (PD). Whereas the (reduced) occurrence of specific NAbs in AD is widely accepted, previous literature examining the relation of these NAb titres between PD patients and controls, as well as comparing these levels with demographic and clinical parameters in PD patients have produced inconsistent findings. We therefore aimed, in a cross-sectional approach, to determine serum titres of the above NAbs in a cohort of 93 PD patients (31 of them demented) and 194 controls. Levels were correlated with demographic and clinical variables, cerebrospinal fluid Abeta1-42, total tau and phospho-tau levels, as well as with single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of genes which either have been reported to influence the immune system, the amyloid cascade or the occurrence of PD (ApoE, GSK3B, HLA-DRA, HSPA5, SNCA, and STK39). The investigated NAb titres were neither significantly associated with the occurrence of PD, nor with demographic and clinical parameters, neurodegenerative markers or genetic variables. These results argue against a major potential of blood-borne parameters of the adaptive immune system to serve as trait or state markers in PD

Promising Metabolite Profiles in the Plasma and CSF of Early Clinical Parkinson's Disease

Parkinson's disease (PD) shows high heterogeneity with regard to the underlying molecular pathogenesis involving multiple pathways and mechanisms. Diagnosis is still challenging and rests entirely on clinical features. Thus, there is an urgent need for robust diagnostic biofluid markers. Untargeted metabolomics allows establishing low-molecular compound biomarkers in a wide range of complex diseases by the measurement of various molecular classes in biofluids such as blood plasma, serum, and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF). Here, we applied untargeted high-resolution mass spectrometry to determine plasma and CSF metabolite profiles. We semiquantitatively determined small-molecule levels (≤1.5 kDa) in the plasma and CSF from early PD patients (disease duration 0-4 years; n = 80 and 40, respectively), and sex- and age-matched controls (n = 76 and 38, respectively). We performed statistical analyses utilizing partial least square and random forest analysis with a 70/30 training and testing split approach, leading to the identification of 20 promising plasma and 14 CSF metabolites. These metabolites differentiated the test set with an AUC of 0.8 (plasma) and 0.9 (CSF). Characteristics of the metabolites indicate perturbations in the glycerophospholipid, sphingolipid, and amino acid metabolism in PD, which underscores the high power of metabolomic approaches. Further studies will enable to develop a potential metabolite-based biomarker panel specific for PD

Hierarchisierung von Risikofaktoren für schwere COVID-19-Erkrankungsverläufe im Kontext der COVID-19-Schutzimpfungen

Angesichts der derzeitigen Impfstoffknappheit geht mit den bundesweiten Schutzimpfungen gegen COVID-19 die Notwendigkeit einer Priorisierung bestimmter Bevölkerungsgruppen einher. Basierend auf den Empfehlungen der STIKO sollen zunächst Personen mit besonders hohem Risiko für schwere oder tödliche COVID-19-Verläufe oder beruflicher Exposition geimpft werden. Diese Empfehlungen stützen sich überwiegend auf internationale Studien - für den deutschen Versorgungskontext steht nur begrenzt Evidenz zur Bedeutung relevanter Risikofaktoren für einen schweren COVID-19-Verlauf zur Verfügung. Das Ziel der im Epidemiologischen Bulletin 19/2021 vorgestellten Studie war es, die Relevanz ausgewählter Vorerkrankungen für einen schweren COVID-19-Verlauf in der in Deutschland lebenden Bevölkerung empirisch zu überprüfen, Erkrankungen hinsichtlich ihres Risikos für einen schweren COVID-19-Verlauf zu ordnen und damit eine einfache, im Versorgungsalltag unkompliziert umsetzbare und dabei möglichst effektive Grundlage für die Impfrangfolge in der ambulanten ärztlichen Versorgung bilden

Serum Inflammatory Profile for the Discrimination of Clinical Subtypes in Parkinson's Disease

Background: Blood levels of immune markers have been proposed to discriminate patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) from controls. However, differences between clinical PD subgroups regarding these markers still need to be identified. Objective: To investigate whether clinical phenotypes can be predicted by the assessment of immune marker profiles in the serum of PD patients. Methods: Phenotypes of clinical PD from Tübingen, Germany (n = 145) and Toronto, Canada (n = 90) were defined regarding clinical subtype, disease onset, severity, and progression as well as presence of cognitive and/or autonomic dysfunction. A panel of serum immune markers was assessed using principal component analysis (PCA) and regression models to define the marker(s) that were associated with clinical phenotypes after adjusting for potential confounders. Findings of both centers were compared for validation. Further, a [18F] FEPPA-PET was performed in a group of patients with high and low values of candidate markers for the assessment of in vivo brain microglial activation. Results: Overall, serum immune markers did not cluster to define a pro/anti-inflammatory profile in PCA. Out of 25 markers only IL-12p40 showed a trend to discriminate between PD subgroups in both cohorts which could not be replicated by [18F] FEPPA-PET. Conclusions: Assessment of cytokines in serum does not reliably differentiate clinical PD subtypes. Accompanying subtype-irrelevant inflammation in PD, dual activity, and lack of specificity of the immune markers, the complex function of microglia, probable effects of treatment, disease stage, and progression on inflammation as well as current technical limitations may limit the usefulness of serum immune markers for the differentiation of subtypes

Inflammatory profile in LRRK2-associated prodromal and clinical PD

BACKGROUND There is evidence for a relevant role of inflammation in the pathogenesis of Parkinson's disease (PD). Mutations in the LRRK2 gene represent the most frequent genetic cause for autosomal dominant PD. LRRK2 is highly expressed in macrophages and microglia suggesting an involvement in inflammatory pathways. The objectives are to test (1) whether idiopathic PD and LRRK2-associated PD share common inflammatory pathways or present distinct profiles and (2) whether non-manifesting LRRK2 mutation carriers present with similar aspects of inflammatory profiles as seen in PD-affected patients. METHODS We assessed serum profiles of 23 immune-associated markers and the brain-derived neurotrophic factor in 534 individuals from the MJFF LRRK2 consortium. RESULTS A large proportion of inflammatory markers were gender-dependent. Both PD-affected cohorts showed increased levels of the pro-inflammatory marker fatty-acid-binding protein. Additionally, idiopathic PD but not LRRK2-associated PD patients showed increased levels of the pro-inflammatory marker interleukin-12-p40 as well as the anti-inflammatory species interleukin-10, brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and stem cell factor. Non-manifesting LRRK2 mutation carriers including those with prodromal characteristics of PD presented with control-like inflammatory profiles. CONCLUSIONS Concomitant inflammation seems to be associated with idiopathic and LRRK2-associated PD. Identifying PD patients in whom inflammatory processes play a major role in their pathophysiology might offer a new therapeutic window at least for a subgroup of patients. Since non-manifesting LRRK2 mutation carriers with symptoms of the prodromal phase of PD did not show inflammatory profiles, activation of the immune system seems not an early event in the disease cascade

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe