Regularised Model Identification Improves Accuracy of Multisensor Systems for Noninvasive Continuous Glucose Monitoring in Diabetes Management

Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) by suitable portable sensors plays a central role in the treatment of diabetes, a disease currently affecting more than 350 million people worldwide. Noninvasive CGM (NI-CGM), in particular, is appealing for reasons related to patient comfort (no needles are used) but challenging. NI-CGM prototypes exploiting multisensor approaches have been recently proposed to deal with physiological and environmental disturbances. In these prototypes, signals measured noninvasively (e.g., skin impedance, temperature, optical skin properties, etc.) are combined through a static multivariate linear model for estimating glucose levels. In this work, by exploiting a dataset of 45 experimental sessions acquired in diabetic subjects, we show that regularisation-based techniques for the identification of the model, such as the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (better known as LASSO), Ridge regression, and Elastic-Net regression, improve the accuracy of glucose estimates with respect to techniques, such as partial least squares regression, previously used in the literature. More specifically, the Elastic-Net model (i.e., the model identified using a combination of ${l}_{1}$ and ${l}_{2}$ norms) has the best results, according to the metrics widely accepted in the diabetes community. This model represents an important incremental step toward the development of NI-CGM devices effectively usable by patients

Non-invasive measurement of cholesterol in human blood by impedance technique: an investigation by 2D finite element field modelling

This paper concerns detection of solid particles suspended in conductive media by impedance technique. The technique is based on changes in impedance measured between two electrodes placed across a given volume of conducting medium. It presents a methodology for modelling and investigation of the feasibility of such a technique for particle detection by 2D finite element (FE) field modelling. This is based on modelling and computation of electric field distribution between the above electrodes. It establishes the modelling approach, the complexity involved and justifies the need for modelling in 3D to incorporate some of the effects that cannot be taken into account in 2D models. It reports on the modelling investigation for a specific case of detecting, by impedance technique cholesterol particles suspended in human blood and points to a possible instrument for non-invasive measurement of blood cholesterol level

Mind the Gap:Newsfeed Visualisation with Metro Maps

News overload has emerged as a growing problem in our increasinglyconnected digital information era. With complex long-running storiesunfolding over weeks and months, young adults in particular are leftoverwhelmed and demotivated, which leads to their disengagementfrom politics and current events news.This dissertation presents a method for the automatic generationof metro maps based on news content obtained from user-speciedRSS feeds. Metro maps are familiar to most adults, and they areintuitive visual metaphors for representing concepts which branchand diverge, such as news stories. The method described performsentity disambiguation and various other NLP techniques to extracta set of topics (metro lines) from a news corpus which provide acohesive summary of its content.The diculty of drawing unoccluded octilinear metro maps is a barrierto their current utility in InfoVis. Therefore, this dissertationalso introduces a heuristic force-directed approach for drawing metromaps, which is rened using multicriteria optimisations taken fromneighbouring literature in information cartography.The resultant system is demonstrated using the RSS feeds publishedby several popular British newspapers, and empirically evaluated ina user study. The results of the study support the hypothesis thatmetro map users demonstrate greater topic recall than users of anequivalent RSS reader. Lastly, areas for future research are discussed,followed by recommendations for the commercial development of thisand similar systems

Automatic dielectrophoretic characterisation of cells Biotechnological and biomedical applications

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