Manufacturing SMEs Competitiveness against the Crisis: Management Characteristics and New Perspectives

The purpose of this paper is to study the drivers of competitiveness in sectors of the Greek manufacturing industry, both in the pro and post economic crisis era, based on firm level financial and qualitative data cover this gap, providing evidence about factors impact competitive dynamic of Greek manufacturing SMEs taking into account aspects of IT, knowledge management, training, innovation and financial ratios. The study is structured as follows: the next section presents a literature review on this subject, while section 3 highlight the methodology as well as the model approach of the study. In section 4, the empirical results of the study are presented and section 5 the main findings are discussed. Section 6 summarizes the empirical findings and draws the policy implications of the study

Designing a gamified social platform for people living with dementia and their live-in family caregivers

In the current paper, a social gamified platform for people living with dementia and their live-in family caregivers, integrating a broader diagnostic approach and interactive interventions is presented. The CAREGIVERSPRO-MMD (C-MMD) platform constitutes a support tool for the patient and the informal caregiver - also referred to as the dyad - that strengthens self-care, and builds community capacity and engagement at the point of care. The platform is implemented to improve social collaboration, adherence to treatment guidelines through gamification, recognition of progress indicators and measures to guide management of patients with dementia, and strategies and tools to improve treatment interventions and medication adherence. Moreover, particular attention was provided on guidelines, considerations and user requirements for the design of a User-Centered Design (UCD) platform. The design of the platform has been based on a deep understanding of users, tasks and contexts in order to improve platform usability, and provide adaptive and intuitive User Interfaces with high accessibility. In this paper, the architecture and services of the C-MMD platform are presented, and specifically the gamification aspects. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Modeling andsimulationofspeedselectiononleftventricular assist devices

The control problem for LVADs is to set pump speed such that cardiac output and pressure perfusion are within acceptable physiological ranges. However, current technology of LVADs cannot provide for a closed-loop control scheme that can make adjustments based on the patient\u27s level of activity. In this context, the SensorART Speed Selection Module (SSM) integrates various hardware and software components in order to improve the quality of the patients\u27 treatment and the workflow of the specialists. It enables specialists to better understand the patient-device interactions, and improve their knowledge. The SensorART SSM includes two tools of the Specialist Decision Support System (SDSS); namely the Suction Detection Tool and the Speed Selection Tool. A VAD Heart Simulation Platform (VHSP) is also part of the system. The VHSP enables specialists to simulate the behavior of a patient?s circulatory system, using different LVAD types and functional parameters. The SDSS is a web-based application that offers specialists with a plethora of tools for monitoring, designing the best therapy plan, analyzing data, extracting new knowledge and making informative decisions. In this paper, two of these tools, the Suction Detection Tool and Speed Selection Tool are presented. The former allows the analysis of the simulations sessions from the VHSP and the identification of issues related to suction phenomenon with high accuracy 93%. The latter provides the specialists with a powerful support in their attempt to effectively plan the treatment strategy. It allows them to draw conclusions about the most appropriate pump speed settings. Preliminary assessments connecting the Suction Detection Tool to the VHSP are presented in this paper

PERFORM: A System for Monitoring, Assessment and Management of Patients with Parkinson’s Disease

In this paper, we describe the PERFORM system for the continuous remote monitoring and management of Parkinson’s disease (PD) patients. The PERFORM system is an intelligent closed-loop system that seamlessly integrates a wide range of wearable sensors constantly monitoring several motor signals of the PD patients. Data acquired are pre-processed by advanced knowledge processing methods, integrated by fusion algorithms to allow health professionals to remotely monitor the overall status of the patients, adjust medication schedules and personalize treatment. The information collected by the sensors (accelerometers and gyroscopes) is processed by several classifiers. As a result, it is possible to evaluate and quantify the PD motor symptoms related to end of dose deterioration (tremor, bradykinesia, freezing of gait (FoG)) as well as those related to over-dose concentration (Levodopa-induced dyskinesia (LID)). Based on this information, together with information derived from tests performed with a virtual reality glove and information about the medication and food intake, a patient specific profile can be built. In addition, the patient specific profile with his evaluation during the last week and last month, is compared to understand whether his status is stable, improving or worsening. Based on that, the system analyses whether a medication change is needed—always under medical supervision—and in this case, information about the medication change proposal is sent to the patient. The performance of the system has been evaluated in real life conditions, the accuracy and acceptability of the system by the PD patients and healthcare professionals has been tested, and a comparison with the standard routine clinical evaluation done by the PD patients’ physician has been carried out. The PERFORM system is used by the PD patients and in a simple and safe non-invasive way for long-term record of their motor status, thus offering to the clinician a precise, long-term and objective view of patient’s motor status and drug/food intake. Thus, with the PERFORM system the clinician can remotely receive precise information for the PD patient’s status on previous days and define the optimal therapeutical treatment

Training Artificial Neural Networks Using a Global Optimization Method That Utilizes Neural Networks

Perhaps one of the best-known machine learning models is the artificial neural network, where a number of parameters must be adjusted to learn a wide range of practical problems from areas such as physics, chemistry, medicine, etc. Such problems can be reduced to pattern recognition problems and then modeled from artificial neural networks, whether these problems are classification problems or regression problems. To achieve the goal of neural networks, they must be trained by appropriately adjusting their parameters using some global optimization methods. In this work, the application of a recent global minimization technique is suggested for the adjustment of neural network parameters. In this technique, an approximation of the objective function to be minimized is created using artificial neural networks and then sampling is performed from the approximation function and not the original one. Therefore, in the present work, learning of the parameters of artificial neural networks is performed using other neural networks. The new training method was tested on a series of well-known problems, a comparative study was conducted against other neural network parameter tuning techniques, and the results were more than promising. From what was seen after performing the experiments and comparing the proposed technique with others that have been used for classification datasets as well as regression datasets, there was a significant difference in the performance of the proposed technique, starting with 30% for classification datasets and reaching 50% for regression problems. However, the proposed technique, because it presupposes the use of global optimization techniques involving artificial neural networks, may require significantly higher execution time than other techniques

Use RBF as a Sampling Method in Multistart Global Optimization Method

In this paper, a new sampling technique is proposed that can be used in the Multistart global optimization technique as well as techniques based on it. The new method takes a limited number of samples from the objective function and then uses them to train an Radial Basis Function (RBF) neural network. Subsequently, several samples were taken from the artificial neural network this time, and those with the smallest network value in them are used in the global optimization method. The proposed technique was applied to a wide range of objective functions from the relevant literature and the results were extremely promising