Acidosis activates complement system in vitro.

We investigated the in vitro effect of different forms of acidosis (pH 7.0) on the formation of anaphylatoxins C3a and C5a. Metabolic acidosis due to addition of hydrochloric acid (10 micromol/ml blood) or lactic acid (5.5 micromol/ml) to heparin blood (N=12) caused significant activation of C3a and C5a compared to control (both p=0.002). Respiratory acidosis activated C3a (p=0.007) and C5a (p=0.003) compared to normocapnic controls. Making blood samples with lactic acidosis hypocapnic resulted in a median pH of 7.37. In this respiratory compensated metabolic acidosis, C3a and C5a were not increased. These experiments show that acidosis itself and not lactate trigger for activation of complement components C3 and C5

Pointing Gesture Based User Interaction of Tool Supported Brainstorming Meetings

This paper presents a brainstorming tool combined with pointing gestures to improve the brainstorming meeting experience for blind and visually impaired people (BVIP). In brainstorming meetings, BVIPs are not able to participate in the conversation as well as sighted users because of the unavailability of supporting tools for understanding the explicit and implicit meaning of the non-verbal communication (NVC). Therefore, the proposed system assists BVIP in interpreting pointing gestures which play an important role in non-verbal communication. Our system will help BVIP to access the contents of a Metaplan card, a team member in the brainstorming meeting is referring to by pointing. The prototype of our system shows that targets on the screen a user is pointing at can be detected with 80% accuracy

SmartObjects: Fourth Workshop on Interacting with Smart Objects

The increasing number of smart objects in our everyday life shapes how we interact beyond the desktop. In this workshop we discussed how the interaction with these smart objects should be designed from various perspectives. This year's workshop put a special focus on affective computing with smart objects, as reflected by the keynote talk

SCWT: A joint workshop on smart connected and wearable things

The increasing number of smart objects in our everyday life shapes how we interact beyond the desktop. In this workshop we discuss how advanced interactions with smart objects in the context of the Internet-of-Thingsshould be designed from various perspectives, such as HCI and AI as well as industry and academia