Compressing Inertial Motion Data in Wireless Sensing Systems – An Initial Experiment

The use of wireless inertial motion sensors, such as accelerometers, for supporting medical care and sport’s training, has been under investigation in recent years. As the number of sensors (or their sampling rates) increases, compressing data at source(s) (i.e. at the sensors), i.e. reducing the quantity of data that needs to be transmitted between the on-body sensors and the remote repository, would be essential especially in a bandwidth-limited wireless environment. This paper presents a set of compression experiment results on a set of inertial motion data collected during running exercises. As a starting point, we selected a set of common compression algorithms to experiment with. Our results show that, conventional lossy compression algorithms would achieve a desirable compression ratio with an acceptable time delay. The results also show that the quality of the decompressed data is within acceptable range

Artifact of the phonon-induced localization by variational calculations in the spin-boson model

We present energy and free energy analyses on all variational schemes used in the spin-boson model at both T=0 and $T\neq0$. It is found that all the variational schemes have fail points, at where the variational schemes fail to provide a lower energy (or a lower free energy at $T\neq0$) than the displaced-oscillator ground state and therefore the variational ground state becomes unstable, which results in a transition from a variational ground state to a displaced oscillator ground state when the fail point is reached. Such transitions are always misidentied as crossover from a delocalized to localized phases in variational calculations, leading to an artifact of phonon-induced localization. Physics origin of the fail points and explanations for different transition behaviors with different spectral functions are found by studying the fail points of the variational schemes in the single mode case.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure

Site-directed mutagenesis of structural hot spots for enhanced solubility of deoxyxylulose phosphate pathway enzymes

Increasing the metabolic flux through a biochemical pathway is highly desirable for metabolic engineering. One strategy is to enhance the solubility of overexpressed pace-making enzymes. Accurate theoretical prediction of target mutation sites is instrumental to reduce the experimental efforts and speed up the optimization process. In this study, the rate-limiting steps along the non-mevalonate (DXP) pathway, namely E. coli Dxs and IspG, were used as the model enzymes to learn and develop a set of bioinformatics tools that would enable rational optimization of enzyme solubility. TANGO prediction was first used to identify the aggregation-prone regions (APRs), and then SIFT analysis was carried out to eliminate the non-tolerable amino acids in the APRs. Preliminary results have shown that 5 out of 8 tested mutations have resulted in an increase in Dxs solubility. Similarly, 7 out of 12 IspG mutants have displayed enhanced solubility. Importantly, the in vivo activities of the more soluble mutants were improved. Taken together, the solubility of both Dxs and IspG were enhanced by ~2-fold, by targeted single amino acid mutation. The study demonstrated rapid improvement of enzyme solubility by combinations of computational tools. The information gained would be useful for rational engineering of over-expressed pathway enzymes and improve pathway efficiencies

Mathematical Model of Innate and Adaptive Immunity of Sepsis: A Modeling and Simulation Study of Infectious Disease

Citation: Shi, Z. Z., Wu, C. H. J., Ben-Arieh, D., & Simpson, S. Q. (2015). Mathematical Model of Innate and Adaptive Immunity of Sepsis: A Modeling and Simulation Study of Infectious Disease. Biomed Research International, 31. doi:10.1155/2015/504259Sepsis is a systemic inflammatory response (SIR) to infection. In this work, a system dynamics mathematical model (SDMM) is examined to describe the basic components of SIR and sepsis progression. Both innate and adaptive immunities are included, and simulated results in silico have shown that adaptive immunity has significant impacts on the outcomes of sepsis progression. Further investigation has found that the intervention timing, intensity of anti- inflammatory cytokines, and initial pathogen load are highly predictive of outcomes of a sepsis episode. Sensitivity and stability analysis were carried out using bifurcation analysis to explore system stability with various initial and boundary conditions. The stability analysis suggested that the system could diverge at an unstable equilibrium after perturbations if r(t2max) (maximum release rate of Tumor Necrosis Factor- (TNF-) alpha by neutrophil) falls below a certain level. This finding conforms to clinical findings and existing literature regarding the lack of efficacy of anti- TNF antibody therapy

Penerapan Teknologi General Packet Radio Service Pada Sistem Monitoring Sepeda Motor

General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) merupakan sistem transmisi berbasis paket untuk Global System for Mobile (GSM). Pengembangan sistem keamanan menggunakan GPRS merupakan salah satu bidang yang terus mengalami pembaharuan terutama di negara Indonesia dimana keamanan masih menjadi salah satu fokus dalam perbaikan. Tingkat keamanan kendaraan terutama sepeda motor di Indonesia masih sangat kurang terjamin, hal ini menjadi latar belakang tugas akhir ini dirancang. Alat ini dirancang untuk dapat memberikan informasi tentang keberadaan sepeda motor baik dalam informasi kehilangan maupun informasi posisi kendaraan. Data mengenai informasi kehilangan akan dikirimkan langsung ke Handphone pengguna dengan transmisi GSM dan data mengenai informasi posisi berupa data lintang dan bujur akan dikirimkan menuju database yang dibuat dengan menggunakan MySQl melalui GPRS serta dapat diakses menggunakan website dengan halaman utama menggunakan HyperText Markup Language (HTML) dan koneksi dengan Google Maps API. Peta dasar yang dinamis membuat akurasi yang lebih baik antara data pelacakan dengan penandaan posisi pada peta. Data mengenai posisi akan didapat melalui Global Positioning System (GPS) yang kemudian data tersebut akan diolah menjadi data yang siap dikonversikan pada peta dan dalam bentuk sebuah marker

Laboratory evaluation of pavement performance using modified asphalt mixture with a new composite reinforcing material

As a new way of modifying asphalt or asphalt mixture, composite modification has obvious effects. In order to improve the performance of asphalt pavement in a simple, fast and efficient way, a new kind of composite reinforcing material (CRM) is used in this study. The Marshall Immersion test, the freeze–thaw splitting test and low-temperature bending test were conducted to evaluate the pavement performance of the asphalt mixture with different CRM contents. Test results show that the pavement performance of modified asphalt mixtures is better than unmodified asphalt mixture. When the CRM content increases, resistance to rutting at a high temperature increases significantly, low temperature cracking resistance and moisture damage resistance first rise and then fall. In consideration of other pavement performance, such as dynamic stability (DS), indirect tensile strength ratio (TSR) and maximum tensile strain, the suggested optimal CRM dosage is 5.9‰ to 7.9‰. © 2017 Chinese Society of Pavement Engineerin