Classification techniques on computerized systems to predict and/or to detect Apnea: A systematic review

Sleep apnea syndrome (SAS), which can significantly decrease the quality of life is associated with a major risk factor of health implications such as increased cardiovascular disease, sudden death, depression, irritability, hypertension, and learning difficulties. Thus, it is relevant and timely to present a systematic review describing significant applications in the framework of computational intelligence-based SAS, including its performance, beneficial and challenging effects, and modeling for the decision-making on multiple scenarios.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Internet of Things Architectures, Technologies, Applications, Challenges, and Future Directions for Enhanced Living Environments and Healthcare Systems: A Review

Internet of Things (IoT) is an evolution of the Internet and has been gaining increased attention from researchers in both academic and industrial environments. Successive technological enhancements make the development of intelligent systems with a high capacity for communication and data collection possible, providing several opportunities for numerous IoT applications, particularly healthcare systems. Despite all the advantages, there are still several open issues that represent the main challenges for IoT, e.g., accessibility, portability, interoperability, information security, and privacy. IoT provides important characteristics to healthcare systems, such as availability, mobility, and scalability, that o er an architectural basis for numerous high technological healthcare applications, such as real-time patient monitoring, environmental and indoor quality monitoring, and ubiquitous and pervasive information access that benefits health professionals and patients. The constant scientific innovations make it possible to develop IoT devices through countless services for sensing, data fusing, and logging capabilities that lead to several advancements for enhanced living environments (ELEs). This paper reviews the current state of the art on IoT architectures for ELEs and healthcare systems, with a focus on the technologies, applications, challenges, opportunities, open-source platforms, and operating systems. Furthermore, this document synthesizes the existing body of knowledge and identifies common threads and gaps that open up new significant and challenging future research directions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

From data acquisition to data fusion : a comprehensive review and a roadmap for the identification of activities of daily living using mobile devices

This paper focuses on the research on the state of the art for sensor fusion techniques, applied to the sensors embedded in mobile devices, as a means to help identify the mobile device user’s daily activities. Sensor data fusion techniques are used to consolidate the data collected from several sensors, increasing the reliability of the algorithms for the identification of the different activities. However, mobile devices have several constraints, e.g., low memory, low battery life and low processing power, and some data fusion techniques are not suited to this scenario. The main purpose of this paper is to present an overview of the state of the art to identify examples of sensor data fusion techniques that can be applied to the sensors available in mobile devices aiming to identify activities of daily living (ADLs)

Towards an accurate sleep apnea detection based on ECG signal: The quintessential of a wise feature selection

A wise feature selection from minute-to-minute Electrocardiogram (ECG) signal is a challenging task for many reasons, but mostly because of the promise of the accurate detection of clinical disorders, such as the sleep apnea. In this study, the ECG signal was modeled in order to obtain the Heart Rate Variability (HRV) and the ECG-Derived Respiration (EDR). Selected features techniques were used for benchmark with different classifiers such as Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Support Vector Machine(SVM), among others. The results evidence that the best accuracy was 82.12%, with a sensitivity and specificity of 88.41% and 72.29%, respectively. In addition, experiments revealed that a wise feature selection may improve the system accuracy. Therefore, the proposed model revealed to be reliable and simpler alternative to classical solutions for the sleep apnea detection, for example the ones based on the Polysomnography.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Keyed User Datagram Protocol: Concepts and Operation of an Almost Reliable Connectionless Transport Protocol

Departing from the well-known problem of the excessive overhead and latency of connection oriented protocols, this paper describes a new almost reliable connectionless protocol that uses user datagram protocol (UDP) segment format and is UDP compatible. The problem is presented and described, the motivation, the possible areas of interest and the concept and base operation modes for the protocol named keyed UDP are presented (here called KUDP). Also, discussed are some of the possible manners in which the KUDP can be used, addressing potential problems related with current networking technologies. As UDP is a connectionless protocol, and KUDP allows for some degree of detection of loss and re-ordering of segments received out-of-sequence, we also present a proposal for a stream reconstruction algorithm. This paper ends by mentioning some of the research issues that still need to be addressed.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Judicial Independence and Party Politics in the Kelsenian Constitutional Courts: The Case of Portugal

In this paper we test to what extent the Kelsenian-type of constitutional judges are independent from political parties by studying of the Portuguese Constitutional Court. The results yield three main conclusions. First, constitutional judges in Portugal are quite sensitive to their political affiliations and their political party\u27s presence in government when voting. Second, peer pressure is very relevant. Third, the 1997 reform that was enacted to increase judicial independence has had no robust statistically significant effect