Performance testing of a low power consumption wireless sensor communication system integrated with an energy harvesting power source

This paper presents the performance testing results of a wireless sensor communication system with low power consumption integrated with a vibration energy harvesting power source. The experiments focus on the system’s capability to perform continuous monitoring and to wirelessly transmit the data acquired from the sensors to a user base station, completely battery-free. Energy harvesting technologies together with system design optimisation for power consumption minimisation ensure the system’s energy autonomous capability demonstrated in this paper by presenting the promising testing results achieved following its integration with Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) and Body Area Network (BAN) applications

Analysis of term roles along taxonomy nodes by adopting discriminant and characteristic capabilities

Taxonomies are becoming essential to a growing number of application, particularly for specific domains. Taxonomies, originally built by hand, have been recently focused on their automatic generation. In particular, a main issue on automatic taxonomy building regards the choice of the most suitable features. In this paper, we propose an analy- sis on how each feature changes its role along taxonomy nodes in a text categorization scenario, in which the features are the terms in textual documents. We deem that, in a hierarchical structure, each node should intuitively be represented with proper meaningful and discriminant terms (i.e., performing a feature selection task for each node), instead of con- sidering a fixed feature space. To assess the discriminant power of a term, we adopt two novel metrics able to measure it. Our conjecture is that a term could significantly change its discriminant power (hence, its role) along the taxonomy levels. We perform experiments aimed at proving that a significant number of terms play different roles in each taxonomy node, giving emphasis to the usefulness of a distinct feature selection for each node. We assert that this analysis should support automatic taxonomy building approaches

Automated taxonomy building by adopting discriminant and characteristic capabilities

Taxonomies are becoming essential in several fields, playing an important role in a large number of applications, particularly for specific domains. Taxonomies provide efficient tools to people by organizing a huge amount of information into a small hierarchical structure. Taxonomies were originally built by hand, but nowadays the technology permits to produce a vast amount of information. Consequently, recent research activities have been focused on automated taxonomy generation. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for automatically build a taxonomy, starting from a set of categories. We deem that, in a hierarchical structure, each node should intuitively be represented with proper meaningful and discriminant features, instead of considering a fixed feature space. Our proposal relies on two metrics able to identify the most meaningful features. Our conjecture is that a feature could significantly change its discriminant power (hence, its role) along the taxonomy levels. Hence, we devise a greedy algorithm able to build a taxonomy by identifying the meaningful terms for each level. We perform preliminary experiments that give rise to the usefulness of the proposed approach

Project and Realization of a Wide-Range High-Frequency RFID Gate Allowing Omnidirectional Detection of Transponders

The paper describes the study and development of a 2-meter-wide HF RFID gate providing omnidirectional detection of transponders.Common commercial HF RFID gate structures provide a maximum reading range around 150 cm.Moreover, this value is in most cases guaranteed only for the maximum coupling direction, with lower values for the other 2 orientations. The proposed structure raises the value of the reading range up to 200 cm for every orientation of the transponder, with even better results (220 cm) when the transponder is in the position of maximum coupling. This result has been achieved through numerical simulations, focused on the study of the geometry of the antenna system and on the realization of the matching circuit and then confirmed with the physical implementation of the system

MASSP3: A System for Predicting Protein Secondary Structure

A system that resorts to multiple experts for dealing with the problem of predicting secondary structures is described, whose performances are comparable to those obtained by other state-of-the-art predictors. The system performs an overall processing based on two main steps: first, a "sequence-to-structure" prediction is performed, by resorting to a population of hybrid genetic-neural experts, and then a "structure-to-structure" prediction is performed, by resorting to a feedforward artificial neural networks. To investigate the performance of the proposed approach, the system has been tested on the RS126 set of proteins. Experimental results (about 76% of accuracy) point to the validity of the approach

RFID Applications for Sanitary Environments

Healthcare represents one of the most significant sectors where the diffusion of RFID technology is growing day by day. Many different applications have already been studied and developed, with both active and passive devices working at all the available operative frequencies. Sanitary environments are nowadays extremely complex structures employing several thousands of people with very strict safety requirements: in emergency situations for example 5 minutes can make the difference for a patient between survive and die. RFID is especially indicated to be employed in these scenarios for two main reasons: first of all because it’s a particularly reliable technology, with good performances, few errors and fast interaction, and secondly because, due to the presence of many different technological systems, ad-hoc solutions can be designed on the specific requirements of the application to be realized. At present the most common RFID applications in healthcare can be divided into two main categories: the items tracking and the tracking and identification of people, patients and sanitary operators. The items tracking is performed in order to avoid the loss of expensive devices and to reduce wasting of time during assistance operations: systems studied and realized for this purpose cover all the range of RFID systems and provide different services according to their different performances. RFID systems for the identification of people probably represent the most interesting sector, due to the variety of different applications that can be studied and realized. The most common systems foresee the use of RFID for the tracking of sanitary operators or patients during their assistance operations. Along with this many other applications have been implemented, including systems operating the unambiguous matching between the patient and his treatments (for example the medicine or the blood sack) or between the mother and the child in the paediatrics departments. Finally the availability of a memory on the transponders fostered to the use of RFID technology also as a mean to promptly store and retrieve patient related information: for example electronic case history or electronic medical prescription applications have been studied and developed

Trunk posture adaptations during sitting on dynamic stool: a validation study

Back pain is a complex condition that results from multiple factors including sitting issues such as the chair type and spinal sitting posture. The physiological spinal curvature on the sagittal plane represents a typical feature of good body posture. Sitting postures matching the physiological shape of the spine on the sagittal plane during standing are deemed advantageous from a postural point of view. The aim of this study was to validate a novel dynamic stool by comparing trunk posture adaptations on the sagittal plane during dynamic sitting vs. conventional sitting (standard stool) in healthy people. In total, 100 healthy adults were included. Age, sex and body mass index were recorded. Thoracic kyphosis and lumbar lordosis were measured with the IncliMed(R) goniometer during standing posture, conventional sitting posture (standard stool) and dynamic sitting posture (novel dynamic stool). Sitting posture was maintained for 2 min before evaluation. Thoracic kyphosis and lumbar lordosis were significantly different between standing vs. sitting (dynamic and conventional) posture (p < 0.001) and between dynamic vs. conventional sitting posture (p < 0.001). Sitting on the novel dynamic stool tested in this study was shown to provide a greater match of thoracic kyphosis and lumbar lordosis with the physiological spinal curvature on the sagittal plane during standing than conventional sitting