IoT DEVELOPMENT FOR HEALTHY INDEPENDENT LIVING

The rise of internet connected devices has enabled the home with a vast amount of enhancements to make life more convenient. These internet connected devices can be used to form a community of devices known as the internet of things (IoT). There is great value in IoT devices to promote healthy independent living for older adults. Fall-related injuries has been one of the leading causes of death in older adults. For example, every year more than a third of people over 65 in the U.S. experience a fall, of which up to 30 percent result in moderate to severe injury. Therefore, this thesis proposes an IoT-based fall detection system for smart home environments that not only to send out alerts, but also launches interaction models, such as voice assistance and camera monitoring. Such connectivity could allow older adults to interact with the system without concern of a learning curve. The proposed IoT-based fall detection system will enable family and caregivers to be immediately notified of the event and remotely monitor the individual. Integrated within a smart home environment, the proposed IoT-based fall detection system can improve the quality of life among older adults. Along with the physical concerns of health, psychological stress is also a great concern among older adults. Stress has been linked to emotional and physical conditions such as depression, anxiety, heart attacks, stroke, etc. Increased susceptibility to stress may accelerate cognitive decline resulting in conversion of cognitively normal older adults to MCI (Mild Cognitive Impairment), and MCI to dementia. Thus, if stress can be measured, there can be countermeasures put in place to reduce stress and its negative effects on the psychological and physical health of older adults. This thesis presents a framework that can be used to collect and pre-process physiological data for the purpose of validating galvanic skin response (GSR), heart rate (HR), and emotional valence (EV) measurements against the cortisol and self-reporting benchmarks for stress detection. The results of this framework can be used for feature extraction to feed into a regression model for validating each combination of physiological measurement. Also, the potential of this framework to automate stress protocols like the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) could pave the way for an IoT-based platform for automated stress detection and management

Young consumers’ preferences for water-saving wines: an experimental study

Freshwater scarcity is becoming one of the most pressing issues of the global environmental sustainability, and agriculture is the main responsible of that scarcity. During the last decade, there has been an increasing consumers’ environmental concern about the impact of food production on water usage. This paper investigates young consumers’ preferences towards water saving wines and the determinants of willingness to pay (WTP) for these products. Data were collected through an experimental auction mechanism in Italy by assessing young consumers’ willingness to pay for three different wines (i.e. conventional-no water saving label, water saving front-of-pack labelled and water saving back-of-pack labelled). Young consumers’ (N=200) characteristics related to their personal values, pro-environmental attitudes, wine habits, labeling attitudes and socio-demographics were also collected. Results reveal that on average young consumers are willing to pay higher prices for water saving labeled wines. Additionally, wine consumption frequency, label trust and use as well as consumers’ environmental-friendly attitude have a positive effect on willingness to pay for these wines. The current study offers valuable insights to policy makers and wine producers for product differentiation and for more efficiently targeting campaigns towards young consumers, in order to increase sustainability-labeled wine consumption

Measuring intermolecular rupture forces with a combined TIRF-optical trap microscope and DNA curtains

We report a new approach to probing DNA-protein interactions by combining optical tweezers with a high-throughput DNA curtains technique. Here we determine the forces required to remove the individual lipid-anchored DNA molecules from the bilayer. We demonstrate that DNA anchored to the bilayer through a single biotin-streptavidin linkage withstands similar to 20 pN before being pulled free from the bilayer, whereas molecules anchored to the bilayer through multiple attachment points can withstand >= 65 pN; access to this higher force regime is sufficient to probe the responses of protein-DNA interactions to force changes. As a proof-of-principle, we concurrently visualized DNA-bound fluorescently-tagged RNA polymerase while simultaneously stretching the DNA molecules. This work presents a step towards a powerful experimental platform that will enable concurrent visualization of DNA curtains while applying defined forces through optical tweezers. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reservedclos