Service-Relationship Programming Framework for the Social IoT

We argue that for a true realization of innovative programming opportunities for smart spaces, the developers should be equipped with informative tools that assist them in building domain-related applications. Such tools should utilize the services offered by the space's smart things and consider the different relationships that may tie these services opportunistically to build applications. In this paper, we utilize our Inter-thing relationships programming framework to present a distributed programming ecosystem. The framework broadens the restricted set of thing-level relationships of the evolving social IoT paradigm with a set of service-level relationships. Such relationships provide guidance into how services belonging to different things can be combined to build meaningful applications. We also present a uniform way of describing the thing services and the service-level relationships along with new capabilities for the things to dynamically generate their own services, formulate the corresponding programmable interfaces (APIs) and create an ad-hoc network of socially related smart things at runtime. We then present the semantic rules that guide the establishment of IoT applications and finally demonstrate the features of the framework through a proof-of-concept application

The role of sildenafil citrate in the treatment of fetal growth restriction: a randomized controlled trial

Background: This study was aimed to evaluate the effect of sildenafil citrate on Doppler velocity indices in patients with fetal growth restriction (FGR) associated with impaired placental circulation.Methods: A double-blinded, parallel group randomized clinical trial (clinicaltrials.gov NCT02590536) was conducted in Ain Shams Maternity Hospital, in the period between October 2015 and June 2017. Ninety pregnant women with documented intrauterine growth retardation at 24-37 weeks of gestation were randomized to either sildenafil citrate 25 mg orally every 8 hours or placebo visually-identical placebo tablets with the same regimen. The primary outcome of the study was the change in umbilical artery and fetal middle cerebral artery indices.Results: There was a significant improvement in umbilical and middle cerebral artery indices after sildenafil administration p<0.001. Present study observed that, sildenafil group, in comparison to placebo, has a significantly higher mean neonatal birth weight. 1783±241g vs 1570±455g (p<0.001). There was a significantly higher mean gestational age at delivery in women in sildenafil group 35.3±1.67 weeks, whereas it was lower in the placebo group 33.5±1.7 weeks. The side effects as headache, palpitation and facial flushing were significantly higher in sildenafil group compared to placebo group.Conclusions: The use sildenafil citrate in pregnancies with fetal growth restriction (FGR) improved the feto-placental Doppler indices (pulsatility index of umbilical artery and middle cerebral artery) and improved neonatal outcomes

Interoperable communication framework for bridging RESTful and topic-based communication in IoT

The promise of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the many visions of unprecedented and transforming IoT applications are challenged by the realities of a highly fragmented ecosystem of devices, standards and industries. Systems research in IoT is shifting priorities to explore explicit “thing architectures” that promote and enable the friction-free interactions of things despite such fragmentations. In this paper, we focus on overcoming light-weight communication protocol fragmentation. We introduce the Atlas IoT communication framework which enables interactions among things that speak similar or different communication protocols. The framework tools up Atlas things with protocol translator “attachments” that could be either hosted on board the Atlas thing platform, or in the cloud. The translator enables the seamless communication between heterogeneous things through a set of well-defined interfaces. The proposed framework supports seamless communication among the widely adopted Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP), Representational State Transfer (REST) over Hypertext Transfer protocol HTTP, and the Message Queue Telemetry Transport protocol (MQTT). Our framework is carefully designed to facilitate interoperability among heterogeneously communicating things without taxing the performance of things that are homogenously communicating. The framework itself utilizes the topic concept and uses a meta-topic hierarchy to map out and guide the translations. We present the details of the Atlas IoT communication framework and give a detailed benchmarking study to measure the energy consumption and code footprint characteristics of the different aspects of the framework on real hardware platforms. In addition to basic characterizations, we compare our framework to the Eclipse Ponte framework and show how our framework is advantageous in energy consumption and how it is unique in that it does not tangibly penalize the homogeneous communication case

IoT Hub as a Service (HaaS): Data-Oriented Environment for Interactive Smart Spaces

Smart devices around us produce a considerable volume of data and interact in a wide range of scenarios that guide the evolution of the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT adds informative and interactive aspects to our living spaces, converting them into smart spaces. However, the development of applications is challenged by the fragmented nature due to the vast number of different IoT things, the format of reported information, communication standards, and the techniques used to design applications. This paper introduces IoT Hub as a Service (HaaS), a data-oriented framework to enable communication interoperability between the ecosystem's entities. The framework abstracts things' information, reported data items, and developers' applications into programmable objects referred to as Cards. Cards represent specific entities and interactions of focus with meta-data. The framework then indexes cards' meta-data to enable interoperability, data management, and application development. The framework allows users to create virtual smart spaces (VSS) to define cards' accessibility and visibility. Within VSS, users can identify accessible data items, things to communicate, and authorized applications. The framework, in this paper, defines four types of Cards to represent: participating IoT things, data items, VSS, and applications. The proposed framework enables the development of synchronous and asynchronous applications. The framework dynamically creates, updates, and links the cards throughout the life-cycle of the different entities. We present the details of the proposed framework and show how our framework is advantageous and applicable

Knowledge and Awareness about Aggravating Factors of the Peptic Ulcer Disease: A Cross-Sectional Study

Background: Peptic ulcer disease is a gastrointestinal disorder due to the imbalance between the defense mechanism and gastric acid secretion. It affects 5-10% of the population worldwide and induces eight million deaths every year globally. In Sudan, this disease represents one of the major health problems. Limited studies have shown the knowledge level of Sudanese about aggravating factors of Peptic ulcer disease, which lead to more prevalent complications. Therefore, this study aimed to assess awareness about aggravating factors of peptic ulcer disease among the population of Khartoum state, Sudan. Method: A descriptive cross-sectional study targeted the general population in Khartoum state during the period from January to June 2022. We used an online survey form to collect data from the study population. The distribution of the questionnaire was done via social media tools. We analyzed the data using SPSS Software version 26. Results: The study included 398 participants, 40.7% of them male and 59.3% female, with mean age equal to 24.9 (SD=8.9), and a range between (18-64). Most of the participants (77.1%) were unmarried and (89.2%) were educated. The type of food was the most known risk factor (79.1%) and the weather changes were the least known risk factor (8.5%) that have effects on peptic ulcers. There also was a significant difference between educated and non-educated people based on the awareness of peptic ulcer risk factors, as the second was higher (p&gt;0.000). Furthermore, people with peptic ulcers and people who have one or more members of their family with peptic ulcers scored more than nonpatients and those who did not have (p&gt;0.000, p= 0.04; respectively). Conclusion: In conclusion, awareness about aggravating factors of peptic ulcers was variable among the population in Khartoum state. Our study findings revealed a high knowledge effect of type of food, helicobacter pylori, analgesic medications, drinking coffee, smoking, and social stress of the majority population. As for other factors, weather changes, genetic factors, and body weight were associated with a poor level of awareness. Lastly, these results need to be affirmed by furthermore research with a large sample among the general population in different regions in Sudan

Clinical monitoring of tooth wear progression in patients over a period of one year using CAD/CAM

Purpose: The aim of this study was to clinically monitor the progression of tooth wear over a period of 1 year in a cohort of referred tooth wear patients through the use of a computer-aided design/ computer-assisted manufacture (CAD/CAM) scanner and a standardized scanning/assessment methodology. Materials and Methods: Polyether impressions were made of 11 participants (130 teeth) at baseline and at 1 year. Impressions were poured in type IV dental stone and the anterior teeth were 3D scanned. A surface-matching software was used to compare 1-year and baseline scans and identify any dimensional differences. Results: Parafunctional habits were reported by all patients. All participants exhibited tooth wear ≥ 140 μm in depth and extending to ≥ 280 μm in at least one tooth. Maxillary central incisors were the most commonly and severely affected teeth. Conclusion: The ability of the developed CAD/CAM scanning methodology in clinical monitoring of tooth wear was demonstrated. Further research is needed to assess its practicality in large-scale epidemiologic tooth wear studies

IoT-DDL—Device Description Language for the “T” in IoT

We argue that the success of the Internet of Things (IoT) vision will greatly depend on how its main ingredient—the “thing”—is architected and prepared to engage. The IoT’s fragmented and wide-varying nature introduces the need for additional effort to homogenize these things so they may blend together with the surrounding space to create opportunities for powerful and unprecedented IoT applications. We introduce the IoT Device Description Language (IoT-DDL), a machine- and human-readable descriptive language for things, seeking to achieve such integration and homogenization. IoT-DDL explicitly tools things to self-discover and securely share their own capabilities, entities, and services, including the various cloudbased accessories that may be attached to them. We also present the Atlas thing architecture—a lightweight architecture for things that fully exploits IoT-DDL and its specifications. Our architecture provides new OS layers, services, and capabilities we believe a thing must have in order to be prepared to engage in IoT scenarios and applications. The architecture and IoT-DDL enable things to generate their offered services and self-formulate APIs for such services, on the fly, at power-on or whenever a thing description changes. The architecture takes advantage of widely used device management, micro-services, security, and communication standards and protocols. We present details of IoT-DDL and corresponding parts of the thing architecture. We demonstrate some features of IoT-DDL and the architecture through proof-of-concept implementations. Finally, we present a benchmarking study to measure and assess time performance and energy consumption characteristics of our architecture and IoT-DDL on real hardware platforms