Telemedicine in pre-hospital care: a review of telemedicine applications in pre-hospital environment.

The right person in the right place and at the right time is not always possible; telemedicine offers the potential to give audio and visual access to the appropriate clinician for patients. Advances in information and communication technology (ICT) in the area of video-to-video communication have led to growth in telemedicine applications in recent years. For these advances to be properly integrated into healthcare delivery, a regulatory framework, supported by definitive high-quality research, should be developed. Telemedicine is well suited to extending the reach of specialist services particularly in the pre-hospital care of acute emergencies where treatment delays may affect clinical outcome. The exponential growth in research and development in telemedicine has led to improvements in clinical outcomes in emergency medical care. This review is part of the LiveCity project to examine the history and existing applications of telemedicine in the pre-hospital environment. A search of electronic databases including Medline, Excerpta Medica Database (EMBASE), Cochrane, and Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) for relevant papers was performed. All studies addressing the use of telemedicine in emergency medical or pre-hospital care setting were included. Out of a total of 1,279 articles reviewed, 39 met the inclusion criteria and were critically analysed. A majority of the studies were on stroke management. The studies suggested that overall, telemedicine had a positive impact on emergency medical care. It improved the pre-hospital diagnosis of stroke and myocardial infarction and enhanced the supervision of delivery of tissue thromboplasminogen activator in acute ischaemic stroke. Telemedicine presents an opportunity to enhance patient management. There are as yet few definitive studies that have demonstrated whether it had an effect on clinical outcome

Dynamic District Information Server: On the Use of W3C Linked Data Standards to Unify Construction Data

The 2019 European Conference on Computing in Construction (EC3), Chania, Crete, Greece, 10-12 July 2019The evolution of ICT and BIM systems in the construc- tion domain yield detailed views of buildings and their use throughout their lifespan. These systems also provide a structure around which information about buildings and their effect on surrounding infrastructure can be described in space and time. Thus, when aggregated, information provided by these systems can serve as a semantic structure through which other information can be stored and con- textualized. While bespoke systems have explored these approaches in particular contexts, few if any systems have been constructed to provide a flexible, semantically rich structure that can be used to structure information about any urban landscape at district and regional scales. This paper describes such a system. The Dynamic District Information Server (DDIS) provides a core information structure which can be extended to store as yet undefined information structures and allow these to be reasoned about in the contexts that range from neighbourhoods to regions. In addition, the paper describes how the DDIS can serve as a coordinating process in a tool chain by providing a semantically rich and flexible notification system that al- lows tools in the chain to notify one another when steps in some information process have been completed.Science Foundation Irelan

Harmonic stability of VSC connected Low Frequency AC offshore transmission with long HVAC cables

Low Frequency AC (LFAC) transmission has been proposed as an alternative to HVDC transmission for the integration of offshore wind. The LFAC offshore grid as a fully power electronic grid with a long HVAC cable provides significant challenges to harmonic stability. This paper presents an impedance based stability analysis to determine the stability of the power electronic offshore system across the harmonic frequency range. The stability analysis is introduced and applied to the LFAC system. The impact of different current and voltage control bandwidths and component sizes on the dynamic impedance of the converters is then examined and their impact on harmonic stability of the LFAC grid is determined. It is found that detailed knowledge of the control parameters and the ability to tune the bandwidths can mitigate significant harmonic instability with the presence of a long HVAC cable. Three phase simulations are then used to validated the impedance based stability technique.Science Foundation Irelan

GIS-Based Residential Building Energy Modeling at District Scale

BSO 2018: 4th IBPSA-England Conference on Building Simulation and Optimization, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 11-12 September 2018Urban planners often develop strategic sustainable energy planning processes that aim to minimize the overall energy consumption and CO2 emissions of buildings. Planning at such scales could be informed by the use of building energy modeling approaches. However, due to inconsistencies in available urban energy data and a lack of scalable building modeling approaches, a gap persists between building energy modeling and traditional planning practices. This paper develops a methodology based on bottom-up approach for GIS-based residential building energy modeling at a district scale. The methodology is applied to districts in Dublin and modeling results indicate where and what type of buildings have the greatest potential for energy savings throughout the city.Science Foundation IrelandESIPP UC

Extending IFC to support thermal comfort prediction during design

During the early design stage, designers often rely on general rules of thumb to make critical decisions about the geometry, construction systems and materials without fully evaluating their effects on indoor thermal environment requirements and constraints. Currently, reviewing a design’s sustainability requires designers to spend a significant amount of time manually extracting Thermal Comfort (TC) data from BIMs because of the tedious nature of this task. This paper is motivated by the absence of a standard method and a schema for extracting the necessary data for an automated TC assessment of building designs. The aim is to generate a reusable and retrievable set of Exchange Requirement’s for BIM-based BTCS to facilitate efficient data extraction and exchanges from design models using the IFC file format. Furthermore, we develop an MVD mechanism that provides a structured framework for the definition and exchange of the target data as a step towards standardisation and production of BTCS related information, the results from which contribute to a proposed MVD. The application of the MVD in building design has the potential to improve the early-stage TC assessment of design alternatives. Further, it could reduce the time required to conduct the assessment, increase the reproducibility of results, and formalises the method used.Science Foundation IrelandUniversity College DublinDepartment of Education of the Kingdom Saudi Arabi