Advances in indoor positioning and indoor navigation

Locating devices in indoor environments has become a key issue for many emerging location-based applications and intelligent spaces in different fields [...]This work was supported by European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska Curie grant agreement No. 813278 (A-WEAR: A network for dynamic WEarable Applications with pRivacy constraints)

Magnetic Field as a Characterization of Wide and Narrow Spaces in a Real Challenging Scenario Using Dynamic Time Warping

Ponencia presentada en 2018 International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN), 24-27 Sept. 2018This paper presents a study of indoor positioning in public zones of the Parc Taulí Hospital in Sabadell. It is a challenging scenario because: (1) it combines wide spaces with middle sized and narrow spaces; (2) it is a shielded zone where no signals are available, and therefore, no WiFi signal can be used for positioning; and (3) it is not possible to deploy beacons for positioning. The goal of this work is to test whether it is possible to get indoor positioning in a real and challenging scenario by using only the magnetic field. The positioning precision requires to locate the part of the hospital where the user is. The proposed solution defines “virtual corridors” to improve positioning in wide areas. To validate the work, magnetic field data have been recorded from the scenario, using different smartphones and by different persons. The obtained magnetic data curves have been compared by using dynamic time warping distance. Results show that it is possible to characterize every path with the magnetic field. The main contributions of the present paper are: (1) defining “virtual corridors” as a way to position using magnetic field in 2D spaces; and (2) showing that even in wide spaces, like the hall of a hospital, it is possible to find magnetic anomalies linked to positions

A Low-Cost Control Occupancy Solution Using a Time-of-Flight Ranging Sensor Laser

Forma part de la Conferència IPIN 2021 WiP Proceedings, November 29 – December 2, 2021, Lloret de Mar, Spain "International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation, IPIN 2021 [Preface]," 2021 International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN), 2021, doi: 10.1109/IPIN51156.2021.9701845.The pandemic situation has driven to several measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. One of these measures is social distance and, as a consequence, limitation of capacity of indoor closed spaces. This makes necessary the deployment of systems that help to control occupancy of spaces. This work proposes a low-cost system to control access to an indoor closed space with a single door. The system is based in a two laser Time-of-Flight sensors VL53L0X over a HiLetgo UNO R3D1R32 ESP32 microcontroller. The system counts the occupancy of the room and share it with a database and a dashboard, using Node-RED. The tested prototype shows a 86.6% reliability that increases to a 100% reliability when users are informed to enter or exit one by one. The main contributions of this work are: to control capacity of one-entrance indoor closed space with a low cost open system; and to record occupancy of the room in order to analyse it behaviour with time

Adaptive and architecture-independent task granularity for recursive applications

In the last few decades, modern applications have become larger and more complex. Among the users of these applications, the need to simplify the process of identifying units of work increased as well. With the approach of tasking models, this want has been satisfied. These models make scheduling units of work much more user-friendly. However, with the arrival of tasking models, came granularity management. Discovering an application’s optimal granularity is a frequent and sometimes challenging task for a wide range of recursive algorithms. Often, finding the optimal granularity will cause a substantial increase in performance. With that in mind, the quest for optimality is no easy task. Many aspects have to be considered that are directly related to lack or excess of parallelism in applications. There is no general solution as the optimal granularity depends on both algorithm and system characteristics. One commonly used method to find an optimal granularity consists in experimentally tuning an application with different granularities until an optimal is found. This paper proposes several heuristics which, combined with the appropriate monitoring techniques, allow a runtime system to automatically tune the granularity of recursive applications. The solution is independent of the architecture, execution environment or application being tested. A reference implementation in OmpSs—a task-parallel programming model—shows the programmability, ease of use and competitive performance of the proposed solution. Results show that the proposed solution is able to achieve, for any scenario, at least 75% of the performance of optimally tuned applications.This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (contract TIN2015-65316), the grant SEV-2015-0493 of Severo Ochoa Program awarded by the Spanish Government, and by Generalitat de Catalunya (contract 2014-SGR-1051)Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Prevention of sexually transmitted infections using mobile devices and ubiquitous computing

Advances in the development of information and communication technologies have facilitated social interrelationships, but also sexual contacts without appropriate preventive measures. In this paper, we will focus on situations in which people use applications to meet sexual partners nearby, which could increase their chance of exposure to sexually transmitted infections (STI). How can we encourage users to adopt preventive measures without violating their privacy or infringing on the character of the application

Most mitochondrial dGTP is tightly bound to respiratory complex I through the NDUFA10 subunit

Biochemistry; Molecular medicineBioquímica; Medicina molecularBioquímica; Medicina molecularImbalanced mitochondrial dNTP pools are known players in the pathogenesis of multiple human diseases. Here we show that, even under physiological conditions, dGTP is largely overrepresented among other dNTPs in mitochondria of mouse tissues and human cultured cells. In addition, a vast majority of mitochondrial dGTP is tightly bound to NDUFA10, an accessory subunit of complex I of the mitochondrial respiratory chain. NDUFA10 shares a deoxyribonucleoside kinase (dNK) domain with deoxyribonucleoside kinases in the nucleotide salvage pathway, though no specific function beyond stabilizing the complex I holoenzyme has been described for this subunit. We mutated the dNK domain of NDUFA10 in human HEK-293T cells while preserving complex I assembly and activity. The NDUFA10E160A/R161A shows reduced dGTP binding capacity in vitro and leads to a 50% reduction in mitochondrial dGTP content, proving that most dGTP is directly bound to the dNK domain of NDUFA10. This interaction may represent a hitherto unknown mechanism regulating mitochondrial dNTP availability and linking oxidative metabolism to DNA maintenance.We thank Dr, Luke Formosa (Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia) for his valuable advice and assistance on NDUFA10 molecular studies and Dr. Francesc Canals and his team (Proteomics Laboratory, Vall d’Hebron Institute of Oncology [VHIO], Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain) for their assistance with LC-MS/MS analyses. This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Industry, Economy and Competitiveness [grants BFU2014-52618-R, SAF2017-87506, and PID2020-112929RB-I00 to Y.C.], by the Spanish Instituto de Salud Carlos III [grants PI21/00554 and PMP15/00025 to R.M.], co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), and by an NHMRC Project grant to M.R. (GNT1164459)

Off-Line Evaluation of Indoor Positioning Systems in Different Scenarios: The Experiences From IPIN 2020 Competition

Every year, for ten years now, the IPIN competition has aimed at evaluating real-world indoor localisation systems by testing them in a realistic environment, with realistic movement, using the EvAAL framework. The competition provided a unique overview of the state-of-the-art of systems, technologies, and methods for indoor positioning and navigation purposes. Through fair comparison of the performance achieved by each system, the competition was able to identify the most promising approaches and to pinpoint the most critical working conditions. In 2020, the competition included 5 diverse off-site off-site Tracks, each resembling real use cases and challenges for indoor positioning. The results in terms of participation and accuracy of the proposed systems have been encouraging. The best performing competitors obtained a third quartile of error of 1 m for the Smartphone Track and 0.5 m for the Foot-mounted IMU Track. While not running on physical systems, but only as algorithms, these results represent impressive achievements

Coronary Revascularization and Long-Term Survivorship in Chronic Coronary Syndrome

Ischemic heart disease (IHD) persists as the leading cause of death in the Western world. In recent decades, great headway has been made in reducing mortality due to IHD, based around secondary prevention. The advent of coronary revascularization techniques, first coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) surgery in the 1960s and then percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in the 1970s, has represented one of the major breakthroughs in medicine during the last century. The benefit provided by these techniques, especially PCI, has been crucial in lowering mortality rates in acute coronary syndrome (ACS). However, in the setting where IHD is most prevalent, namely chronic coronary syndrome (CCS), the increase in life expectancy provided by coronary revascularization is controversial. Over more than 40 years, several clinical trials have been carried out comparing optimal medical treatment (OMT) alone with a strategy of routine coronary revascularization on top of OMT. Beyond a certain degree of symptomatic improvement and lower incidence of minor events, routine invasive management has not demonstrated a convincing effect in terms of reducing mortality in CCS. Based on the accumulated evidence more than half a century after the first revascularization procedures were used, invasive management should be considered in those patients with uncontrolled symptoms despite OMT or high-risk features related to left ventricular function, coronary anatomy, or functional assessment, taking into account the patient expectations and preferences

Evaluation of Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy as a First-Line Typing Tool for the Identification of Extended-Spectrum β-Lactamase-Producing Klebsiella pneumoniae Outbreaks in the Hospital Setting

Early detection of pathogen cross-transmission events and environmental reservoirs is needed to control derived nosocomial outbreaks. Whole-genome sequencing (WGS) is considered the gold standard for outbreak confirmation, but, in most cases, it is time-consuming and has elevated costs. Consequently, the timely incorporation of WGS results to conventional epidemiology (CE) investigations for rapid outbreak detection is scarce. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) is a rapid technique that establishes similarity among bacteria based on the comparison of infrared light absorption patterns of bacterial polysaccharides and has been used as a typing tool in recent studies. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the performance of the FTIR as a first-line typing tool for the identification of extended-spectrum β-lactamase-producing Klebsiella pneumoniae (ESBL-Kp) outbreaks in the hospital setting in comparison with CE investigations using WGS as the gold standard method. Sixty-three isolates of ESBL-Kp collected from 2018 to 2021 and classified according to CE were typed by both FTIR and WGS. Concordance was measured using the Adjusted Rand index (AR) and the Adjusted Wallace coefficient (AW) for both CE and FTIR clustering considering WGS as the reference method. Both AR and AW were significantly higher for FTIR clustering than CE clustering (0.475 vs. 0.134, p = 0.01, and 0.521 vs. 0.134, p = 0.009, respectively). Accordingly, FTIR inferred more true clustering relationships than CE (38/42 vs. 24/42, p = 0.001). However, a similar proportion of genomic singletons was detected by both FTIR and CE (13/21 vs. 12/21, p = 1). This study demonstrates the utility of the FTIR method as a quick, low-cost, first-line tool for the detection of ESBL-Kp outbreaks, while WGS analyses are being performed for outbreak confirmation and isolate characterization. Thus, clinical microbiology laboratories would benefit from integrating the FTIR method into CE investigations for infection control measures in the hospital setting.We thank the Germans Trias i Pujol Research Institute (IGTP) Translational Genomics Core Facility and staff for their contribution to this publication. We also thank CERCA Programme/Government of Catalonia for their support to the IGTP.S

Magnetic resonance microscopy and correlative histopathology of the infarcted heart

Altres ajuts:The present study was supported by the EU Joint Programming Initiative 'A Healthy Diet for a Healthy Life' (JPI HDHL INTIMIC-085), Generalitat Valenciana (GV/2018/116), INCLIVA and Universitat de Valencia (program VLC-BIOCLINIC 20-nanomIRM-2016A).Delayed enhancement cardiovascular magnetic resonance (MR) is the gold-standard for non-invasive assessment after myocardial infarction (MI). MR microscopy (MRM) provides a level of detail comparable to the macro objective of light microscopy. We used MRM and correlative histopathology to identify infarct and remote tissue in contrast agent-free multi-sequence MRM in swine MI hearts. One control group (n = 3 swine) and two experimental MI groups were formed: 90 min of ischemia followed by 1 week (acute MI = 6 swine) or 1 month (chronic MI = 5 swine) reperfusion. Representative samples of each heart were analysed by contrast agent-free multi-sequence (T1-weighting, T2-weighting, T2*-weighting, T2-mapping, and T2*-mapping). MRM was performed in a 14-Tesla vertical axis imager (Bruker-AVANCE 600 system). Images from MRM and the corresponding histopathological stained samples revealed differences in signal intensities between infarct and remote areas in both MI groups (p-value < 0.001). The multivariable models allowed us to precisely classify regions of interest (acute MI: specificity 92% and sensitivity 80%; chronic MI: specificity 100% and sensitivity 98%). Probabilistic maps based on MRM images clearly delineated the infarcted regions. As a proof of concept, these results illustrate the potential of MRM with correlative histopathology as a platform for exploring novel contrast agent-free MR biomarkers after MI