Open source hardware based sensor platform suitable for human gait identification

Most initiatives about embedded sensing capabilities in computational systems lead to de- vise an ad hoc sensor platform, usually poorly reusable, as a first stage to prepare a data corpus or production prototype. In this paper, an open source hardware platform for sensing is described. This platform was intended to be used in data acquisition for gait identification, and is designed in a way general enough so many other projects could reuse the design to accelerate prototyping. The platform is based on popular open source hardware and software like Arduino and Raspberry Pi using well known languages and libraries. Some experimental results about the throughput of the overall system are reported showing the feasibility of acquiring data from up to 6 sensors with a sampling frequency no less than 118 Hz

Is Open Science the Same as Open Source Science?

How open source hardware and software can help to level up open science into open research when used for both methods and tools in the research activities

Identifying users from the interaction with a door handle

Ambient intelligence pursues the integration of intelligent approaches on an IoT infrastructure, mainly using everyday objects of the environment. The main hypothesis of the work is that the way in which a user interacts with a door handle is suitable to be used in the identification task. Our proposal contributes with a new method to identify persons in a seamless and un-obstrusive way, suitable to be used in a smart building scenery without the need to bring any additional device. In this case, we embed accelerometers and gyroscopes in a door handle in order to obtain a data set comprising samples of 47 individuals. A parametric approximation is adopted to reduce each sample to a feature vector by using a dynamic time warping technique. A study has been made of the outcomes of different classification techniques over six different feature sets in order to assess the feasibility of this identification challenge. The AUC values observed with the selected feature set show promising results above 0.90 using neural networks and SVM classifiers

Measuring the coefficient of restitution and more: a simple experiment to promote students’ critical thinking and autonomous work

Innovación EducativaAbstract A simple experiment on the determination of the coefficient of restitution of different materials is taken as the basis of an extendable work that can be done by the students in an autonomous way. On the whole, the work described in this paper would involve concepts of kinematics, materials science, air drag and buoyancy, and would help students to think of physics as a whole subject instead of a set of, more or less, isolated parts. The experiment can be done either in teaching laboratories or as an autonomous work by students at home. Students’ smartphones and cheap balls of different materials are the only experimental materials required to do the experiment. The proposed work also permits the students to analyse the limitations of a physical model used in the experiment by analysing the approximations considered in it, and then enhancing their critical thinking

Teaching and Learning Physics with Smartphones

Innovación EducativaThe use of mobile technologies is reshaping how to teach and learn. In this paper the authors describe their research on the use of these technologies to teach physics. On the one hand they develop mobile applications to complement the traditional learning and to help students learn anytime and anywhere. The use of these applications has proved to have very positive influence on the students’ engagement. On the other hand, they use smartphones as measurement devices in physics experiments. This opens the possibility of designing and developing low cost laboratories where expensive material can be substituted by smartphones. The smartphones’ sensors are reliable and accurate enough to permit good measurements. However, as it is shown with some examples, special care must be taken here if one does not know how these apps used to access the sensors’ data are programmed

COVID-19 : Age, Interleukin-6, C-reactive protein, and lymphocytes as key clues from a multicentre retrospective study

Background: The SARS-CoV-2 infection has widely spread to become the greatest public health challenge to date, the COVID-19 pandemic. Different fatality rates among countries are probably due to non-standardized records being carried out by local health authorities. The Spanish case-fatality rate is 11.22%, far higher than those reported in Asia or by other European countries. A multicentre retrospective study of demographic, clinical, laboratory and immunological features of 584 Spanish COVID-19 hospitalized patients and their outcomes was performed. The use of renin-angiotensin system blockers was also analysed as a risk factor. Results: In this study, 27.4% of cases presented a mild course, 42.1% a moderate one and for 30.5% of cases, the course was severe. Ages ranged from 18 to 98 (average 63). Almost 60 % (59.8%) of patients were male. Interleukin 6 was higher as severity increased. On the other hand, CD8 lymphocyte count was significantly lower as severity grew and subpopulations CD4, CD8, CD19, and NK showed concordant lowering trends. Severity-related natural killer percent descents were evidenced just within aged cases. A significant severity-related decrease of CD4 lymphocytes was found in males. The use of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors was associated with a better prognosis. The angiotensin II receptor blocker use was associated with a more severe course. Conclusions: Age and age-related comorbidities, such as dyslipidaemia, hypertension or diabetes, determined more frequent severe forms of the disease in this study than in previous literature cohorts. Our cases are older than those so far reported and the clinical course of the disease is found to be impaired by age. Immunosenescence might be therefore a suitable explanation for the hampering of immune system effectors. The adaptive immunity would become exhausted and a strong but ineffective and almost deleterious innate response would account for COVID-19 severity. Angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors used by hypertensive patients have a protective effect in regards to COVID-19 severity in our series. Conversely, patients on angiotensin II receptor blockers showed a severer disease

El reto de la inclusión de los Objetivos de Desarrollo Sostenible en la formación inicial de profesores de secundaria: creación del MOOC curso cero sobre educación y ODS, inclusión en asignaturas y en trabajos fin de máster

Memoria ID-041. Ayudas de la Universidad de Salamanca para la innovación docente, curso 2021-2022

Epidemiological trends of HIV/HCV coinfection in Spain, 2015-2019

Altres ajuts: Spanish AIDS Research Network; European Funding for Regional Development (FEDER).Objectives: We assessed the prevalence of anti-hepatitis C virus (HCV) antibodies and active HCV infection (HCV-RNA-positive) in people living with HIV (PLWH) in Spain in 2019 and compared the results with those of four similar studies performed during 2015-2018. Methods: The study was performed in 41 centres. Sample size was estimated for an accuracy of 1%. Patients were selected by random sampling with proportional allocation. Results: The reference population comprised 41 973 PLWH, and the sample size was 1325. HCV serostatus was known in 1316 PLWH (99.3%), of whom 376 (28.6%) were HCV antibody (Ab)-positive (78.7% were prior injection drug users); 29 were HCV-RNA-positive (2.2%). Of the 29 HCV-RNA-positive PLWH, infection was chronic in 24, it was acute/recent in one, and it was of unknown duration in four. Cirrhosis was present in 71 (5.4%) PLWH overall, three (10.3%) HCV-RNA-positive patients and 68 (23.4%) of those who cleared HCV after anti-HCV therapy (p = 0.04). The prevalence of anti-HCV antibodies decreased steadily from 37.7% in 2015 to 28.6% in 2019 (p < 0.001); the prevalence of active HCV infection decreased from 22.1% in 2015 to 2.2% in 2019 (p < 0.001). Uptake of anti-HCV treatment increased from 53.9% in 2015 to 95.0% in 2019 (p < 0.001). Conclusions: In Spain, the prevalence of active HCV infection among PLWH at the end of 2019 was 2.2%, i.e. 90.0% lower than in 2015. Increased exposure to DAAs was probably the main reason for this sharp reduction. Despite the high coverage of treatment with direct-acting antiviral agents, HCV-related cirrhosis remains significant in this population

Presentación ponencia ICERI2016: Improving the Physics Laboratory Experience

Presentación de la ponencia en ICERI2016, del trabajo: Improving the Physics Laboratory Experience Through Sensors on a Eireless Open Source Hardwaare and Software Platform.Departamento de Informátic

Documentos de diseño de OSHIWASP-2017

Documentos de Diseño de la plataforma de sensorización de prácticas docentes de física open hardware y software: OSHIWASPDepartamento de InformáticaUniversidad de Valladolid - PID 16-17_8