Social Aspects of Diabetic Foot: A Scoping Review

Diabetic foot ulcer (DFU) is a severe complication of diabetes mellitus (DM). Patients with DFU have increased mortality and morbidity as well as decreased quality of life (QoL). The present scoping review aims to study the social issues of diabetic foot. Following PRISMA guidelines, the review was conducted in two databases (Scopus and Pubmed) with the use of the following keywords: “social aspects and diabetic foot”, “social characteristics and diabetic foot”, “social issues and diabetic foot”, “demographic profiles and diabetic foot”, “social determinants and diabetic foot”, “social capital and diabetic foot”, “social characteristics and gender and diabetic foot”, “social profiles and diabetic foot”, “social relationships and diabetic foot” and “social risk and diabetic foot”, from July to August 2021. Predetermined exclusion and inclusion criteria were selected. Forty-five studies (quantitative and qualitative) were eligible for inclusion in this review. Gender problems, socioeconomic status, social capital, and medical problems were the most important negative variables for diabetic foot. All the included variables reveal that the social impact of diabetic foot is the most important factor for management and prevention, in terms of aggravation and more, of the diabetic foo

Peak load optimization through 2-dimensional packing and multi-processor real-time scheduling

The use of real-time scheduling methods to coordinate a set of power loads is being explored in the field of Cyber-Physical Energy Systems, with the goal of optimizing the aggregated peak load of power used by many electric loads. Real-time scheduling has attractive features in this domain. Thanks to its inherent resource optimization, which limits the number of concurrent tasks that are running at the same time, real-time scheduling provides direct benefits to peak load optimization. This paper shows the combined use of a two-dimensional binpacking method and an optimal multi-processor real-time scheduling algorithm to coordinate the activation of electric loads. The result is an effective global scheduling approach where the activation of loads is organized into a pattern that takes into account the timing constraints of the loads and the actual combination of active loads. The validation is done by scheduling a set of thermal loads (heaters) in a building, with accurately modeled temperature dynamics. The proposed method is shown to achieve a significant peak load reduction, up to around 70%, w.r.t. the traditional thermostat controller

Identification of risk conditions for the development of adrenal disorders: how optimized PubMed search strategies makes the difference

The exponential growth of scientific literature available through electronic databases (namely PubMed) has increased the chance of finding interesting articles. At the same time, search has become more complicated, time consuming, and at risk of missing important information. Therefore, optimized strategies have to be adopted to maximize searching impact. The aim of this study was to formulate efficient strings to search PubMed for etiologic associations between adrenal disorders (ADs) and other conditions. A comprehensive list of terms identifying endogenous conditions primarily affecting adrenals was compiled. An ad hoc analysis was performed to find the best way to express each term in order to find the highest number of potentially pertinent articles in PubMed. A predefined number of retrieved abstracts were read to assess their association with ADs\ue2\u80\u99 etiology. A more sensitive (providing the largest literature coverage) and a more specific (including only those terms retrieving\uc2\ua0>40\uc2\ua0% of potentially pertinent articles) string were formulated. Various researches were performed to assess strings\ue2\u80\u99 ability to identify articles of interest in comparison with non-optimized literature searches. We formulated optimized, ready applicable tools for the identification of the literature assessing etiologic associations in the field of ADs using PubMed, and demonstrated the advantages deriving from their application. Detailed description of the methodological process is also provided, so that this work can easily be translated to other fields of practice