Development of a preliminary design tool for microsatellites structure in a concurrent engineering facility

This project deals with the work done in a Concurrent Design Facility environment in order to develop a new Matlab calculus tool for the structure subsystem of microsatellites. This tool is based on another simple Excel document which was able to do some calculus for a preliminary design of the main structure of a satellite, but then it has been improved in term of versatility and quality, type and number of results. Its capabilities have been compared with some FEM models created in Nastranope

Traveling in a fragile world: the value of ecoturism

What is ecotourism and why is it a current topic today more than ever? Tourism represents a significant economic sector and further forecasted to grow at a global level – exceeding even in the first few months of 2018 the most optimistic growth expectations according to WTTC (2018a)1. According to the International Ecotourism society2, ecotourism can be defined as a form of responsible tourism that prefers natural areas and that focuses its attention and commitment to conserve the environment and sustain the well-being of local people through interpretation (of heritage, traditions) and education (habitats, animals, cultures). Ecotourism has the potential to contribute, directly or indirectly, to all the objectives set by the 2030 Agenda3 for Sustainable Development4, which establishes ambitious global targets for people, planet, prosperity and peace through partnerships (UNWTO 2019; WCED 1987). Moreover, it provides the opportunity to preserve natural areas, through natural resources management and increasing environmental awareness and eco-friendly practices; provide sustainable economic growth of local communities in countries like Nepal, Costa Rica or Ecuador; preserve indigenous culture and tradition through educational programs; and reinvest money for conservation efforts like the protection of species or reforestation. However, critics to Ecotourism claim the negative impacts that this industry has on local people and environments as consequence of long travel distances (like the pollution generated by planes) and the negative impacts deriving from the presence of tourists in delicate environments (and the related production of waste or pollution). This paper aims to provide a general examination of the available data about the ecotourism activities on a global level, presenting examples from representative countries worldwide. We consider both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of this industry, trying to focus on what it represents in terms of its impacts and benefits for the country’s natural resources, communities and economy. In the first part of the manuscript, we compare ecotourism to other forms of natural resources’ use such as trophy hunting and mass tourism, trying to evaluate whether these represent a preferable alternative or not in terms of sustainability and economic benefits. The next section is divided by regions: Africa, The Americas, Europe, and Australia. For the study, we used statistics made available mainly by the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) and the UN Environment World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), together with information from specialized international literature

Wireless communication, identification and sensing technologies enabling integrated logistics: a study in the harbor environment

In the last decade, integrated logistics has become an important challenge in the development of wireless communication, identification and sensing technology, due to the growing complexity of logistics processes and the increasing demand for adapting systems to new requirements. The advancement of wireless technology provides a wide range of options for the maritime container terminals. Electronic devices employed in container terminals reduce the manual effort, facilitating timely information flow and enhancing control and quality of service and decision made. In this paper, we examine the technology that can be used to support integration in harbor's logistics. In the literature, most systems have been developed to address specific needs of particular harbors, but a systematic study is missing. The purpose is to provide an overview to the reader about which technology of integrated logistics can be implemented and what remains to be addressed in the future

THE PATIENT IN THE OPERATING ROOM: CONSIDERATION AT SEVEN YEARS FROM WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION GUIDELINES PUBLICATION.

Modern surgery is burdened by a huge amount of patient to be treated and an increasingly complex number of procedures which request planned action and shared behaviours, aimed to prevent perioperative accidents and favour good surgical outcomes. Surgical and anaesthetic safety has improved significantly in last few decades. However, the operating room environment continues to have significant safety risks for patients as well as the health care providers who work there. Adverse events may result from problems in practice, products, procedures or systems. The worldwide incidence of surgical site infection, one of the most important and frequent post-operative complication, ranges from 3% to 16%, with a mortality rate ranging from 0.4% to 0.8%; in these studies, about 50% of cases were considered preventable (1-9). Patients safety improvements demand a complex system-wide effort, involving a wide range of actions in performance improvement, environmental safety and risk management, including infection control, safe use of medicines, equipment safety, safe clinical practice and safe environment of care. Just as public health interventions and educational projects have dramatically improved maternal and neonatal survival, analogous efforts might improve surgical safety and quality of care (10). According to these objectives, the World Health Organization (WHO) has published and diffused the international “Guidelines for Safe Surgery” (11). The guidelines have the clear proposal to 61ameliorate the safety of surgical interventions; they define and promote recommendation and safety standards suitable for the different Countries and operative settings, suggesting a new deal in managing pre-operative, intra-operative and post-operative processes. On the base of these recommendations, the WHO has also developed a checklist for the safety in the operating room, in order to prevent avoidable adverse events, thus minimizing unnecessary loss of life and serious complications. The results raised from a multicentre study carried out in eight different Countries, demonstrating the effectiveness of the WHO checklist in terms of better patient safety, reduction of deaths and post-operative complications (12). The objectives of this international effort are resumable as follow: 1. the patient must be correctly positioned on the surgical bed and prepared; 2. the surgery team must operate on the correct patient at the correct site; 3. blood loss and risk for surgical site infection must be minimized; 4. inadvertent retention of instruments and sponges in surgical site must be prevented; 5. during surgery, anaesthesiologists must prevent harm from the administration of anaesthetics, while protecting the patient from pain; 6. anaesthesiologists must manage patient’s airways and respiratory function, in order to avoid life-threatening complications; 7. the team should consider patient’s allergies or intolerances in order to prevent an allergic or adverse drug reaction; 8. at the end of intervention, the surgical team must secure and accurately identify all surgical specimens, while the anaesthesiologists will guarantee a correct patient awakening; 9. all the members of the team will effectively communicate and exchange critical information for the safe conduct of the operation; 10. post-operative thromboembolism must be prevented adopting the right measures; 11. each member of the team is responsible for his own clinical documentation; 12. hospitals and public health systems will establish routine surveillance of surgical capacity, volume and results. On March 2013, the American Agency for Health Research and Quality (AHRQ) published the Making Health Care Safer II report, which confirmed the effectiveness of WHO checklist and considered it as one of the 10 strongest recommended practices health care organizations should immediately apply to improve patient safety (13). After the first launch of the WHO checklist, the American Veteran Health Administration observed a constant reduction of patient mortality (0.5/1000 surgeries/4 months); in Holland, compliance to the new guidelines raised from 12% of the first 4 months to the 60%, observed at the end of the second year after publication. This means that «The checklist only works if you use it» (14). The checklist does not reduces itself patient complications, but only the application of all the provided items could help to do so. The checklist should be understood not merely as a list of items to be checked off, but as an instrument for the improvement of communication, teamwork, and safety culture in the operating room, and it should be accordingly implemented. To reach the expected results it needs time, the time to let surgical team to learn and involve (gradually) all the interested units of a determined hospital or the hospitals of a specific geographic area. Agreeing with Bosk and colleagues (15), using an electronic recording format within the standard mandatory strategy facilitates apparent compliance and the use of the safety checklist as a tick box exercise. It seems that the main trick to improving safety is a strategy leading to positive attitudes on the part of the health professionals involved, involving a far more complex adaptive process than merely mandating the use of a checklist

A Sensing Platform to Monitor Sleep Efficiency

Sleep plays a fundamental role in the human life. Sleep research is mainly focused on the understanding of the sleep patterns, stages and duration. An accurate sleep monitoring can detect early signs of sleep deprivation and insomnia consequentially implementing mechanisms for preventing and overcoming these problems. Recently, sleep monitoring has been achieved using wearable technologies, able to analyse also the body movements, but old people can encounter some difficulties in using and maintaining these devices. In this paper, we propose an unobtrusive sensing platform able to analyze body movements, infer sleep duration and awakenings occurred along the night, and evaluating the sleep efficiency index. To prove the feasibility of the suggested method we did a pilot trial in which several healthy users have been involved. The sensors were installed within the bed and, on each day, each user was administered with the Groningen Sleep Quality Scale questionnaire to evaluate the user’s perceived sleep quality. Finally, we show potential correlation between a perceived evaluation with an objective index as the sleep efficiency.</p

GAUSSIAN MIXTURE MODELS FOR THE ANALYSIS OF WISC-IV DIMENSIONS: A MULTIVARIATE APPROACH TO IMPROVE THE ASSESSMENT OF INTELLECTUAL FUNCTIONING

The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-IV provides four indexes that analyze the intellectual functioning in specific cognitive fields and a full-scale intelligence quotient (FSIQ) as a measure of the general cognitive ability. However, often the diagnostic process considers the FSIQ score only. This study exploits the Gaussian mixture model (GMM) as a statistical tool to analyze WISC-IV capability to support the diagnostic decision-making process in a multidimensional approach based on the joint evaluation of the four main indexes. The study was conducted on two groups of participants (10 and 12 years old with N=52 and N=47, respectively) with clinical diagnosis. In addition, N=50 observations were randomly generated from the distribution of the Italian reference populations referred to each age group. In both groups, GMM detected two components underlining different behaviors in central tendency, variability, and correlation. Comparison of GMM partitions with a supervised classification shows that group memberships are congruent

Bernard-Horner Syndrome after accidental lesion of carotid artery: case report

Among the complications of internal jugular vein insertion there is the lesion of the cervical sympathetic trunk with the onset of Bernard-Horner syndrome, consisting of miosis, eyelid ptosis, enophthalmos and anhidrosis on the same side of the lesion. The neurological damage can be caused by the direct puncture of the trunk or by the irritating and compressive action of a hematoma during the puncture of the internal jugular; the clinical picture, when reversible, resolves in a few months. The case we report is about the onset of the syndrome after accidental puncture of carotid artery, followed by the total disappearance of signs in a few day

Bioengineered vascular scaffolds: the state of the art

To date, there is increasing clinical need for vascular substitutes due to accidents, malformations, and ischemic diseases. Over the years, many approaches have been developed to solve this problem, starting from autologous native vessels to artificial vascular grafts; unfortunately, none of these have provided the perfect vascular substitute. All have been burdened by various complications, including infection, thrombogenicity, calcification, foreign body reaction, lack of growth potential, late stenosis and occlusion from intimal hyperplasia, and pseudoaneurysm formation. In the last few years, vascular tissue engineering has emerged as one of the most promising approaches for producing mechanically competent vascular substitutes. Nanotechnologies have contributed their part, allowing extraordinarily biostable and biocompatible materials to be developed. Specifically, the use of electrospinning to manufacture conduits able to guarantee a stable flow of biological fluids and guide the formation of a new vessel has revolutionized the concept of the vascular substitute. The electrospinning technique allows extracellular matrix (ECM) to be mimicked with high fidelity, reproducing its porosity and complexity, and providing an environment suitable for cell growth. In the future, a better knowledge of ECM and the manufacture of new materials will allow us to "create" functional biological vessels - the base required to develop organ substitutes and eventually solve the problem of organ failure

A perceptual sound space for auditory displays based on sung-vowel synthesis

When designing displays for the human senses, perceptual spaces are of great importance to give intuitive access to physical attributes. Similar to how perceptual spaces based on hue, saturation, and lightness were constructed for visual color, research has explored perceptual spaces for sounds of a given timbral family based on timbre, brightness, and pitch. To promote an embodied approach to the design of auditory displays, we introduce the Vowel-Type-Pitch (VTP) space, a cylindrical sound space based on human sung vowels, whose timbres can be synthesized by the composition of acoustic formants and can be categorically labeled. Vowels are arranged along the circular dimension, while voice type and pitch of the vowel correspond to the remaining two axes of the cylindrical VTP space. The decoupling and perceptual effectiveness of the three dimensions of the VTP space are tested through a vowel labeling experiment, whose results are visualized as maps on circular slices of the VTP cylinder. We discuss implications for the design of auditory and multi-sensory displays that account for human perceptual capabilities