Seamless Mobile Communications for mHealth

There is a growing trend in the health domain to incorporate Smartphones and other wireless technologies to provide more efficient, cost effective, and higher quality healthcare. With newer more sophisticated mobile devices for example, Smartphones this is an escalating practice. To date the use of mobile phone technology in the healthcare domain (mHealth) has been limited to uses such as disseminating information. However, mHealth is beginning to include software and data applications based on mobile devices and technologies. This movement is largely due to the advent of newer technologies associated with Smartphones. Some Smartphones can now be considered to be intelligent sensors with sensing capabilities such as GPS location, proximity and accelerometers. This paper examines the use of such technology in providing seamless mobile communications for mHealth

An Adaptive Middleware Applied to the Ad-hoc Nature of Cardiac Health Care

Heart disease is the number one killer in the civilized world, accounting for around 1.9 million people every year in the EU, with the associated annual health costs of approximately EUR 105 billion. Important aspects of treating cardiac problems are monitoring and directing critical data to key individuals. The middleware proposed in this paper interacts with ECG sensors and provides a dynamic decision making framework for forming critical decisions when defined thresholds are exceeded. The middleware and its defined services target the embedded device domain which has an existing large scale deployment within the healthcare sector. The services help to ease development and address problems like dynamic grouping, load balancing and providing a uniform level of abstraction from the underlying network

Reactions of (-)-sparteine with alkali metal HMDS complexes : conventional meets the unconventional

Conventional (-)-sparteine adducts of lithium and sodium 1,1,1,3,3,3-hexamethyldisilazide (HMDS) were prepared and characterised, along with an unexpected and unconventional hydroxyl-incorporated sodium sodiate, [(-)-sparteine·Na(-HMDS)Na·(-)-sparteine]+[Na4(-HMDS)4(OH)]--the complex anion of which is the first inverse crown ether anion

Service Group Management facilitated by DSL driven Policies in embedded Middleware

Middleware by its very nature is fundamental to the functioning of systems as it provides the communication between software components. It is very much an underlying technology and is rarely visible to end users. As systems develop, certain domain semantics, provided by the domain experts, need to be injected into the behaviour of the underlying middleware, but in a controlled manner. The methods used to achieve this are often static in nature, wholly dependent on how they are implemented, deployed and managed. An increasingly popular way to manage this behaviour injection is through the use of policies, a technique used to govern defined rules, triggered by associated events, resulting in specific actions when certain conditions are encountered. Strong efforts have been made throughout the evolution of software development methods and programming languages to solve the lack of dynamicity which can arise through poor practices. Successive language based attempts to attain a higher level of abstraction in the notations used and techniques deployed have resulted in the re-discovery of Domain Specific Languages (DSL). This paper looks at injecting the dynamicity required in the management of service groups through a policy based DSL

QoE Testbed Infrastructure and Services: Enriching the End User’s Experience

Quality of Experience (QoE) is the subjective judgment of the satisfaction an end user perceives from an application running over a given network topology and configuration. The information provided by end users regarding their QoE preferences, experience and feedback is invaluable in providing a service that meets with their mobile activity needs within various access networks. The PERIMETER project progresses the QoE thematic research area by taking end user-related QoE factors for end user-centric mobility experimentation, thus empowering them to always have a service in which their QoE is high. This paper will detail the components of the PERIMETER framework and the user centric scenario based process adopted to implement and develop such a framework. This paper provides an insight into the federated testbed infrastructure, testing methodology and tools, operating system and applications used in the project, thus demonstrating PERIMETER’s innovative advances within the QoE end user domain

PERIMETER: A Quality of Experience Framework

Although Quality of Experience (QoE) is perceived as a subjective measure of a user’s experience, it is the only measure that actually counts to a user of a service. For the success of the Future Internet, it is essential to identify, quantify and ultimately improve the perception of QoE for a user, in a given situation. PERIMETER pushes the boundaries to improve a user’s experience by identifying a more user-centric network selection based on QoE preferences, high level rules and policies. With the fundamental focus on the user’s preferences, PERIMETER will support generic QoE definition, QoE signalling, and QoE based content adaptation. This paper provides an insight into PERIMETER’s QoE model and management system which are responsible for the definition, gathering, description and management of QoE-related parameters, indicators and enablers. This paper will demonstrate how PERIMETER will proceed beyond the state of the art in the QoE thematic research area and contribute to research of the Future Internet

Food for thought:Leptin regulation of hippocampal function and its role in Alzheimer's disease

Expression of TP63 in breast cancer cell lines. (PDF 407 kb

Effects of antiplatelet therapy on stroke risk by brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases: subgroup analyses of the RESTART randomised, open-label trial

Background Findings from the RESTART trial suggest that starting antiplatelet therapy might reduce the risk of recurrent symptomatic intracerebral haemorrhage compared with avoiding antiplatelet therapy. Brain imaging features of intracerebral haemorrhage and cerebral small vessel diseases (such as cerebral microbleeds) are associated with greater risks of recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage. We did subgroup analyses of the RESTART trial to explore whether these brain imaging features modify the effects of antiplatelet therapy

Effects of antiplatelet therapy after stroke due to intracerebral haemorrhage (RESTART): a randomised, open-label trial

Background: Antiplatelet therapy reduces the risk of major vascular events for people with occlusive vascular disease, although it might increase the risk of intracranial haemorrhage. Patients surviving the commonest subtype of intracranial haemorrhage, intracerebral haemorrhage, are at risk of both haemorrhagic and occlusive vascular events, but whether antiplatelet therapy can be used safely is unclear. We aimed to estimate the relative and absolute effects of antiplatelet therapy on recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage and whether this risk might exceed any reduction of occlusive vascular events. Methods: The REstart or STop Antithrombotics Randomised Trial (RESTART) was a prospective, randomised, open-label, blinded endpoint, parallel-group trial at 122 hospitals in the UK. We recruited adults (≥18 years) who were taking antithrombotic (antiplatelet or anticoagulant) therapy for the prevention of occlusive vascular disease when they developed intracerebral haemorrhage, discontinued antithrombotic therapy, and survived for 24 h. Computerised randomisation incorporating minimisation allocated participants (1:1) to start or avoid antiplatelet therapy. We followed participants for the primary outcome (recurrent symptomatic intracerebral haemorrhage) for up to 5 years. We analysed data from all randomised participants using Cox proportional hazards regression, adjusted for minimisation covariates. This trial is registered with ISRCTN (number ISRCTN71907627). Findings: Between May 22, 2013, and May 31, 2018, 537 participants were recruited a median of 76 days (IQR 29–146) after intracerebral haemorrhage onset: 268 were assigned to start and 269 (one withdrew) to avoid antiplatelet therapy. Participants were followed for a median of 2·0 years (IQR [1·0– 3·0]; completeness 99·3%). 12 (4%) of 268 participants allocated to antiplatelet therapy had recurrence of intracerebral haemorrhage compared with 23 (9%) of 268 participants allocated to avoid antiplatelet therapy (adjusted hazard ratio 0·51 [95% CI 0·25–1·03]; p=0·060). 18 (7%) participants allocated to antiplatelet therapy experienced major haemorrhagic events compared with 25 (9%) participants allocated to avoid antiplatelet therapy (0·71 [0·39–1·30]; p=0·27), and 39 [15%] participants allocated to antiplatelet therapy had major occlusive vascular events compared with 38 [14%] allocated to avoid antiplatelet therapy (1·02 [0·65–1·60]; p=0·92). Interpretation: These results exclude all but a very modest increase in the risk of recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage with antiplatelet therapy for patients on antithrombotic therapy for the prevention of occlusive vascular disease when they developed intracerebral haemorrhage. The risk of recurrent intracerebral haemorrhage is probably too small to exceed the established benefits of antiplatelet therapy for secondary prevention