Assessment of Domestic Well-Being: From Perception to Measurement

Nowadays, there are plenty of sensing devices that enable the measurement of physiological, environmental, and behavioral parameters of people 24 hours a day, seven days a week and provide huge quantities of different data. Data and signals coming from sensing devices, installed in indoor or outdoor environments or often worn by the users, generate heterogeneous and complex structured datasets, most of the time not uniformly structured. The artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms applied to these sets of data have demonstrated capabilities to infer indices related to a subject's status and well-being [1]. Well-being is a key parameter in the World Health Organization (WHO) definition of health, considering its physical, mental, and social spheres. Quantitatively assessing a subject's well-being is of paramount importance if we want to assess the whole status of a person, which is particularly useful in the case of ageing people living alone. Assessment allows for continuous remote monitoring to improve people's quality of life (QoL) according to their perceptions, needs, and preferences. Technology undoubtedly plays a pivotal role in this regard, providing us new tools to support the objective evaluation of a subject's status, including her/his perception of the living environment. Its potential is huge, also in terms of support to the healthcare system and ageing people; however, there are several engineering challenges to consider, especially in terms of sensors integrability, connectivity, and metrological performance, in order to obtain reliable and accurate measurement systems

uncertainty analysis of cell counting by metabolic assays

Cell counting is a fundamental procedure in living cell culture-based experiments and protocols in which the cell number quantification is required. The number of cells is one of the parameters necessary to investigate several cell culture features requiring to be monitored as function of time, such as cell viability, proliferation, growth, fitness and metabolism. Aim of this paper is contributing to declare a comprehensive uncertainty budget for cell counting through metabolic assays according to the EURACHEM/CITAC Guide Quantifying Uncertainty in Analytical Measurement

Short photoperiod-induced decrease of histamine H3 receptors facilitates activation of hypothalamic neurons in the Siberian Hamster

Nonhibernating seasonal mammals have adapted to temporal changes in food availability through behavioral and physiological mechanisms to store food and energy during times of predictable plenty and conserve energy during predicted shortage. Little is known, however, of the hypothalamic neuronal events that lead to a change in behavior or physiology. Here we show for the first time that a shift from long summer-like to short inter-like photoperiod, which induces physiological adaptation to winter in the Siberian hamster, including a body weight decrease of up to 30%, increases neuronal activity in the dorsomedial region of the arcuate nucleus (dmpARC) assessed by electro physiological patch-clamping recording. Increased neuronal activity in short days is dependent on a photoperiod-driven down-regulation of H3 receptor expression and can be mimicked in long-day dmpARC neurons by the application of the H3 receptor antagonist, clobenproprit. Short-day activation of dmpARC neurons results in increased c-Fos expression. Tract tracing with the trans-synaptic retrograde tracer, pseudorabies virus, delivered into adipose tissue reveals a multisynaptic neuronal sympathetic outflow from dmpARC to white adipose tissue. These data strongly suggest that increased activity of dmpARC neurons, as a consequence of down-regulation of the histamine H3 receptor, contributes to the physiological adaptation of body weight regulation in seasonal photoperiod

Erratum to: Comparative assessment of image quality for coronary CT angiography with iobitridol and two contrast agents with higher iodine concentrations: iopromide and iomeprol. A multicentre randomized double-blind trial

Unfortunately, there is amistake in the section Results, Clinical safety. While the text states that “no severe AEs were reported”, in fact one severe AE was reported in the iomeprol group (one severe injection site pain assessed as possibly related to contrast agent), as shown in Table 5. In addition, the name of the author Jean-François Paul was rendered incorrectly in the original publication but has since been corrected. The authors apologize for these mistakes

Effet de la souche de levure sur les proprietes organoleptiques des vins issus de cinq cepages blancs portugais

Neuf souches de levures commerciales, appartenant au genre Saccharomyces (six souches de S. cerevisiae et trois souches de S. bayanus), ont ete testees lors de la fermentation de moths issus de cinq cepages portugais: Loureiro, Trajadura, Pedernk Azal e Avesso. Pour un même cepage la levure d'implantation semble ne pas avoir d'influence sur la teneur en alcool et sur l'acidité totale des vins produits. Les variations des quantites produites en esters ethyliques d'acides gras (BRAG) et acetates d'alcools superieurs (AAS) peuvent varier d'un facteur 2.1 et 4.3 respectivement, pour un même cepages les teneurs maximales en AAS sont observêes avec les deux mêmes souches pour tour les cepages, a une exception pres. En ce qui concerne les alcools superieurs, les souches plus ou moths productrices different pour chaque cépage. Une etude statistique a permis d'etablir une correlation entre l'analyse chimique et l'analyse sensorielle. D'un point de vue organoleptique, les vins prefer-es sont riches en acides gras et en EEAG mais relativement pauvres en AAS

Measurement of the diffractive structure function in deep inelastic scattering at HERA

This paper presents an analysis of the inclusive properties of diffractive deep inelastic scattering events produced in $ep$ interactions at HERA. The events are characterised by a rapidity gap between the outgoing proton system and the remaining hadronic system. Inclusive distributions are presented and compared with Monte Carlo models for diffractive processes. The data are consistent with models where the pomeron structure function has a hard and a soft contribution. The diffractive structure function is measured as a function of \xpom, the momentum fraction lost by the proton, of $\beta$, the momentum fraction of the struck quark with respect to \xpom, and of $Q^2$. The \xpom dependence is consistent with the form \xpoma where $a~=~1.30~\pm~0.08~(stat)~^{+~0.08}_{-~0.14}~(sys)$ in all bins of $\beta$ and $Q^2$. In the measured $Q^2$ range, the diffractive structure function approximately scales with $Q^2$ at fixed $\beta$. In an Ingelman-Schlein type model, where commonly used pomeron flux factor normalisations are assumed, it is found that the quarks within the pomeron do not saturate the momentum sum rule.Comment: 36 pages, latex, 11 figures appended as uuencoded fil