Here we share four key lessons from an interdisciplinary project (Nuestro Rio) that gathered community perspectives on local water quality in the Santa River basin (Peru) utilising a digital ...technological approach where we collected data via a novel photo elicitation app, supported by a field work campaign. The lessons explored in this article provide insights into challenges and opportunities for researchers considering developing technological tools for encouraging participation and engagement in marginalised communities.
The Internet of Bodies (IoB) is an imminent extension of the vast Internet of Things (IoT) domain, where wearable, ingestible, injectable, and implantable smart objects form a network in, on, and ...around the human body. The highly radiative nature of radio-frequency (RF) IoB devices unnecessarily extends the coverage range beyond the human body, which reduces energy efficiency, causes co-existence and interference issues, and exposes sensitive personal data to security threats. Alternatively, capacitive body channel communication (BCC) confine signal transmission to the human body to reduce signal leakage, experience less propagation loss, and reach pJ/b energy efficiency levels. Therefore, capacitive BCC is a key enabler to reach the ultimate design goals of ultra low power, high throughput, and small form-factor IoB devices. Albeit these attractive features, the communication and networking aspects of the capacitive BCC are not thoroughly explored yet. Therefore, this article proposes orthogonal and nonorthogonal capacitive body channel access schemes with or without cooperation among the IoB nodes. In order to address the Quality of Service (QoS) demand scenarios of different IoB applications, we present and formulate the max-min rate, max-sum rate, and QoS sufficient operational regimes, and then provide closed-form and numerical solution optimal power and phase time allocations. Extensive numerical results are analyzed to compare the performance of orthogonal and nonorthogonal schemes with and without cooperation for various design parameters under prescribed QoS regimes. The obtained results show that capacitive body channel access schemes can provide several Mb/s rates even at low transmission powers ranging between −60 and −90 dBm. Moreover, the cooperative schemes are shown to be effective to avoid performance degradation caused by increasing network size, low transmission power, and poor channel quality.
Odoriferous compounds are troublesome in natural waters in many parts of the world. The simultaneous determination of these complex compounds due to their low sample concentration and odor thresholds ...has been difficult. A simple, sensitive and automated technique for the determination of eight odoriferous compounds from aqueous samples was developed using online purge and trap (P&T) coupled to gas chromatography with mass spectrometry. P&T was selected to extract and purify the water samples. Several parameters that affect the extraction and concentration performance were investigated, including the trap sorbent, ionic strength, purge time, sample temperature and desorption time. Under the optimal conditions, the adsorption capacity for the Tenax TA sorbent to 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine, 4-chloroanisole, 2-isobutyl-3-methoxypyrazine, 2-methylisoborneol, 2-tert-butylphenol, 2,4-dichloroanisole, 2,4,6-trichloroanisole and geosmin reached an equilibration when sample volume was 25 ml at a concentration of 150.0 μg/l. The method provided good linearity in the range from 1.0 to1000 ng/l and the limits of detection were from 0.1 to 0.3 ng/l, which are below the odor thresholds for most of these compounds. The proposed method was applied to the determination of eight odoriferous compounds in surface and tap waters with recoveries from 74.7% to 112.8% and relative standard deviations from 2.6% to 10.8%. This method may be widely employed for monitoring odoriferous compounds in water samples.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
BFBNIB, DOBA, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Wireless sensing has been increasingly used in smart homes, human–computer interaction and other fields due to its comprehensive coverage, non-contact and absence of privacy leakage. However, most ...existing methods are based on the amplitude or phase of the Wi-Fi signal to recognize gestures, which provides insufficient recognition accuracy. To solve this problem, we have designed a deep spatiotemporal gesture recognition method based on Wi-Fi signals, namely Wi-GC. The gesture-sensitive antennas are selected first and the fixed antennas are denoised and smoothed using a combined filter. The consecutive gestures are then segmented using a time series difference algorithm. The segmented gesture data is fed into our proposed RAGRU model, where BAGRU extracts temporal features of Channel State Information (CSI) sequences and RNet18 extracts spatial features of CSI amplitudes. In addition, to pick out essential gesture features, we introduce an attention mechanism. Finally, the extracted spatial and temporal characteristics are fused and input into softmax for classification. We have extensively and thoroughly verified the Wi-GC method in a natural environment and the average gesture recognition rate of the Wi-GC way is between 92–95.6%, which has strong robustness.
The Internet of Bodies (IoB) is a network formed by wearable, implantable, ingestible, and injectable smart devices to collect physiological, behavioral, and structural information from the human ...body. Thus, the IoB technology can revolutionize the quality of human life by using these context-rich data in myriad smart-health applications. Radio frequency (RF) transceivers have been typically preferred due to their availability and maturity. However, for most RF standards (e.g., Bluetooth low energy), the highly radiative omnidirectional RF propagation (even at the lowest settings) reaches tens of meters of coverage, thereby reducing energy efficiency, causing interference and co-existence issues, and raising privacy and security concerns. On the other hand, body channel communication (BCC) confines low-power and low-frequency (10 kHz-100 MHz) signals to the human body, leading to more secure and efficient communications. Since energy efficiency is one of the critical design parameters of IoB networks, this article focuses on energy-efficient orthogonal body channel access (OBA) and non-OBA (NOBA) schemes with and without cooperation. To this aim, three main BCC topologies are presented: 1) point-to-point channel; 2) medium access channel; and 3) broadcast channel. These topologies are then used as building blocks to create IoB networks relying on OBA and NOBA schemes for downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) traffic. For all schemes and traffic directions, optimal transmit power and phase time allocations are derived in closed-form, which is essential to reduce energy consumption by eliminating computational power. The closed-form expressions are further leveraged to obtain maximum network size as a function of data rate requirement, bandwidth, and hardware parameters.
•Atypical blood metabolite levels may reflect abnormal homeostasis in internet gaming disorder (IGD).•Multiple logistic regression model suggested significant association between plasma metabolites ...and internet addiction severity.•Potential biomarker cluster simultaneously discriminated different psychiatric status in combination of metabolites and clinical characteristics.•Among them were arabitol, myo-inositol, methionine, and depression that were the unique predictors for IGD group.
The main aim of the current research is to characterize the molecular dynamics related to internet gaming disorder (IGD) using non-targeted plasma metabolite profiling based on gas-chromatography time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC-TOF MS). IGD is a psychiatric disorder instigated by excessive and prolonged internet gaming, which shared many pathological symptoms with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The prevalence of the disorder has been rapidly increased particularly in East Asia countries (5.9% in South Korea) compared to Europe or North America (0.3–1.0% in United States and 1.16% in Germany). Thus we comparably explored the correlation between plasma metabolites and internet addiction severity in IGD patients, and potential biomarker composite in combination with clinical parameters. The systematic metabolite profiling of 54 blood samples (normal user, N=28 and IGD, N=24) identified a total of 104 metabolites out of 1212 metabolic feature, and revealed unique relation of co-linearly regressed set of plasma metabolites (arabitol, myo-inositol, methionine, pyrrole-2-carboxylic acid, and aspartic acid) with internet addiction severity scale (R=0.795). In addition, orthogonal partial least squared discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA) and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis identified the potential biomarker cluster that simultaneously discriminated the different types of the psychiatric status. The potential biomarker re-composite was comprehensively evaluated by a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis where the AUCs were 0.890, 0.880, 1.000, and 0.935 for control, IGD, AD and IGD+AD, respectively (N=18, 19, 5, and 10) against the others. This exploratory method may provide robustness of predictive diagnosis in population screening of IGD. The identified metabolic features, the relatedness with clinical parameters, and the putative biochemical linkage will hopefully aid future pathological studies in IGD.
Spice: A never ending story? Lindigkeit, Rainer; Boehme, Anja; Eiserloh, Ina ...
Forensic science international,
10/2009, Letnik:
191, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Abstract On January 22nd 2009, the German Health Authorities prohibited several non-traditional cannabinoids, that proved to be the active components in popular “Bio-Designer-Drugs” like “Spice” and ...analogous products. The recent detection of CP 47,497-C8 in Europe and Japan documents that these products have already spread world wide. We synthesized several potentially interesting alkylaminoindoles (alkylchain C3 to C7 ) and isolated CP 47,497-C8 from “Spice Gold”. The compounds were purified and characterized by NMR and mass spectrometry methods. With the aid of these authentic references we were able to detect and quantify added psychoactive compounds in different herbal blends. All samples that were acquired before the prohibition in December 2008 contained either CP 47,497-C8 (5.4–11.0 mg/g) or JWH-018 (2.3 mg/g). Some samples acquired in March 2009, 4 weeks after the prohibition took place, still contained CP 47,497-C8 (3.0–3.3 mg/g) but JWH-018 was not detected anymore. Instead it was replaced by its non-regulated C4 -homolog JWH-073 (5.8–22.9 mg/g). Furthermore some of the new products did not contain any non-traditional cannabinoids. To our knowledge this is the first report of the appearance JWH-073 as a new designer drug. The data and method presented here will facilitate and accelerate the detection of these compounds in complex matrices.
The emerging mobile commerce (m-commerce) technology promises exciting possibilities for marketplace exchanges, but expected benefits to consumers as well as businesses await an understanding of ...consumer acceptance of this technology. Borrowing the technology acceptance model (TAM) from the work environment, we apply it to the consumer context (c-TAM) and extend it by incorporating both utilitarian and hedonic aspects of technology use. In workplace settings, perceived usefulness has been the predominant driver of technology adoption. Our empirical results show that while perceived usefulness (a utilitarian aspect) contributes to consumer adoption of Internet devices, what contributes even more is their “fun” attribute (a hedonic aspect). Moreover, some consumers are more visually oriented than others and are likely to adopt these devices even more than those who are less visually oriented. Marketing implications of these findings are described.
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