Location-based services have increased in popularity in recent years and can be fruitfully exploited in the field of smart homes, opening the doors to a wide range of personalized services. In this ...context, radio technology can be widely employed since, other than connecting devices in the home system, it offers solutions for the user localization issue without the need of any extra device. Techniques based on received signal strength indicator (RSSI) are often used, relying on fingerprinting or proximity algorithms. In this paper, a novel RSSI-based fingerprinting approach for room-level localization is presented: it is a threshold algorithm based on receiver operating characteristic analysis. Moreover, the actual user location is estimated from his/her interaction with the home system devices deployed in the house: if the home environment is inhabited by more than one person, it becomes of utmost importance the identification of who is actually interacting with a given device. A proximity method is exploited for this purpose. Tests have been carried out to characterize the approach, particularly, the effects of RSSI samples, number and position, of the anchor nodes have been analyzed. Finally, some considerations about power consumption of the mobile node have been presented.
L’argomentazione è una pratica complessa e, allo stesso tempo, cruciale per il nostro agire (sociale) quotidiano: saper argomentare rientra, infatti, tra i principali obiettivi da raggiungere alla ...fine del percorso scolastico. A tal fine, diventa imprescindibile la realizzazione di un curricolo verticale che preveda un iter graduale di avvicinamento all’atto argomentativo (e ai suoi processi costitutivi) e che, dalla scuola primaria, in una prospettiva di continuità organica e sistematica, accompagni il discente fino all’esame finale del secondo ciclo. Considerando la dimensione testuale (e la pratica di interazione con la multiformità dei testi argomentativi) il filo conduttore dell’intero percorso, dopo aver illustrato i principi e i modelli teorici utili alla definizione della struttura argomentativa e dei dispositivi linguistici su cui si regge, con questo lavoro si prova ad avanzare una serie di proposte didattiche concrete da poter sviluppare anche in aula.
Designing “vertical” paths on argumentation, between descriptive models and teaching proposals
Argumentation is a complex practice and, at the same time, crucial for our (social) daily interaction: being able to argue is one of the main objectives to reach at the end of the school career. To this end, it becomes essential to create a vertical curriculum that provides a gradual approach to the act of argumentation (and its constituent processes) and that, from elementary school, in a perspective of organic and systematic continuity, accompanies the learner until the final exam of the second cycle. Considering the textual dimension (and the practice of interaction with the multiformity of argumentative texts) as the guiding thread of the entire course, after illustrating the principles and theoretical models useful for the definition of the argumentative structure and the linguistic devices on which it is based, this paper attempts to suggest a series of concrete didactic proposals that can also be developed in the classroom.
This is an update of a previous meta-analysis published in 2005.
It includes the data published up to march 2010 for a total of 247 papers and 18,300 cases. Cognitive deficits are examined in 5 ...different domains: Memory functioning (128 studies), Global cognitive functioning (131 studies), Language (70 studies), Executive function (67 studies), Attention (76 studies). Only controlled studies were included: patients vs. normal subjects.
Results evidence that in all domains and in all different analyses performed within each domain, patients show a significant reduction of cognitive efficiency with respect to normal subjects. The between studies heterogeneity is very high in almost all domains. There are various sources of this heterogeneity (age, sex, sample size, type of patients, and type of measurement) which contribute to the high degree of not-overlapping information offered by the single studies.
Our results, based on the current scientific evidence, confirm the previous findings that there is a generalized impairment of various cognitive functions in patients with schizophrenia when compared to normal cases. The modalities with which these results are obtained have not changed over the years and the more recent studies do not modify the high heterogeneity previously found between the studies. This reduces the methodological quality of the results. In order to improve the methodological quality of the studies performed in the field of cognitive deficits of patients with schizophrenia, various factors should be taken into account and better managed in designing future studies.
Human activity recognition (HAR) is currently recognized as a key element of a more general framework designed to perform continuous monitoring of human behaviors in the area of ambient assisted ...living (AAL), well-being management, medical diagnosis, elderly care, rehabilitation, entertainment, and surveillance in smart home environments. In this paper, an innovative HAR system, exploiting the potential of wearable devices integrated with the skills of deep learning techniques, is presented with the aim of recognizing the most common daily activities of a person at home. The designed wearable sensor embeds an inertial measurement unit (IMU) and a Wi-Fi section to send data on a cloud service and to allow direct connection to the Internet through a common home router so that the user themselves could manage the installation procedure. The sensor is coupled to a convolutional neural network (CNN) network designed to make inferences with the minimum possible resources to keep open the way of its implementation on low-cost or embedded devices. The system is conceived for daily activity monitor and nine different activities can be highlighted with an accuracy of 97%.
Anastomotic leakage in colorectal cancer surgery Chiarello, Maria Michela; Fransvea, Pietro; Cariati, Maria ...
Surgical oncology,
March 2022, 2022-Mar, 2022-03-00, 20220301, Letnik:
40
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The safety of colorectal surgery for oncological disease is steadily improving, but anastomotic leakage is still the most feared and devastating complication from both a surgical and oncological ...point of view. Anastomotic leakage affects the outcome of the surgery, increases the times and costs of hospitalization, and worsens the prognosis in terms of short- and long-term outcomes. Anastomotic leakage has a wide range of clinical features ranging from radiological only finding to peritonitis and sepsis with multi-organ failure. C-reactive protein and procalcitonin have been identified as early predictors of anastomotic leakage starting from postoperative day 2–3, but abdominal-pelvic computed tomography scan is still the gold standard for the diagnosis. Several treatments can be adopted for anastomotic leakage. However, there is not a universally accepted flowchart for the management, which should be individualized based on patient's general condition, anastomotic defect size and location, indication for primary resection and presence of the proximal stoma. Non‐operative management is usually preferred in patients who underwent proximal faecal diversion at the initial operation. Laparoscopy can be attempted after minimal invasive surgery and can reduce surgical stress in patients allowing a definitive treatment. Reoperation for sepsis control is rarely necessary in those patients who already have a diverting stoma at the time of the leak, especially in extraperitoneal anastomoses. In patients without a stoma who do not require abdominal reoperation for a contained pelvic leak, there are several treatment options, including laparoscopic diverting ileostomy combined with trans-anal anastomotic tube drainage, percutaneous drainage or recently developed endoscopic procedures, such as stent or clip placement or endoluminal vacuum‐assisted therapy. We describe the current approaches to treat this complication, as well as the clinical tests necessary to diagnose and provide an effective therapy.
•The safety of colorectal surgery for oncological disease is steadily improving.•Anastomotic leakage is the most severe complication.•Anastomotic leakage affects the short- and long-term outcomes.•Several treatments can be adopted for anastomotic leakage.
Mutation-derived neoantigens are taking central stage as a determinant in eliciting effective antitumor immune responses following adoptive T-cell therapies. These mutations are patient-specific, and ...their targeting calls for highly personalized pipelines. The promising clinical outcomes of tumor-infiltrating lymphocyte (TIL) therapy have spurred interest in generating T-cell infusion products that have been selectively enriched in neoantigen (or autologous tumor) reactivity. The implementation of an isolation step, prior to T-cell
expansion and reinfusion, may provide a way to improve the overall response rates achieved to date by adoptive T-cell therapies in metastatic cancer patients. Here we provide an overview of the main technologies i.e., peptide major histocompatibility complex (pMHC) multimers, cytokine capture, and activation markers to enrich infiltrating or circulating T-cells in predefined neoantigen specificities (or tumor reactivity). The unique technical and regulatory challenges faced by such highly specialized and patient-specific manufacturing T-cell platforms are also discussed.
Recent research in wearable sensors have led to the development of an advanced platform capable of embedding complex algorithms such as machine learning algorithms, which are known to usually be ...resource-demanding. To address the need for high computational power, one solution is to design custom hardware platforms dedicated to the specific application by exploiting, for example, Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). Recently, model-based techniques and automatic code generation have been introduced in FPGA design. In this paper, a new model-based floating-point accumulation circuit is presented. The architecture is based on the state-of-the-art delayed buffering algorithm. This circuit was conceived to be exploited in order to compute the kernel function of a support vector machine. The implementation of the proposed model was carried out in Simulink, and simulation results showed that it had better performance in terms of speed and occupied area when compared to other solutions. To better evaluate its figure, a practical case of a polynomial kernel function was considered. Simulink and VHDL post-implementation timing simulations and measurements on FPGA confirmed the good results of the stand-alone accumulator.
Monitoring the State of Charge (SoC) in battery cells is necessary to avoid damage and to extend battery life. Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithms and Machine Learning techniques in general can ...provide real-time SoC estimation without the need to design a cell model. In this work, an SVM was trained by applying an Ant Colony Optimization method. The obtained trained model was 10-fold cross-validated and then designed in Hardware Description Language to be run on FPGA devices, enabling the design of low-cost and compact hardware. Thanks to the choice of a linear SVM kernel, the implemented architecture resulted in low resource usage (about 1.4% of Xilinx Artix7 XC7A100TFPGAG324C FPGA), allowing multiple instances of the SVM SoC estimator model to monitor multiple battery cells or modules, if needed. The ability of the model to maintain its good performance was further verified when applied to a dataset acquired from different driving cycles to the cycle used in the training phase, achieving a Root Mean Square Error of about 1.4%.
Ambrosini, L, Presta, V, Vitale, M, Menegatti, E, Guarnieri, A, Bianchi, V, De Munari, I, Condello, G, and Gobbi, G. A higher kick frequency swimming training program optimizes swim-to-cycle ...transition in triathlon. J Strength Cond Res 38(5): 976-984, 2024-The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of an 8-week swimming training program on biomechanical and physiological responses during a swim-to-cycle simulation. Fifteen triathletes were randomly allocated to 3 groups: a 6-beat-kick group (K6), a 4-beat-kick group (K4), and a control group (CG). Biomechanical and physiological parameters were evaluated during a 400-m swim and a 10-minute cycle segment before (Pretraining) and after (Posttraining) the program. A lower stroke frequency ( p = 0.004) and a higher stroke length ( p = 0.002) was found in K6 compared with CG at Posttraining. A reduction in the K6 emerged between Pretraining and Posttraining during cycling for heart rate ( p = 0.005), V̇O 2 ( p = 0.014), and energy expenditure ( p = 0.008). A positive association emerged between swim kick index and cycling cadence in the K6 group. The improvement in stroke frequency and length observed in the K6 group could be explained as an improvement in swimming technique. Similarly, the reduction in energy expenditure during cycling at Posttraining for the K6 group suggests an improvement in the working economy. Triathlon coaches and athletes should consider the inclusion of high swim kick into their training programs to enhance swim and cycling performance, which can ultimately lead to an improvement in the swim-to-cycle transition and the overall triathlon performance.
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