1,721,014 research outputs found
Temporal abstractions for interpreting diabetic patients monitoring data
No full textIn this article we present a new approach for the intelligent analysis of longitudinal data coming from chronic patients home monitoring. This approach exploits temporal abstractions to pre-process the raw data and to obtain a new time series of abstract episodes, whose features are then interpreted through statistical and probabilistic techniques. We describe in detail an application of the presented technique to the analysis of diabetic patients' data, showing some results obtained on a real case monitored for six months. © 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved
Interpreting longitudinal data through temporal abstractions: An application to diabetic patients monitoring
No full textIn this paper we present a new approach for the intelligent analysis of longitudinal data coming from diabetic patients home monitoring. This approach consists in exploiting temporal abstractions to preprocess the raw data and to obtain a new time series of abstract episodes, whose features are then interpreted through statistical and probabilistic techniques. We finally show the application of this methodology on the data of two diabetic patients monitored for six months
A distributed system for diabetic patient management
No full textThis paper describes a telemedicine system for diabetic patients management, presenting its architecture, the technical solutions adopted and the methodologies on which it is based. The system, designed to provide decision support in a distributed environment, is composed of two modules, a Patient Unit and a Medical Unit, connected by telecommunication services. We outline how the two modules can interact to perform an effective monitoring and a cooperative control of glucose metabolism. In particular, we detail the data analysis tasks performed by the two units and how the results are exploited to assist patients and physicians in revising and adjusting the therapeutic protocol. We will finally describe the current prototypical implementation of the system that uses HTTP as the communication protocol and HTML pages as the graphical user interface
Impact of COVID-19 lockdown on PM concentrations in an Italian Northern City: A year-by-year assessment
No full textIn the last century, the increase in traffic, human activities and industrial production have led to a diffuse presence of air pollution, which causes an increase of risk of several health conditions such as respiratory diseases. In Europe, air pollution is a serious concern that affects several areas, one of the worst ones being northern Italy, and in particular the Po Valley, an area characterized by low air quality due to a combination of high population density, industrial activity, geographical factors and weather conditions. Public health authorities and local administrations are aware of this problem, and periodically intervene with temporary traffic limitations and other regulations, often insufficient to solve the problem. In February 2020, this area was the first in Europe to be severely hit by the SARS-CoV-2 virus causing the COVID-19 disease, to which the Italian government reacted with the establishment of a drastic lockdown. This situation created the condition to study how significant is the impact of car traffic and industrial activity on the pollution in the area, as these factors were strongly reduced during the lockdown. Differently from some areas in the world, a drastic decrease in pollution measured in terms of particulate matter (PM) was not observed in the Po Valley during the lockdown, suggesting that several external factors can play a role in determining the severity of pollution. In this study, we report the case study of the city of Pavia, where data coming from 23 air quality sensors were analyzed to compare the levels measured during the lockdown with the ones coming from the same period in 2019. Our results show that, on a global scale, there was a statistically significant reduction in terms of PM levels taking into account meteorological variables that can influence pollution such as wind, temperature, humidity, rain and solar radiation. Differences can be noticed analyzing daily pollution trends too, as—compared to the study period in 2019—during the study period in 2020 pollution was higher in the morning and lower in the remaining hours
Dynamic assessment of personal exposure to air pollution for everyone: A smartphone-based approach
No full textIn Epidemiology, exposure assessment is the process of measuring or estimating the intensity of human exposures to an environmental agent such as air pollution. Healthcare agencies typically take into consideration yearly averaged pollution values and apply them to all citizens, in risk models. However distinct parts of cities can have significantly different levels of pollution and individual habits can influence exposure, too. Consequently, in epidemiology and public health, there is an increasing interest for personal exposure assessment, i.e. the capability of measuring the exposure of individuals. Within the EU H2020 PULSE project, an innovative mechanism for the individual and dynamic assessment of exposure to air pollution has been implemented. The present paper illustrates its technological and scientific components. The system has already been deployed to several pilot cities of the project and Pavia, Italy, has been the first one. In that city several hundreds of tracks have already been acquired and processed. Therefore, the paper thoroughly illustrates the assessment procedure with examples
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Certification of component-based particle therapy software
No full textThe operation of particle therapy facilities requires complex control systems, often spanning several software development environments, each containing large number of applications. While the component-based development approach brings many benefits, institutions often struggle integrating it during the certification process. As part of the technological update of one of its control system environments, the Centro Nazionale di Adroterapia Oncologica (CNAO) treatment center chose to develop the software applications of this environment in a component-based approach, while focusing on strategies to also optimize the certification process. In this document, we examine the challenges of compositional development in the medical software certification process. Additionally, the approach taken by CNAO during the update of one of its control system's environments is presented, along with the evaluation of the expected impact on its certification as medical software
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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