1,721,216 research outputs found
Sleep disturbances in dialysis patients
No full textSleep disorders are common in dialysis patients. Insomnia is reported in almost 70% of the dialysed. Old age, presence of common sleep disorders, such as sleep apnea syndrome (SAS) and restless legs syndrome (RLS), comorbid clinical conditions, metabolic parameters and characteristics of dialysis, represent the main risk factors for insomnia. RLS is independently associated with uremia, affecting almost 30% of Caucasians dialysed. Pathophysiology of uremic RLS is still unclear. Although the exact pathogenetic mechanism remains unknown, the efficacy of kidney transplantation on RLS symptoms supports the involvement of renal function in this disturbance. SAS affects 30-80% of dialysis patients. The use of neurophysiological measures is necessary to diagnose SAS. This approach is not applicable in all dialysis patients; consequently, validated questionnaires might be useful to screen patients with a high risk of apnea. Risk of obstructive and central respiratory events are increased by renal failure and dialysis therapy. Excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS) is often reported by the dialysed population. Direct effects of uremic encephalopathy and of somnogenic cytokines have been suggested as the cause of EDS, in addition to the sleep disturbances that increase daytime sleepiness by impairing nocturnal sleep efficiency. Although less frequent, the presence of other sleep disturbances (such as nightmares and narcolepsy) should be carefully evaluated in the uremic population. Several sleep disturbances may potentially be treated but, if left untreated, may impair health status and increase the risk of mortality. However, literature and personal data suggest that undertreatment is common, calling to higher awareness of sleep disturbances among nephrologis
Sleep-related movement disorders.
No full textSeveral movement disorders may occur during nocturnal rest disrupting sleep. A part of these complaints is characterized by relatively simple, non-purposeful and usually stereotyped movements. The last version of the International Classification of Sleep Disorders includes these clinical conditions (i.e. restless legs syndrome, periodic limb movement disorder, sleep-related leg cramps, sleep-related bruxism and sleep-related rhythmic movement disorder) under the category entitled sleep-related movement disorders. Moreover, apparently physiological movements (e.g. alternating leg muscle activation and excessive hypnic fragmentary myoclonus) can show a high frequency and severity impairing sleep quality. Clinical and, in specific cases, neurophysiological assessments are required to detect the presence of nocturnal movement complaints. Patients reporting poor sleep due to these abnormal movements should undergo non-pharmacological or pharmacological treatments
Authorization transparency for accountable access to IoT services
No full textHighly distributed smart environments, such as Smart Cities, require scalable architectures to support a large number of stakeholders that share Internet of Things (IoT) resources and services. We focus on authorization solutions that regulate access of users to smart objects and consider scenarios where a large number of smart objects owners want to share the resources of their devices in a secure way. A popular solution is to delegate third parties, such as public Cloud services, to mediate authorization procedures among users and smart objects. This approach has the disadvantage of assuming third parties as trusted proxies that guarantee correctness of all authorization procedures. In this paper, we propose a system that allows to audit authorizations managed by third parties, to detect and expose their misbehaviors to users, smart objects owners and, possibly, to the public. The proposed system is inspired by the transparency projects used to monitor Web Certification Authorities, but improves over existing proposals through a twofold contribution. First, it is specifically designed for IoT devices, provided with little resources and distributed in constrained environments. Second, it complies to current standard authorization protocols and available open-source software, making it ready to be deployed
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
Design and evaluation of a fog platform supporting device mobility through container migration
Full text linkThe integration between the Internet of Things (IoT) and fog computing can pave the way to a plethora of applications. Fog computing indeed allows IoT devices to offload complex tasks to computing resources, known as fog nodes, that are in their proximity (e.g., at the network edge). Fog proximity enables important advantages, first and foremost low latency. However, IoT device mobility endangers those advantages, as the IoT device gets farther away from the serving fog node. Migrating the fog service among fog nodes, following the device route, permits to maintain proximity and preserve low latency. In this work, we propose an OpenStack-based platform that implements a fog service as a container and migrates the latter to support device mobility. We performed experiments over a real testbed to: (i) evaluate the impact of hardware resources of fog nodes on migration performance; (ii) validate our platform. Results are encouraging, as the average round-trip latency between the mobile device and the fog layer was as low as 10ms and exceeded the maximum value allowed by the considered application (i.e., 20ms) in 1.5% of the experiment duration
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