94 research outputs found
Designing Wearable and Environmental Systems for Elderly Monitoring at Home
No full textThis work presents a research on assistive technology acceptability conducted in the framework of a wider public funded project called MAMMA (Multimodal Ageing Monitoring and Assistance) involving companies, university and a health care institution aimed at developing a telemonitoring system to support autonomously living elderly people.
MAMMA system is aimed to connect permanently elderly patients with their relatives and care givers. In this way, users can continue to live their everyday life with naturality but continuously monitored as in the hospital. In case of anomalous events or health conditions, the system will provide an alarm to care givers and relatives. The monitoring is based on the collection of biological data (ECG and blood pressure) and information related to users movements. The collected data are transmitted to a hub where they are processed, compared and evaluated. The hub is able to create patterns between biological condition and movements (if the user is sleeping, walking, falling...) and define anomalous situations. Eventual alarms are transmitted to the remote assistant & health management.
In our hypothesis, if it is possible to provide this technology to elderly people and if they accept it, then it will be easy to use it for social improvement goals. In the situation where technological issues are solved, acceptability is the key factor. For this reason we developed a multidisciplinary approach to design systems and services that can match the specific needs of elderly users
The Effect of an Impaired Arousal on Short- and Long-Term Mortality of Elderly Patients Admitted to an Acute Geriatric Unit
No full textErgonomics and Design in Healthcare: a Multifactorial User-Centred Approach to Biomedical Assistive Devices
No full text
Effects of 12-months treatment with zoledronate or teriparatide on intima-media thickness of carotid artery in women with postmenopausal osteoporosis: A pilot study
No full textAtherosclerosis and osteoporosis are interrelated entities and share similar pathogenic mechanisms. Recent studies showed that key proteins of bone metabolism, such as osteoprotegerin (OPG) and osteopontin (OPN), are also involved in vascular atherosclerosis and calcifications. The carotid intima-media thickness (CA-IMT) is an early quantitative marker of generalized atherosclerosis. Aim of study was to investigate whether 12-months treatment with zoledronate (ZLN) or teriparatide (TPT) affects CA-IMT and circulating OPG and OPN levels. In this study, 11 postmenopausal osteoporotic women (aged 73, 70.5–74.5 years; median, range interquartile) treated with 5 mg/year iv ZLN; 9 postmenopausal osteoporotic women (aged 70, 62.5–73.5 years) treated with 20 μg/day sc TPT; and 10 aged-, body mass index (BMI)-, glycemic, and lipid profiles-matched, free from anti-osteoporotic and hypocholesterolemic drugs, controls were prospectively investigated at baseline and after 12 months. At baseline, median CA-IMT was similar in the three groups and increased after 12 months. CA-IMT increased significantly in TPT-treated patients (1.0, 0.8–1.2 vs 1.1, 0.9–15 mm, P = 0.04), though the change was minimal. After 12 months of treatment, CA-IMT positively correlated with alkaline phosphatase (ALP) levels (r = 0.767, P = 0.008) and negatively with high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol levels (r = −0.65, P = 0.03), suggesting interplay between active bone remodeling and lipid profile. At baseline and after 12 months, median serum OPG and OPN levels did not differ among the groups and did not correlate with changes in CA-IMT. In conclusion, ZLN and TPT treatments are safe on carotid walls in osteoporotic women with subclinical atherosclerosis; circulating OPG and OPN are not affected by long-term anti-osteoporotic treatments and do not correlate with CA-IMT
Novel cytotoxic 7-iminomethylene and 7-aminomethyl derivatives of camptothecin
No full textA series of new 7-iminomethyl derivatives of camptothecin were obtained from camptothecin-7-aldehyde and aromatic, alicyclic and aliphatic amines. Their hydrogenation led to the corresponding amines. All the imines and the less polar amines showed a marked increase of the cytotoxic activity against H460 non-small lung carcinoma cell line, with respect to topotecan. The lipophilicity of the substituent in position 7 of camptothecin seems to play an important role for cytotoxic potency. The 7-phenyliminomethyl derivative showed efficacy comparable to topotecan in vivo against NSCLC H460 xenografted in athymic nude mice
Cooled SPAD array detector for low light-dose fluorescence laser scanning microscopy
No full text: The single-photon timing and sensitivity performance and the imaging ability of asynchronous-readout single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) array detectors have opened up enormous perspectives in fluorescence (lifetime) laser scanning microscopy (FLSM), such as super-resolution image scanning microscopy and high-information content fluorescence fluctuation spectroscopy. However, the strengths of these FLSM techniques depend on the many different characteristics of the detector, such as dark noise, photon-detection efficiency, after-pulsing probability, and optical cross talk, whose overall optimization is typically a trade-off between these characteristics. To mitigate this trade-off, we present, to our knowledge, a novel SPAD array detector with an active cooling system that substantially reduces the dark noise without significantly deteriorating any other detector characteristics. In particular, we show that lowering the temperature of the sensor to -15°C significantly improves the signal/noise ratio due to a 10-fold decrease in the dark count rate compared with room temperature. As a result, for imaging, the laser power can be decreased by more than a factor of three, which is particularly beneficial for live-cell super-resolution imaging, as demonstrated in fixed and living cells expressing green-fluorescent-protein-tagged proteins. For fluorescence fluctuation spectroscopy, together with the benefit of the reduced laser power, we show that cooling the detector is necessary to remove artifacts in the correlation function, such as spurious negative correlations observed in the hot elements of the detector, i.e., elements for which dark noise is substantially higher than the median value. Overall, this detector represents a further step toward the integration of SPAD array detectors in any FLSM system
The BrightEyes-TTM as an open-source time-tagging module for democratising single-photon microscopy
No full textFluorescence laser-scanning microscopy (LSM) is experiencing a revolution thanks to new single-photon (SP) array detectors, which give access to an entirely new set of single-photon information. Together with the blooming of new SP LSM techniques and the development of tailored SP array detectors, there is a growing need for (i) DAQ systems capable of handling the high-throughput and high-resolution photon information generated by these detectors, and (ii) incorporating these DAQ protocols in existing fluorescence LSMs. We developed an open-source, low-cost, multi-channel time-tagging module (TTM) based on a field-programmable gate array that can tag in parallel multiple single-photon events, with 30 ps precision, and multiple synchronisation events, with 4 ns precision. We use the TTM to demonstrate live-cell super-resolved fluorescence lifetime image scanning microscopy and fluorescence lifetime fluctuation spectroscopy. We expect that our BrightEyes-TTM will support the microscopy community in spreading SP-LSM in many life science laboratories
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