Wood biochemicals for the protection of health. Focus on hemicellulose, stilbenoids and lignans

Trees produce an enormous amount of compounds that are still scantly utilized.However, the results obtained from structurally similar biochemicals suggest that wood-derived compounds could be used for the protection of health in various applications. Polyphenols, for instance, could be extracted from wood in high quantities. Similar polyphenols to those in wood include resveratrol, found in grapes, and secoisolariciresinol, present in flaxseeds. Their consumption has been inversely associated with the incidence of various diseases, especially certain cancers and obesity-related disorders. The aim of this study was to determine the health-promoting effects of woodderived biochemicals. The effect of spruce hemicellulose on the growth of probiotic intestinal bacteria was studied. The results suggest that the bifidobacteria and lactobacilli can utilize hemicellulose and thus it has potential as a prebiotic compound. In particular, the efficacy of pine polyphenols to inhibit the growth of prostate cancer was our main interest. It was found that stilbenoids and lignans inhibited the proliferation of various cancer cells, and reduced the growth of prostate cancer xenografts in mice. The polyphenol rich pine knot extract was well tolerated in diet and extract-derived polyphenols were rapidly absorbed after intake. Furthermore, we determined the effect of the dietary pine knot extract on the weight gain and the expression of aromatase gene in reporter mouse expressing the promoter region of a human aromatase gene. It was found that dietary pine knot extract alleviated the obesity-induced inflammation in adipose tissue and downregulated the expression of a human aromatase gene. Taken together, several components of spruce and pine may have a future role as health-promoting compounds.

Sensor communication in Smart cities and regions: An efficient IoT-based remote health monitoring system

Recent advances in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), especially those related to the Internet of Things (IoT), are facilitating smart regions. Among many services that a smart region can offer, remote health monitoring is a typical application of IoT paradigm. It offers the ability to continuously monitor and collect health-related data from a person, and transmit the data to a remote entity (for example, a healthcare service provider) for further processing and knowledge extraction. An IoT-based remote health monitoring system can be beneficial in rural areas belonging to the smart region where people have limited access to regular healthcare services. The same system can be beneficial in urban areas where hospitals can be overcrowded and where it may take substantial time to avail healthcare. However, this system may generate a large amount of data. In order to realize an efficient IoT-based remote health monitoring system, it is imperative to study the network communication needs of such a system; in particular the bandwidth requirements and the volume of generated data. The thesis studies a commercial product for remote health monitoring in Skellefteå, Sweden. Based on the results obtained via the commercial product, the thesis identified the key network-related requirements of a typical remote health monitoring system in terms of real-time event update, bandwidth requirements and data generation. Furthermore, the thesis has proposed an architecture called IReHMo - an IoT-based remote health monitoring architecture. This architecture allows users to incorporate several types of IoT devices to extend the sensing capabilities of the system. Using IReHMo, several IoT communication protocols such as HTTP, MQTT and CoAP has been evaluated and compared against each other. Results showed that CoAP is the most efficient protocol to transmit small size healthcare data to the remote servers. The combination of IReHMo and CoAP significantly reduced the required bandwidth as well as the volume of generated data (up to 56 percent) compared to the commercial product. Finally, the thesis conducted a scalability analysis, to determine the feasibility of deploying the combination of IReHMo and CoAP in large numbers in regions in north Sweden.