Remotely delivered exercise-based cardiac rehabilitation: design and content development of a novel mHealth platform

BACKGROUND: Participation in traditional center-based cardiac rehabilitation exercise programs (exCR) is limited by accessibility barriers. Mobile health (mHealth) technologies can overcome these barriers while preserving critical attributes of center-based exCR monitoring and coaching, but these opportunities have not yet been capitalized on.

OBJECTIVE: We aimed to design and develop an evidence- and theory-based mHealth platform for remote delivery of exCR to any geographical location.

METHODS: An iterative process was used to design and develop an evidence- and theory-based mHealth platform (REMOTE-CR) that provides real-time remote exercise monitoring and coaching, behavior change education, and social support.

RESULTS: The REMOTE-CR platform comprises a commercially available smartphone and wearable sensor, custom smartphone and Web-based applications (apps), and a custom middleware. The platform allows exCR specialists to monitor patients' exercise and provide individualized coaching in real-time, from almost any location, and provide behavior change education and social support. Intervention content incorporates Social Cognitive Theory, Self-determination Theory, and a taxonomy of behavior change techniques. Exercise components are based on guidelines for clinical exercise prescription.

CONCLUSIONS: The REMOTE-CR platform extends the capabilities of previous telehealth exCR platforms and narrows the gap between existing center- and home-based exCR services. REMOTE-CR can complement center-based exCR by providing an alternative option for patients whose needs are not being met. Remotely monitored exCR may be more cost-effective than establishing additional center-based programs. The effectiveness and acceptability of REMOTE-CR are now being evaluated in a noninferiority randomized controlled trial.

Platform technology towards the chemical fingerprinting methamphetamine from ephedrine pathways.

A platform technology based on two-dimensional chromatography that allows for the chemical fingerprinting of the synthetic routes of methamphetamine manufacture has been developed. Further novel clandestine synthetic chemistry pathways to methamphetamine have been investigated in collaboration with the Victoria Police Forensic Services Department.

Computer-based monitoring platform for renewable energy systems: Four experimental application cases using NI LabVIEW

Sustainability and responsible environmental behaviour constitute a vital premise in the development of the humankind. In fact, during last decades, the global energetic scenario is evolving towards a scheme with increasing relevance of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) like photovoltaic, wind, biomass and hydrogen. Furthermore, hydrogen is an energy carrier which constitutes a mean for long-term energy storage. The integration of hydrogen with local RES contributes to distributed power generation and early introduction of hydrogen economy. Intermittent nature of many of RES, for instance solar and wind sources, impose the development of a management and control strategy to overcome this drawback. This strategy is responsible of providing a reliable, stable and efficient operation of the system. To implement such strategy, a monitoring system is required.The present paper aims to contribute to experimentally validate LabVIEW as valuable tool to develop monitoring platforms in the field of RES-based facilities. To this aim, a set of real systems successfully monitored is exposed.

Smart mail – a smart platform for mail management

Email is a key communication format in a digital world, both for professional and/or personal usage. Exchanged messages (both human and automatically generated) have reached such a volume that processing them can be a great challenge for human users that try to do it on a daily basis and in an efficient manner. In fact, a significant amount of their time is spent searching and getting context information (normally historic information) in order to prepare a reply message or to take a decision/action, when compared to the actual time required for writing a reply. Therefore, it is of utmost importance for this process to use both automatic and semi-automatic mechanisms that allow to put email messages into context. Since context information is given, not only by historical email messages but also inferred from the relationship between contacts and/or organizations present in the messages, the existence of navigation mechanisms (and even exploration ones) between contacts and entities associated to email messages, is of fundamental importance. This is the main purpose of the SMART Mail prototype, which architecture, data visualization and exploration components and AI algorithms, are presented throughout this paper.

Airborne particulate matter at a bus station : concentration levels and governing parameters

Traffic emissions are an important contributor to ambient air pollution, especially in large cities featuring extensive and high density traffic networks. Bus fleets represent a significant part of inner city traffic causing an increase in exposure to general public, passengers and drivers along bus routes and at bus stations. Limited information is available on quantification of the levels, and governing parameters affecting the air pollution exposure at bus stations. The presented study investigated the bus emissions-dominated ambient air in a large, inner city bus station, with a specific focus on submicrometer particles. The study’s objectives were (i) quantification of the concentration levels; (ii) characterisation of the spatio-temporal variation; (iii) identification of the parameters governing the emissions levels at the bus station and (iv) assessment of the relationship between particle concentrations measured at the street level (background) and within the bus station. The results show that up to 90% of the emissions at the station are ultrafine particles (smaller than 100 nm), with the concentration levels up to 10 times the value of urban ambient air background (annual) and up to 4 times the local ambient air background. The governing parameters affecting particle concentration at the station were bus flow rate and meteorological conditions (wind velocity). Particle concentration followed a diurnal trend, with an increase in the morning and evening, associated with traffic rush hours. Passengers’ exposure could be significant compared to the average outdoor and indoor exposure levels.

Improving the Flexibility of Active Grids through Web Services

Active Grids are a form of grid infrastructure where the grid network is active and programmable. These grids directly support applications with value added services such as data migration, compression, adaptation and monitoring. Services such as these are particularly important for eResearch applications which by their very nature are performance critical and data intensive. We propose an architecture for improving the flexibility of Active Grids through web services. These enable Active Grid services to be easily and flexibly configured, monitored and deployed from practically any platform or application. The architecture is called WeSPNI ('Web Services based on Programmable Networks Infrastructure'). We present the architecture together with some early experimental results on using web services to monitor data movement in an active grid.

Indoor exposure to submicrometer particles and PM2.5 in residential houses in Brisbane, Australia

As part of a large study investigating indoor air in residential houses in Brisbane, Australia, the purpose of this work was to quantify indoor exposure to submicrometer particles and PM2.5 for the inhabitants of 14 houses. Particle concentrations were measured simultaneously for more than 48 hours in the kitchens of all the houses by using a condensation particle counter (CPC) and a photometer (DustTrak). The occupants of the houses were asked to fill in a diary, noting the time and duration of any activity occurring throughout the house during measurement, as well as their presence or absence from home. From the time series concentration data and the information about indoor activities, exposure to the inhabitants of the houses was calculated for the entire time they spent at home as well as during indoor activities resulting in particle generation. The results show that the highest median concentration level occurred during cooking periods for both particle number concentration (47.5´103 particles cm-3) and PM2.5 concentration (13.4 mg m-3). The highest residential exposure period was the sleeping period for both particle number exposure (31%) and PM2.5 exposure (45.6%). The percentage of the average residential particle exposure level in total 24h particle exposure level was approximating 70% for both particle number and PM2.5 exposure.