Wearables for Biomechanical Performance Optimization and Risk Assessment in Industrial and Sports Applications

Wearable technologies are emerging as a useful tool with many different applications. While these devices are worn on the human body and can capture numerous data types, this literature review focuses specifically on wearable use for performance enhancement and risk assessment in industrial- and sports-related biomechanical applications. Wearable devices such as exoskeletons, inertial measurement units (IMUs), force sensors, and surface electromyography (EMG) were identified as key technologies that can be used to aid health and safety professionals, ergonomists, and human factors practitioners improve user performance and monitor risk. IMU-based solutions were the most used wearable types in both sectors. Industry largely used biomechanical wearables to assess tasks and risks wholistically, which sports often considered the individual components of movement and performance. Availability, cost, and adoption remain common limitation issues across both sports and industrial applications.

EdgeX over Kubernetes: Enabling Container Orchestration in EdgeX

With the exponential growth of the Internet of Things (IoT), edge computing is in the limelight for its ability to quickly and efficiently process numerous data generated by IoT devices. EdgeX Foundry is a representative open-source-based IoT gateway platform, providing various IoT protocol services and interoperability between them. However, due to the absence of container orchestration technology, such as automated deployment and dynamic resource management for application services, EdgeX Foundry has fundamental limitations of a potential edge computing platform. In this paper, we propose EdgeX over Kubernetes, which enables remote service deployment and autoscaling to application services by running EdgeX Foundry over Kubernetes, which is a product-grade container orchestration tool. Experimental evaluation results prove that the proposed platform increases manageability through the remote deployment of application services and improves the throughput of the system and service quality with real-time monitoring and autoscaling.

Rapid and concise quantification of mycelial growth by microscopic image intensity model and application to mass cultivation of fungi

The microbial food fermentation industry requires real-time monitoring and accurate quantification of cells. However, filamentous fungi are difficult to quantify as they have complex cell types such as pellet, spores, and dispersed hyphae. In this study, numerous data of microscopic image intensity (MII) were used to develop a simple and accurate quantification method of Cordyceps mycelium. The dry cell weight (DCW) of the sample collected during the fermentation was measured. In addition, the intensity values were obtained through the ImageJ program after converting the microscopic images. The prediction model obtained by analyzing the correlation between MII and DCW was evaluated through a simple linear regression method and found to be statistically significant (R2 = 0.941, p < 0.001). In addition, validation with randomly selected samples showed significant accuracy, thus, this model is expected to be used as a valuable tool for predicting and quantifying fungal growth in various industries.

Polymath: Low-Latency MPC via Secure Polynomial Evaluations and Its Applications

While the practicality of secure multi-party computation (MPC) has been extensively analyzed and improved over the past decade, we are hitting the limits of efficiency with the traditional approaches of representing the computed functionalities as generic arithmetic or Boolean circuits. This work follows the design principle of identifying and constructing fast and provably-secure MPC protocols to evaluate useful high-level algebraic abstractions; thus, improving the efficiency of all applications relying on them. We present Polymath, a constant-round secure computation protocol suite for the secure evaluation of (multi-variate) polynomials of scalars and matrices, functionalities essential to numerous data-processing applications. Using precise natural precomputation and high-degree of parallelism prevalent in the modern computing environments, Polymath can make latency of secure polynomial evaluations of scalars and matrices independent of polynomial degree and matrix dimensions. We implement our protocols over the HoneyBadgerMPC library and apply it to two prominent secure computation tasks: privacy-preserving evaluation of decision trees and privacy-preserving evaluation of Markov processes. For the decision tree evaluation problem, we demonstrate the feasibility of evaluating high-depth decision tree models in a general n-party setting. For the Markov process application, we demonstrate that Poly-math can compute large powers of transition matrices with better online time and less communication.

Towards automatic detection and classification of orca (Orcinus orca) calls using cross-correlation methods

Orca (Orcinus orca) is known for complex vocalisation. Their social structure consists of pods and clans sharing unique dialects due to geographic isolation. Sound type repertoires are fundamental for monitoring orca populations and are typically created visually and aurally. An orca pod occurring in the Ligurian Sea (Pelagos Sanctuary) in December 2019 provided a unique occasion for long-term recordings. The numerous data collected with the bottom recorder were analysed with a traditional human-driven inspection to create a repertoire of this pod and to compare it to catalogues from different orca populations (Icelandic and Antarctic) investigating its origins. Automatic signal detection and cross-correlation methods (R package warbleR) were used for the first time in orca studies. We found the Pearson cross-correlation method to be efficient for most pairwise calculations (> 85%) but with false positives. One sound type from our repertoire presented a high positive match (range 0.62–0.67) with one from the Icelandic catalogue, which was confirmed visually and aurally. Our first attempt to automatically classify orca sound types presented limitations due to background noise and sound complexity of orca communication. We show cross-correlation methods can be a powerful tool for sound type classification in combination with conventional methods.

Density-based classification with the DENCLUE algorithm

<p><span>Classification of information is a vague and difficult to explore area of research, hence the emergence of grouping techniques, often referred to Clustering. It is necessary to differentiate between an unsupervised and a supervised classification. Clustering methods are numerous. Data partitioning and hierarchization push to use them in parametric form or not. Also, their use is influenced by algorithms of a probabilistic nature during the partitioning of data. The choice of a method depends on the result of the Clustering that we want to have. This work focuses on classification using the density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBSCAN) and DENsity-based CLUstEring (DENCLUE) algorithm through an application made in csharp. Through the use of three databases which are the IRIS database, breast cancer wisconsin (diagnostic) data set and bank marketing data set, we show experimentally that the choice of the initial data parameters is important to accelerate the processing and can minimize the number of iterations to reduce the execution time of the application.</span></p>

Rapid and Concise Quantification of Mycelial Growth by Microscopic Image Intensity Model and Application to Mass Cultivation of Fungi

The microbial food fermentation industry requires real-time monitoring and accurate quantification of cells. However, filamentous fungi are difficult to quantify as they have complex cell types such as pellet, spores, and dispersed hyphae. In this study, numerous data of microscopic image intensity (MII) were used to develop a simple and accurate quantification method of Cordyceps mycelium. The dry cell weight (DCW) of the sample collected during the fermentation was measured. In addition, the intensity values were obtained through the ImageJ program after converting the microscopic images. The prediction model obtained by analyzing the correlation between MII and DCW was evaluated through a simple linear regression method and found to be statistically significant (R2 = 0.941, p <0.001). In addition, validation with randomly selected samples showed significant accuracy, thus, this model is expected to be used as a valuable tool for predicting and quantifying fungal growth in various industries.

New insights into neuropeptides regulation of immune system and hemopoiesis: effects on hematologic malignancies

: Several neurotransmitters and neuropeptides were reported to join to or to cooperate with different cells of the immune system, bone marrow, and peripheral cells and numerous data support that neuroactive molecules might control immune system activity and hemopoiesis operating on lymphoid organs, and the primary hematopoietic unit, the hematopoietic niche. Furthermore, many compounds seem to be able to take part to the leukemogenesis and lymphomagenesis process, and in the onset of multiple myeloma. In this review, we will assess the possibility that neurotransmitters and neuropeptides may have a role in the onset of haematological neoplasms, may affect the response to treatment or may represent a useful starting point for a new therapeutic approach. More in vivo investigations are needed to evaluate neuropeptide’s role in haematological malignancies and the possible utilization as an antitumor therapeutic target. Comprehending the effect of the pharmacological administration of neuropeptide modulators on hematologic malignancies opens up new possibilities in curing clonal hematologic diseases to achieve more satisfactory outcomes.

The Utah Population Database. The Legacy of Four Decades of Demographic Research

This paper summarizes the unique characteristics of the Utah Population Database (UPDB) and how it has catalyzed demographic, social and medical research since the mid-1970s. The UPDB is one of the world’s richest sources of linked population-based information for demographic, genetic, and epidemiological studies at the Individual-level. UPDB has supported hundreds of demographic and biomedical investigations, with heavy emphasis on families, in large part because of its size, representativeness, inclusion of multi-generational pedigrees, and linkages to numerous data sources. The UPDB contains data on over 11 million individuals from the late 18th century to the present. UPDB data represent Utah’s population that appear in administrative records and many of these data are updated due to longstanding efforts to add records as they become available including statewide birth and death certificates, hospitalizations, ambulatory surgeries, and driver licenses. The depth of information within UPDB has been used to support a wide range of family, medical and historical demographic studies which are described here arranged into four broad categories: fertility, mortality, life course analyses and some selected special topics. The paper concludes with a discussion of the future areas of innovation within the UPDB and the types of novel studies that they are likely to facilitate.

DE-striping hype spectral Remote Sensing Images using Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Hyperspectral far off detecting records reflectance or emittance information in a huge amount of bordering and tight unearthly groups, and accordingly has numerous data in distinguishing and planning the mineral zones. Then again, the science and natural information gives us some other productive data about the actual qualities of pictures and channels that have been recorded from the surface. In this work, we focus on de-striping the hyperspectral remote sensing images on Hyperion data by applying Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN). What is clear is the high significance of applying the sufficient pre-preparing on Hyperion information as a result of low sign to-commotion proportion. By contrasting the known layers of DCNN model for de-striping hyperspectral pictures. The results obtained by applying the mentioned methods, it is revealed that all the higher stripes in an image as well as black color has been reduced and entirely associated with the Hyperion data alteration, and in contrast, the Hyperion imagery successfully corresponds to the de-striping of hyperspectral image with an accuracy of 91.89% using DCNN model. The proposed DCNN is capable of reaching high accuracy 150s after the start of the evaluation phase and never reaches low accuracy. The pre-trained DCNN model approach would be an adequate solution considering de-striping as its high inference time is lower compared existing available methods which are not as efficient for de-striping.