Leveraging LoRaWAN Technology for Precision Agriculture in Greenhouses.

The technology development in wireless sensor network (WSN) offers a sustainable solution towards precision agriculture (PA) in greenhouses. It helps to effectively use the agricultural resources and management tools and monitors different parameters to attain better quality yield and production. WSN makes use of Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs), a wireless technology to transmit data over long distances with minimal power consumption. LoRaWAN is one of the most successful LPWAN technologies despite its low data rate and because of its low deployment and management costs. Greenhouses are susceptible to different types of interference and diversification, demanding an improved WSN design scheme. In this paper, we contemplate the viable challenges for PA in greenhouses and propose the successive steps essential for effectual WSN deployment and facilitation. We performed a real-time, end-to-end deployment of a LoRaWAN-based sensor network in a greenhouse of the 'Proefcentrum Hoogstraten' research center in Belgium. We have designed a dashboard for better visualization and analysis of the data, analyzed the power consumption for the LoRaWAN communication, and tried three different enclosure types (commercial, simple box and airflow box, respectively). We validated the implications of real-word challenges on the end-to-end deployment and air circulation for the correct sensor readings. We found that temperature and humidity have a larger impact on the sensor readings inside the greenhouse than we initially thought, which we successfully solved through the airflow box design.

'Fit-for-purpose?' - challenges and opportunities for applications of blockchain technology in the future of healthcare.

Blockchain is a shared distributed digital ledger technology that can better facilitate data management, provenance and security, and has the potential to transform healthcare. Importantly, blockchain represents a data architecture, whose application goes far beyond Bitcoin - the cryptocurrency that relies on blockchain and has popularized the technology. In the health sector, blockchain is being aggressively explored by various stakeholders to optimize business processes, lower costs, improve patient outcomes, enhance compliance, and enable better use of healthcare-related data. However, critical in assessing whether blockchain can fulfill the hype of a technology characterized as 'revolutionary' and 'disruptive', is the need to ensure that blockchain design elements consider actual healthcare needs from the diverse perspectives of consumers, patients, providers, and regulators. In addition, answering the real needs of healthcare stakeholders, blockchain approaches must also be responsive to the unique challenges faced in healthcare compared to other sectors of the economy. In this sense, ensuring that a health blockchain is 'fit-for-purpose' is pivotal. This concept forms the basis for this article, where we share views from a multidisciplinary group of practitioners at the forefront of blockchain conceptualization, development, and deployment.

Internet of Things in Marine Environment Monitoring: A Review.

Marine environment monitoring has attracted more and more attention due to the growing concern about climate change. During the past couple of decades, advanced information and communication technologies have been applied to the development of various marine environment monitoring systems. Among others, the Internet of Things (IoT) has been playing an important role in this area. This paper presents a review of the application of the Internet of Things in the field of marine environment monitoring. New technologies including advanced Big Data analytics and their applications in this area are briefly reviewed. It also discusses key research challenges and opportunities in this area, including the potential application of IoT and Big Data in marine environment protection.

The Times they Are a-Changin' - Healthcare 4.0 Is Coming!

The Industrial Revolution brought new economics and new epidemic patterns to the people, which formed the healthcare 1.0 that focused on public health solutions. The emergence of large production concept and technology brought healthcare to 2.0. Bigger hospitals and better medical education were established, and doctors were trained for specialty for better treatment quality. The size of computer shrunk. This allowed fast development of computer-based devices and information technology, leading the healthcare to 3.0. The initiation of smart medicine nowadays announces the arrival of healthcare 4.0 with new brain and new hands. It is an era of big revision of previous technologies, one of which is artificial intelligence which will lead humans to a new world that emphasizes more on advanced and continuous learnings.

Managing Psychiatrist-Patient Relationships in the Digital Age: a Summary Review of the Impact of Technology-enabled Care on Clinical Processes and Rapport.

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: Participatory medicine and the availability of commercial technologies have given patients more options to view and track their health information and to communicate with their providers. This shift in the clinical process may be of particular importance in mental healthcare where rapport plays a significant role in the therapeutic process. RECENT FINDINGS: In this review, we examined literature related to the impact of technology on the clinical workflow and patient-provider rapport in the mental health field between January 2014 and June 2017. Thirty three relevant articles, of 226 identified articles, were summarized. The use of technology clinically has evolved from making care more accessible and efficient to leveraging technology to improve care, communication, and patient-provider rapport. Evidence exists demonstrating that information and communication technologies may improve care by better connecting patients and providers and by improving patient-provider rapport, although further research is needed.

[Communication and Networking - Results of the Working Group 8 of the Forum Future Public Health, Berlin 2016]. / Kommunikation und Vernetzung.

Steady changes in society present challenges to constructive cooperation between stakeholders in the diverse PH landscape of Germany through individualism, globalisation, medical progress, digitalisation, etc. Working group 8 therefore suggests that the PH community should build new internal structures, in order to be able to respond jointly to external challenges, facilitate networking amongst the actors and speak with one voice, when needed. The suggestion is to establish an office that has the task to organise further meetings, harmonize written joint statements and moderate the dialogue amongst peers.

[Education and Training in Public Health - Results of the Working Group 9 of the Forum Future Public Health, Berlin 2016]. / Lehre, Fort- und Weiterbildung in Public Health.

The need for a qualified public health workforce can only be met by appropriate provision of a wide spectrum of basic, advanced and continuing education and training programs on public health that meet international standards. At the same time, efforts must be made to offer young academics attractive career opportunities. Training in public health competences must also be provided for allied professionals in health care and for professions with influence on the determinants of health such as urban planning or agricultural science. This report from a working group meeting at the 'Public Health Zukunftsforum 2016' in Berlin presents ideas for the further development of training in public health in Germany.

Distributed Data Networks That Support Public Health Information Needs.

INTRODUCTION: Data networks, consisting of pooled electronic health data assets from health care providers serving different patient populations, promote data sharing, population and disease monitoring, and methods to assess interventions. Better understanding of data networks, and their capacity to support public health objectives, will help foster partnerships, expand resources, and grow learning health systems. METHODS: We conducted semistructured interviews with 16 key informants across the United States, identified as network stakeholders based on their respective experience in advancing health information technology and network functionality. Key informants were asked about their experience with and infrastructure used to develop data networks, including each network's utility to identify and characterize populations, usage, and sustainability. RESULTS: Among 11 identified data networks representing hundreds of thousands of patients, key informants described aggregated health care clinical data contributing to population health measures. Key informant interview responses were thematically grouped to illustrate how networks support public health, including (1) infrastructure and information sharing; (2) population health measures; and (3) network sustainability. CONCLUSION: Collaboration between clinical data networks and public health entities presents an opportunity to leverage infrastructure investments to support public health. Data networks can provide resources to enhance population health information and infrastructure.

Study of the uses of Information and Communication Technologies by Pain Treatment Unit Physicians.

Adequate use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in health has been shown to save the patient and caregiver time, improve access to the health system, improve diagnosis and control of disease or treatment. All this results in cost savings, and more importantly, they help improve the quality of service and the lives of patients. The purpose of this study is to analyse the differences in the uses of this ICTs between those physicians that belong to Pain Treatment Units (PU) and other physicians that work in pain not linked to these PUs. An online survey, generated by Netquest online survey tool, was sent to both groups of professionals and the data collected was statistical analysed through a logistic regression methodology which is the Logit binomial model. Our results show that those physicians that belong to PUs use ICTs more frequently and consider it more relevant to their clinical practice.

Wireless Medical Telemetry Service Is Changing, Not Going Away.

The Wireless Medical Telemetry Service (WMTS) was established in 1999 by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to protect the use of licensed medical telemetry for physiological and fetal monitoring. The WMTS space has three frequency bands: 608-614 MHz (over-the-air [OTA] television channel 37), 1,395-1,400 MHz, and 1,427-1,432 MHz. This article addresses the recent FCC rule affecting the OTA channel 37 WMTS band. We also will address the potential impact on WMTS use in the hospital, the potential risks, and what hospitals need to do to mitigate those risks.

[Serious game, a link between institution and home]. / Le serious game, un lien entre institution et domicile.

Serious game is a personal innovative technology to facilitate learning and social interaction. It can be used in a patient's home or in an institution. This training tool can also be developed for health professionals, especially accommodation facilities for the elderly. The objective is to integrate knowledge and know-how.

Spatial cyberinfrastructures, ontologies, and the humanities.

We report on research into building a cyberinfrastructure for Chinese biographical and geographic data. Our cyberinfrastructure contains (i) the McGill-Harvard-Yenching Library Ming Qing Women's Writings database (MQWW), the only online database on historical Chinese women's writings, (ii) the China Biographical Database, the authority for Chinese historical people, and (iii) the China Historical Geographical Information System, one of the first historical geographic information systems. Key to this integration is that linked databases retain separate identities as bases of knowledge, while they possess sufficient semantic interoperability to allow for multidatabase concepts and to support cross-database queries on an ad hoc basis. Computational ontologies create underlying semantics for database access. This paper focuses on the spatial component in a humanities cyberinfrastructure, which includes issues of conflicting data, heterogeneous data models, disambiguation, and geographic scale. First, we describe the methodology for integrating the databases. Then we detail the system architecture, which includes a tier of ontologies and schema. We describe the user interface and applications that allow for cross-database queries. For instance, users should be able to analyze the data, examine hypotheses on spatial and temporal relationships, and generate historical maps with datasets from MQWW for research, teaching, and publication on Chinese women writers, their familial relations, publishing venues, and the literary and social communities. Last, we discuss the social side of cyberinfrastructure development, as people are considered to be as critical as the technical components for its success.

Users as essential contributors to spatial cyberinfrastructures.

Current accounts of spatial cyberinfrastructure development tend to overemphasize technologies to the neglect of critical social and cultural issues on which adoption depends. Spatial cyberinfrastructures will have a higher chance of success if users of many types, including nonprofessionals, are made central to the development process. Recent studies in the history of infrastructures reveal key turning points and issues that should be considered in the development of spatial cyberinfrastructure projects. These studies highlight the importance of adopting qualitative research methods to learn how users work with data and digital tools, and how user communities form. The author's empirical research on data sharing networks in the Pacific Northwest salmon crisis at the turn of the 21st century demonstrates that ordinary citizens can contribute critical local knowledge to global databases and should be considered in the design and construction of spatial cyberinfrastructures.

The emergence of spatial cyberinfrastructure.

Cyberinfrastructure integrates advanced computer, information, and communication technologies to empower computation-based and data-driven scientific practice and improve the synthesis and analysis of scientific data in a collaborative and shared fashion. As such, it now represents a paradigm shift in scientific research that has facilitated easy access to computational utilities and streamlined collaboration across distance and disciplines, thereby enabling scientific breakthroughs to be reached more quickly and efficiently. Spatial cyberinfrastructure seeks to resolve longstanding complex problems of handling and analyzing massive and heterogeneous spatial datasets as well as the necessity and benefits of sharing spatial data flexibly and securely. This article provides an overview and potential future directions of spatial cyberinfrastructure. The remaining four articles of the special feature are introduced and situated in the context of providing empirical examples of how spatial cyberinfrastructure is extending and enhancing scientific practice for improved synthesis and analysis of both physical and social science data. The primary focus of the articles is spatial analyses using distributed and high-performance computing, sensor networks, and other advanced information technology capabilities to transform massive spatial datasets into insights and knowledge.

Ephedrine QoS: an antidote to slow, congested, bufferless NoCs.

Datacenters consolidate diverse applications to improve utilization. However when multiple applications are colocated on such platforms, contention for shared resources like networks-on-chip (NoCs) can degrade the performance of latency-critical online services (high-priority applications). Recently proposed bufferless NoCs (Nychis et al.) have the advantages of requiring less area and power, but they pose challenges in quality-of-service (QoS) support, which usually relies on buffer-based virtual channels (VCs). We propose QBLESS, a QoS-aware bufferless NoC scheme for datacenters. QBLESS consists of two components: a routing mechanism (QBLESS-R) that can substantially reduce flit deflection for high-priority applications and a congestion-control mechanism (QBLESS-CC) that guarantees performance for high-priority applications and improves overall system throughput. We use trace-driven simulation to model a 64-core system, finding that, when compared to BLESS, a previous state-of-the-art bufferless NoC design, QBLESS, improves performance of high-priority applications by an average of 33.2% and reduces network-hops by an average of 42.8%.

Based on regular expression matching of evaluation of the task performance in WSN: a queue theory approach.

Due to the limited resources of wireless sensor network, low efficiency of real-time communication scheduling, poor safety defects, and so forth, a queuing performance evaluation approach based on regular expression match is proposed, which is a method that consists of matching preprocessing phase, validation phase, and queuing model of performance evaluation phase. Firstly, the subset of related sequence is generated in preprocessing phase, guiding the validation phase distributed matching. Secondly, in the validation phase, the subset of features clustering, the compressed matching table is more convenient for distributed parallel matching. Finally, based on the queuing model, the sensor networks of task scheduling dynamic performance are evaluated. Experiments show that our approach ensures accurate matching and computational efficiency of more than 70%; it not only effectively detects data packets and access control, but also uses queuing method to determine the parameters of task scheduling in wireless sensor networks. The method for medium scale or large scale distributed wireless node has a good applicability.

On the multiuser diversity of relay-aided downlink systems using reduced feedback.

We introduce an efficient multiuser scheduling method using amplify-and-forward relaying in relay-aided downlink systems, consisting of one base station (BS), one relay station, and multiple mobile stations (MSs). In our scheme, the BS opportunistically selects both the transmission mode, that is, either one- or two-hop transmission, and the desired user (i.e., the desired MS). Closed-form expressions for the average achievable rates are derived for the two transmission modes with multiuser scheduling, and its asymptotic solutions are also analyzed in the limit of large number of MSs. Based on the analysis, we propose a feedback-efficient two-step multiuser scheduling algorithm: the transmission mode selection followed by the user selection that only needs a partial feedback for instantaneous signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) to the BS. We also analyze the average SNR condition such that the multiuser diversity gain is fully exploited for two-hop transmission. The proposed two-step scheduling algorithm exhibits the quite comparable achievable rates to those of the optimal one using full feedback information, while its required feedback information is reduced by half of the optimal one.

An opportunistic routing mechanism combined with long-term and short-term metrics for WMN.

WMN (wireless mesh network) is a useful wireless multihop network with tremendous research value. The routing strategy decides the performance of network and the quality of transmission. A good routing algorithm will use the whole bandwidth of network and assure the quality of service of traffic. Since the routing metric ETX (expected transmission count) does not assure good quality of wireless links, to improve the routing performance, an opportunistic routing mechanism combined with long-term and short-term metrics for WMN based on OLSR (optimized link state routing) and ETX is proposed in this paper. This mechanism always chooses the highest throughput links to improve the performance of routing over WMN and then reduces the energy consumption of mesh routers. The simulations and analyses show that the opportunistic routing mechanism is better than the mechanism with the metric of ETX.

Dynamic cooperative clustering based power assignment: network capacity and lifetime efficient topology control in cooperative ad hoc networks.

Cooperative communication (CC) is used in topology control as it can reduce the transmission power and expand the transmission range. However, all previous research on topology control under the CC model focused on maintaining network connectivity and minimizing the total energy consumption, which would lead to low network capacity, transmission interruption, or even network paralysis. Meanwhile, without considering the balance of energy consumption in the network, it would reduce the network lifetime and greatly affect the network performance. This paper tries to solve the above problems existing in the research on topology control under the CC model by proposing a power assignment (DCCPA) algorithm based on dynamic cooperative clustering in cooperative ad hoc networks. The new algorithm clusters the network to maximize network capacity and makes the clusters communicate with each other by CC. To reduce the number of redundant links between clusters, we design a static clustering method by using Kruskal algorithm. To maximize the network lifetime, we also propose a cluster head rotating method which can reach a good tradeoff between residual energy and distance for the cluster head reselection. Experimental results show that DCCPA can improve 80% network capacity with Cooperative Bridges algorithm; meanwhile, it can improve 20% network lifetime.