Real-Time Wireless Platform for In Vivo Monitoring of Bone Regeneration.

For the monitoring of bone regeneration processes, the instrumentation of the fixation is an increasingly common technique to indirectly measure the evolution of bone formation instead of ex vivo measurements or traditional in vivo techniques, such as X-ray or visual review. A versatile instrumented external fixator capable of adapting to multiple bone regeneration processes was designed, as well as a wireless acquisition system for the data collection. The design and implementation of the overall architecture of such a system is described in this work, including the hardware, firmware, and mechanical components. The measurements are conditioned and subsequently sent to a PC via wireless communication to be in vivo displayed and analyzed using a developed real-time monitoring application. Moreover, a model for the in vivo estimation of the bone callus stiffness from collected data was defined. This model was validated in vitro using elastic springs, reporting promising results with respect to previous equipment, with average errors and uncertainties below 6.7% and 14.04%. The devices were also validated in vivo performing a bone lengthening treatment on a sheep metatarsus. The resulting system allowed the in vivo mechanical characterization of the bone callus during experimentation, providing a low-cost, simple, and highly reliable solution.

An Efficient Wireless Sensor Network for Industrial Monitoring and Control.

This paper presents the design of a wireless sensor network particularly designed for remote monitoring and control of industrial parameters. The article describes the network components, protocol and sensor deployment, aimed to accomplish industrial constraint and to assure reliability and low power consumption. A particular case of study is presented. The system consists of a base station, gas sensing nodes, a tree-based routing scheme for the wireless sensor nodes and a real-time monitoring application that operates from a remote computer and a mobile phone. The system assures that the industrial safety quality and the measurement and monitoring system achieves an efficient industrial monitoring operations. The robustness of the developed system and the security in the communications have been guaranteed both in hardware and software level. The system is flexible and can be adapted to different environments. The testing of the system confirms the feasibility of the proposed implementation and validates the functional requirements of the developed devices, the networking solution and the power consumption management.

A Smart Sensor for Defending against Clock Glitching Attacks on the I2C Protocol in Robotic Applications.

This paper presents a study about hardware attacking and clock signal vulnerability. It considers a particular type of attack on the clock signal in the I2C protocol, and proposes the design of a new sensor for detecting and defending against this type of perturbation. The analysis of the attack and the defense is validated by means of a configurable experimental platform that emulates a differential drive robot. A set of experimental results confirm the interest of the studied vulnerabilities and the efficiency of the proposed sensor in defending against this type of situation.

Design and implementation of a new real-time frequency sensor used as hardware countermeasure.

A new digital countermeasure against attacks related to the clock frequency is presented. This countermeasure, known as frequency sensor, consists of a local oscillator, a transition detector, a measurement element and an output block. The countermeasure has been designed using a full-custom technique implemented in an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC), and the implementation has been verified and characterized with an integrated design using a 0.35 mm standard Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology (Very Large Scale Implementation-VLSI implementation). The proposed solution is configurable in resolution time and allowed range of period, achieving a minimum resolution time of only 1.91 ns and an initialization time of 5.84 ns. The proposed VLSI implementation shows better results than other solutions, such as digital ones based on semi-custom techniques and analog ones based on band pass filters, all design parameters considered. Finally, a counter has been used to verify the good performance of the countermeasure in avoiding the success of an attack.

Cardiovascular disease risk in subjects with type 2 diabetes mellitus in a population in southern Spain.

To calculate overall 10-year cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk for patients with type 2 diabetes we applied the UKPDS and SCORE prediction models to data derived from clinical notes of 1846 patients (mean age 65.5 years; 55.8% women) with type 2 diabetes attending eight Primary-Care Centres serving a catchment population of 200,000 citizens in Andalusia. The results showed obesity and high blood pressure present in >50%, established CVD in 24%, retinopathy in 30%, and nephropathy in 17%. Mean HbAlc level was 7.3%. Compliance with therapeutic goals was 54% for systolic blood pressure <130 mmHg, 39% for HbA1c <7% and 9% for LDL cholesterol <2.58 mmol/L. Approximately 33% were receiving treatment with metformin, statins, renin-angiotensin system inhibitors and anti-aggregation agents. UKPDS risk for coronary heart disease (CHD) was 23% and 16% for stroke. The SCORE 10-year mortality risk was 5%. Correlation coefficient between the two models predicting CVD risk was 0.68 (p<0.001). We conclude that, despite the European consensus that CVD is low in Mediterranean countries, the CVD risk factors in the type 2 diabetes sub-population in southern Spain is relatively high. Specific measures of health-care intervention are needed if CVD-associated morbido-mortality rates in these diabetic patients are to be reduced.