Healthcare

The concept of quality is central to the delivery of laboratory services and this is achieved through the incorporation of quality systems, quality control and quality assurance in all aspects of laboratory practice. Essential to all aspects of laboratory results is to ensure that they are accurate, reliable and delivered in a timely fashion. To ensure that these requirements are in place and that they are consistently being met, audits should be regularly undertaken. Quality audits play an essential role in the Quality Management System and these are typically a systematic examination of a system, discrete operate, product or process. In pharmaceuticals and healthcare, the analytical laboratory function plays an important role in testing products and samples against defined acceptance criteria and this information is used for release purposes. Such laboratories tend to be organized along specific disciplines (such as chemistry or microbiology) and fall within a generalized control laboratory (or quality control laboratory) unit.

Audits of the laboratory will be performed at predefined time intervals, assessing whether the laboratory complies with the defined quality system processes and this can involve procedural or results-based assessment criteria. Such audits (sometimes called ‘assessments’) can be internal (from within the company) or external (such as conducted by customers or inspectors from regulator bodies or standards / certification agencies for accreditation purposes or where inspections are performed by regulatory agencies).

People at risk of suicide tend to be isolated and cannot share their thoughts. For this reason, suicidal ideation monitoring becomes a hard task. Therefore, people at risk of suicide need to be monitored in a manner capable of identifying if and when they have a suicidal ideation, enabling professionals to perform timely interventions. This study aimed to develop the Boamente tool, a solution that collects textual data from users’ smartphones and identifies the existence of suicidal ideation. The solution has a virtual keyboard mobile application that passively collects user texts and sends them to a web platform to be processed. The platform classifies texts using natural language processing and a deep learning model to recognize suicidal ideation, and the results are presented to mental health professionals in dashboards. Text classification for sentiment analysis was implemented with different machine/deep learning algorithms. A validation study was conducted to identify the mode...

Conclusion: Adult Japanese AD patients who experience severe exacerbation of symptoms immediately after discontinuation of TCS use generally improve over time. We suggest caution regarding long-term TCS treatment in AD patients.

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The wide use of wearable devices rises a lot of concerns about the privacy and security of personal data that are collected and stored by such services. This concern is even higher when such data is produced by healthcare monitoring wearable devices and thus the impact of any data leakage is more significant. In this work a classification of the wearable devices used for healthcare monitoring is conducted, and the most prominent relevant privacy and security issues and concerns are presented. Furthermore, a brief review of alternative approaches that can eliminate most of such issues, including federated learning, homomorphic encryption, and tinyML, is presented. The aim of this work is to present the privacy and security concerns in healthcare monitoring wearable devices, as well as some solutions in hot topics about these issues.

Sedation encompasses a continuum from complete unconsciousness to drowsiness and anxiolysis where some awareness might be expected. Most patients undergoing endoscopy sedation expect to be completely unconscious during the procedure and thus have unmet expectations regarding their state of consciousness. This study aimed to evaluate whether endoscopy sedation information sheets reduce the level of concern regarding possible awareness during endoscopy sedation at a major regional hospital. Our findings were that 28.8% of patients who received the endoscopy sedation information sheet (n = 82) were concerned about awareness during the procedure, compared to 36.5% of patients in the control group (n = 105). However, the difference was not statistically significant. We also found that the incidence of awareness was higher (13.9%) in the intervention group compared to 8.8% in the control group but, again, not statistically different. This study allowed us to elucidate the level of concern...

This work is motivated by a general question: can energy harvesting capabilities embedded in modern sensor nodes be exploited so as to support security
mechanisms which otherwise would be too demanding and hardly viable?
More specifically, in this work we focus on the support of extremely powerful,
but complex, fine-grained data-centric access control mechanisms based on
multi-authority Ciphertext Policy Attribute Based Encryption (CP-ABE).
By integrating access control policies into the (encrypted) data, such mechanisms do not require any server-based access control infrastructure and are
thus highly desirable in many wireless sensor network scenarios. However,
as concretely shown by a proof-of-concept implementation first carried out
in this paper on TelosB and MicaZ motes, computational complexity and
energy toll of state-of-the-art multi-authority CP-ABE schemes are still critical. We thus show how to mitigate the relatively large energy consumption
of the CP-ABE cryptographic operations by proposing
AGREE
(Access
control for GREEn wireless sensor networks), a framework which exploits
energy harvesting opportunities to pre-compute and cache suitably chosen
CP-ABE-encrypted keys, so as to minimize the need to perform CP-ABE
encryptions when no energy from harvesting is available. We assess the performance of
AGREE
by means of simulation and actual implementation,
and by validating its operation with real-world energy-harvesting traces collected indoors by Telos B motes equipped with photovoltaic cells, as well as
publicly available traces of radiant light energy. Our results show that complex security mechanisms may become significantly less demanding when
implemented so as to take advantage of energy harvesting opportunities.

Background: The study is to correlate Chest X-ray scoring with the laboratory markers and to determine the oxygen requirement in COVID-19 patients. Methodology: We conducted a retrospective study in COVID confirmed patients in the age group of 18 to 80 years admitted in our health care system. At the time of admission within 24 hours, chest X-ray and blood investigations like complete blood count, C-reactive protein, Lactate Dehydrogenase (LDH), d-dimers, serum ferritin were performed in all the patients.