Methods for identifying biomedical translation: a systematic review.

Translational medicine is an important area of biomedicine, and has significantly facilitated the development of biomedical research. Despite its relevance, there is no consensus on how to evaluate its progress and impact. A systematic review was carried out to identify all the methods to evaluate translational research. Seven methods were found according to the established criteria to analyze their characteristics, advantages, and limitations. They allow us to perform this type of evaluation in different ways. No relevant advantages were found between them; each one presented its specific limitations that need to be considered. Nevertheless, the Triangle of Biomedicine could be considered the most relevant method, concerning the time since its publication and usefulness. In conclusion, there is still a lack of a gold-standard method for evaluating biomedical translational research.

Managing RFID sensors networks with a general purpose RFID middleware.

RFID middleware is anticipated to one of the main research areas in the field of RFID applications in the near future. The Data EPC Acquisition System (DEPCAS) is an original proposal designed by our group to transfer and apply fundamental ideas from System and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems into the areas of RFID acquisition, processing and distribution systems. In this paper we focus on how to organize and manage generic RFID sensors (edge readers, readers, PLCs, etc…) inside the DEPCAS middleware. We denote by RFID Sensors Networks Management (RSNM) this part of DEPCAS, which is built on top of two new concepts introduced and developed in this work: MARC (Minimum Access Reader Command) and RRTL (RFID Reader Topology Language). MARC is an abstraction layer used to hide heterogeneous devices inside a homogeneous acquisition network. RRTL is a language to define RFID Reader networks and to describe the relationship between them (concentrator, peer to peer, master/submaster).