ABSTRACT
Today, maintaining an Internet connection is indispensable; as an example, we can refer to IoT applications that can be found in fields such as environmental monitoring, smart manufacturing, healthcare, smart buildings, smart homes, transportation, energy, and others. The critical elements in IoT applications are both the Wireless Sensor Nodes (WSn) and the Wireless Sensor Networks. It is essential to state that designing an application demands a particular design of a WSn, which represents an important time consumption during the process. In line with this observation, our work describes the development of a modular WSn (MWSn) built with digital processing, wireless communication, and power supply subsystems. Then, we reduce the WSn-implementing process into the design of its modular sensing subsystem. This would allow the development and launching processes of IoT applications across different fields to become faster and easier. Our proposal presents a versatile communication between the sensing modules and the MWSn using one- or two-wired communication protocols, such as I2C. To validate the efficiency and versatility of our proposal, we present two IoT-based remote monitoring applications.
ABSTRACT
A comparative single-evaluation cross-sectional study was performed to evaluate cognitive damage in post-COVID-19 patients. The psychophysics tests of Two-Alternative Forced Choice (2AFC) and Simple Reaction Time (SRT), under a designed virtual environment, were used to evaluate the cognitive processes of decision-making, visual attention, and information processing speed. The population under study consisted of 147 individuals, 38 controls, and 109 post-COVID patients. During the 2AFC test, an Emotiv EPOC+® headset was used to obtain EEG signals to evaluate their Focus, Interest, and Engagement metrics. Results indicate that compared to healthy patients or recovered patients from mild-moderate COVID-19 infection, patients who recovered from a severe-critical COVID infection showed a poor performance in different cognitive tests: decision-making tasks required higher visual sensitivity (p = 0.002), Focus (p = 0.01) and information processing speed (p < 0.001). These results signal that the damage caused by the coronavirus on the central nervous and visual systems significantly reduces the cognitive processes capabilities, resulting in a prevalent deficit of 42.42% in information processing speed for mild-moderate cases, 46.15% for decision-making based on visual sensitivity, and 62.16% in information processing speed for severe-critical cases. A psychological follow-up for patients recovering from COVID-19 is recommended based on our findings.
