Techniques and Safety Issues for Intraperitoneal Chemotherapy.

Different techniques for delivering perioperative intraperitoneal chemotherapy have been described, but no significant differences have been found among them. Hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy (HIPEC) is a safe treatment for the patient and for the health care workers involved in the procedure provided standard protective and environmental measures are employed.

General Architecture for Development of Virtual Coaches for Healthy Habits Monitoring and Encouragement.

Good health is the result of a healthy lifestyle, where caring about physical activity and nutrition are key concerns. However, in today's society, nutritional disorders are becoming increasingly frequent, affecting children, adults, and elderly people, mainly due to limited nutrition knowledge and the lack of a healthy lifestyle. A commonly adopted therapy to these imbalances is to monitor physical activity and daily habits, such as recording exercise or creating custom meal plans to count the amount of macronutrients and micronutrients acquired in each meal. Nowadays, many health tracking applications (HTA) have been developed that, for instance, record energy intake as well as users' physiological parameters, or measure the physical activity during the day. However, most existing HTA do not have a uniform architectural design on top of which to build other applications and services. In this manuscript, we present system architecture intended to serve as a reference architecture for building HTA solutions. In order to validate the proposed architecture, we performed a preliminary evaluation with 15 well recognized experts in systems and software architecture from different entities around world and who have estimated that our proposal can generate architecture for HTA that is adequate, reliable, secure, modifiable, portable, functional, and with high conceptual integrity. In order to show the applicability of the architecture in different HTA, we developed two telemonitoring systems based on it, targeted to different tasks: nutritional coaching (Food4Living) and physical exercise coaching (TrainME). The purpose was to illustrate the kind of end-user monitoring applications that could be developed.

A Comparative Study on the Suitability of Smartphones and IMU for Mobile, Unsupervised Energy Expenditure Calculi.

The metabolic equivalent of task (MET) is currently the most used indicator for measuring the energy expenditure (EE) of a physical activity (PA) and has become an important measure for determining and supervising a person's state of health. The use of new devices which are capable of measuring inertial movements by means of built-in accelerometers enable the PA to be measured objectively on the basis of the reckoning of "counts". These devices are also known as inertial measurement units (IMUs) and each count is an aggregated value indicating the intensity of a movement and can be used in conjunction with other parameters to determine the MET rate of a particular physical activity and thus it's associated EE. Various types of inertial devices currently exist that enable count calculus and physical activity to be monitored. The advent of mobile devices, such as smartphones, with empowered computation capabilities and integrated inertial sensors, has enabled EE to be measure in a distributed, ubiquitous and natural way, thereby overcoming the reluctance of users and practitioners associated with in-lab studies. From the point of view of the process analysis and infrastructure needed to manage data from inertial devices, there are also various differences in count computing: extra devices are required, out-of-device processing, etc. This paper presents a study to discover whether the estimation of energy expenditure is dependent on the accelerometer of the device used in measurements and to discover the suitability of each device for performing certain physical activities. In order to achieve this objective, we have conducted several experiments with different subjects on the basis of the performance of various daily activities with different smartphones and IMUs.

A communication model to integrate the Request-Response and the Publish-Subscribe paradigms into ubiquitous systems.

The Request-Response (RR) paradigm is widely used in ubiquitous systems to exchange information in a secure, reliable and timely manner. Nonetheless, there is also an emerging need for adopting the Publish-Subscribe (PubSub) paradigm in this kind of systems, due to the advantages that this paradigm offers in supporting mobility by means of asynchronous, non-blocking and one-to-many message distribution semantics for event notification. This paper analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of both the RR and PubSub paradigms to support communications in ubiquitous systems and proposes an abstract communication model in order to enable their seamless integration. Thus, developers will be focused on communication semantics and the required quality properties, rather than be concerned about specific communication mechanisms. The aim is to provide developers with abstractions intended to decrease the complexity of integrating different communication paradigms commonly needed in ubiquitous systems. The proposal has been applied to implement a middleware and a real home automation system to show its applicability and benefits.