Lameness detection in sheep through behavioural sensor data analysis

Lameness is a clinical symptom referring to locomotion changes, resulting in impaired and erratic movements that differ widely from normal gait or posture. Lameness has an adverse impact on both sheep welfare and farm economy, therefore the preclinical detection of lameness will improve both sheep health and, in turn, support farming businesses. A newly developed sensor technology should enable automatic monitoring of animals to determine physiological and behavioural indicators, which would then be subsequently used as inputs into data analysis algorithms. The sensor that will be used to conduct this research is immensely accurate and sensitive. It provides acceleration, angular velocity, orientation, longitude, latitude and the time of reading which can be set up according to the demanded accuracy. This study will develop an automated model to detect lameness in sheep by analysing the data retrieved from a mounted sensor on the neck of the sheep. This model will help the shepherd to detect lame sheep earlier, to prevent trimming or even culling

Energy efficiency using cloud management of LTE networks employing fronthaul and virtualized baseband processing pool

The cloud radio access network (C-RAN) emerges as one of the future solutions to handle the ever-growing data traffic, which is beyond the physical resources of current mobile networks. The C-RAN decouples the traffic management operations from the radio access technologies, leading to a new combination of a virtualized network core and a fronthaul architecture. This new resource coordination provides the necessary network control to manage dense Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks overlaid with femtocells. However, the energy expenditure poses a major challenge for a typical C-RAN that consists of extended virtualized processing units and dense fronthaul data interfaces. In response to the power efficiency requirements and dynamic changes in traffic, this paper proposes C-RAN solutions and algorithms that compute the optimal backup topology and network mapping solution while denying interfacing requests from low-flow or inactive femtocells. A graph-coloring scheme is developed to label new formulated fronthaul clusters of femtocells using power as the performance metric. Additional power savings are obtained through efficient allocations of the virtualized baseband units (BBUs) subject to the arrival rate of active fronthaul interfacing requests. Moreover, the proposed solutions are used to reduce power consumption for virtualized LTE networks operating in the Wi-Fi spectrum band. The virtualized network core use the traffic load variations to determine those femtocells who are unable to transmit to switch them off for additional power savings. The simulation results demonstrate an efficient performance of the given solutions in large-scale network models

A smart voltage and current monitoring system for three phase inverters using an android smartphone application

In this paper, a new smart voltage and current monitoring system (SVCMS) technique is proposed. It monitors a three phase electrical system using an Arduino platform as a microcontroller to read the voltage and current from sensors and then wirelessly send the measured data to monitor the results using a new Android application. The integrated SVCMS design uses an Arduino Nano V3.0 as the microcontroller to measure the results from three voltage and three current sensors and then send this data, after calculation, to the Android smartphone device of an end user using Bluetooth HC-05. The Arduino Nano V3.0 controller and Bluetooth HC-05 are a cheap microcontroller and wireless device, respectively. The new Android smartphone application that monitors the voltage and current measurements uses the open source MIT App Inventor 2 software. It allows for monitoring some elementary fundamental voltage power quality properties. An effort has been made to investigate what is possible using available off-the-shelf components and open source software

The Role of Microbiota in Cardiovascular Risk: Focus on Trimethylamine Oxide

The extensive collection of bacteria cohabiting within the host collaborates with human functions and metabolisms in both health and disease. The fine equilibrium of commensals is tightly controlled and an imbalance (“dysbiosis”) in the gut microbiota can play different roles in human disease. The development of new genome sequencing techniques has allowed a better understanding of the role of human gut microbiota. This led to the identification of numerous metabolites produced in the gut, which have been suggested to play a role in human disease. Among these, trimethylamine oxide (TMAO) appears to be of particular importance as a risk factor and potentially as a causative agent of various pathologies, most remarkably cardiovascular and disease and other associated conditions. Mechanistic links are yet to be established, however, increased levels of TMAO have been shown to augment the risk of developing renal failure, metabolic syndrome, diabetes mellitus, heart failure, hypertension, atherosclerosis, and dyslipidemia ultimately leading to increased risk of serious cardiovascular events. This article reviews the potential impact of TMAO in human cardiovascular disease

An interference-aware virtual clustering paradigm for resource management in cognitive femtocell networks

Femtocells represent a promising alternative solution for high quality wireless access in indoor scenarios where conventional cellular system coverage can be poor. They are randomly deployed by the end user, so only post deployment network planning is possible. Furthermore, this uncoordinated deployment creates severe interference to co-located femtocells, especially in dense deployments. This paper presents a new architecture using a generalised virtual cluster femtocell (GVCF) paradigm, which groups together FAP into logical clusters. It guarantees severely interfering and overlapping femtocells are assigned to different clusters. Since each cluster operates on different band of frequencies, the corresponding virtual cluster controller only has to manage its own FAPs, so the overall system complexity is low. The performance of the GVCF algorithm is analysed from both a resource availability and cluster number perspective. Simulation results conclusively corroborate the superior performance of the GVCF model in interference mitigation, particularly in high density FAP scenarios

A new synchronization technique of a three-phase grid tied inverter for photovoltaic applications

Three-phase grid synchronization is one of the main techniques of the three-phase grid connected power inverters used in photovoltaic systems. This technique was used to reach the fast and accurate three-phase grid tied inverter synchronization. In this paper a new synchronization method is presented on the basis of integrating the grid voltage two times (line-to-line or phase voltage). This method can be called “double integral synchronization method” (DISM) as it integrates the grid voltage signals two times to generate the reference signals of three-phase photovoltaic inverter currents. DISM is designed and simulated in this paper to operate in both analog and digital circuits of three-phase photovoltaic inverter system with the same topology. The digital circuit design and dsPIC33FJ256GP710A as a microcontroller (the dsPIC33FJ256GP710A with the Explorer 16 Development Board from microchip) was used practically in this paper to generate and control the sine pulse width modulation (SPWM) technique according to DISM for three-phase photovoltaic inverter system. The main advantage for this method (DISM) is learning how to eliminate the integration constant to generate the reference signals without needing any reference signals or truth table, just the line-to-line or phase voltage of grid

Design and implementation of a gate driver circuit for three-phase grid tied photovoltaic inverter application

This paper presents and describes the design and implementation of a new gate driver circuit for a three-phase grid tide photovoltaic inverter system using SIC- MOSFET at the power stage. The proposed design consists of a 5 kW power three-phase inverter system with a new isolated gate driver related to IGBT, MOSFET and SIC-MOSFETs. The designed circuit has a dual gate driver in a single package for each leg, and each circuit has an optocoupler to provide high output peak current to turn the power transistor On or Off, and a saturation protection circuit. The control algorithm for the full system of the three-phase application runs on a TMS320F28335 DSP. The TMS320F28335 Digital Signal Processor (DSP) microcontroller is one of the Texas Instruments™ (TI) family that was used to generate the three-phase 120⁰ Bus Clamp PWM of the system, with high frequency around 25 kHz

Detection of ochratoxin A in aptamer assay using total internal reflection ellipsometry

The current work is a continuation of our research targeted the development of novel optical sensing technologies for detection of mycotoxins. The method of (TIRE) was developed in the last decade as a combination of spectroscopic ellisometry and SPR and was proved to be a highly sensitive analytical tool in bio-sensing particularly attractive for detection of low molecular weight analytes, such as mycotoxins. The use of aptamers as highly specific artificial molecular receptors to ochratoxin A (OTA) in conjunction with the method Total Internal Reflection Ellipsometry (TIRE) is reported here for the first time. Our results showed a possibility of label-free optical detection of OTA down to 0.01 ppb in concentration in direct assay with specific aptamer. The kinetics of aptamer/OTA binding was studied with dynamic TIRE spectral measurements and allowed evaluating the affinity constant KD = 1.8 10−8 Mol which is characteristic for highly specific aptamer/OTA binding. © 201

New pulse width modulation technique to reduce losses for three-phase photovoltaic inverters

Nowadays, most three-phase, “of the shelf” inverters use electrolytic capacitors at the DC bus to provide short term energy storage. However, this has a direct impact on inverter lifetime and the total cost of the photovoltaic system. Tis article proposes a novel control strategy called a 120∘ bus clamped PWM (120BCM). Te 120BCM modulates the DC bus and uses a smaller DC bus capacitor value, which is typical for flm capacitors. Hence, the inverter lifetime can be increased up to the operational lifetime of the photovoltaic panels. Tus, the total cost of ownership of the PV system will decrease signifcantly. Furthermore, the proposed 120BCM control strategy modulates only one phase current at a time by using only one leg to perform the modulation. As a result, switching losses are signifcantly reduced. Te full system setup is designed and presented in this paper with some practical result