Impact of information technology supported serious leisure gardening on the wellbeing of older adults: The Turntable project.

Objective: The study presented in this paper aimed to assess the effect of an Information Technology enabled community gardening program for older adults, developed by an international consortium.

Methods: We have executed a quantitative, pre- and post-test field trial with older adult volunteers to test the proposed programme in two European countries, Italy and Belgium (n=98). We used standardized and ad hoc questionnaires to measure changes in the volunteers' mental and psychological state during the trial.

Automatic signal quality assessment of raw trans-abdominal biopotential recordings for non-invasive fetal electrocardiography.

Wearable monitoring systems for non-invasive multi-channel fetal electrocardiography (fECG) can support fetal surveillance and diagnosis during pregnancy, thus enabling prompt treatment. In these embedded systems, power saving is the key to long-term monitoring. In this regard, the computational burden of signal processing methods implemented for the fECG extraction from the multi-channel trans-abdominal recordings plays a non-negligible role.

Impact of pulsed-wave-Doppler velocity-envelope tracing techniques on classification of complete fetal cardiac cycles.

Fetal echocardiography is an operator-dependent examination technique requiring a high level of expertise. Pulsed-wave Doppler (PWD) is often used as a reference for the mechanical activity of the heart, from which several quantitative parameters can be extracted. These aspects suggest the development of software tools that can reliably identify complete and clinically meaningful fetal cardiac cycles that can enable their automatic measurement.

A non-invasive multimodal foetal ECG-Doppler dataset for antenatal cardiology research.

Non-invasive foetal electrocardiography (fECG) continues to be an open topic for research. The development of standard algorithms for the extraction of the fECG from the maternal electrophysiological interference is limited by the lack of publicly available reference datasets that could be used to benchmark different algorithms while providing a ground truth for foetal heart activity when an invasive scalp lead is unavailable. In this work, we present the Non-Invasive Multimodal Foetal ECG-Doppler Dataset for Antenatal Cardiology Research (NInFEA), the first open-access multimodal early-pregnancy dataset in the field that features simultaneous non-invasive electrophysiological recordings and foetal pulsed-wave Doppler (PWD).

Systematic analysis of wavelet denoising methods for neural signal processing.

Among the different approaches for denoising neural signals, wavelet-based methods are widely used due to their ability to reduce in-band noise. All wavelet denoising algorithms have a common structure, but their effectiveness strongly depends on several implementation choices, including the mother wavelet, the decomposition level, the threshold definition, and the way it is applied (i.e.

Annotated real and synthetic datasets for non-invasive foetal electrocardiography post-processing benchmarking.

Non-invasive foetal electrocardiography (fECG) can be obtained at different gestational ages by means of surface electrodes applied on the maternal abdomen. The signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the fECG is usually low, due to the small size of the foetal heart, the foetal-maternal compartment, the maternal physiological interferences and the instrumental noise. Even after powerful fECG extraction algorithms, a post-processing step could be required to improve the SNR of the fECG signal.

A Novel Tool for Non-Invasive Fetal Electrocardiography Research: the NInFEA Dataset.

In this work, a novel open-source dataset for noninvasive fetal electrocardiography research is presented. It is composed of 60 high-quality electrophysiological recordings acquired between the 21st and the 27th weeks of gestation. For each acquisition, whose average duration is 30.

Wavelet denoising as a post-processing enhancement method for non-invasive foetal electrocardiography.

Background And Objective: The detection of a clean and undistorted foetal electrocardiogram (fECG) from non-invasive abdominal recordings is an open research issue. Several physiological and instrumental noise sources hamper this process, even after that powerful fECG extraction algorithms have been used. Wavelet denoising is widely used for the improvement of the SNR in biomedical signal processing.

Automatic detection of complete and measurable cardiac cycles in antenatal pulsed-wave Doppler signals.

Background And Objective: Pulsed-wave Doppler (PWD) echocardiography is the primary tool for antenatal cardiological diagnosis. Based on it, different measurements and validated reference parameters can be extracted. The automatic detection of complete and measurable cardiac cycles would represent a useful tool for the quality assessment of the PWD trace and the automated analysis of long traces.

Morphological Neural Computation Restores Discrimination of Naturalistic Textures in Trans-radial Amputees.

Humans rely on their sense of touch to interact with the environment. Thus, restoring lost tactile sensory capabilities in amputees would advance their quality of life. In particular, texture discrimination is an important component for the interaction with the environment, but its restoration in amputees has been so far limited to simplified gratings.

Comparison of Single- and Multi-reference QRD-RLS adaptive filter for non-invasive fetal electrocardiography.

Non-invasive fetal electrocardiography (ECG) would allow accessing very relevant information on fetal cardiac function, especially for arrhythmias. However, the signal-to-noise ratio is significantly low, since fetal ECG is embedded in instrumental noise and spectrally overlapping maternal electrophysiological interferences. Among the different techniques proposed in the scientific literature, some variants of adaptive filters have been proposed for maternal ECG cancellation and fetal QRS complex enhancement.

Systematic analysis of single- and multi-reference adaptive filters for non-invasive fetal electrocardiography.

Non-invasive fetal electrocardiography (ECG) has been a research challenge for the past few decades. Due to instrumental noise and the spectral overlap of the maternal ECG signal, the signal-to-noise ratio for fetal ECG is very low. Various techniques have been proposed for cancelling the maternal ECG signal and extracting the fetal QRS complex from non-invasive abdominal recordings.

Design and Usability Assessment of a Multi-Device SOA-Based Telecare Framework for the Elderly.

Telemonitoring is a branch of telehealth that aims at remotely monitoring vital signs, which is important for chronically ill patients and the elderly living alone. The available standalone devices and applications for the self-monitoring of health parameters largely suffer from interoperability problems; meanwhile, telemonitoring medical devices are expensive, self-contained, and are not integrated into user-friendly technological platforms for the end user. This paper presents the technical aspects and usability assessment of the telemonitoring features of the HEREiAM platform, which supports heterogeneous information technology systems.

Correction: An automated system for the objective evaluation of human gustatory sensitivity using tongue biopotential recordings.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.

Six-Month Assessment of a Hand Prosthesis with Intraneural Tactile Feedback.

Objective: Hand amputation is a highly disabling event, which significantly affects quality of life. An effective hand replacement can be achieved if the user, in addition to motor functions, is provided with the sensations that are naturally perceived while grasping and moving. Intraneural peripheral electrodes have shown promising results toward the restoration of the sense of touch.

Automatic Recognition of Complete Atrioventricular Activity in Fetal Pulsed-Wave Doppler Signals.

Echocardiography is the gold standard for antenatal cardiological assessment. However, the adoption of this technique is challenging, since it is intrinsically operator-dependent and because of the different confounding factors related to the fetal heart size, the fetal movements and the ultrasound artifacts. Among the different options, fetal echocardiography is widely used, concurring to an early diagnosis of several cardiac pathologies.

Functional estimation of bony segment lengths using magneto-inertial sensing: Application to the humerus.

Inertial sensor technology has assumed an increasingly important role in the field of human motion analysis. However, the reliability of the kinematic estimates could still be critical for specific applications in the field of functional evaluation and motor rehabilitation. Within this context, the definition of subject-specific multi-body kinematic models is crucial since it affects the accuracy and repeatability of movement reconstruction.

Exploiting All Programmable SoCs in Neural Signal Analysis: A Closed-Loop Control for Large-Scale CMOS Multielectrode Arrays.

Microelectrode array (MEA) systems with up to several thousands of recording electrodes and electrical or optical stimulation capabilities are commercially available or described in the literature. By exploiting their submillisecond and micrometric temporal and spatial resolutions to record bioelectrical signals, such emerging MEA systems are increasingly used in neuroscience to study the complex dynamics of neuronal networks and brain circuits. However, they typically lack the capability of implementing real-time feedback between the detection of neuronal spiking events and stimulation, thus restricting large-scale neural interfacing to open-loop conditions.

A 64-channels neural interface for biopotentials recording and PNS stimulation.

A biomedical interface that combines into a single and compact device the recording of biopotentials and the electrical stimulation of neural fibres is presented. It is intended for enabling the control over a robotic hand and for restoring the sensory feedback in amputees by directly interfacing the peripheral nervous system (PNS) in closed-loop. A modular system consisting in one or more independent 16-channels bidirectional units was conceived.

Comparative evaluation of different wavelet thresholding methods for neural signal processing.

Neural signal decoding is the basis for the development of neuroprosthetic devices and systems. Depending on the part of the nervous system these signals are picked up from, different signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) can be experienced. Wavelet denoising is often adopted due to its capability of reducing, to some extent, the noise falling within the signal spectrum.

An automated system for the objective evaluation of human gustatory sensitivity using tongue biopotential recordings.

The goal of this work is to develop an automatic system for the evaluation of the gustatory sensitivity of patients using an electrophysiological recording of the response of bud cells to taste stimuli. In particular, the study aims to evaluate the effectiveness and limitations of supervised classifiers in the discrimination between subjects belonging to the three 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP) taster categories (supertasters, medium tasters, and non-tasters), exploiting features extracted from electrophysiological recordings of the tongue. Thirty-nine subjects (equally divided into the three PROP status classes by standard non-objective scaling methods) underwent a non-invasive, differential, biopotential recording of their tongues during stimulation with PROP by using a custom-made, flexible, silver electrode.

An FPGA Platform for Real-Time Simulation of Spiking Neuronal Networks.

In the last years, the idea to dynamically interface biological neurons with artificial ones has become more and more urgent. The reason is essentially due to the design of innovative neuroprostheses where biological cell assemblies of the brain can be substituted by artificial ones. For closed-loop experiments with biological neuronal networks interfaced with modeled networks, several technological challenges need to be faced, from the low-level interfacing between the living tissue and the computational model to the implementation of the latter in a suitable form for real-time processing.

Investigation on the hermeticity of an implantable package with 32 feedthroughs for neural prosthetic applications.

This paper presents an implantable package aimed at hosting a bidirectional neural interface for neural prosthetic applications. The package has been conceived to minimize the invasivity for the patient, for this reason a cylindrical container with an outer diameter of 7 mm and a length of 21 mm has been designed. The package, realized in alumina (Al2O3), presents 32 hermetic feedthroughs located at the top and bottom base of the cylinder.