Designing a Low-Cost System to Monitor the Structural Behavior of Street Lighting Poles in Smart Cities.

The structural collapse of a street lighting pole represents an aspect that is often underestimated and unpredictable, but of relevant importance for the safety of people and things. These events are complex to evaluate since several sources of damage are involved. In addition, traditional inspection methods are ineffective, do not correctly quantify the residual life of poles, and are inefficient, requiring enormous costs associated with the vastness of elements to be investigated.

Deep learning applications in telerehabilitation speech therapy scenarios.

Nowadays, many application scenarios benefit from automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology. Within the field of speech therapy, in some cases ASR is exploited in the treatment of dysarthria with the aim of supporting articulation output. However, in presence of atypical speech, standard ASR approaches do not provide any reliable result in terms of voice recognition due to main issues, including: (i) the extreme intra and inter-speakers variability of the speech in presence of speech impairments, such as dysarthria; (ii) the absence of dedicated corpora containing voice samples from users with a speech disability to train a state-of-the-art speech model, particularly in non-English languages.

Recent Considerations on Gaming Console Based Training for Multiple Sclerosis Rehabilitation.

Multiple Sclerosis (MS) is a well-known, chronic demyelinating disease of the Central Nervous System (CNS) and one of the most common causes of disability in young adults. In this context, one of the major challenges in patients' rehabilitation is to maintain the gained motor abilities in terms of functional independence. This could be partially obtained by applying new emerging and cutting-edge virtual/augmented reality and serious game technologies for a playful, noninvasive treatment that was demonstrated to be quite efficient and effective in enhancing the clinical status of patients and their (re)integration into society.

Effects of Accelerated Aging on the Performance of Low-Cost Ultrasonic Sensors Used for Public Lighting and Mobility Management in Smart Cities.

In the field of Smart Cities, especially for Smart Street Lighting and Smart Mobility, the use of low-cost devices is considered an advantageous solution due to their easy availability, cost reduction and, consequently, technological and methodological development. However, this type of transducers shows many critical issues, e.g.

Blockchain-Based Healthcare Workflow for Tele-Medical Laboratory in Federated Hospital IoT Clouds.

In a pandemic situation such as that we are living at the time of writing of this paper due to the Covid-19 virus, the need of tele-healthcare service becomes dramatically fundamental to reduce the movement of patients, thence reducing the risk of infection. Leveraging the recent Cloud computing and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, this paper aims at proposing a tele-medical laboratory service where clinical exams are performed on patients directly in a hospital by technicians through IoT medical devices and results are automatically sent via the hospital Cloud to doctors of federated hospitals for validation and/or consultation. In particular, we discuss a distributed scenario where nurses, technicians and medical doctors belonging to different hospitals cooperate through their federated hospital Clouds to form a virtual health team able to carry out a healthcare workflow in secure fashion leveraging the intrinsic security features of the Blockchain technology.

Why Deep Learning Is Changing the Way to Approach NGS Data Processing: A Review.

Nowadays, big data analytics in genomics is an emerging research topic. In fact, the large amount of genomics data originated by emerging next-generation sequencing (NGS) techniques requires more and more fast and sophisticated algorithms. In this context, deep learning is re-emerging as a possible approach to speed up the DNA sequencing process.

Are Next-Generation Sequencing Tools Ready for the Cloud?

Cloud-based next-generation sequencing (NGS) tools are currently at an early stage. In this Forum article, we provide a clear picture of the current cloud-based NGS solutions and highlight what is still missing, along with future challenges for the achievement of an ecosystem of biotechnology clouds.

An OAIS-Based Hospital Information System on the Cloud: Analysis of a NoSQL Column-Oriented Approach.

The Open Archive Information System (OAIS) is a reference model for organizing people and resources in a system, and it is already adopted in care centers and medical systems to efficiently manage clinical data, medical personnel, and patients. Archival storage systems are typically implemented using traditional relational database systems, but the relation-oriented technology strongly limits the efficiency in the management of huge amount of patients' clinical data, especially in emerging cloud-based, that are distributed. In this paper, we present an OAIS healthcare architecture useful to manage a huge amount of HL7 clinical documents in a scalable way.

Enabling Secure XMPP Communications in Federated IoT Clouds Through XEP 0027 and SAML/SASL SSO.

Nowadays, in the panorama of Internet of Things (IoT), finding a right compromise between interactivity and security is not trivial at all. Currently, most of pervasive communication technologies are designed to work locally. As a consequence, the development of large-scale Internet services and applications is not so easy for IoT Cloud providers.

Embedded systems for supporting computer accessibility.

Nowadays, customized AT software solutions allow their users to interact with various kinds of computer systems. Such tools are generally available on personal devices (e.g.

Providing Assistive Technology Applications as a Service Through Cloud Computing.

Users with disabilities interact with Personal Computers (PCs) using Assistive Technology (AT) software solutions. Such applications run on a PC that a person with a disability commonly uses. However the configuration of AT applications is not trivial at all, especially whenever the user needs to work on a PC that does not allow him/her to rely on his / her AT tools (e.