Discussion on Secure Standard Network of Sensors Powered by Microbial Fuel Cells

Everyday tasks use sensors to monitor and provide information about processes in different scenarios, such as monitoring devices in manufacturing or homes. Sensors need to communicate, with or without wires, while providing secure information. Power can be derived from various energy sources, such as batteries, electrical power grids, and energy harvesting. Energy harvesting is a promising way to provide a sustainable and renewable source to power sensors by scavenging and converting energy from ambient energy sources. However, low energy is harvested through these methods. Therefore, it is becoming a challenge to design and deploy wireless sensor networks while ensuring the sensors have enough power to perform their tasks and communicate with each other through careful management and optimization, matching energy supply with demand. For this reason, data cryptography and authentication are needed to protect sensor communication. This paper studies how energy harvested with microbial fuel cells can be employed in algorithms used in data protection during sensor communication.

An Interoperable Digital Twin with the IEEE 1451 Standards

The shop floor or factory floor is the area inside a factory where manufacturing production is executed. The digitalisation of this area has been increasing in the last few years, introducing the Digital Twin (DT) and the Industry 4.0 concepts. A DT is the digital representation of a real object or an entire system. A DT includes a high diversity of components from different vendors that need to interact with each other efficiently. In most cases, the development of standards and protocols does not consider the need to operate with other standards and protocols, causing interoperability issues. Transducers (sensors and actuators) use the communication layer to exchange information with digital contra parts, and for this reason, the communication layer is one of the most relevant aspects of development. This paper covers DT development, going from the physical to the visualisation layer. The reference architecture models, standards, and protocols focus on interoperability to reach a syntactic level of communication between the IEEE 1451 and the IEC 61499 standards. A semantic communication layer connects transducer devices to the digital representation, achieving a semantic level of interoperability. This communication layer adds semantics to the communication process, allowing the development of an interoperable DT based on the IEEE 1451 standards. The DT presented reaches the syntactic and semantic levels of interoperability, allowing the monitoring and visualisation of a prototype system.

[Modes of death in the PICU of a tertiary care hospital]

BACKGROUND

To determine the prevalence of different modes of death and to identify therapeutic limitations in patients admitted to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) at a teaching hospital.

METHODS

A retrospective study was carried out. Information was collected from the medical records of patients who died at the PICU of Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre between July 1st, 1996 and June 30th, 1997. Four modes of death were considered: patient not responding to cardiopulmonary resuscitation methods (NRCPR), brain death (BD), withdrawal / withhold life-support measures (W/WLS) and decision not to resuscitate (DNR). For cause of death we employed the criterion of organ failure.

RESULTS

Out of 61 deaths occurred during the period under analysis, 44 patients were included in the study. Patient age median was 28 months. The cause of death for all patients was multiple organ failure. Twenty-six patients (59%) were classified in group I (NRCPR and BD) and 18 (41%) in group II (W/WLS and DNR). Among patients of group II, 83% had a chronic and/or debilitating disease (p = 0.017; chi(2)). The prevalent reason for patient admission was the need for organ support (55%), both respiratory and cardiovascular. The median for duration of patient stay at the PICU was 5 days and at the hospital was 11 days. There was no statistically significant difference between the two groups in terms of reason for patient admission or duration of PICU/hospital stay.

CONCLUSIONS

There was a high prevalence of W/WLS and DNR deaths among ICU patients, thus suggesting therapeutic limitation for them. We were unable to evaluate the level of participation by the medical team and by the family in this decision making process.