INTECS (Italy)

The integration of wearable smart garments with multiple sensors has gained momentum, enabling real-time monitoring of users' vital parameters across various domains. This study presents the development and validation of an instrumented smart shirt for risk prevention in workplaces designed to enhance worker safety and well-being in occupational settings. The proposed smart shirt is equipped with sensors for collecting electrocardiogram, respiratory waveform, and acceleration data, with signal conditioning electronics and Bluetooth transmission to the mobile application. The mobile application sends the data to the cloud platform for subsequent Preventive Risk Index (PRI) extraction. The proposed SenseRisc system was validated with eight healthy participants during the execution of different physically exerting activities to assess the capability of the system to capture physiological parameters and estimate the PRI of the worker, and user subjective perception of the instrumented intelligent shirt.

Introducción: En el presente artículo se investiga la relación entre autoestima, capital social, confianza y satisfacción con el capital social en personas mayores de 60 años en América Latina1 en 2022 en el marco de la pandemia de COVID-19. Método: Se llevó a cabo una encuesta semiestructurada aplicada a una muestra no probabilística de 255 personas mayores de 60 años de América Latina, provenientes de República Dominicana, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Bolivia y México. Los datos fueron procesados y se construyeron índices de cada dimensión siguiendo la Escala de Rosenberg (1965) y el trabajo de Lee, Lee y Song (2019). Posteriormente se evaluó la normalidad de los indicadores, su distribución y correlación desagregando los resultados por sexo y rango etario, ya sean mayores o menores de 60 años. Resultados: Los resultados indican que la pandemia afectó negativamente el capital social debido al distanciamiento social y la pérdida de interacciones, afectando la salud mental de los adultos mayores. Además, se encontraron diferencias significativas en la autoestima entre hombres y mujeres (p=0.01), pero no en capital social, satisfacción y confianza. También se observaron diferencias en los promedios de capital social entre hombres mayores y menores de 60 años (p=0.03). No hubo diferencias significativas en mujeres mayores y menores de 60 años ni en hombres mayores y mujeres. Entre hombres menores de 60 años y mujeres, solo la autoestima mostró diferencia significativa (p=0.01). Conclusiones: para mejorar la autoestima y la salud mental de las personas mayores, se deberían fomentar espacios de interacción que fortalezcan tanto la red social como la confianza interpersonal.

Location-aware applications are becoming popular nowadays because of the increasing adoption of edge and fog computing. This poses novel difficulties to the conventional applications that utilize the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) as their prevalent communication channel. Also, developers are obliged to figure out the code at whatever point they need to build up MQTT-based location-aware applications. This can causes various issues, for example, protocol standard infringement or problems in data acquisition. This paper proposes a novel extension of the recently released MQTT5 protocol that will permit message delivery by not only respecting the topics of interest but also in addition to geo-referenced information provided by both publishers and subscribers.

Revised Pipeline On-bottom Stability computer program suite. Updated Pipeline On-bottom Stability user guideline. Brief report on indicating possible objectives for further revisions to the analysis tools and user guideline. This report includes reconsideration of the objectives and issues excluded from this program as well as the results of Objective 8 regarding flows at a very low angle of incidence to the alignment of the pipeline.

Contracts are envisaged to support compositional verification of a system as well as reuse and independent development of their implementations. But reuse of safety-relevant components in safety-critical systems needs to cover more than just the implementations. As many safety-relevant artefacts related to the component as possible should be reused together with the implementation to assist the integrator in assuring that the system they are developing is acceptably safe. Furthermore, the reused assurance information related to the contracts should be structured clearly to communicate the confidence in the component. In this work we present a tool-supported methodology for contract-driven assurance and reuse. We define the variability on the contract level in the scope of a trace-based approach to contract-based design. With awareness of the hierarchical nature of systems subject to compositional verification, we propose assurance patterns for arguing confidence in satisfaction of requirements and contracts. We present an implementation extending the AMASS platform to support automated instantiation of the proposed patterns, and evaluate its adequacy for assurance and reuse in a real-world case study.

The development of complex computer-based systems poses two fundamental challenges. On one side, the architectural decomposition must be complemented by a suitable refinement of the requirements. On the other side, it is fundamental to provide the means for component reuse in order to limit development costs. In this chapter, the authors discuss the approach taken in FoReVeR, a project funded by the European Space Agency (ESA), where these two issues are tackled in the setting of space systems. The approach taken in FoReVeR is based on the idea of contracts, which allow one to formally specify the requirements of components at different levels of abstraction and to formally prove the correctness of requirements decomposition. In particular, the authors show how system-level requirements can be progressively refined into software requirements and how the contract-based framework supports the reuse of the components of a reference architecture under development by ESA. The authors discuss how the proposed solution has been integrated in a space development process and present the results of case studies.

In the recent years several proprietary as well as open-source frameworks for network service orchestration have emerged. Similarly a significant body of literature has been produced investigating both the theoretical and practical aspects of network service orchestration. Nevertheless, currently available frameworks for network service orchestration are designed under the assumption that they can have full control over the resources being orchestrated. Such assumption does not hold any more when there is the need to pool both physical and virtual resources across different technological and administrative domains in order to deploy a service. In such a scenario, the different infrastructure providers may be reluctant to provide full access to their resources to a third party. In this paper we present X-MANO, a cross-domain network service orchestration framework. X-MANO is effectively deployment-agnostic and can be used in hierarchical, peer-to-peer and cascading (or recursive) configuration. We validate X-MANO through a proof-of-concept implementation over a multi-domain testbed. Finally, we release all the code under a permissive APACHE 2.0 license making it available to researchers and practitioners.

Abstract Supplying monoethylene glycol (MEG) to the wellhead is critical to gas production since interruption of MEG injection can lead to loss of well production due to the risk of hydrate plug formation in the subsea production infrastructure. Maintaining a high reliability of MEG supply is heavily dependent on good MEG Recovery Unit (MRU) performance. This paper is applicable to subsea gas-condensate wells using MEG for hydrate inhibition and outlines a holistic approach towards diminishing the impact of contaminants in Rich MEG on MRU operating performance. An overview of the impact of various contaminants on MRU operation and how to deal with them will be discussed. Conceptual design considerations and practical applications as per vendor experience will be presented, as well as, examples of the impact of Rich MEG contaminants on MRU operation. During the life of the gas reservoir, both short term events (e.g., completions fluid clean up, well start up, flow rate increases) and long term events (e.g., hydrocarbons entrainment, clay, silt, corrosion products, corrosion inhibitors, scale inhibitors, demulsifiers, formation water breakthrough) introduce contaminants into the Rich MEG that need to be considered in terms of impact on operational reliability of the MRU. If the effects of the contaminants result in reducing the reliability of the MRU to less than the desired design target, then they need to be removed or at least reduced in quantity to a level that permits the reliability target to be achieved. Key groups that need to be involved in conjunction with the Client to ensure successful MRU design are Flow Assurance (wellhead chemistry and pipeline flow), Testing/Simulation facility and/or Vendor facility (study work, bench tests, and/or separation equipment piloting), Hydrocarbons Process Engineering (topsides or onshore processing facilities/MEG Regenerator and MEG Reclaimer design), and the MRU package vendor. Effective communication and collaboration between all parties in the early phases of the project is essential for managing these contaminants and maximizing MRU availability.

The high level of integration in digital electronic chips based on three-dimensional (3D) technology requires accurate modelling of the vertical interconnects (the through silicon vias – TSVs). An accurate prediction of the signal propagation and crosstalk of the TSVs cannot be based on the single via since the interaction among adjacent TSVs in a high density array cannot be neglected. An algorithm is proposed that extends the approach for modelling a TSV array with a complete analytical evaluation of the final multiport scattering parameter matrix, thus making the electromagnetic modelling of such structures more efficient without relying on commercial circuit solvers. The proposed method requires much less processing time with respect to commercial solvers with a comparable accuracy.

The significant growth in mobile data traffic and the ever- increasing user's demand for high-speed, always connected networks continue challenging network providers and lead research towards solutions to enable faster, scalable and more flexible networks. In this paper we present the CROWD approach, a networking framework providing mechanisms to tackle the high densification and heterogeneity of wireless networks. The goal of CROWD is to design protocols and algorithms for very dense and heterogeneous wireless networks, which we call DenseNets. The mechanisms we propose include energy efficiency, MAC enhancements, connectivity management and backhaul configuration to contribute to the next generation of networks considering density as a resource instead of as an obstacle.