Being a Mom Can Be Tough...

The officer at the driving license counter asked a lady: "What is your occupation?"

The woman, seeking a renewal of her license, seemed to be puzzled, so the officer said: "Ma'am, are you employed, have your own business or..." 

 

"Oh yes!" The woman replied, "I do have a full-time occupation. I am a mother!" 

 

The officer rolled his eyes: "We don't have 'mother' as an option for occupation. I'll write it down as 'housewife'. That takes care of all questions."

This had happened long ago, and was forgotten. Years later, when I (the woman in the story, if you hadn't guessed) went to get my license, the public relations officer was a somewhat pompous woman. 

 

"Your occupation?" she asked in a rather authoritative tone. 

 

I just had a moment of inspiration and replied "I am a researcher in the field of child development, nutrition and inter-personal relationships." 

The lady officer stared at me in amazement.

I calmly repeated my statement and she wrote it down verbatim. Then, unable to conceal her curiosity, she politely asked "What exactly do you do in your profession, ma'am?"

 

I was feeling good about having described my occupation so calmly and confidently. so I replied "My research projects have been going on for a number of years (mothers NEVER retire). 

 

My research is conducted in the laboratory as well as in the field. 

 

I have two bosses (one is god and the other is my entire family). 

 

I have received two honors in this field (a son and a daughter). 

 

My topic is considered to be the most difficult part of sociology. (all moms will agree). 

I have to work more than 14 hours every day. Sometimes even 24 hours are not enough and the challenges are tougher than many other professions. My compensation is in terms of mental satisfaction rather than money."

I had earned a small victory over the governmental red tape today. I was no longer merely 'a housewife'. Instead, I was now a highly placed functionary in a service vital to mankind - motherhood!

Housewife.' Isn't it a great title? Fit to be added to the nameplate on the door?

 

By this standard, grandmothers deserve to be called senior research officers, and great- grandmothers qualify as 'research directors '. Aunts and other ladies of that age group can be called 'research facilitators'!

This is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.   

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This IIT Hyd device can alert doctors about heart diseases by monitoring ECG data in real-time

Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad (IIT Hyderabad) have developed a low-power device that can monitor electrocardiogram (ECG) and alert patients and doctors in real-time about the risk of cardiovascular diseases (CVD). CVD tops the list of public health concern compared to other diseases and has almost become the primary cause of human deaths, as per a survey of the World Health Organisation (WHO). The main causes include changing trend in lifestyle, unhealthy eating habits, tobacco usage, low fruit and vegetable intake and lack of physical activity and lot of stress. These factors necessitate developing a personalised CVD monitoring device powered by battery backup and with a very low form factor to achieve unobtrusiveness that works under the emerging cyber-physical system setup.
The research was conducted by a team comprising Vemishetty Naresh (PhD, Research Scholar, Advanced Embedded Systems and IC Design Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering), IIT Hyderabad and Dr Amit Acharyya, Associate Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering. As a proof of concept demonstration, the researchers have taken healthy and various unhealthy cases from the Physionet database to validate the proposed method. Their research has been published recently in the peer-reviewed international journal Scientific Reports, an online open access, scientific journal published by prestigious Nature Research.
Speaking about the importance of this research, Dr Amit Acharyya said, "CVD is one of the deadliest disease and irrespective of the economy of the country people are getting affected by it. It is manifested in different forms necessitating the early diagnosis, therapy and prognosis. Hence the proposed work on the classification is going to be of immense help for the society."
In addition, they also worked on developing different classification techniques and integrating them to make a generic algorithm. A novel System-On-Chip (SoC) architecture is developed in a low complex way by resource sharing concept for the CVD automation. Thus the whole system can cover various ECG abnormalities and finally come up with the prototype board which looks similar to as a smartphone at the patient end.
Speaking about their plans to take this research to benefit the society at large, Vemishetty Naresh said, "There is an exponential increment in human mortality rate, due to the delayed diagnosis, lack of proper distribution of health care facilities and prognosis centers in the vicinity. There is a need of a robust automated device for the early detection of the vital abnormal ECG signals in chronic CVD patients."
This medical science and technological needs impose many challenges on such device development such as low power consuming system design trade-off between the on-board processing and RF (Radio Frequency) communication, low complexity analog front-end circuit design and energy harvesting or self-power mechanism to prolong battery life. Further, there is great necessity to develop a robust algorithm to find any desynchronisation in the ECG waves. With the present advancement in technology, there is a great scope for developing robust medical ECG devices in analysing the ECG signals and classify the patient condition. This method will predict the departure from the healthy condition to unhealthy condition corresponding to the CVDs.

How does the system work?
The researchers overcame the above mentioned challenges by proposing a novel System-on-Chip (SoC) architecture for CVD monitoring. Scrutinising the technical challenges like low-power and low-area for delivering reliable healthcare under resource constraints, they have proposed low-complex Boundary Detection (BD) and Feature Extraction (FE), low-complex f-QRS Detection and Morphology Identification (FDMI) architecture, Rule Engine (RE), and Token based compression technique. The aim of the researchers is to take this idea further to the system level from the concept and propose a low-complexity but medically reliable SoC architecture.
The above proposed methodologies are used to extract the essential clinical features from each ECG beat and compared with the standard values to give the binary classification as normal or abnormal. Many research articles had put thrust on studying the clinical features of ECG beats and the heart rate variability for the diagnosis. Despite these findings, it is difficult to derive an equivocal temporal relationship of these methodologies to predict arrhythmias. The prediction of ECG abnormalities associated with the change of morphology in the localised features (PR interval, QRS complex, QT interval) will allow the clinicians sufficient time to intervene to stop its escalation causing sudden cardiac death. 

"To mitigate the above limitations our attempt in this thesis is to propose a generalised Phase Space Reconstruction (PSR) based detection and classification of the CVD by exploiting the localised features of the ECG unlike the state-of-art PSR techniques," said one of the researchers. Since the aim was to do the real-time ECG classification on an edge-device that is running under resource constrained environment with scarcity of power and area, therefore the idea of the researchers was to propose a low-complexity yet accurate solution and therefore they adopted classical technique of localised features detection.
This research was partly supported by Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India under the ‘Internet of Things (IoT) Research of Interdisciplinary Cyber Physical Systems (ICPS) Programme,' with the Project entitled ‘IOT Based Holistic Prevention and Prediction of CVD. 

this is only for your information, kindly take the advice of your doctor for medicines, exercises and so on.     
https://gscrochetdesigns.blogspot.com. one can see my crochet creations  
https://gseasyrecipes.blogspot.com. feel free to view for easy, simple and healthy recipes    
https://kneereplacement-stickclub.blogspot.com. for info on knee replacement     

Study discovers how diabetes lead to vascular disease

A team of scientists and physicians identified a cellular connection between diabetes and one of its major complications- narrowing of the blood vessel- which increases risks of several health conditions, including heart disease and stroke.

The same team previously found that high blood glucose, the hallmark symptoms of diabetes, activates an enzyme known as protein kinase A (PKA), which increases calcium channel activity and constricts blood vessels.

This was a surprise since PKA is typically associated with blood vessel widening and wasn't really on our radar. We wanted to understand the molecular processes that created this opposite reaction, said senior author.

For the new study, the team conducted a series of experiments on the effects of high glucose on cerebral blood vessels and arterial cells that control blood flow. The tests were conducted on a unique genetically modified mouse and  2 mouse models of diabetes that were developed for studies of cardiovascular health.

The researchers focused on the relationship between PKA and adenylyl cyclase (AC), an enzyme involved in cyclic AMP(cAMP) production, a cellular messenger with a critical role in vascular cell function.

Their results showed that one AC in particular, AC5 mediated cAMP and PKA activation, triggering increased calcium channel activity and blood vessel narrowing. They also found that AC5 was essential for blood-vessel constriction during diabetes.

The team hopes to test the effects of the AC5 chain reaction in high-glucose conditions in human cells. This step could confirm it as a treatment target for reducing the vascular complications of diabetes, which can include eye, kidney and cerebral, gastrointestinal and cardiovascular disease.

We see every day in our clinics the devastating impact of diabetes on the health and lives of our patients. Our work brings into much clearer focus on how high glucose can damage the vascular system and gives us a new target for blocking its effects, said the co-author of the study.

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