Suchergebnisse

Global warming is seriously affecting society, but also to a lesser extent the longevity of the population and migration of people from the countryside to the cities present challenges for governments. Smart applications (smart city, smart grid, smart buildings, smart water, smart health) offer an alternative to deal with these challenges. Pervasive sensors, with increasingly powerful features, allow innovative developments, making possible a progressive growth in the so-called smart applications. Because information is the backbone of any type of smart environment, this work presents an architecture approach to take advantage of the capabilities of advanced sensors. Specifically in this work this architecture is applied to renewable energy systems for a better management of the thermal energy. A semantic sensors network has been developed to provide context awareness for managing thermal flow in a near Zero Energy Building (nZEB). The key elements are an Ontology Web Language (OWL) to describe the sensors and contextual knowledge, and a Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) to represent rule-based inferences for context reasoning. The main goal is to improve thermal energy comfort in a building with a reduction in the energy used. ; Peer reviewed

© 2020 The Authors. European Journal of Immunology published by Wiley‐VCH GmbH. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. ; SARS-CoV-2 has emerged as a human pathogen, causing clinical signs, from fever to pneumonia-COVID-19-but may remain mild or asymptomatic. To understand the continuing spread of the virus, to detect those who are and were infected, and to follow the immune response longitudinally, reliable and robust assays for SARS-CoV-2 detection and immunological monitoring are needed. We quantified IgM, IgG, and IgA antibodies recognizing the SARS-CoV-2 receptor-binding domain (RBD) or the Spike (S) protein over a period of 6 months following COVID-19 onset. We report the detailed setup to monitor the humoral immune response from over 300 COVID-19 hospital patients and healthcare workers, 2500 University staff, and 198 post-COVID-19 volunteers. Anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibody responses follow a classic pattern with a rapid increase within the first three weeks after symptoms. Although titres reduce subsequently, the ability to detect anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG antibodies remained robust with confirmed neutralization activity for up to 6 months in a large proportion of previously virus-positive screened subjects. Our work provides detailed information for the assays used, facilitating further and longitudinal analysis of protective immunity to SARS-CoV-2. Importantly, it highlights a continued level of circulating neutralising antibodies in most people with confirmed SARS-CoV-2. ; We like to acknowledge the funding from the European Union H2020 ERA project (No 667824 – EXCELLtoINNOV) and the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) to P.F‐C. (SFRH/BD/131605/2017), PTDC/MED‐IMU/28003/2017, and research4COVID19 (no. 231_596873172, Generating SARS‐CoV2 seroconversion assay and no. 729, High‐throughput SARS‐CoV2 neutralizing antibodies assessment), with ...