Background: A vast amount of mobile apps have been developed during the past few months in an attempt to “flatten the curve” of the increasing number of COVID-19 cases.Objective: This systematic review aims to shed light into studies found in the scientific literature that have used and evaluated mobile apps for the prevention, management, treatment, or follow-up of COVID-19.Methods: We searched the bibliographic databases Global Literature on Coronavirus Disease, PubMed, and Scopus to identify papers focusing on mobile apps for COVID-19 that show evidence of their real-life use and have been developed involving clinical professionals in their design or validation.Results: Mobile apps have been implemented for training, information sharing, risk assessment, self-management of symptoms, contact tracing, home monitoring, and decision making, rapidly offering effective and usable tools for managing the COVID-19 pandemic.Conclusions: Mobile apps are considered to be a valuable tool for citizens, health professionals, and decision makers in facing critical challenges imposed by the pandemic, such as reducing the burden on hospitals, providing access to credible information, tracking the symptoms and mental health of individuals, and discovering new predictors.

The reduction of road congestion requires intuitive urban congestion-control platforms that can facilitate transport stakeholders in decision making. Interactive ITS visual analytics tools can be of significant assistance, through their real-time interactive visualizations, supported by advanced data analysis algorithms. In this paper, an interactive visual analytics platform is introduced that allows the exploration of historical data and the prediction of future traffic through a unified interactive interface. The platform is backed by several data analysis techniques, such as road behavioral visualization and clustering, anomaly detection, and traffic prediction, allowing the exploration of behavioral similarities between roads, the visual detection of unusual events, the testing of hypotheses, and the prediction of traffic flow after hypothetical incidents imposed by the human operator. The accuracy of the prediction algorithms is verified through benchmark comparisons, while the applicability of the proposed toolkit in facilitating decision making is demonstrated in a variety of use case scenarios, using real traffic and incident data sets.

Indoor localization systems have already wide applications mainly for providing localized information and directions. The majority of them focus on commercial applications providing information such us advertisements, guidance and asset tracking. Medical oriented localization systems are uncommon. Given the fact that an individual’s indoor movements can be indicative of his/her clinical status, in this paper we present a low-cost indoor localization system with room-level accuracy used to assess the frailty of older people. We focused on designing a system with easy installation and low cost to be used by non technical staff. The system was installed in older people houses in order to collect data about their indoor localization habits. The collected data were examined in combination with their frailty status, showing a correlation between them. The indoor localization system is based on the processing of Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) measurements by a tracking device, from Bluetooth Beacons, using a fingerprint-based procedure. The system has been tested in realistic settings achieving accuracy above 93% in room estimation. The proposed system was used in 271 houses collecting data for 1–7-day sessions. The evaluation of the collected data using ten-fold cross-validation showed an accuracy of 83% in the classification of a monitored person regarding his/her frailty status (Frail, Pre-frail, Non-frail).

Air pollution is a widespread problem due to its impact on both humans and the environment. Providing decision makers with artificial intelligence based solutions requires to monitor the ambient air quality accurately and in a timely manner, as AI models highly depend on the underlying data used to justify the predictions. Unfortunately, in urban contexts, the hyper-locality of air quality, varying from street to street, makes it difficult to monitor using high-end sensors, as the cost of the amount of sensors needed for such local measurements is too high. In addition, development of pollution dispersion models is challenging. The deployment of a low-cost sensor network allows a more dense cover of a region but at the cost of noisier sensing. This paper describes the development and deployment of a low-cost sensor network, discussing its challenges and applications, and is highly motivated by talks with the local municipality and the exploration of new technologies to improve air quality related services. However, before using data from these sources, calibration procedures are needed to ensure that the quality of the data is at a good level. We describe our steps towards developing calibration models and how they benefit the applications identified as important in the talks with the municipality.

The implications of frailty in older adults' health status and autonomy necessitates the understanding and effective management of this widespread condition as a priority for modern societies. Despite its importance, we still stand far from early detection, effective management and prevention of frailty. One of the most important reasons for this is the lack of sensitive instruments able to early identify frailty and pre-frailty conditions. The FrailSafe system provides a novel approach to this complex, medical, social and public health problem. It aspires to identify the most important components of frailty, construct cumulative metrics serving as biomarkers, and apply this knowledge and expertise for self-management and prevention. This paper presents a high-level overview of the FrailSafe system architecture providing details on the monitoring sensors and devices, the software front-ends for the interaction of the users with the system, as well as the back-end part including the data analysis and decision support modules. Data storage, remote processing and security issues are also discussed. The evaluation of the system by older individuals from 3 different countries highlighted the potential of frailty prediction strategies based on information and communication technology (ICT).

Although the etiology of chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), the most common type of adult leukemia, is still unclear, strong evidence implicates antigen involvement in disease ontogeny and evolution. Primary and 3D structure analysis has been utilised in order to discover indications of antigenic pressure. The latter has been mostly based on the 3D models of the clonotypic B cell receptor immunoglobulin (BcR IG) amino acid sequences. Therefore, their accuracy is directly dependent on the quality of the model construction algorithms and the specific methods used to compare the ensuing models. Thus far, reliable and robust methods that can group the IG 3D models based on their structural characteristics are missing. Here we propose a novel method for clustering a set of proteins based on their 3D structure focusing on 3D structures of BcR IG from a large series of patients with CLL. The method combines techniques from the areas of bioinformatics, 3D object recognition and machine learning. The clustering procedure is based on the extraction of 3D descriptors, encoding various properties of the local and global geometrical structure of the proteins. The descriptors are extracted from aligned pairs of proteins. A combination of individual 3D descriptors is also used as an additional method. The comparison of the automatically generated clusters to manual annotation by experts shows an increased accuracy when using the 3D descriptors compared to plain bioinformatics-based comparison. The accuracy is increased even more when using the combination of 3D descriptors. The experimental results verify that the use of 3D descriptors commonly used for 3D object recognition can be effectively applied to distinguishing structural differences of proteins. The proposed approach can be applied to provide hints for the existence of structural groups in a large set of unannotated BcR IG protein files in both CLL and, by logical extension, other contexts where it is relevant to characterize BcR IG structural similarity. The method does not present any limitations in application and can be extended to other types of proteins.