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BackgroundVariations in body temperature are highly informative during an illness. To date, there are not many adequate studies that have investigated the feasibility of a wearable wrist device for the continuous monitoring of body surface temperatures in humans. ObjectiveThe objective of this study was to validate the performance of HEARThermo, an innovative wearable device, which was developed to continuously monitor the body surface temperature in humans. MethodsWe implemented a multi-method research design in this study, which included 2 validation studies—one in the laboratory and one with human subjects. In validation study I, we evaluated the test-retest reliability of HEARThermo in the laboratory to measure the temperature and to correct the values recorded by each HEARThermo by using linear regression models. We conducted validation study II on human subjects who wore HEARThermo for the measurement of their body surface temperatures. Additionally, we compared the HEARThermo temperature recordings with those recorded by the infrared skin thermometer simultaneously. We used intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) and Bland-Altman plots to analyze the criterion validity and agreement between the 2 measurement tools. ResultsA total of 66 participants (age range, 10-77 years) were recruited, and 152,881 completed data were analyzed in this study. The 2 validation studies in the laboratory and on human skin indicated that HEARThermo showed a good test-retest reliability (ICC 0.96-0.98) and adequate criterion validity with the infrared skin thermometer at room temperatures of 20°C-27.9°C (ICC 0.72, P

The K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) query has been of significant interest in many studies and has become one of the most important spatial queries in mobile sensor networks. Applications of KNN queries may include vehicle navigation, wildlife social discovery, and squad/platoon searching on the battlefields. Current approaches to KNN search in mobile sensor networks require a certain kind of indexing support. This index could be either a centralized spatial index or an in-network data structure that is distributed over the sensor nodes. Creation and maintenance of these index structures, to reflect the network dynamics due to sensor node mobility, may result in long query response time and low battery efficiency, thus limiting their practical use. In this paper, we propose a maintenance-free itinerary-based approach called Density-aware Itinerary KNN query processing (DIKNN). The DIKNN divides the search area into multiple cone-shape areas centered at the query point. It then performs a query dissemination and response collection itinerary in each of the cone-shape areas in parallel. The design of the DIKNN scheme takes into account several challenging issues such as the trade-off between degree of parallelism and network interference on query response time, and the dynamic adjustment of the search radius (in terms of number of hops) according to spatial irregularity or mobility of sensor nodes. To optimize the performance of DIKNN, a detailed analytical model is derived that automatically determines the most suitable degree of parallelism under various network conditions. This model is validated by extensive simulations. The simulation results show that DIKNN yields substantially better performance and scalability over previous work, both as k increases and as the sensor node mobility increases. It outperforms the second runner with up to a 50 percent saving in energy consumption and up to a 40 percent reduction in query response time, while rendering the same level of query result accuracy. Index Terms--Indexing methods, query processing, distributed databases, sensor networks, mobile environments, wireless communication.

Sampling has been recognized as an important technique to improve the efficiency of clustering. However, with sampling applied, those points which are not sampled will not have their labels after the normal process. Although there is a straightforward approach in the numerical domain, the problem of how to allocate those unlabeled data points into proper clusters remains as a challenging issue in the categorical domain. In this paper, a mechanism named MAximal Resemblance Data Labeling (abbreviated as MARDL) is proposed to allocate each unlabeled data point into the corresponding appropriate cluster based on the novel categorical clustering representative, namely, N-Nodeset Importance Representative (abbreviated as NNIR), which represents clusters by the importance of the combinations of attribute values. MARDL has two advantages: 1) MARDL exhibits high execution efficiency and 2) MARDL can achieve high intracluster similarity and low intercluster similarity, which are regarded as the most important properties of clusters, thus benefiting the analysis of cluster behaviors. MARDL is empirically validated on real and synthetic data sets, and is shown to be significantly more efficient than prior works while attaining results of high quality. Index Terms--Data mining, categorical clustering, data labeling.

Due to the resource limitation in the data stream environments, it has been reported that answering user queries according to the wavelet synopsis of a stream is an essential ability of a Data Stream Management System (DSMS). In the literature, recent research has been elaborated upon minimizing the local error metric of an individual stream. However, many emergent applications such as stock marketing and sensor detection also call for the need of recording multiple streams in a commercial DSMS. As shown in our thorough analysis and experimental studies, minimizing global error in multiple-stream environments leads to good reliability for DSMS to answer the queries. In contrast, only minimizing local error may lead to a significant loss of query accuracy. As such, we first study in this paper the problem of maintaining the wavelet coefficients of multiple streams within collective memory so that the predetermined global error metric is minimized. Moreover, we also examine a promising application in the multistream environment, that is, the queries for top-k range sum. We resolve the problem of efficient top-k query processing with minimized global error by developing a general framework. For the purposes of maintaining the wavelet coefficients and processing top-k queries, several well-designed algorithms are utilized to optimize the performance of each primary component of this general framework. We also evaluate the proposed algorithms empirically on real and simulated data streams and show that our framework can process top-k queries accurately and efficiently. Index Terms--Data Stream Management System, top-k queries, wavelet synopses.

We explore in this paper a novel sampling algorithm, referred to as algorithm PAS (standing for Proportion Approximation Sampling), to generate a high-quality online sample with the desired sample rate. The sampling quality refers to the consistency between the population proportion and the sample proportion of each categorical value in the database. Note that the state-of-the-art sampling algorithm to preserve the sampling quality has to examine the population proportion of each categorical value in a pilot sample a priori and is thus not applicable to incremental mining applications. To remedy this, algorithm PAS adaptively determines the inclusion probability of each incoming tuple in such a way that the sampling quality can be sequentially preserved while also guaranteeing the sample rate close to the user specified one. Importantly, PAS not only guarantees the proportion consistency of each categorical value but also excellently preserves the proportion consistency of multivariate statistics, which will be significantly beneficial to various data mining applications. For better execution efficiency, we further devise an algorithm, called algorithm EQAS (standing for Efficient Quality-Aware Sampling), which integrates PAS and random sampling to provide the flexibility of striking a compromise between the sampling quality and the sampling efficiency. As validated in experimental results on real and synthetic data, algorithm PAS can stably provide high-quality samples with corresponding computational overhead, whereas algorithm EQAS can flexibly generate samples with the desired balance between sampling quality and sampling efficiency. In addition, while applying the sample generated by algorithms PAS and EQAS to incremental mining applications, a significant efficiency improvement can be obtained without compromising the resulting precision, showing the prominent advantage of both proposed algorithms to be the quality-aware sampling means for incremental mining applications. Index Terms--Sequential sampling, incremental data mining.