As one who tried and failed, I sincerely admire the accomplishments of the Stop Hypertension with the Acupuncture Research Program (SHARP) described in this issue of Hypertension.1 As Macklin et al1 note, this is the largest double-blind, randomized, sham-controlled clinical trial of acupuncture for treating hypertension to date. When the work involved in reaching their definitive conclusion is...

The first part of this paper discusses developments wrt. smart (electricity) meters (simply called E-meters) in general, with emphasis on security and privacy issues. The second part will be more technical and describes protocols for secure communication with E-meters and for fraud detection (leakage) in a privacy-preserving manner, using a combination of Paillier’s additive homomorphic encrypt...

BACKGROUND Oxygen therapy is an important therapeutic resource for patients with hypoxemia. When changing oxygen flow meters, we have observed that sometimes, even with the same oxygen flow setting as before, a different S(pO(2)) is obtained. OBJECTIVE To analyze the precision and accuracy of flow meters used in hospital settings. METHODS An experimental study was performed to test oxygen ...

Google Earth now hosts high-resolution imagery that spans twenty percent of the Earth's landmass and more than a third of the human population. This contemporary highresolution archive represents a significant, rapidly expanding, cost-free and largely unexploited resource for scientific inquiry. To increase the scientific utility of this archive, we address horizontal positional accuracy (geore...

Several transmission and distribution companies in Western Europe operate test facilities for testing industrial meters like larger diaphragm gas meters, rotary gas meters and turbine gas meters. Alternatively, they lease mobile provers. Those installations are not suitable to perform the initial calibration (and try to save money on the calibration costs), but are suitable to perform all kind ...

Having been ignored for the most part, analytical accuracy of blood glucose (BG) meters is now the subject of a considerable series of studies (manuscripts). While the results of these studies show considerable differences between meters, they also show that many meters have good analytical quality, i.e., in the hands of highly trained technicians and optimally controlled environmental conditio...

OBJECTIVES To evaluate if inexpensive Stepping Meters are valid in counting steps in adults in free living conditions. METHODS For six days, 35 healthy volunteers wore a criterion Yamax Digiwalker and five Stepping Meters every day until all 973 pedometers had been tested. Steps were recorded daily, and the differences between counts from the Digiwalker and the Stepping Meter were expressed a...

Smart Meters belong to the Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and allow customers to monitor locally and remotely the current usage of energy. Providers query Smart Meters for billing purpose or to establish the amount of energy needed by houses. However, reading details sent from smart meters to the energy provider can be used to violate customers’ privacy. In this paper, our contribution ...