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Aim. The aim of this review is to determine the relationship between sleeping body posture and severity of obstructive sleep apnea. This relationship has been investigated in the past. However, the conclusions derived from some of these studies are conflicting with each other. This paper intends to summarize the reported relationships between sleep posture and various sleep indices in patients diagnosed with sleep apnea. Methods and Materials. A systematic review of the published English literature during a 25-year period from 1983 to 2008 was performed. Results. Published data concerning the sleep apnea severity and posture in adults are limited. Supine sleep posture is consistently associated with more severe obstructive sleep apnea indices in adults. However, relationship between sleep apnea severity indices and prone posture is inconsistent.

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Quadriplegia is a medical condition characterized by partial or complete paralysis of the four limbs and torso. Paraplegia is a variant of quadriplegia and is an impairment in motor or sensory function of the lower extremities. An automated wheelchair is a step taken with an intention to make a difference especially to the lives of these sections of people with restricted mobility. The different modes of control for the movement of the chair are made available in a modular form and can be incorporated by the user based on specific needs. Apart from the controls like joystick, chin control, voice activation, control through head movement, through calls made using a mobile, this chair can also be remotely controlled through the internet. Raspberry Pi is used as a master controller for both joystick as well as internet control. This paper specifically presents the details of control of the smart wheel chair through the internet using the technology of internet of things.

Cold-induced changes affect survival after exposure to vitrification solution during Abstract 35There is limited knowledge of the effects of exposure to low temperatures in the unique Mediterranean 36 climate plant species of Western Australia. We have thus investigated the effect of low temperature on 37 cryogenic tolerance in Lomandra sonderi, an endemic perennial species of southwest Western Australia.

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In vitro propagation for Mesomelaena pseudostygia a difficult-to-propagate dryland sedge species (Cyperaceae) endemic to Western Australia is described. Multiple avenues to in vitro propagation were investigated: shoot culture, organogenesis and somatic embryogenesis, with zygotic embryos as initiation material. The highest multiplication rate for shoots was 3.4 ± 1.0 after six weeks on basal medium (½ strength Murashige and Skoog) with 2.5µM kinetin and 0.5µM 6benzylaminopurine. Shoots achieved peak rooting (83%) following a pulse treatment on basal medium containing 10 µM indolebutyric acid and 2 µM α-naphthaleneacetic acid for seven weeks, followed by transfer to medium (without growth regulators) for a further seven weeks. Alternatively, in vitro grown shoots were pulse treated on basal medium with both 100 µM indolebutyric acid and 20µM α-naphthaleneacetic acid for one week then placed in Rockwool plugs (under propagation house conditions) for another seven weeks resulting in 63% root induction. Rooted plantlets were also successfully transferred to potting mixture either in Rockwool plugs or bare rooted and maintained in propagation house conditions with ≥95% survival after seven weeks. These results indicate that micropropagation of M. pseudostygia is feasible for small to medium scale restoration purposes. The highest frequency of callus induction was from cultured zygotic embryos on basal medium with 5µM α-naphthaleneacetic acid, whereas 2,4-dichlorophenoxacetic acid (2 or 5µM) produced the largest callus sizes. A low frequency of shoot regeneration occurred in zygotic callus tissues in basal medium treatments containing cytokinin (kinetin or thidiazuron at 1µM). A small proportion (<20%) of zygotic embryo callus explants from 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid treatments were found to be embryogenic, firstly developing embryo-like structures after two weeks on basal medium (minus plant growth hormones), that continued to develop with approximately one in twenty germinating after a further four weeks on basal medium to form small plantlets. Further optimisation is needed to improve somatic embryogenesis efficiency for mass propagation.

In spite of the gargantuan number of patients affected by melanoma every year, its detection at an early stage is still a challenging task. This paper illustrates a method which involves the combination of the existing ABCD (Involving symmetry, border, color, and diameter detection) rule and grey level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) along with Local Binary Pattern (LBP) for identification of malignant melanoma skin lesion with greater accuracy. Several steps, such as image acquisition technique, pre-processing (RGB to HSV) techniques and segmentation processes are undertaken for the skin feature selection criteria to successfully determine the skin lesion's characteristic properties for classification. Texture features such as contrast, entropy, energy and homogeneity of the affected region is obtained using LBP and GLCM for discriminatory purposes of the two cases (melanoma and non-melanoma). Finally, the back propagation neural network (BPN) is used as the classifier to determine whether the dermoscopic image is benign or malignant.