Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a common condition in the elderly. It is characterized by deterioration of memory, attention, and cognitive function that is beyond what is expected based on age and educational level. MCI does not interfere significantly with individuals’ daily activities. It can act as a transitional level of evolving dementia with a range of conversion of 10%–15% per year. Thus, it is crucial to protect older people against MCI and developing dementia. The preventive interventions and appropriate treatments should improve cognitive performance, and retard or prevent progressive deficits. The avoidance of toxins, reduction of stress, prevention of somatic diseases, implementation of mental and physical exercises, as well as the use of dietary compounds like antioxidants and supplements can be protective against MCI. The modification of risk factors such as stopping smoking, as well as the treatment of deficiency in vitamins and hormones by correcting behaviors and lifestyle, can prevent cognitive decline in the elderly. The progressive increase in the growth rate of the elderly population can enhance the rate of MCI all over the world. There is no exact cure for MCI and dementia; therefore, further studies are needed in the future to determine causes of MCI and risk factors of progression from MCI to dementia. This will help to find better ways for prevention and treatment of cognitive impairment worldwide.

Mobility of sensor nodes in wireless sensor network (WSN) has posed new challenges particularly in packet delivery ratio and energy consumption. Some real applications impose combined environments of fixed and mobile sensor nodes in the same network, while others demand a complete mobile sensors environment. Packet loss that occurs due to mobility of the sensor nodes is one of the main challenges which comes in parallel with energy consumption. In this paper, we use cross layer design between medium access control (MAC) and network layers to overcome these challenges. Thus, a cluster based routing protocol for mobile sensor nodes (CBR-Mobile) is proposed. The CBR-Mobile is mobility and traffic adaptive protocol. The timeslots assigned to the mobile sensor nodes that had moved out of the cluster or have not data to send will be reassigned to incoming sensor nodes within the cluster region. The protocol introduces two simple databases to achieve the mobility and traffic adaptively. The proposed protocol sends data to cluster heads in an efficient manner based on received signal strength. In CBR-Mobile protocol, cluster based routing collaborates with hybrid MAC protocol to support mobility of sensor nodes. Schedule timeslots are used to send the data message while the contention timeslots are used to send join registration messages. The performance of proposed CBR-Mobile protocol is evaluated using MATLAB and was observed that the proposed protocol improves the packet delivery ratio, energy consumption, delay and fairness in mobility environment compared to LEACH-Mobile and AODV protocols.

The routing protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) is defined as the manner of data dissemination from the network field (source) to the base station (destination). Based on the network topology, there are two types of routing protocols in WSNs, they are namely flat routing protocols and hierarchical routing protocols. Hierarchical routing protocols (HRPs) are more energy efficient and scalable compared to flat routing protocols. This paper discusses how topology management and network application influence the performance of cluster-based and chain-based hierarchical networks. It reviews the basic features of sensor connectivity issues such as power control in topology setup , sleep/idle pairing and data transmission control that are used in five common HRPs, and it also examines their impact on the protocol performance. A good picture of their respective performances give an indication how network applications, i.e whether reactive or proactive, and topology management i.e. whether centralized or distributed would determine the network performance. Finally, from the ensuring discussion, it is shown that the chain-based HRPs guarantee a longer network lifetime compared to cluster-based HRPs by three to five times.

Mobility of sensor nodes in wireless sensor network (WSN) has posed new challenges particularly in packet delivery ratio and energy consumption. Some real applications impose combined environments of fixed and mobile sensor nodes in the same network, while others demand a complete mobile sensors environment. Packet loss that occurs due to mobility of the sensor nodes is one of the main challenges which comes in parallel with energy consumption. In this paper, we use cross layer design between medium access control (MAC) and network layers to overcome these challenges. Thus, a cluster based routing protocol for mobile sensor nodes (CBR-Mobile) is proposed. The CBR-Mobile is mobility and traffic adaptive protocol. The timeslots assigned to the mobile sensor nodes that had moved out of the cluster or have not data to send will be reassigned to incoming sensor nodes within the cluster region. The protocol introduces two simple databases to achieve the mobility and traffic adaptively. The proposed protocol sends data to cluster heads in an efficient manner based on received signal strength. In CBR-Mobile protocol, cluster based routing collaborates with hybrid MAC protocol to support mobility of sensor nodes. Schedule timeslots are used to send the data message while the contention timeslots are used to send join registration messages. The performance of proposed CBR-Mobile protocol is evaluated using MATLAB and was observed that the proposed protocol improves the packet delivery ratio, energy consumption, delay and fairness in mobility environment compared to LEACH-Mobile and AODV protocols.

Hypertension is a common chronic disease in the elderly. This study aimed to determine the effects of age, ethnicity, gender, education, marital status, nutritional parameters, and blood elements on the risk of high blood pressure in the Malaysian elderly. This research was conducted on a group of 2322 non-institutionalized Malaysian elderly. The hierarchy binary logistic regression analysis was applied to estimate the risk of hypertension in respondents. Approximately, 45.61% of subjects had hypertension. The findings indicated that the female gender (Odds ratio (OR) = 1.54), an increase in body weight (OR = 1.61), and an increase in the blood levels of albumin (OR = 1.51), glucose (OR = 1.92), and triglycerides (OR = 1.27) significantly increased the risk of hypertension in subjects (p < 0.05). Conversely, an increase in both dietary carbohydrates (OR = 0.74), and blood cholesterol level (OR = 0.42) significantly reduced the risk of hypertension in samples (p < 0.05). Furthermore, the results showed that ethnicity was a non-relevant factor to increase the risk of hypertension in subjects. It was concluded that female gender, an increase in body weight, and an increase in the blood levels of glucose, triglycerides, and albumin enhanced the risk of high blood pressure in the Malaysian elderly. In addition, an increase in both dietary carbohydrates and blood cholesterol level decreased hypertension in subjects.

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Poor cell selection is the main challenge in Picocell (PeNB) deployment in Long Term Evolution- (LTE-) Advanced heterogeneous networks (HetNets) because it results in load imbalance and intercell interference. A selection technique based on cell range extension (CRE) has been proposed for LTE-Advanced HetNets to extend the coverage of PeNBs for load balancing. However, poor CRE bias setting in cell selection inhibits the attainment of desired cell splitting gains. By contrast, a cell selection technique based on adaptive bias is a more effective solution to traffic load balancing in terms of increasing data rate compared with static bias-based approaches. This paper reviews the use of adaptive cell selection in LTE-Advanced HetNets by highlighting the importance of cell load estimation. The general performances of different techniques for adaptive CRE-based cell selection are compared. Results reveal that the adaptive CRE bias of the resource block utilization ratio (RBUR) technique exhibits the highest cell-edge throughput. Moreover, more accurate cell load estimation is obtained in the extended RBUR adaptive CRE bias technique through constant bit rate (CBR) traffic, which further improved load balancing as against the estimation based on the number of user equipment (UE). Finally, this paper presents suggestions for future research directions.

Although routing is among the key issues of 6LoWPAN research, the way to encapsulate a new routing header in the 6LoWPAN packet has yet been investigated thoroughly. In this paper, different ways of routing header encapsulation in 6LoWPAN protocol stack is discussed. The simplified version Ad-Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) such as On-Demand Distance Vector (LOAD) and Dynamic MANET On-demand for 6LoWPAN (DYMO-low) have currently been proposed in 6LoWPAN routing. Hierarchical routing (HiLow) is another routing protocol that is used in 6LoWPAN to increase the network scalability. Some comparisons of these routing protocols have been made in terms of their routing metric such as number of hops count. The used control messages for the route discovery in different routing protocols have also been investigated. These comparisons show that each routing protocol has its own advantage depends on the involved applications. There are some tradeoffs of respective routing protocols. The routing protocol that uses hello message may provide more reliable but results a higher delay in the packet routing.