Abstract:The present study details the significant contribution that different international institutions have made to the field of sustainability and energy efficiency, with a focus on public buildings. This has been achieved by making use of the database Scopus, by applying bibliometric techniques and by analyzing the contents of articles published from 1976 to 2016. All the materials included in the analysis have been reported from Scopus. Several key aspects of the publications have been considered such as document type, language, subject area, journal type and keywords. Sustainable Development, Sustainability, Energy Conservation, Energy Efficiency and Buildings have been verified as the most used keywords. The obtained contributions have been classified geographically and by institution, with the United States, the United Kingdom, China, Australia and Italy being the leading research countries and Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Delft University of Technology and Tsinghua University the top contributing institutions. The most active categories in those fields are engineering, social sciences and environmental issues in that order. It can be assumed that the study of sustainability and energy efficiency across all its dimensions is of great interest for the scientific community. The global environmental issue has led many countries to incorporate a wide range of Energy Efficiency (EE) strategies in order to reduce energy consumption in public buildings, a highly valued aspect by European Union energy labelling.

Non-invasive fetal electrocardiography (ECG) is based on the acquisition of signals from abdominal surface electrodes. The composite abdominal signal consists of the maternal electrocardiogram along with the fetal electrocardiogram and other electrical interferences. These recordings allow for the acquisition of valuable and reliable information that helps ensure fetal well-being during pregnancy. This paper introduces a procedure for fetal heart rate extraction from a single-channel abdominal ECG signal. The procedure is composed of three main stages: a method based on wavelet for signal denoising, a new clustering-based methodology for detecting fetal QRS complexes, and a final stage to correct false positives and false negatives. The novelty of the procedure thus relies on using clustering techniques to classify singularities from the abdominal ECG into three types: maternal QRS complexes, fetal QRS complexes, and noise. The amplitude and time distance of all the local maxima followed by a local minimum were selected as features for the clustering classification. A wide set of real abdominal ECG recordings from two different databases, providing a large range of different characteristics, was used to illustrate the efficiency of the proposed method. The accuracy achieved shows that the proposed technique exhibits a competitve performance when compared to other recent works in the literature and a better performance over threshold-based techniques.

The first sequencing of a complete genome was published forty years ago by the double Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner Frederick Sanger. That corresponded to the small sized genome of a bacteriophage, but since then there have been many complex organisms whose DNA have been sequenced. This was possible thanks to continuous advances in the fields of biochemistry and molecular genetics, but also in other areas such as nanotechnology and computing. Nowadays, sequencing sensors based on genetic material have little to do with those used by Sanger. The emergence of mass sequencing sensors, or new generation sequencing (NGS) meant a quantitative leap both in the volume of genetic material that was able to be sequenced in each trial, as well as in the time per run and its cost. One can envisage that incoming technologies, already known as fourth generation sequencing, will continue to cheapen the trials by increasing DNA reading lengths in each run. All of this would be impossible without sensors and detection systems becoming smaller and more precise. This article provides a comprehensive overview on sensors for DNA sequencing developed within the last 40 years.

The research presented aims to investigate the relationship between privacy and anonymisation in blockchain technologies on different fields of application. The study is carried out through a systematic literature review in different databases, obtaining in a first phase of selection 199 publications, of which 28 were selected for data extraction. The results obtained provide a strong relationship between privacy and anonymisation in most of the fields of application of blockchain, as well as a description of the techniques used for this purpose, such as Ring Signature, homomorphic encryption, k-anonymity or data obfuscation. Among the literature researched, some limitations and future lines of research on issues close to blockchain technology in the different fields of application can be detected. As conclusion, we extract the different degrees of application of privacy according to the mechanisms used and different techniques for the implementation of anonymisation, being one of the risks for privacy the traceability of the operations.

This work presents a microfluidic paper-based analytical device (μPAD) for glucose determination using a supported metal-organic framework (MOF) acting as a peroxidase mimic. The catalytic action of glucose oxidase (GOx) on glucose causes the formation of HO, and the MOF causes the oxidation of 3,3',5,5'-tetramethylbenzidine (TMB) by HO to form a blue-green product with an absorption peak at 650 nm in the detection zone. A digital camera and the iOS feature of a smartphone are used for the quantitation of glucose with the S coordinate of the HSV color space as the analytical parameter. Different factors such as the concentration of TMB, GOx and MOF, pH and buffer, sample volume, reaction time and reagent position in the μPAD were optimized. Under optimal conditions, the value for the S coordinate increases linearly up to 150 μmol·L glucose concentrations, with a 2.5 μmol·L detection limit. The μPAD remains stable for 21 days under conventional storage conditions. Such an enzyme mimetic-based assay to glucose determination using Fe-MIL-101 MOF implemented in a microfluidic paper-based device possesses advantages over enzyme-based assays in terms of costs, durability and stability compared to other existing glucose determination methods. The procedure was applied to the determination of glucose in (spiked) serum and urine. Graphical abstract Schematic representation of microfluidic paper-based analytical device using metal-organic framework as a peroxidase mimic for colorimetric glucose detection with digital camera or smartphone and iOS app readout.