Maternal anemia affects approximately 56 million women worldwide and increases the risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes. Our study aimed to summarize the evidence for the association between maternal hemoglobin (Hb) concentrations and maternal or infant outcomes, evaluating it in a continuous manner. In this systematic review and meta-analysis, we conducted an electronic search on PubMed, Embase, CINAHL, and Web of Science from inception to April 19, 2017, and further updated to November 21, 2018, applying subject heading terms related to pregnant women with anemia. We included 117 studies with 4,127,430 pregnancies. Maternal anemia increased the risk of low birth weight (odds ratio (OR), 1.65; 95% confidence interval (CI): 1.45−1.87), preterm birth (PTB) (OR, 2.11; 95% CI: 1.76-2.53), perinatal mortality (PNM) (OR, 3.01; 95% CI: 1.92−4.73), stillbirth (OR, 1.95; 95% CI: 1.15−3.31), and maternal mortality (OR, 3.20; 95% CI: 1.16−8.85). A nonlinear relationship was found between maternal Hb and adverse maternal and infant outcomes. The OR of outcomes such as PTB, small-for-gestational age, PNM, preeclampsia, gestational hypertension, and postpartum hemorrhage was increased by two to three times. Assessing Hb as a continuous variable is important to determine the associated risk of adverse outcomes with decreasing or increasing levels.

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In collaborative body sensor networks, namely wireless body area networks (WBANs), each of the physical sensor applications is used to collaboratively monitor the health status of the human body. The applications of WBANs comprise diverse and dynamic traffic loads such as very low-rate periodic monitoring (i.e., observation) data and high-rate traffic including event-triggered bursts. Therefore, in designing a medium access control (MAC) protocol for WBANs, energy conservation should be the primary concern during low-traffic periods, whereas a balance between satisfying high-throughput demand and efficient energy usage is necessary during high-traffic times. In this paper, we design a traffic load-aware innovative MAC solution for WBANs, called ATLAS. The design exploits the superframe structure of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard, and it adaptively uses the contention access period (CAP), contention free period (CFP) and inactive period (IP) of the superframe based on estimated traffic load, by applying a dynamic “wh” (whenever which is required) approach. Unlike earlier work, the proposed MAC design includes load estimation for network load-status awareness and a multi-hop communication pattern in order to prevent energy loss associated with long range transmission. Finally, ATLAS is evaluated through extensive simulations in ns-2 and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the protocol.

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Heterogeneous applications could be assimilated within the same wireless sensor network with the aid of modern motes that have multiple sensor boards on a single radio board. Different types of data generated from such types of motes might have different transmission characteristics in terms of priority, transmission rate, required bandwidth, tolerable packet loss, delay demands etc. Considering a sensor network consisting of such multi-purpose nodes, in this paper we propose Prioritized Heterogeneous Traffic-oriented Congestion Control Protocol (PHTCCP) which ensures efficient rate control for prioritized heterogeneous traffic. Our protocol uses intra-queue and inter-queue priorities for ensuring feasible transmission rates of heterogeneous data. It also guarantees efficient link utilization by using dynamic transmission rate adjustment. Detailed analysis and simulation results are presented along with the description of our protocol to demonstrate its effectiveness in handling prioritized heterogeneous traffic in wireless sensor networks.

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