Background The self-locating catheter invented by Nicola Di Paolo has been used increasingly in Italy and elsewhere since 1994, with about a thousand patients currently implanted every year. Twelve grams of tungsten inserted into the tip of the conventional Tenckhoff catheter during extrusion does not significantly change its form, but suffices to keep the tip firmly in the Douglas cavity. Objective The aim of the present study was to confirm our preliminary results in a large population of peritoneal dialysis patients. Setting 16 Italian nephrology departments. Results In addition to confirming the validity of the new catheter, the present results show that patients with the new catheter have fewer episodes of peritonitis, tunnel infection, cuff extrusion, catheter malfunction, obstruction, and leakage. Conclusion The present multicenter control study confirms preliminary results and demonstrates that complications of peritoneal dialysis, such as cuff extrusion, infection, peritonitis, early leakage, and obstruction, are statistically less frequent in patients with self-locating catheters than in patients with classic Tenckhoff catheters.

The continuous development of internet of things (IoT) infrastructure and applications is paving the way for advanced and innovative ideas and solutions, some of which are pushing the limits of state-of-the-art technology. The increasing demand for Wireless Sensor Nodes (WSNs) able to collect and transmit data through wireless communication channels, while often positioned in locations that are difficult to access, is driving research into innovative solutions involving energy harvesting (EH) and wireless power transfer (WPT) to eventually allow battery-free sensor nodes. Due to the pervasiveness of radio frequency (RF) energy, RF EH and WPT are key technologies with the potential to power IoT devices and smart sensing architectures involving nodes that need to be wireless, maintenance free, and sufficiently low in cost to promote their use almost anywhere. This paper presents a state-of-the-art, ultra-low power 2.5 μ W highly integrated mixed signal system on chip (SoC), for multi-source energy harvesting and wireless power transfer. It introduces a novel architecture that integrates an ultra-low power intelligent power management, an RF to DC converter with very low power sensitivity and high power conversion efficiency (PCE), an Amplitude-Shift-Keying/Frequency-Shift-Keying (ASK/FSK) receiver and digital circuitry to achieve the advantage to cope, in a versatile way and with minimal use of external components, with the wide variety of energy sources and use cases. Diverse methods for powering Wireless Sensor Nodes through energy harvesting and wireless power transfer are implemented providing related system architectures and experimental results.

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This article deals with a microstrip patch antenna working at 868 MHz, suitable for the radio frequency wireless power transfer and energy harvesting applications. The proposed monolithic antenna is compact, lightweight and it is printed on a thick substrate in order to maximize the total gain in the broadside direction. The antenna radiates at 868 MHz with a fractional impedance bandwidth of 5% and it shows a gain of 4.14 dB.