BackgroundGreece is among the European countries with the highest consumption of antibiotics.ObjectivesTo study the rates and characteristics of consumption of antibiotics in the community by children in Greece.MethodsQuestionnaire-based study of parents of hospitalized children.ResultsA total of 549 children were studied; 247 (45%) received at least one course of antibiotics the previous year (mean number of antibiotic courses the past year: 1.9), including 427 (91.8%) following examination by a pediatrician, 6 (1.3%) following phone consultation, 2 (0.4%) following suggestion by a pharmacist and 2 (0.4%) as self-medication. Prevalent reasons for antibiotic consumption were acute otitis media (AOM) (27.3%), pharyngotonsillitiss (25.4%), and bronchitis (17.8%). Amoxicillin-clavulanate was the prevalent antibiotic for pharyngotonsillitis, urinary tract infection (UTI) and skin infection (30.5%, 35.7% and 36.4% of cases, respectively), amoxicillin for AOM and pneumonia (32.3% and 36.4% of cases, respectively), and clarithromycin for bronchitis (27.7%). We found 84.3%, 81.9%, 64.3%, 63.7%, and 50% of parents reporting treatment consisted with the national guidelines for AOM, pneumonia, UTI, skin infection, and pharyngotonsillitis, respectively. In the multivariate analysis, an age of 1–5 years and asthma were significantly associated with a higher probability for antibiotic consumption.ConclusionsAntibiotic consumption of children in Greece is mainly driven by pediatricians. Continuing medical education is expected to further improve antibiotic prescription practices by pediatricians.

Today's customers are characterized by individual requirements that lead the manufacturing industry to increased product variety and volume reduction. Manufacturing systems and more specifically assembly systems (ASs) should allow quick adaptation of manufacturing assets so as to respond to the evolving market requirements that lead to mass customization. Meanwhile, the manufacturing era is changing due to the fourth industrial revolution, i.e., Industry 4.0, that will change the traditional manufacturing environment to an IoT-based one. In this context, this paper introduces the concept of cyber-physical microservice in the Manufacturing and the ASs domain and presents the Cyber-Physical microservice and IoT-based (CPuS-IoT) framework. The CPuS-IoT framework exploits the benefits of the microservice architectural style and the IoT technologies, but also utilizes the existing in this domain huge investment based on traditional technologies, to support the life cycle of evolvable ASs in the age of Industry 4.0. It provides a solid basis to capture domain knowledge that is used by a model-driven engineering (MDE) approach to semi-automate the development, evolution and operation of ASs, as well as, to establish a common vocabulary for assembly system experts and IoT ones. The CPuS-IoT approach and framework effectively combines MDE with IoT and the microservice architectural paradigm. A case study for the assembly of an everyday life product is adopted to demonstrate the approach even to nonexperts of this domain.

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