No abstract

Medication adherence, which is the extent to which patients take their medication as prescribed, is essential in treating chronic inflammatory diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Therefore, we nested a subproject in the two-year multicenter Glucocorticoid Low-dose Outcome in Rheumatoid Arthritis (GLORIA) trial to add a low-dose prednisolone (5 mg/day) or placebo to the standard care in older people (≥65 years) with RA. Adherence was measured with an electronic monitoring cap that recorded bottle openings in all patients. In the subproject, we performed an adherence intervention with an advanced cap that could communicate with an application on the smart device via Bluetooth. We randomized patients with a smart device to receive or not to receive adherence reminders on the smart device for three months. Multiple problems emerged that precluded an answer to the research question: sample size (overly optimistic estimates of older patients with a smart device), logistic issues (availability of smartcaps, data extraction), randomization and treatment allocation errors (despite training of personnel), and low quality of the data in the intervention group (hardware failure, discovered too late because data was read in batches). For future trials planning to include a subproject, we recommend keeping it simple, starting with a field test before the actual study starts, and monitoring data from the beginning of the study.

No abstract

Layered network architectures (OSI, TCP/IP) separate functionality in layers, allowing them to be designed and implemented independently. However, from the security point of view, once a lower layer is compromised, the reliability of the higher layers can be impaired. This paper is about the security of the Data Link Layer, which can affect the reliability of higher layers, like TCP, HTTP and other WorldWide Web protocols. The paper analyzes security-wise a layer 2 protocol-the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), part of the Ethernet suite-and presents a solution to detect attacks against this protocol using Specification-based Intrusion Detection.