Environmental monitoring is extremely important to ensure a safe and wealthy life of both humans and artifacts. Monitoring requirements are extremely different depending on the environment, leading to ad-hoc implementations that lack flexibility. This paper describes an implementation that can be adapted to many different applications and embeds the flexibility required to be deployed and upgraded without the necessity of arranging complex infrastructures. The solution is based on small autonomous wireless sensor nodes, small wireless receivers connected to the Internet and a cloud architecture which provides data storage and delivery to remote clients. The solution permits supervisors on-site to have an immediate idea of the current situation by using their smart-phones, but also to monitor remote sites through the Internet. All measurements are redundantly stored at different concentration levels to guarantee a safe backtrace and to provide quality assurance also in case of network failure or unavailability. The sensing nodes have small impact, with dimensions which can be of less than 2.5 cm x 1.5 cm when the nodes have to acquire only temperature and relative humidity, and a low cost that enables using them in a set-and-forget way for intervals in excess of one year.

Objectives To compare the degree of accuracy of the Face Hunter facial scanner and the Dental Pro application for facial scanning, with respect to both manual measurements and each other. Materials and Methods Twenty-five patients were measured manually and scanned using each device. Six reference markers were placed on each subject's face at the cephalometric points Tr, Na′, Prn, Pog′, and L–R Zyg. Digital measurement software was used to calculate the distances between the cephalometric reference points on each of the scans. Geomagic X Control was used to superimpose the scans, automatically determining the best-fit alignment and calculating the percentage of overlapping surfaces within the tolerance ranges. Results Individual comparisons of the four distances measured anthropometrically and on the scans yielded an intraclass correlation coefficient index greater than .9. The t-test for matched samples yielded a P value below the significance threshold. Right and left cheeks reached around 60% of the surface, with a margin of error between 0.5 mm and −0.5 mm. The forehead was the only area in which most of the surface fell within the poorly reproducible range, presenting values out of tolerance of more than 20%. Conclusions Three-dimensional scans of the facial surface provide an excellent analytical tool for clinical evaluation; it does not appear that one or the other of the measuring tools is systematically more accurate, and the cheeks are the area with the highest average percentage of surface in the highly reproducible range.

JDSMStudy Objectives: The supine sleeping posture can heighten the risk of sleep-disordered breathing events. Patients with positional obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) are characterized by a supine apnea-hypopnea index (AHI) that is at least two times higher than in nonsupine positions. This study aimed to assess the influence of mouth opening on the outcome of mandibular advancement splint (MAS) treatment in patients with positional OSA. Methods:The secondary data of 230 individuals treated for positional OSA with MAS (standard MAS group) or with MAS plus vertical elastics to prevent mouth opening (MAS+elastics group) were compared in terms of treatment response. Treatment success was defined as at least a 75% reduction in AHI from baseline. Secondary outcomes included the change in AHI, supine AHI, and nonsupine AHI.Results: Both groups showed a significant improvement in AHI with MAS in situ. The improvement in AHI, supine AHI, and nonsupine AHI with MAS was significantly greater in the MAS+elastics group than in the standard MAS group. Treatment success rate was significantly higher in the MAS+elastics group (67.4% versus 36.2%; P < .001). After adjusting for potential confounders, the odds of successful treatment increased 3.8-fold through the use of vertical elastics.Conclusions: This pilot study suggests that vertical elastics that minimize mouth opening enhance the outcome of MAS treatment in patients with positional OSA. These findings support the need for further research to verify the role of vertical elastics with bimaxillary oral appliances to improve the response to treatment in patients with positional OSA.

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Background Obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) is the most common sleep disorder due mainly to peripheral causes, characterized by repeated episodes of obstruction of the upper airways, associated with arousals and snoring. Sleep bruxism (SB) is a masticatory muscle activity during sleep that is characterized as rhythmic (phasic) or nonrhythmic (tonic) and is not a movement disorder or a sleep disorder in otherwise healthy individuals. Given the potentially severe consequences and complications of apnea, the concurrent high prevalence of SB in daily dental practice, getting deeper into the correlation between these phenomena is worthy of interest.. Study Objectives The aim of this study was to investigate the correlation between SB‐related masseter muscle activity (MMA) and apnea–hypopnea events as well as to assess their temporal sequence. Methods Thirty (N = 30) patients with sleep respiratory disorders and clinical suspicion of sleep bruxism (SB) were recruited. Ambulatory polygraphic recording was performed to detect apnea–hypopnea events (AHEs) and sleep bruxism episodes (SBEs). Pearson test was used to assess the correlation between apnea–hypopnea index (AHI) and SB index (SBI). A 5‐s time window with respect to the respiratory events was considered to describe the temporal distribution of SBEs. Furthermore, SBI was compared between groups of patients with different AHI severity (i.e., mild, moderate and severe) using ANOVA. Results On average, AHI was 27.1 ± 21.8 and SBI 9.1 ± 7.5. No correlation was shown between AHI and SBI. Most of SBEs (66.8%) occurred without a temporal relationship with respiratory events. Considering OSA, 65.7% of SBEs occurred within 5 s after AHEs, while in the case of central apnea (CA) 83.8% of SBEs occurred before the respiratory event. The participants with severe apnea (N = 9) show a tendency to have higher bruxism indexes when compared to patients with mild (N = 11) and moderate apnea (N = 10). Conclusions Findings suggest that: 1. At the study population level, there is no correlation between AHI and SBI, as well as any temporal relationship between SBEs and respiratory events. 2. Specific patterns of temporal relationship might be identified with future studies focusing on the different types of apnea–hypopnea events and bruxism activities.