As the age profile of many societies continues to increase, in addition to the increasing population of people affected by chronic diseases, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity, and so on, supporting health, both mentally and physically, is of increasing importance if independent living is to be maintained. Sensing, remote health monitoring, and, ultimately, recognising activities of daily living have been an promising solution. From a technical perspective, the Internet of Things (IoT) is gaining a rapidly growing attention in many disciplines, especially in personalised healthcare. Meanwhile, body area sensor network (BASN) under the IoT framework has been widely applied for ubiquitous health monitoring, for example. ECG monitoring has been commonly adopted as vital approach for diagnosing heart disease. The main contribution of this paper include the following: firstly, this paper presents a novel system, the WISE (Wearable IoT-cloud-baSed hEalth monitoring system), for real-time personal health monitoring. WISE adopts the BASN (body area sensor network) framework in the support of real-time health monitoring. Several wearable sensors have been embedded, including the heartbeat, body temperature, and the blood pressure sensors. Secondly, the majority of existing wearable health monitoring systems requisite a smart phone as data processing, visualisation, and transmission gateway, which will indeed impact the normal daily use of the smart phone. Whilst in WISE, data gathered from the BASN are directly transmitted to the cloud, and a lightweight wearable LCD can be embedded as an alternative solution for quick view of the real-time data.

The activities of digestive protease within the midgut of Mamestra configurata (bertha armyworm) larvae were examined using specific substrates and protease inhibitors. The bulk of the activity was associated with serine proteases comprising trypsin-, chymotrypsin-, and elastase-like enzymes. At least 10-15 serine protease isozymes were detected using one-dimension gelatin gel electrophoresis. Cysteine or aspartic protease activities were not present; however, amino- and carboxypeptidase activities were associated with the midgut extract. Midgut proteases were active in the pH range of 5.0-12.0 with peaks at pH 7.5 and 11.0. In general, the middle region of the midgut exhibited a higher pH (approximately 8.0) than either the posterior or anterior regions (approximately 7.3-7.7). Moulting larvae possessed a neutral gut pH that was 0.5-1.5 units below that of feeding larvae. Degenerate PCR and expressed sequence tag (EST)-based approaches were used to isolate 30 distinct serine protease encoding cDNAs from a midgut-specific cDNA library including 8 putative trypsins, 9 chymotrypsins, 1 elastase, and 12 whose potential activities could not be determined. cDNAs encoding three amino- and two carboxypeptidases were also identified. Larvae feeding upon artificial diet containing 0.2% soybean trypsin inhibitor experienced a significant delay in development.

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