In May 2022, an apparent speculative attack, followed by market panic, led to the precipitous downfall of UST, one of the most popular stablecoins at that time. However, UST is not the only stablecoin to have been depegged in the past. Designing resilient and long-term stable coins, therefore, appears to present a hard challenge. To further scrutinize existing stablecoin designs and ultimately lead to more robust systems, we need to understand where volatility emerges. Our work provides a game-theoretical model aiming to help identify why stablecoins suffer from a depeg. This game-theoretical model reveals that stablecoins have different price equilibria depending on the coin's architecture and mechanism to minimize volatility. Moreover, our theory is supported by extensive empirical data, spanning $1$ year. To that end, we collect daily prices for 22 stablecoins and on-chain data from five blockchains including the Ethereum and the Terra blockchain.
Falls among the elderly are a major health concern, frequently resulting in serious injuries and a reduced quality of life. In this paper, we propose "BlockTheFall," a wearable device-based fall detection framework which detects falls in real time by using sensor data from wearable devices. To accurately identify patterns and detect falls, the collected sensor data is analyzed using machine learning algorithms. To ensure data integrity and security, the framework stores and verifies fall event data using blockchain technology. The proposed framework aims to provide an efficient and dependable solution for fall detection with improved emergency response, and elderly individuals' overall well-being. Further experiments and evaluations are being carried out to validate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed framework, which has shown promising results in distinguishing genuine falls from simulated falls. By providing timely and accurate fall detection and response, this framework has the potential to substantially boost the quality of elderly care.
Nicola Marotta, Antonio Ammendolia, Cinzia Marinaro, Andrea Demeco · 6 authors
BACKGROUND: Stroke is the third cause of long term disability worldwide and its rehabilitation program must to have into account all aspects of disability. International research and politics increasingly study the relationship between disability and the direct costs associated with living with a disability. OBJECTIVE: Using the ICF, this article provides a correlation between financial assets and disability in participation and activities, in a context such as the Italian one where there is a twenty-year decentralization of the national health system Methods. At the University of Catanzaro, in southern Italy, n=130 ICF checklists of stroke patients were analyzed at 6 months from the end of the rehabilitation treatment. Financial assets domains in environment and nine domains in participation and activities were correlated, in order to evaluate the relationship between familiar economic condition and disability. RESULTS: Pearson's r test (t = -6.6515, df = 25, p-value<0.05) showed a significant correlation of 0.79. Multiple R-squared was 0.639 and an we reported an Adjusted R-squared of 0.6245 (p<0.05). Thus, about 62% of the increase of the all considered disability qualifiers in participation and activities in ICF checklist can be explained by a lower financial income. CONCLUSIONS: In a regional context (Calabria) of an European country (Italy) with a national health system, thanks to the ICF it can be assumed that with the decrease of the financial income, the gap in participation of activities increases.
This paper analyzes the stability of stablecoins and proposes a framework to test for absolute and relative stability of stablecoins. Based on high-frequency data, we find strong evidence of excess price variations. While Bitcoin is a likely source of this excess volatility because stablecoin returns, volatility and volumes are highly correlated with corresponding Bitcoin time-series, we also demonstrate through a quasi-natural experiment that stablecoins increase the trading volume of Bitcoin. The findings suggest stablecoins play a key role in cryptocurrency markets.