Taste masking technologies in oral pharmaceuticals: recent developments and approaches

Taste is one of the most important parameters governing patient compliance. Undesirable taste is one of several important formulation problems that are encountered with certain drugs. Oral administration of bitter drugs with an acceptable degree of palatability is a key issue for health care providers, especially for pediatric patients. Several oral pharmaceuticals, numerous food and beverage products, and bulking agents have unpleasant, bitter-tasting components. So, any pharmaceutical formulation with a pleasing taste would definitely be preferred over a competitor's product and would translate into better compliance and therapeutic value for the patient and more business and profits for the company. The desire of improved palatability in these products has prompted the development of numerous formulations with improved performance and acceptability. This article reviews the earlier applications and methodologies of taste masking and discusses the most recent developments and approaches of bitterness reduction and inhibition for oral pharmaceuticals.     

Soft Magnetic Properties and Electrochemical Behavior of Nanocrystalline CoFeCu Thin Films Electrodeposited from Citrate-Added Baths

CoFeCu thin films were electrodeposited from baths with natural pH (instead of pH～2.8 used in conventional baths) and containing different sodium citrate dosages. ChemEQL V.3.0 software was employed to study speciation diagrams of citrate-added CoFeCu bath with natural pH. At low sodium citrate dosage, Co⁺⁺, Fe⁺⁺, and Cu⁺⁺ species were dominant in CoFeCu bath with natural pH (around 5.2). However, as dosage of sodium citrate in the bath increased, the concentration of complexed species (especially Co(C₆H₅O₇)^?, Fe(C₆H₅O₇)^?, and Cu(OHC₆H₅O₇)^2?) significantly raised. Cyclic voltammetry (CV) studies showed that the formation of complexed species in the bath shifted reduction potential of metals towards more negative potentials. Moreover, in order to deposit cobalt and iron simultaneously with copper, it was necessary to increase the reverse potential (E _λ ) value gradually with sodium citrate dosage, otherwise, only copper would have deposited from citrate-added CoFeCu bath. Scanning electron micrographs illustrated that using natural pH (about 5.2) remarkably decreased the number of microvoids in the deposited films compared with the film deposited from conventional baths with pH level of 2.8. EDS, XRD, and VSM were also used for characterization of the deposited films. All deposited films exhibited nanocrystalline structures, and increasing sodium citrate into the baths led to reduction in grain sizes (D) and coercivity (H _c) of the CoFeCu thin films. Plotting log(H _c) versus log(D ⁶) demonstrated that films coercivity followed the “D ⁶ law”. There were only two phase structures (FCC (Co) or BCC (Fe)) observed in the X-ray diffraction patterns of the films. In addition, films with double-phase structures (FCC+BCC) showed finer grain sizes and therefore exhibited lower coercivity in comparison with single-phase (FCC or BCC) films. CoFeCu thin films deposited at higher dosages of sodium citrate (>20 g/L) were poor in diamagnetic copper and consequently showed higher saturation magnetizations.     

Nework topology for maximizing the terminal reliability in a Computer Communication Network

In the design of a Computer Communication Network (CCN), the reliability between any pair of nodes and the maximum permissible installation cost are of great importance. These characteristics are largely dependant upon the topological layout of the links, their costs and reliabilities. Having the knowledge of the topological layout of the various computer centres (nodes) and maximum permissible cost of installing the various links at their pre-assigned positions; in this paper an algorithm for obtaining an optimal network topology which gives the maximum s?t reliability is presented. The developed method is general and is computerized. The proposed method has an additional advantage that the system is not to be redesigned, if at a later stage the permissible cost is enhanced by budgetary provisions. An example illustrates the algorithm.     

Adaptive MAC Protocol for Solar Energy Harvesting Based Wireless Sensor Networks in Agriculture

The wireless sensor network is one of the promising technologies in the agriculture field. Its actual usage in real agriculture fields is limited by its dependence on the small batteries which cannot make the network survive for long. Various protocols are being designed at the network and MAC layer to increase the lifetime of the nodes, but up to a certain extent only. Hence the energy harvesting to power up the WSN nodes is a promising technology to fulfill this ever energy demand, but the protocols need to be redesigned for this scenario. Solar energy harvesting based MAC protocol which is adaptive to the changing weather conditions is designed in this paper for the smart agriculture applications. It is based on the multilayer and receiver-initiated process to improve network quality. It has shown the remarkable performance over the other energy harvesting based protocols in terms of ENO ratio, energy consumption and collision rate.

     

A stable energy efficient clustering protocol for wireless sensor networks

Sensor networks comprise of sensor nodes with limited battery power that are deployed at different geographical locations to monitor physical events. Information gathering is a typical but an important operation in many applications of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It is necessary to operate the sensor network for longer period of time in an energy efficient manner for gathering information. One of the popular WSN protocol, named low energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) and its variants, aim to prolong the network lifetime using energy efficient clustering approach. These protocols increase the network lifetime at the expense of reduced stability period (the time span before the first node dies). The reduction in stability period is because of the high energy variance of nodes. Stability period is an essential aspect to preserve coverage properties of the network. Higher is the stability period, more reliable is the network. Higher energy variance of nodes leads to load unbalancing among nodes and therefore lowers the stability period. Hence, it is perpetually attractive to design clustering algorithms that provides higher stability, lower energy variance and are energy efficient. In this paper to overcome the shortcomings of existing clustering protocols, a protocol named stable energy efficient clustering protocol is proposed. It balances the load among nodes using energy-aware heuristics and hence ensures higher stability period. The results demonstrate that the proposed protocol significantly outperforms LEACH and its variants in terms of energy variance and stability period.     

An enhanced architecture for route discovery and load balancing in WSN

The Journal of Supercomputing - The sensor network comprises various sensor nodes in which packet transfer requires detection of the route. The discovery of the path in such a network becomes...     

Evolution of PAPR Reduction Techniques: A Wavelet Based OFDM Approach

Wireless Personal Communications - Orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is considered among the most suitable multiplexing technique for realizing high speed wireless communication in...     

Request combining in multiprocessors with arbitrary interconnectionnetworks

Several techniques have been proposed to allow parallel access to a shared memory location by combining requests. They have one or more of the following attributes: requirements for a priori knowledge of the request to combine, restrictions on the routing of messages in the network, or the use of sophisticated interconnection network nodes. We present a new method of combining requests that does not have the above requirements. We obtain this new method for request combining by developing a classification scheme for the existing methods of request combining. This classification scheme is facilitated by separating the request combining process into a two part operation: determining the combining set, which is the set of requests that participate in a combined access; and distributing the results of the combined access to the members of the combining set. The classification of combining strategies is based upon which system component, processor elements, or interconnection network performs each of these tasks. Our approach, which uses the interconnection network to establish the combining set and the processor elements to distribute the results, lies in an unexplored area of the design space. We also present simulation results to assess the benefits of the proposed approach     

An Adaptive Weighted Min-Mid-Max Value Based Filter for Eliminating High Density Impulsive Noise

In this study, non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) together with cognitive radio (CR) benefit to the vehicle-to-everything (V2X) as promising application with high spectrum efficiency. We have higher priority to evaluate system performance of the secondary network in such CR-NOMA system operating in the context of V2X. We first arrange vehicles belonging to serving group in this CR-NOMA assisted V2X, and it is beneficial to serve massive connections for vehicles. There are two scenarios studied in this paper, with and without the support of CR scheme. In our proposed system, two system metrics need be investigated to evaluate performance of vehicles that need higher quality of service (QoS). Our results indicate that the outage performance gap among two vehicles exists since different transmit power allocation factors were assigned to them. In particular, the outage probability is first derived in exact forms and then the bit error rate (BER) can be further achieved. In specific situations, the optimal outage probability can be obtained by numerical simulations. Simulation results are also provided to verify the correctness of the derived expressions and it exhibits advantages of the proposed CR-NOMA assisted V2X system in terms of two main metrics such as outage probability and BER.