AMARAVATI: The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) on Sunday decided not to contest the Telangana Assembly elections scheduled next month.
With the TDP supremo and former Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu still in jail in alleged skill development scam, the party decided to stay away from the contest.
Chandrababu Naidu conveyed the decision to TDP Telangana unit president Kasani Gnaneshwar when the latter called on him in Rajahmundry Central Jail on Saturday. The TDP national president told him that in view of the current situation in Andhra Pradesh, the party can’t focus on Telangana elections.
Naidu asked him to explain to the party leaders in Telangana the circumstances which forced the party to stay away from the polls.
The former chief minister was arrested by the Crime Investigation Department (CID) in a multi-crore skill development scam on September 9. He remained in judicial custody since then and the CID is also probing his alleged involvement in two other cases.
Naidu’s family and the TDP are currently busy with the legal battle in various courts.
TDP MLA and actor N. Balakrishna had held a meeting with TDP leaders in Hyderabad recently and had asked them to gear up for the polls. Balakrishna, who is brother-in-law of Naidu, had stated that TDP will contest the elections in Telangana with full force.
Kasani Gnaneswar had also said earlier that the TDP will contest a limited number of seats in Telangana.
Chandarbabu Naidu had addressed a public meeting in Khammam in December last year. He had expressed confidence that the party will regain glory in Telangana.
This was the first TDP meeting in Telangana since crushing defeat in the 2018 Assembly elections.
The TDP had contested in the 2018 elections in Telangana in alliance with the Congress. The party could win just two seats and both the MLAs later defected to ruling TRS (now BRS).
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+91-120-4Google scientists use noise-canceling headphones to measure heart rate
SAN FRANCISCO: Google scientists have successfully used audioplethysmography (APG), that utilises ultrasound to measure heart rate, for cardiac monitoring with hearable devices without adding extra sensors or compromising battery life.
The team conducted two rounds of user experience studies with 153 participants.
The results demonstrate that APG achieves consistently accurate heart rate (3.21 per cent median error across participants in all activity scenarios) and heart rate variability (2.70 per cent median error in inter-beat interval) measurements.
People frequently wear headphones and earbuds not just for music listening, but also for exercising, focusing, or simply mood adjustment.
“We have introduced a novel active in-ear health sensing modality. APG enables ANC hearables to monitor a user's physiological signals, such as heart rate and heart rate variability, without adding extra sensors or compromising battery life, ” Google researchers said in a blog post.
APG adheres to safety regulations with an 80 dB margin below the limit, remains unaffected by seal conditions, and is inclusive of all skin tones.
The signal quality of passive listening in the ear canal heavily relies on the earbud seal conditions.
It is challenging to embed health features that rely on the passive listening of low frequency signals on commercial ANC headphones.
“APG bypasses the aforementioned ANC headphone hardware constraints by sending a low intensity ultrasound probing signal through an ANC headphone's speakers, ” said Xiaoran “Van" Fan, Experimental Scientist and Trausti Thormundsson, Director, Google.
This signal triggers echoes, which are received via on-board feedback microphones. We observe that the tiny ear canal skin displacement and heartbeat vibrations modulate these ultrasound echoes.
“The final APG waveform looks strikingly similar to a photoplethysmograms (PPG) waveform, but provides an improved view of cardiac activities with more pronounced dicrotic notches (pressure waveforms that provide rich insights about the central artery system, such as blood pressure), ” they explained.
During their initial experiments, they observed that APG works robustly with bad earbuds seals and with music playing.
“However, we noticed the APG signal can sometimes be very noisy and could be heavily disturbed by body motion. At that point, we determined that in order to make APG useful, we had to make it more robust to compete with more than 80 years of PPG development, ” said the team.
APG transforms any TWS ANC headphones into smart sensing headphones with a simple software upgrade, and works robustly across various user activities, the researchers added.