Assessing Impressions of Community Health Worker Use of Tablet-Based Medication Documentation Software.

Community health workers, an important and emerging role in the evolution of the care delivery system, are uniquely positioned to play a vital role in information gathering and exchange. NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital carried out a feasibility study to assess community health worker use and impressions of a medication documentation application that runs on a tablet. The nine community health workers successfully collected data on 16 patients in the home setting.

Monitoring gene expression to evaluate oxygen infusion at a gasoline-contaminated site.

Increasingly, molecular biological tools, most notably quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), are being employed to provide a more comprehensive assessment of bioremediation of petroleum hydrocarbons and fuel oxygenates. While qPCR enumeration of key organisms or catabolic genes can aid in site management decisions, evaluation of site activities conducted to stimulate biodegradation would ideally include a direct measure of gene expression to infer activity. In the current study, reverse-transcriptase (RT) qPCR was used to monitor gene expression to evaluate the effectiveness of an oxygen infusion system to promote biodegradation of BTEX and MTBE.

Photorefractive phase-conjugate technique for measuring surface granularity.

A self-aligned photorefractive autocorrelator is implemented for the real-time use of second-order statistics for texture analysis. We demonstrate the measurement of the length scale of the granularity of a rough surface.

Photorefractive phase conjugation with orthogonally polarized pumping beams.

We solve the undepleted-pumps photorefractive four-wave mixing equations for the case of orthogonally polarized pump beams. Advantages over the parallel-polarized-pumps case include the potential for reflectivity enhancement and easy isolation of the conjugator from the source. The phase-conjugate reflectivities for both the parallel and orthogonally polarized pump beam cases were measured with a BaTiO3 crystal, and the results support our theoretical predictions.