The relationship between proxy agency and the medical decisions concerning pediatric patients in palliative care: a qualitative study.

Background: The children's agency and that exercised by parents and health professionals in palliative care, along with structural limitations imposed by the conditions of inequality, will provide a new perspective from medical anthropology and biomedicine to improve pediatric palliative care in complex therapeutic scenarios. The main purpose of the study was to analyze the ways in which pediatric patients have agency in relation to their parents and palliative care (PC) professionals within the hospital setting, as well as the structural circumstances that constrain said agency.

Method: A hospital ethnography (by means of non-participant observation and interviews) of the palliative care (PC) unit in a children's hospital was conducted over the course of six months.

Characterization, Statistical Analysis and Method Selection in the Two-Clocks Synchronization Problem for Pairwise Interconnected Sensors.

Time synchronization among sensor devices connected through non-deterministic media is a fundamental requirement for sensor fusion and other distributed tasks that need a common time reference. In many of the time synchronization methods existing in literature, the estimation of the relation between pairs of clocks is a core concept; moreover, in applications that do not have general connectivity among its devices but a simple pairwise topology, such as embedded systems, mobile robots or home automation, two-clock synchronization is actually the basic form of the time estimation problem. In these kinds of applications, especially for critical ones, not only the quality of the estimation of the relation between two clocks is important, but also the bounds the methods provide for the estimated values, and their computational effort (since many are small systems).

Marginal probabilistic modeling of the delays in the sensory data transmission of networked telerobots.

Networked telerobots are remotely controlled through general purpose networks and components, which are highly heterogeneous and exhibit stochastic response times; however their correct teleoperation requires a timely flow of information from sensors to remote stations. In order to guarantee these time requirements, a good on-line probabilistic estimation of the sensory transmission delays is needed. In many modern applications this estimation must be computationally highly efficient, e.