Barriers to Healthy Family Dinners and Preventing Child Obesity: Focus Group Discussions with Parents of 5-to-8-Year-Old Children.

Background: Although numerous physical and mental health benefits for children have been linked to family dinners, many families still do not have regular family meals together. This study sought to identify the barriers that keep families from having dinners together.

Methods: We interviewed 42 parents of 5-to-8-year-old children in small focus groups to identify barriers and challenges that keep families from having healthy and consistent dinners together.

Remote Spectral Light Sensing in the Home Environment: Further Development of the TWLITE Study Concept.

Aging is a significant contributor to changes in sleep patterns, which has compounding consequences on cognitive health. A modifiable factor contributing to poor sleep is inadequate and/or mistimed light exposure. However, methods to reliably and continuously collect light levels long-term in the home, a necessity for informing clinical guidance, are not well established.

Tunable White Light for Elders (TWLITE): A Protocol Demonstrating Feasibility and Acceptability for Deployment, Remote Data Collection, and Analysis of a Home-Based Lighting Intervention in Older Adults.

Sleep disturbances are common in older adults and may contribute to disease progression in certain populations (e.g., Alzheimer's disease).

The Remote Assessment and Dynamic Response Program: Development of an In-Home Dementia-Related Care Needs Assessment to Improve Well-Being.

Background And Objectives: The Remote Assessment and Dynamic Response (READyR) Program was developed in order to address the current lack of early-stage dementia care planning programs that assess the care needs of persons with dementia. The goal was to create a program informed by care values and ongoing ecologically valid data. The objectives of this study are to describe the development and design process of the READyR Program, and to evaluate the utility of the READyR Program for identifying dementia-related care needs.

Association Between Mild Cognitive Impairment and Seasonal Rest-Activity Patterns of Older Adults.

Seasonal variation in rest-activity patterns has been observed in healthy adult populations. This study examined seasonal variation in total time spent overnight in the bedroom by cognitively intact older adults and older adults with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). We hypothesize that seasonal variation in rest-activity patterns is observed in the cognitively intact group and that this variation is disturbed in those with MCI.

In-Home Mobility Frequency and Stability in Older Adults Living Alone With or Without MCI: Introduction of New Metrics.

Older adults spend a considerable amount of time inside their residences; however, most research investigates out-of-home mobility and its health correlates. We measured indoor mobility using room-to-room transitions, tested their psychometric properties, and correlated indoor mobility with cognitive and functional status. Community-dwelling older adults living alone ( = 139; age = 78.

Emfit Bed Sensor Activity Shows Strong Agreement with Wrist Actigraphy for the Assessment of Sleep in the Home Setting.

Purpose: Wrist-worn actigraphy via research-grade devices, a well-established approach to the assessment of rest-activity, is limited by poor compliance, battery life, and lack of direct evidence for time spent physically in the bed. A non-invasive bed sensor (Emfit) may provide advantages over actigraphy for long-term sleep assessment in the home. This study compared sleep-wake measurements between this sensor and a validated actigraph.

The Collaborative Aging Research Using Technology Initiative: An Open, Sharable, Technology-Agnostic Platform for the Research Community.

Introduction: Future digital health research hinges on methodologies to conduct remote clinical assessments and in-home monitoring. The Collaborative Aging Research Using Technology (CART) initiative was introduced to establish a digital technology research platform that could widely assess activity in the homes of diverse cohorts of older adults and detect meaningful change longitudinally. This paper reports on the built end-to-end design of the CART platform, its functionality, and the resulting research capabilities.

Sensing a problem: Proof of concept for characterizing and predicting agitation.

Introduction: Agitation, experienced by patients with dementia, is difficult to manage and stressful for caregivers. Currently, agitation is primarily assessed by caregivers or clinicians based on self-report or very brief periods of observation. This limits availability of comprehensive or sensitive enough reporting to detect early signs of agitation or identify its precipitants.

Nonlinear dynamics captures brain states at different levels of consciousness in patients anesthetized with propofol.

The information processing capability of the brain decreases during unconscious states. Capturing this decrease during anesthesia-induced unconsciousness has been attempted using standard spectral analyses as these correlate relatively well with breakdowns in corticothalamic networks. Much of this work has involved the use of propofol to perturb brain activity, as it is one of the most widely used anesthetics for routine surgical anesthesia.

Mid-spatial frequency removal on aluminum free-form mirror.

Mid-spatial frequency (MSF) errors challenge freeform manufacture, not in the least due to tool-misfit. This can compromise the performance of functional surfaces and is difficult to remove by post-processing. Our previously reported work on an effective process-chain for aluminum polishing demonstrated the ability to remove MSFs by hard-tool grolishing.

Methodology for Establishing a Community-Wide Life Laboratory for Capturing Unobtrusive and Continuous Remote Activity and Health Data.

An end-to-end suite of technologies has been established for the unobtrusive and continuous monitoring of health and activity changes occurring in the daily life of older adults over extended periods of time. The technology is aggregated into a system that incorporates the principles of being minimally obtrusive, while generating secure, privacy protected, continuous objective data in real-world (home-based) settings for months to years. The system includes passive infrared presence sensors placed throughout the home, door contact sensors installed on exterior doors, connected physiological monitoring devices (such as scales), medication boxes, and wearable actigraphs.

Wood cellulose preparation methods and mass spectrometric analyses of delta13C, delta18O, and nonexchangeable delta2H values in cellulose, sugar, and starch: an interlaboratory comparison.

Interlaboratory comparisons involving nine European stable isotope laboratories have shown that the routine methods of cellulose preparation resulted in data that generally agreed within the precision of the isotope ratio mass spectrometry (IRMS) method used: +/-0.2 per thousand for carbon and +/-0.3 per thousand for oxygen.

Light and salinity affect growth of the salt marsh plant Aster laurentianus.

• The effects are reported of substrate salinity and light on the relative growth rate of the annual Aster laurentianus, an endangered species of eastern Canadian salt marshes. • The independent and combined effects of photosynthetically active photon flux density and salinity on the relative growth rate (RGR) and overall plant performance were measured in glasshouse and growth-chamber experiments on seedlings of A. laurentianus.