Using Robots at Home to Support Patients With Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease: Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial.

Background: Socially assistive robots are being developed for patients to help manage chronic health conditions such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Adherence to medication and availability of rehabilitation are suboptimal in this patient group, which increases the risk of hospitalization.

Objective: This pilot study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of a robot delivering telehealth care to increase adherence to medication and home rehabilitation, improve quality of life, and reduce hospital readmission compared with a standard care control group.

Statistical inference in mechanistic models: time warping for improved gradient matching.

Inference in mechanistic models of non-linear differential equations is a challenging problem in current computational statistics. Due to the high computational costs of numerically solving the differential equations in every step of an iterative parameter adaptation scheme, approximate methods based on gradient matching have become popular. However, these methods critically depend on the smoothing scheme for function interpolation.

The Gulfwatch contaminants monitoring program in the Gulf of Maine: Are its data being used for ocean protection, with special reference to Nova Scotia, Canada?

The Gulfwatch Contaminants Monitoring Program is part of the Canada-US, Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment (GOMC). Programs monitoring legacy toxic substances, i.e.

Homecare Robots to Improve Health and Well-Being in Mild Cognitive Impairment and Early Stage Dementia: Results From a Scoping Study.

Objectives: This scoping study is the first step of a multiphase, international project aimed at designing a homecare robot that can provide functional support, track physical and psychological well-being, and deliver therapeutic intervention specifically for individuals with mild cognitive impairment.

Design: Observational requirements gathering study.

Participants And Settings: Semistructured interviews were conducted with 3 participant groups: (1) individuals with memory challenges, mild cognitive impairment (MCI), or mild dementia (patients; n = 9); (2) carers of those with MCI or dementia (carers; n = 8); and (3) those with expertise in MCI or dementia research, clinical care, or management (experts; n = 16).

Colonization of Durum Wheat (Triticum turgidum L. var. durum) Culms Exhibiting Premature Senescence (Dead Heads) Associated with Fusarium pseudograminearum Crown Rot.

Fusarium crown rot is a significant disease of durum wheat (Triticum turgidum L. var. durum), which exhibits high levels of disease susceptibility.

An investigation into the immediate effects of pelvic taping on hamstring eccentric force in an elite male sprinter - A case report.

Background: Hamstring Injuries commonly cause missed training and competition time in elite sports. Injury surveillance studies have demonstrated high injury and re-injury rates, which have not improved across sports despite screening and prevention programmes being commonplace. The most commonly suggested intervention for hamstring prevention and rehabilitation is eccentric strength assessment and training.

Causal Learning Across Culture and Socioeconomic Status.

Extensive research has explored the ability of young children to learn about the causal structure of the world from patterns of evidence. These studies, however, have been conducted with middle-class samples from North America and Europe. In the present study, low-income Peruvian 4- and 5-year-olds and adults, low-income U.

A Pilot Randomized Trial of a Companion Robot for People With Dementia Living in the Community.

Objectives: To investigate the affective, social, behavioral, and physiological effects of the companion robot Paro for people with dementia in both a day care center and a home setting.

Design: A pilot block randomized controlled trial over 12 weeks. Participants were randomized to the intervention (Paro) or control condition (standard care).

Predictors of anemia in women of reproductive age: Biomarkers Reflecting Inflammation and Nutritional Determinants of Anemia (BRINDA) project.

Anemia in women of reproductive age (WRA) (age range: 15-49 y) remains a public health problem globally, and reducing anemia in women by 50% by 2025 is a goal of the World Health Assembly. We assessed the associations between anemia and multiple proximal risk factors (e.g.

Predictors of anemia in preschool children: Biomarkers Reflecting Inflammation and Nutritional Determinants of Anemia (BRINDA) project.

A lack of information on the etiology of anemia has hampered the design and monitoring of anemia-control efforts. We aimed to evaluate predictors of anemia in preschool children (PSC) (age range: 6-59 mo) by country and infection-burden category. Cross-sectional data from 16 surveys ( = 29,293) from the Biomarkers Reflecting Inflammation and Nutritional Determinants of Anemia (BRINDA) project were analyzed separately and pooled by category of infection burden.

Ectopic orbital meningioma: Fact or fiction?

Primary intraorbital ectopic meningiomas are rare and their existence remains controversial. We present a 30-year-old female with painless, non-axial proptosis and a palpable superomedial mass. The MRI demonstrated that the mass had no optic nerve sheath or sphenoid wing involvement and was initially reported to have no intracranial extension.

Significance and Novelty effects in single-trial ERP components and autonomic responses.

The phasic orienting reflex (OR) was investigated in two counterbalanced blocks of an auditory dishabituation paradigm differing in stimulus Significance (operationalised as tone counting). Twelve tones were presented at very long, randomly-varying interstimulus intervals (ISIs). Novelty and Significance were varied within subjects.

Earth-tide-induced fluctuations in the salinity of an inland river, New South Wales, Australia: a short-term study.

Wybong Creek discharges salts into the agriculturally and industrially important Hunter River in New South Wales, Australia. Abrupt increases in salinity occur periodically in the mid-Wybong Creek catchment. In order to understand the processes which cause these abrupt increases, changes in surface and groundwater were investigated.

Experimental investigation of interfacial energy transport in an evaporating sessile droplet for evaporative cooling applications.

In this paper we experimentally examine evaporation flux distributions and modes of interfacial energy transport for continuously fed evaporating spherical sessile water droplets in a regime that is relevant for applications, particularly for evaporative cooling systems. The contribution of the thermal conduction through the vapor phase was found to be insignificant compared to the thermal conduction through the liquid phase for the conditions we investigated. The local evaporation flux distributions associated with thermal conduction were found to vary along the surface of the droplet.

NK-Cell Recruitment Is Necessary for Eradication of Peritoneal Carcinomatosis with an IL12-Expressing Maraba Virus Cellular Vaccine.

Despite improvements in chemotherapy and radical surgical debulking, peritoneal carcinomatosis (PC) remains among the most common causes of death from abdominal cancers. Immunotherapies have been effective for selected solid malignancies, but their potential in PC has been little explored. Here, we report that intraperitoneal injection of an infected cell vaccine (ICV), consisting of autologous tumor cells infected with an oncolytic Maraba MG1 virus expressing IL12, promotes the migration of activated natural killer (NK) cells to the peritoneal cavity in response to the secretion of IFNγ-induced protein-10 (IP-10) from dendritic cells.

Prostate volume estimations using magnetic resonance imaging and transrectal ultrasound compared to radical prostatectomy specimens.

Introduction: We sought to evaluate the accuracy of prostate volume estimates in patients who received both a preoperative transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in relation to the referent pathological specimen post-radical prostatectomy.

Methods: Patients receiving both TRUS and MRI prior to radical prostatectomy at one academic institution were retrospectively analyzed. TRUS and MRI volumes were estimated using the prolate ellipsoid formula.