Ambulatory autonomic nervous system activity in relation to hearing impairment.

Previous research has demonstrated that hearing impairment is associated with heightened subjective experiences of listening effort, fatigue, and stress, impacting daily functioning. This study aimed to evaluate whether hearing impairment alters physiological stress systems and whether different aspects of hearing impairment could vary in predicting dysregulation in these systems. Hallmark measures of parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous system activity were derived from electrocardiography, impedance cardiography, and electrodermal activity recordings taken from 133 individuals, aged 37 to 73, over two 24-hr periods, including sleep.

Incorporating Virtual Reality Agents During a Dichotic Speech Reception Task: Insights From the Heart.

Objectives: Listening effort is moderated by not only task difficulty, but also success importance. In real communication scenarios, success importance varies based upon the social context. However, in the laboratory, it can be challenging to manipulate social context without compromising experimental control.

Accelerometer-based heart rate adjustment for ambulatory stress research.

Using heart rate (HR) measurements to detect mental stress in naturalistic settings is hampered by the physiological impact of hemodynamic and metabolic demands. Correcting HR for these demands can help isolate fluctuations in HR associated with psychosocial stress responses, a concept termed additional heart rate (aHR). This study examined whether adding predictors for posture, activity type, and lagged movement intensity for the prolonged impact of physical activity (PA) improved aHR estimation across various manipulations of mental stress, posture, and PA in a controlled laboratory environment (n = 197).

The effects of special educational needs and socioeconomic status on teachers' and parents' judgements of pupils' cognitive abilities.

Background: Teachers' and parents' judgements of pupils' cognitive abilities influence pupils' daily learning opportunities and experiences, as these judgements affect the difficulty level of materials and instruction that teachers and parents provide. Over time, these judgements thus significantly shape educational success. However, pupils' characteristics, such as special educational needs (SEN), giftedness and socioeconomic status (SES) can influence and bias judgement accuracy.

Use of a risk-based intervention bundle to prescribe and implement interventions to prevent pressure injury: An observational study.

Aim: To explore the relationship between the prescription and implementation of pressure injury preventative interventions following risk assessment combined with a risk-stratified intervention bundle.

Design: Single-centre, cross-sectional, observational, prospective.

Methods: The charts and bedsides of 341 adult inpatients were examined.

The prospective associations between autonomy support, basic psychological needs, motivation and well-being among people with a mild to borderline intellectual disability: a two-wave study.

Background: This study, grounded in self-determination theory, examined how satisfaction of the needs for autonomy, relatedness and competence in people with mild to borderline intellectual disability (MBID) changed over a 4.5-year period. Additionally, it explored the association between life events across various domains (i.

Effectiveness of the HEAR-Aware App for Adults Not Ready for Hearing Aids, but Open to Self-Management Support: Results of a Randomized Controlled Trial.

Introduction: Recently, the HEAR-aware app was developed to support adults who are eligible for hearing aids (HAs) but not yet ready to use them. The app serves as a self-management tool, offering assistance for a range of target behaviors (TBs), such as communication strategies and emotional coping. Using ecological momentary assessment and intervention, the app prompts users to complete brief surveys regarding challenging listening situations they encounter in their daily lives (ecological momentary assessment).

Effects of hearing acuity on psychophysiological responses to effortful speech perception.

In recent studies, psychophysiological measures have been used as markers of listening effort, but there is limited research on the effect of hearing loss on such measures. The aim of the current study was to investigate the effect of hearing acuity on physiological responses and subjective measures acquired during different levels of listening demand, and to investigate the relationship between these measures. A total of 125 participants (37 males and 88 females, age range 37-72 years, pure-tone average hearing thresholds at the best ear between -5.

An Event-Based Neural Compressive Telemetry With >11× Loss-Less Data Reduction for High-Bandwidth Intracortical Brain Computer Interfaces.

Intracortical brain-computer interfaces offer superior spatial and temporal resolutions, but face challenges as the increasing number of recording channels introduces high amounts of data to be transferred. This requires power-hungry data serialization and telemetry, leading to potential tissue damage risks. To address this challenge, this paper introduces an event-based neural compressive telemetry (NCT) consisting of 8 channel-rotating Δ-ADCs, an event-driven serializer supporting a proposed ternary address event representation protocol, and an event-based LVDS driver.

Pressure injury risk assessment and prescription of preventative interventions using a structured tool versus clinical judgement: An interrater agreement study.

Aim: To assess agreement of pressure injury risk level and differences in preventative intervention prescription between nurses using a structured risk assessment tool compared with clinical judgement.

Design: Interrater agreement study.

Methods: Data were collected from November 2019 to December 2022.

Clinical outcomes after online adaptive MR-guided stereotactic body radiotherapy for pancreatic tumors on a 1.5 T MR-linac.

Introduction: Online adaptive magnetic resonance-guided radiotherapy (MRgRT) is a promising treatment modality for pancreatic cancer and is being employed by an increasing number of centers worldwide. However, clinical outcomes have only been reported on a small scale, often from single institutes and in the context of clinical trials, in which strict patient selection might limit generalizability of outcomes. This study presents clinical outcomes of a large, international cohort of patients with (peri)pancreatic tumors treated with online adaptive MRgRT.

Human neuronal excitation/inhibition balance explains and predicts neurostimulation induced learning benefits.

Previous research has highlighted the role of the excitation/inhibition (E/I) ratio for typical and atypical development, mental health, cognition, and learning. Other research has highlighted the benefits of high-frequency transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS)-an excitatory form of neurostimulation-on learning. We examined the E/I as a potential mechanism and studied whether tRNS effect on learning depends on E/I as measured by the aperiodic exponent as its putative marker.

Towards an Integrative Model of Math Cognition: Interactions between Working Memory and Emotions in Explaining Children's Math Performance.

Individual variation in mathematical skills can be ascribed to differences in cognitive ability, but also to students' emotional experiences of mathematics, such as enjoyment and anxiety. The current study investigated how the interplay of working memory with math anxiety and enjoyment explains mathematical performance in primary school students. We also explored whether these relations differed with the type of math test and students' age.

Endoscopic screening of the upper gastrointestinal tract for second primary tumors in patients with head and neck cancer in a Western country.

Background: Patients with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) can develop second primary tumors (SPTs) in the esophagus. Endoscopic screening could lead to detection of SPTs at early stages and improve survival.

Methods: We performed a prospective endoscopic screening study in patients with curably treated HNSCC diagnosed between January 2017-July 2021 in a Western country.

The pupil near response is short lasting and intact in virtual reality head mounted displays.

The pupil of the eye constricts when moving focus from an object further away to an object closer by. This is called the pupil near response, which typically occurs together with accommodation and vergence responses. When immersed in virtual reality mediated through a head-mounted display, this triad is disrupted by the vergence-accommodation conflict.

Feasibility of online radial magnetic resonance imaging for adaptive radiotherapy of pancreatic tumors.

Background And Purpose: Online adaptive magnetic resonance (MR)-guided treatment planning for pancreatic tumors on 1.5T systems typically employs Cartesian 3D w magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The main disadvantage of this sequence is that respiratory motion results in substantial blurring in the abdomen, which can hamper delineation accuracy.

Towards automated video-based assessment of dystonia in dyskinetic cerebral palsy: A novel approach using markerless motion tracking and machine learning.

Video-based clinical rating plays an important role in assessing dystonia and monitoring the effect of treatment in dyskinetic cerebral palsy (CP). However, evaluation by clinicians is time-consuming, and the quality of rating is dependent on experience. The aim of the current study is to provide a proof-of-concept for a machine learning approach to automatically assess scoring of dystonia using 2D stick figures extracted from videos.

Supplementation of Water Spinach () on the utilization of and leaf for fermentation.

Background And Aim: (Water Spinach) is the most potential for livestock growth performance, including chickens, pigs, cattle, and goats, especially in a tropical country like Cambodia. It is not only an alternative feed source but also one kind of supplemented feed for goat raising. Supplementation with Water Spinach in the utilization of low-quality tree foliage results in an increase in dry matter intake in goat production.

An Implantable Neuromorphic Sensing System Featuring Near-sensor Computation and Send-on-Delta Transmission for Wireless Neural Sensing of Peripheral Nerves.

This paper presents a bio-inspired event-driven neuromorphic sensing system (NSS) capable of performing on-chip feature extraction and "send-on-delta" pulse-based transmission, targeting peripheral-nerve neural recording applications. The proposed NSS employs event-based sampling which, by leveraging the sparse nature of electroneurogram (ENG) signals, achieves a data compression ratio of >125×, while maintaining a low normalized RMS error of 4% after reconstruction. The proposed NSS consists of three sub-circuits.

Impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on gifted and non-gifted primary school students' well-being and motivation from a self-determination perspective.

This study examined the impact of the COVID-19-induced school lockdown on need satisfaction, well-being and motivation in both gifted and non-gifted primary school students in the Netherlands. A total of 312 parents (122 from gifted children) participated. The lockdown had mainly negative effects on students' need satisfaction, well-being and motivation.

The phenotypic spectrum and genotype-phenotype correlations in 106 patients with variants in major autism gene CHD8.

CHD8, a major autism gene, functions in chromatin remodelling and has various roles involving several biological pathways. Therefore, unsurprisingly, previous studies have shown that intellectual developmental disorder with autism and macrocephaly (IDDAM), the syndrome caused by pathogenic variants in CHD8, consists of a broad range of phenotypic abnormalities. We collected and reviewed 106 individuals with IDDAM, including 36 individuals not previously published, thus enabling thorough genotype-phenotype analyses, involving the CHD8 mutation spectrum, characterization of the CHD8 DNA methylation episignature, and the systematic analysis of phenotypes collected in Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO).

Screening for head and neck tumors in patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma and vice versa: a nationwide survey among medical specialists.

 Retrospectively, minimally 5% of patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) and 11 % with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) in Western countries developed a second primary tumor (SPT). SPT screening in ESCC and HNSCC patients is not implemented routinely in daily practice in many Western countries. This study aimed to assess medical specialist knowledge and opinions regarding screening for head and neck SPTs (HNSPTs) in ESCC patients and vice versa in the Netherlands.

'Are we opening a can of worms?': Community-based occupational therapists' experiences working with clients with unexpected mental health issues.

General community occupational therapists (OTs) work with clients experiencing chronic and complex conditions, some living with one or more comorbid common mental health issues (such as anxiety, depression or distress). This study aimed to describe the perspectives of general community OTs of their engagement with clients experiencing mental health issues; their perceptions of the implementation of routine screening in their practice, and the knowledge, skills and support they need to identify and support their clients' mental health needs. Six focus groups were undertaken with general community OTs (n = 21) from three Australian health services in rural, regional and metropolitan settings, between December 2020 and January 2021.

Prevalence of lung tumors in patients with esophageal squamous cell carcinoma and vice versa: a systematic review and meta-analysis.

Purpose: Recent reports suggest an increased prevalence of lung second primary tumors (LSPTs) in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma (ESCC) patients and vice versa. However, the exact prevalence of SPTs remains unclear and screening for these SPTs is currently not routinely performed in western countries. We aimed to report on the prevalence of LSPTs in patients with ESCC and esophageal second primary tumors (ESPTs) in patients with lung cancer (LC).