12508 research outputs found
Sort by
'Making the most of time during personal care' : nursing home staff experiences of meaningful engagement with residents with advanced dementia
Get PDFYesObjectives: Dementia progressively affects cognitive functioning, including the ability to communicate. Those who struggle to communicate are often considered unable to relate to other people. Frontline care workers are in a position to connect with residents. However, we know little about their perspectives. The aim of this study was to understand how and when nursing home staff meaningfully engaged with residents with advanced dementia. Methods: Semi-structured interviews, supplemented by informal conversations, were conducted with 21 staff from seven nursing homes. Inductive thematic analysis identified themes in the accounts. Results: Four themes related to how staff engaged with residents with advanced dementia (initiating meaningful engagement, recognising subtle reactions, practising caring behaviours, patience and perseverance). Two themes related to when meaningful engagement occurred (lacking time to connect, making the most of time during personal care). Conclusion: A key barrier to implementing formal interventions to improve care is lack of staff time. Staff overcome this by using personal care time for meaningful engagement with residents. Their approach, developed through experience, is consonant with person-centred dementia care. Building on this, future research should use participatory approaches building on practice wisdom to further develop and evaluate meaningful engagement with residents with advanced dementia.The work reported in this article contributed to a PhD by the first author, with funding awarded to the Centre for Applied Dementia Studies at the University of Bradford by BUPA
A Strategic Public Diplomacy Framework for Enhancing Implementation of Public Diplomacy Practice in the Diplomatic Field of Qatar
Get PDFThe role of Public Diplomacy (PD) in conducting foreign relations has emerged as a critical component for modern statecraft, foreign policy and arguably for the state’s global existence. With the world now more interconnected than ever before, public diplomacy has taken on new meaning and new importance. However, despite these marked shifts, public diplomacy remains under-researched and under-utilised both as a concept and as a vital activity. The complexities that underscore the development and evolution of public diplomacy within a dynamic international milieu therefore warrant renewed attention. The benefits and opportunities that accompany public diplomacy are equally complicated by a number of challenges to its practice.
This research identifies and advances a critical understanding of public diplomacy through a theoretically rigorous perspective that accounts for the fluid environment in which it operates, the evolving nature of stakeholders and audiences involved in shaping it, the sweeping impact of global information and communications development, the persistence of cultural divides and conflicts of interests and how they contribute to the lack of strategic frameworks in place to advance public diplomacy practice.
This thesis investigates Qatar as a case study due to its international stature and influence despite it being a small geographical state. Renowned for its international role as a leading actor in conflict reconciliation and commended for its contributions to international humanitarianism, the ambitious, forward-looking and steadfast foreign policy of Qatar has faced increased pressure in recent years. Qatar has encountered significant challenges in the form of the Nepali workers’ crisis that ensued following its selection as host for FIFA World Cup 2022 and with the diplomatic siege against it by a number of Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states. This study critically analyses Qatar’s public diplomacy practice considering these pressing developments and advances an original strategic public diplomacy framework that can assist Qatar in managing and mitigating the effect of these crises on its global image and reputation.
This research contributes to enhancing public diplomacy practice within the diplomatic context of statecraft and foreign policy by developing a nuanced and original framework that can be utilised by Qatar and other states to manage and mitigate modern public diplomacy challenges. The thesis utilises a mixed-methods research approach that includes literature reviews, media analyses, interviews and questionnaires. The study contributes to knowledge and practice by advancing research in an understudied field and by developing and implementing an original strategic PD empowerment framework
Sequential Pattern Mining: A Proposed Approach for Intrusion Detection Systems
No full textNoTechnological advancements have played a pivotal role in the rapid
proliferation of the fourth industrial revolution (4IR) through the
deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in large numbers.
COVID-19 caused serious disruptions across many industries with
lockdowns and travel restrictions imposed across the globe. As a
result, conducting business as usual became increasingly untenable,
necessitating the adoption of new approaches in the workplace.
For instance, virtual doctor consultations, remote learning, and
virtual private network (VPN) connections for employees working
from home became more prevalent. This paradigm shift has brought
about positive benefits, however, it has also increased the attack vectors and surfaces, creating lucrative opportunities for cyberattacks.
Consequently, more sophisticated attacks have emerged, including
the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) and Ransomware attacks,
which pose a serious threat to businesses and organisations worldwide. This paper proposes a system for detecting malicious activities
in network traffic using sequential pattern mining (SPM) techniques.
The proposed approach utilises SPM as an unsupervised learning
technique to extract intrinsic communication patterns from network traffic, enabling the discovery of rules for detecting malicious
activities and generating security alerts accordingly. By leveraging this approach, businesses and organisations can enhance the
security of their networks, detect malicious activities including
emerging ones, and thus respond proactively to potential threats
Living well with dementia: An exploratory matched analysis of minority ethnic and white people with dementia and carers participating in the IDEAL programme
Get PDFYesThe increasing heterogeneity of the population of older people is reflected in an increasing number of people with dementia and carers drawn from minority ethnic groups. Data from the IDEAL study are used to compare indices of 'living well' among people with dementia and carers from ethnic minority groups with matched white peers.
We used an exploratory cross-sectional case-control design to compare 'living well' for people with dementia and carers from minority ethnic and white groups. Measures for both groups were quality of life, life satisfaction, wellbeing, loneliness, and social isolation and, for carers, stress, relationship quality, role captivity and caring competence.
The sample of people with dementia consisted of 20 minority ethnic and 60 white participants and for carers 15 and 45 respectively. People with dementia from minority ethnic groups had poorer quality of life (-4.74, 95% CI: -7.98 to -1.50) and higher loneliness (1.72, 95% CI: 0.78-2.66) whilst minority ethnic carers had higher stress (8.17, 95% CI: 1.72-14.63) and role captivity (2.00, 95% CI: 0.43-3.57) and lower relationship quality (-9.86, 95% CI: -14.24 to -5.48) than their white peers.
Our exploratory study suggests that people with dementia from minority ethnic groups experience lower quality of life and carers experience higher stress and role captivity and lower relationship quality than their white peers. Confirmatory research with larger samples is required to facilitate analysis of the experiences of specific minority ethnic groups and examine the factors contributing to these disadvantages.Economic and Social Research Council. National Institute for Health and Care Research. Grant Number: ES/L001853/
Which product description phrases affect sales forecasting? An explainable AI framework by integrating WaveNet neural network models with multiple regression
No full textYesThe rapid rise of many e-commerce platforms for individual consumers has generated a large amount of text-based data, and thus researchers have begun to experiment with text mining techniques to extract information from the large amount of textual data to assist in sales forecasting. The existing literature focuses textual data on product reviews; however, consumer reviews are not something that companies can directly control, here we argue that textual product descriptions are also important determinants of consumer choice. We construct an artificial intelligence (AI) framework that combines text mining, WaveNet neural networks, multiple regression, and SHAP model to explain the impact of product descriptions on sales forecasting. Using data from nearly 200,000 sales records obtained from a cross-border e-commerce firm, an empirical study showed that the product description presented to customers can influence sales forecasting, and about 44% of the key phrases greatly affect sales forecasting results, the sales forecasting models that added key product description phrases had improved forecasting accuracy. This paper provides explainable results of sales forecasting, which can provide guidance for firms to design product descriptions with reference to the market demand reflected by these phrases, and adding these phrases to product descriptions can help win more customers
Surface Engineered Novel Patterned Polymers to Remove Pathogenic Biofilms from Human Skin. Effective Removal of Antimicrobial Resistant Bacteria from Chronic Wounds
No full textA silent pandemic, chronic, non-healing wounds are a major cause of morbidity, with treatment and management representing significant health burdens. The opportunistic pathogens Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa are the most common species isolated from chronic wounds. Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), a biocompatible and, inexpensive to fabricate polymer, can undergo various modifications. The ability of the produced polymers to attract S. aureus and P. aeruginosa, either from the planktonic state, or while sessile in biofilms on ex vivo skin, was investigated using flat (FL) or patterned (PT) PDMS with or without 1% or 10% triclosan
Patterned PDMS + 10% triclosan (PT 10%) attracted significantly more live S. aureus and P. aeruginosa, as determined using Colony Forming Unit (CFU) analysis (*p<0.01), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) (*p<0.01) and Confocal Scanning Laser Microscopy (CSLM) (*p<0.01). The released triclosan was not cytotoxic against either bacteria or primary cultures of human dermal fibroblasts using Water Soluble Tetrazolium Salts (WST-1) assay. High performance liquid chromatography analysis highlights low level of triclosan release from the PDMS. Bacterial infection in co-culture using the Boyden chamber assay increased fibroblast viability in the presence of PDMS (*p<0.05). PT 10% demonstrated superior biofilm transfer from epidermis (*p<0.05), in comparison to all other analysed polymers. In summary, the unique topography of PDMS combined with triclosan attracted bacteria most efficiently. This promising data suggests potential for engineering a patterned polymer to physically transfer biofilms from wounds, and importantly lacks bactericidal properties which is vital in the quest to combat antimicrobial resistance
Failure analysis of IoT-based smart agriculture system: towards sustainable food security
Get PDFYesInternet of Things (IoT)-based smart agriculture
systems are increasingly being used to improve agricultural yield.
IoT devices used for agricultural monitoring are often deployed
in outdoor environments in remote areas. Due to the exposure
to harsh environments and the nature of deployment, sensors
and other devices are susceptible to an increased rate of failure,
which can take a system to unsafe and dangerous states. Failure
of a smart agriculture system can cause significant harm to
nature and people and reduce agricultural production. To address
the concerns associated with the failure of the system, it is
necessary to understand how the failures of the components of
a system can contribute to causing the overall system failure.
This paper adopts Fault Tree Analysis, a widely used framework
for failure behaviour analysis in other safety-critical domains, to
demonstrate the qualitative failure analysis of smart irrigation
systems based on the components' failure
Predicate Calculus for Perception-led Automata
Get PDFArtificial Intelligence is a fuzzy concept. My role, as I see it, is to put
down a working definition, a criterion, and a set of assumptions to set
up equations for a workable methodology. This research introduces the
notion of Artificial Intelligent Agency, denoting the application of Artificial
General Intelligence. The problem being handled by mathematics and
logic, and only thereafter semantics, is Self-Supervised Machine Learning
(SSML) towards Intuitive Vehicle Health Management, in the domain of
cybernetic-physical science.
The present work stems from a broader engagement with a major multinational
automotive OEM, where Intelligent Vehicle Health Management
will dynamically choose suitable variants only to realise predefined variation
points. Physics-based models infer properties of a model of the system,
not properties of the implemented system itself. The validity of their
inference depends on the models’ degree of fidelity, which is always an approximate
localised engineering abstraction. In sum, people are not very
good at establishing causality.
To deduce new truths from implicit patterns in the data about the physical
processes that generate the data, the kernel of this transformative technology
is the intersystem architecture, occurring in-between and involving the physical and engineered system and the construct thereof, through the communication core at their interface. In this thesis it is shown that the
most practicable way to establish causality is by transforming application models into actual implementation. The hypothesis being that the ideal source of training data for SSML, is an isomorphic monoid of indexical facts, trace-preserving events of natural kind
Behaviour of buried pipes adjacent to ground voids under dynamic loading
Get PDFProtection of buried pipes is a serious issue that concerns countries around the world. Therefore, there is a need for new soil improvement techniques such as geosynthetic materials installation to protect these pipes from damage. This study used large-scale laboratory tests to study the behaviour of buried pipes. A total of 22 large-scale tests were performed to study the behaviour of buried flexible HDPE pipes with and without void presence under the protection of the geogrid reinforcing layers subjected to incrementally increasing cyclic loading.
The presence of voids located at the spring-line of the flexible buried pipes, led to a considerable increase in the soil surface settlement, pressure recorded at the pipe crown, spring-line and invert, pipe deformation and strain recorded in the pipe wall. Increasing the pipe burial depth contributed to significant reductions in the soil surface settlement, pressure recorded at the pipe crown and invert, pipe deformation and strain recorded in the pipe wall. However, the void presence limited the contribution of increasing the pipe burial depth. The inclusion of a geogrid reinforcing layer contributed to a considerable reduction in the soil surface settlement, pressure recorded at the pipe crown, spring-line and invert, pipe deformation and strain recorded in the pipe wall. The use of a combination of geogrid reinforcing layers and increasing the pipe burial depth contributed in diminishing the ground void presence effect, where better pressure distribution inside the system was achieved. Consequently, more protection was provided to the buried pipe
Experimental study on mechanical behavior of steel truss-reinforced concrete box girders
No full textYesThis paper proposes a new design concept for a steel truss-reinforced concrete box girder which incorporates a steel truss instead of longitudinal bars and stirrups. A comprehensive assessment of the flexural and shear behavior of the proposed steel truss-reinforced concrete box girders was conducted through the testing of twelve girders until failure. All test specimens had the same concrete depth and width of 400 mm and 300 mm, but the length of concrete in the shear and flexural specimens were 3300 mm and 3100 mm, respectively. Moreover, the reinforcing steel truss configuration and member sizes were different. The effects of the angle steel size of the lower chord, vertical webs spacing, shear span ratio and presence of diagonal webs on the cracking, yield and ultimate loads, crack patterns, failure modes, vertical load-deflection curves and strain distribution of these steel truss-reinforced concrete box girders were studied. The test results showed that the flexural capacity of the steel truss-reinforced concrete box girder increases with the increase of angle steel size of the lower chord. Moreover, the spacing of vertical webs and presence of diagonal webs have little effect on the flexural capacity of steel truss-reinforced concrete box girders tested. With the decrease of the shear span ratio and vertical webs spacing, the shear capacity of the steel truss-reinforced concrete box girder increases. Finally, simplified formulae for calculating the flexural and shear capacities of steel truss-reinforced concrete box girders were proposed, showing good agreement with the experimental results