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Quality of life and multiple long-term conditions in Southeast Asia: a systematic review and meta-analysis
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The data informing from this review are extracted from previously published studies in the public domain. The dataset generated and analysed during the review is available on Figshare repository (https://doi.org/10.25392/leicester.data.30156316.v1)."We are providing an unedited version of this manuscript to give early access to its findings. Before final publication, the manuscript will undergo further editing. Please note there may be errors present which affect the content, and all legal disclaimers apply."Supplementary information is available online at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-68197-z#Sec16 .This review systematically synthesised the evidence on quality of life measures and outcomes for people living with multiple long-term conditions in the Southeast Asia region. Results were analysed using a combination of methods, meta-analysis for studies where the same quality of life score was reported across three or more cohorts, and descriptive narrative synthesis. In total, 34 studies comprising 11,876 participants were included in the narrative synthesis and 14 of these were included in meta-analysis. The most common quality of life tools used included WHOQOL-BREF ( n = 8) and EQ-5D-5L ( n = 3) with pooled mean values of 70.47 (95% CI: 62.71 to 78.24) and 0.76 (95% CI: 0.67 to 0.84) respectively, indicating reduced but good quality of life. As healthcare systems adapt to the evolving challenges associated with multiple long-term conditions, understanding the tools and measures used to assess quality of life in different contexts becomes imperative to account for disease combinations and cultural nuances.This research was funded by the NIHR Global Health Research Centre for Multiple Long-Term Conditions using UK aid from the UK Government to support global health research (NIHR203257). The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the UK government. K.K. is supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Applied Research Collaboration East Midlands (ARC EM), NIHR Global Research Centre for Multiple Long-Term Conditions, NIHR Cross NIHR Collaboration for Multiple Long-Term Conditions, NIHR Leicester Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) and the British Heart Foundation (BHF) Centre of Excellence. M.P.F., D.I., S.C., S.J. and A.P. are supported by the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration East Midlands (ARC EM). P.H. and R.A. are supported by an Advanced Research Fellowship award from the National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR303176). S.C. is supported by the supported by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Global Health Research Group for Cardiometabolic Disease Research in Africa Partnership (CREATE) (NIHR132995)
Theoretical and experimental results on time-series representations of polynomials
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The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.This study considers time-series representations of polynomials. Often in data modelling and many other applications, accurate estimations of the degree of a polynomial, of the noise standard deviation, and of the coefficient of the highest degree of a polynomial are useful in detection, estimation, and prediction. The major contributions of this paper can be found in the original research offering novel theoretical and experimental results. The theoretical results include an alternative proof of the qth order AR time-series representation, with a constant, of a polynomial of degree q, an alternative proof of the (q + 1)-th order AR time-series representation, without a constant, of a polynomial of degree q, as well as generalized equations (valid for a polynomial of an arbitrary degree) for reduced variance estimation of the polynomial coefficient corresponding to the highest degree. The experimental investigations are the most comprehensive so far, in that they use well over 35 times more realisations than before, use a greater variety of noisy data (Gaussian, Uniform, and Exponential noise), and use a larger range of polynomial degrees as well as of noise standard deviations than before. Experimental results on estimations of the degree of a polynomial, of the noise standard deviation, and of the polynomial coefficient corresponding to the highest degree using seven methods (AIC, AICc, GIC, BIC, Chi-square, F-distribution, and PTS2) are presented. Results indicate clearly that PTS2 performs the best
Space Matters: The Effect of Product Spacing on Consumer Variety-Seeking
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Data is available from the author on request.Supplementary Information is available online at: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11002-025-09777-3#Sec28 .Across four studies spanning various product categories and involving both hypothetical and real choices with monetary incentives, we demonstrate that consumers tend to seek greater variety when products are spaced closely together rather than farther apart. This effect arises from shifts in attentional focus: close spacing promotes a holistic view, diverting attention from individual options and leading to less defined preferences. Consequently, consumers rely more on variety-seeking heuristics. We validate this mechanism through product memory tests, preference certainty assessments, and the direct manipulation of participants’ attention. Specifically, participants exposed to closely spaced products better recalled the overall arrangement of the choice set, while those viewing widely spaced products remembered individual options more accurately. Additionally, expressed preferences were less distinct and less predictive of choices in the close- versus wide-spacing condition. Notably, directing attention to individual products mitigated this effect. Our findings offer practical implications for consumers seeking to manage excessive variety-seeking, while providing valuable insights for practitioners on how to strategically use product spacing to influence consumer choices and enhance profitability.This research was supported by the Korea University Business School Research Grant and the Insung Research Grant
‘Memories we treasure’: Evaluating the impact on co-designers and audiences of a photographic exhibition by participants with memory problems
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Data is available from the corresponding author on receipt of a reasonable request.Visual research, including photovoice methods are increasingly used to elicit the experiences of people living with memory loss, though few such studies have investigated the impact of produced images on audiences. Drawing on Freire’s empowerment pedagogy, we aimed to explore how a photography exhibition, created by individuals with memory concerns participating in the APPLE-Tree (Active Prevention in People at risk of dementia through Lifestyle, bEhaviour change and Technology to build REsiliEnce) dementia prevention programme contributed to an understanding on life with memory loss, and whether it reduced any stigma, among its co-producers and audience. Approximately 200 people attended the exhibition launch, of whom 97 completed a survey. We interviewed two co-producers with lived experience of memory problems and seven academic co-producers. In our thematic analysis of survey responses and interview transcripts, we developed three themes: (1) Increasing understanding by giving voice to participants: seeing unique individuals behind the work; (2) The power of visual methods to communicate research findings: interviewees described how the quality of the works and exhibition created an atmosphere that honoured participants as artists, valuing and respecting their messages; (3) Evoking emotions: fear and hope: The audience described the exhibition’s power to evoke strong emotions of fear at the risk of losing “treasured memories” and hope of living successfully with memory loss. Some attendees and study team members felt motivated to try to reduce their future dementia risk. We consider the value of public engagement using arts-based co-production, and the impact of the exhibition in this field. We explore how our findings reflect notions of empowerment in two juxtaposing ways: empowerment to express how living with memory loss feels as a means of activism to reduce associated stigma, and empowerment to change future dementia risk through lifestyle changes.This work is funded by an Economic and Social Research Council/National Institute for Health Research programme grant (ES/S010408/1). Claudia Cooper is funded by an NIHR Senior Investigator award (NIHR205009)
Exclusion Rates among Disabled and Older Users of Virtual and Augmented Reality
Get PDFThis paper examines the levels of exclusion encountered by disabled and older users of consumer-level VR and AR technology and identifies methods formed by people with diverse access needs to circumvent encountered barriers to use. First, we estimate exclusion rates for a selection of nine immersive experiences of VR and AR, computed using population statistics data for the United Kingdom (UK). We then present an empirical lab-based study evaluating the usability of the same VR and AR experiences. The study involved 60 UK-based participants with varying access needs and the study results were used to calculate the empirical exclusion rates. Both the estimated and empirical exclusion rates display high levels of exclusion, which for the more complex experiences in the study reached 100 %. However, multiple participants overcame usability barriers and completed experiences through provided assistance and self-initiated adaptations, suggesting that future VR and AR can become more inclusive if designed to counter these barriers.This work was supported by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC, grants EP/S027637/1, EP/S027432/1, EP/W025698/1, EP/W02456X/1)
A review of faithfulness metrics for hallucination assessment in Large Language Models
Get PDFThis article has been accepted for publication in IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing. This is the author's version which has not been fully edited and content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/JSTSP.2025.3579203 .This review examines the means with which faithfulness has been evaluated across open-ended summarization, question answering and machine translation tasks. We find that the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) as a faithfulness evaluator is commonly the metric that is most highly correlated with human judgement. The means with which other studies have mitigated hallucinations is discussed, with both retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and prompting framework approaches having been linked with superior faithfulness, whilst other recommendations for mitigation are provided. Research into faithfulness is integral to the continued widespread use of LLMs, as unfaithful responses can pose major risks to many areas whereby LLMs would otherwise be suitable. Furthermore, evaluating open-ended generation provides a more comprehensive measure of LLM performance than commonly used multiplechoice benchmarking, which can help in advancing the trust that can be placed within LLMs.10.13039/501100000780-European Commission
Optimized Feature Points and Keyframe Methods for VSLAM in High-Dynamic Indoor Environments
Get PDFVSLAM is one of the key technologies for indoor mobile robots, used to perceive the surrounding environment, achieve accurate positioning and mapping. However, traditional VSLAM algorithms based on the assumption of a static environment still face certain challenges. The movement, occlusion, and appearance changes of dynamic objects can lead to feature point-matching errors, making data association difficult and causing biases in motion estimation. In order to address this challenge, this paper proposes a dynamic feature point removal method and a closed-loop detection method for high dynamic scenes, aiming to effectively improve the robustness and positioning accuracy in dynamic environments. First, the YOLOv7-tiny object detection network and LK optical flow algorithm are combined to detect the dynamic area, and the adaptive threshold keyframe selection method is adopted to solve the problem of poor quality of keyframe caused by the existing heuristic threshold selection method. Then, this paper proposes a dynamic keyframe sequence creation method based on the angle difference between keyframes, which reduces the workload of loop back detection and accelerates the efficiency of loop back detection in the system. Next, the ParC_NetVLAD image matching algorithm is proposed. In this paper, ConvNeXt-Tiny network is used for feature extraction of images, and ParC-Net network and CBAM attention mechanism are added to the feature extraction network. Finally, NetVLAD is used to cluster the extracted local features to obtain global features that can represent images. Experiments are conducted on public TUM RGB-D datasets and in real-world situations. The proposed algorithm reduces the ATE (Absolute Trajectory Error) by 96.4% and the RPE (Relative Trajectory Error) by 82.8% on average in highly dynamic scenarios. In the Pittsburgh30k dataset, the average accuracy of loop closure detection has been improved by 2.6%.10.13039/501100001809-National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number: 62161010 and 62361024);
10.13039/501100013142-Key Research and Development Project of Hainan Province (Grant Number: ZDYF2022GXJS348 and ZDYF2024GXJS021);
Hainan Province Natural Science Foundation (Grant Number: 623RC446)
Regulating NFT marketplaces: a comparative analysis of the EU and UK legal systems
No full text...other eds. DiMatteo/Hufnagel
Match and training injury epidemiology in elite UK netball: a prospective cohort study over one season
Get PDFSupplementary files are available online at: https://bmjopensem.bmj.com/content/11/1/e002324#supplementary-materials .What is already known on this topic:
⇒ Netball is a popular female sport with high injury rates, particularly at the ankle and knee.
⇒ There is a lack of ongoing, systematic injury surveillance systems and limited epidemiological data in elite UK netball.
What this study adds:
⇒ This first netball study comparing the profile of match and training injuries found match incidence was considerably higher than training incidence.
⇒ Contact-related, acute ankle ligament injuries had the highest incidence and time-loss burden in matches.
⇒ Non-contact, overuse leg tendinopathies, with a high medical attention burden, were most common in training.
⇒ Knee anterior cruciate ligament injuries were infrequent but caused significant time loss in matches and training.
⇒ The centre position sustained most injuries in matches and training
How this study might affect research, practice or policy:
⇒ Implementing such an injury surveillance system for elite UK netball will enable continuous, systematic injury data collection, enhancing future injury incidence evidence and informing appropriate prevention strategies.
⇒ Prevention strategies should focus on reducing the incidence and impact of acute lower limb injuries.
⇒ Strategies should also prioritise the prevention of overuse injuries, with further investigation required to assess the impact of playing while managing these injuries.
⇒ Further understanding of position-specific injuries could aid tailored prevention programmes.Objective: To describe the incidence and characteristics of match and training injuries in the UK Vitality Netball Superleague (VNSL).
Methods: Ninety players were observed over one 14-month VNSL season (2021), including pre-, in- and post-season periods. Team physiotherapists recorded injuries using an online surveillance system, classifying them by location, type, mode, mechanism and impact, including severity (time-loss days, TL) and medical attention days (MA). Injury incidence (I) and TL/MA injury burden were calculated per 1000 player hours. χ2 analysis compared match and training differences.
Results: Thirty-nine players sustained 70 injuries (n=35 match, 35 training). Match incidence exceeded training (I=41.12 vs 1.10 injuries). Acute injuries were higher in matches (27 vs 17), while overuse injuries were higher in training (18 vs 3; p=0.001). Contact injuries were higher in matches (21 vs 7), and non-contact injuries were higher in training (10 vs 6; p=0.028). Acute ankle ligament injuries in matches caused substantial TL burden (411.7 days lost), while overuse lower leg injuries in training led to high MA burden (13.8). Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries were infrequent but burdensome (TL 496). The centre position sustained the most injuries (41%).
Conclusion: This study underpinned implementing the first injury surveillance system in the elite UK netball competition, revealing match injury rates ~40 times higher than in training, with distinct injury characteristics. Findings suggest that prevention should target acute lower limb injuries and overuse conditions. Further research should assess the impact of playing with overuse injuries
Demokratija pred sudom: Demokratija kao pravno primenjiv koncept u EU
No full textDemocracy is a justiciable concept under EU law. Beyond identifying the EU as being a representative democracy, the EU treaties provide relatively little guidance of what democracy entails. The context is the contestedness of the concept of democracy, especially across 27 polities of the Member States of the EU, and the potentially extensive review of national constitutional orders that could result from the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the EU regarding Article 2 TEU (Treaty on European Union) as a statement of foundational values of the EU. This paper considers, in particular, how the concept of democracy interacts with the other values in Article 2, principally, the rule of law and respect for human rights. The jurisdiction of the Court of Justice under Article 2 highlights the problem of determining the relative importance and interaction of the fundamental values of the EU given their relative incommensurability, including the problems of i. relating democracy at national and supranational levels in the EU and of ii. the limits of democratic authority. It is argued that Article 2 should be understood as presenting a complex problem of the inter-relationship of values for which a method of reflective equilibrium and a threshold test are essential for their application as justiciable concepts. Applying this framework or approach, the final part considers some examples of national practices relating to democracy that could be considered contrary to the values of democracy in EU law and subject to jurisdiction under Articles 2 and 7 TEU: the lengthening of parliamentary terms, recall procedures, and militant democracy.Apstrakt:
Demokratija je pravno primenljiv (justiciabilan) koncept u okviru prava Evropske unije. Iako se EU identifikuje kao predstavnička demokratija, ugovori EU pružaju relativno malo smernica o tome šta demokratija zapravo podrazumeva. Kontekst ovog pitanja je u tome što je sam pojam demokratije predmet sporenja, naročito među 27 političkih sistema država članica EU, kao i u potencijalno širokom preispitivanju nacionalnih ustavnih poredaka koje bi moglo proisteći iz nadležnosti Suda pravde EU u vezi sa članom 2 Ugovora o Evropskoj uniji (TEU), koji predstavlja izjavu o osnovnim vrednostima EU.
Ovaj rad se posebno bavi time kako se koncept demokratije prepliće sa ostalim vrednostima iz člana 2, pre svega sa vladavinom prava i poštovanjem ljudskih prava. Nadležnost Suda pravde prema članu 2 naglašava problem određivanja relativne važnosti i međusobne interakcije osnovnih vrednosti EU, imajući u vidu njihovu relativnu neuporedivost. To uključuje i probleme: i. povezivanja demokratije na nacionalnom i nadnacionalnom nivou u EU, i ii. određivanja granica demokratskog autoriteta.
U radu se tvrdi da član 2 treba shvatiti kao predstavljanje složenog problema međusobnog odnosa vrednosti, za koji su neophodni metoda reflektivne ravnoteže i test praga kako bi se ti koncepti mogli pravno primeniti.
Na osnovu ovog okvira, završni deo rada razmatra neke primere nacionalne prakse u vezi sa demokratijom koje bi se mogle smatrati suprotnim vrednostima demokratije prema pravu EU i koje bi mogle potpasti pod nadležnost prema članovima 2 i 7 TEU-a: produžavanje trajanja mandata parlamenata, postupci opoziva (recall procedures), i koncept “borbene demokratije” (militant democracy)
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