27 research outputs found
Improving the fee structure to support Marine Managed Areas in Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines
No full textIncludes bibliographical references.Marine Managed Areas (MMAs) in the Caribbean are important for eco-tourism revenue generation, as well as many cultural and economic benefits derived from marine ecosystems (ecosystem services). MMAs in Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines are underfunded, understaffed, and therefore suffer from inadequate law enforcement and conservation management. Our team researched current fees, willingness to pay studies, and the value of ecosystem services to create presentations and policy briefs informing policy-makers about opportunities to increase MMA fees. Increasing fees will not only generate more income for the countries, but will also optimize opportunities for better management, training, and infrastructure in these important areas
Evidence-based Development of Trustworthy Mobile Medical Apps
No full textabstract: Widespread adoption of smartphone based Mobile Medical Apps (MMAs) is opening new avenues for innovation, bringing MMAs to the forefront of low cost healthcare delivery. These apps often control human physiology and work on sensitive data. Thus it is necessary to have evidences of their trustworthiness i.e. maintaining privacy of health data, long term operation of wearable sensors and ensuring no harm to the user before actual marketing. Traditionally, clinical studies are used to validate the trustworthiness of medical systems. However, they can take long time and could potentially harm the user. Such evidences can be generated using simulations and mathematical analysis. These methods involve estimating the MMA interactions with human physiology. However, the nonlinear nature of human physiology makes the estimation challenging.
This research analyzes and develops MMA software while considering its interactions with human physiology to assure trustworthiness. A novel app development methodology is used to objectively evaluate trustworthiness of a MMA by generating evidences using automatic techniques. It involves developing the Health-Dev β tool to generate a) evidences of trustworthiness of MMAs and b) requirements assured code generation for vulnerable components of the MMA without hindering the app development process. In this method, all requests from MMAs pass through a trustworthy entity, Trustworthy Data Manager which checks if the app request satisfies the MMA requirements. This method is intended to expedite the design to marketing process of MMAs. The objectives of this research is to develop models, tools and theory for evidence generation and can be divided into the following themes:
• Sustainable design configuration estimation of MMAs: Developing an optimization framework which can generate sustainable and safe sensor configuration while considering interactions of the MMA with the environment.
• Evidence generation using simulation and formal methods: Developing models and tools to verify safety properties of the MMA design to ensure no harm to the human physiology.
• Automatic code generation for MMAs: Investigating methods for automatically
• Performance analysis of trustworthy data manager: Evaluating response time generating trustworthy software for vulnerable components of a MMA and evidences.performance of trustworthy data manager under interactions from non-MMA smartphone apps.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Computer Science 201
Original Article Psychometric Properties of a Short Self-Reported Measure of Medication Adherence Among Patients With Hypertension Treated in a Busy Clinical Setting in Korea
No full textCopyright © 2014 Jeung-Hee Kim et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Background: We examined the psychometric properties of the Korean version of the 8-item Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS-8) among adults with hypertension. Methods: A total of 373 adults with hypertension were given face-to-face interviews in 2 cardiology clinics at 2 large teaching hospitals in Seoul, South Korea. Blood pressure was measured twice, and medical records were reviewed. About one-third of the participants (n = 109) were randomly selected for a 2-week test-retest evaluation of reliability via telephone interview. Results: Internal consistency reliability was moderate (Cronbach α = 0.56), and test-retest reliability was excellent (intraclass correlation = 0.91; P < 0.001), although a ceiling effect was detected. The correlation of MMAS-8 scores with scores for the original 4-item scale indicated that convergent validity was good (r = 0.92; P < 0.01). A low MMAS-8 score was significantly associated with poor blood pressure control (χ2 = 29.86; P < 0.001; adjusted odds ratio = 5.08; 95 % CI, 2.56–10.08). Using a cut-off point of 6, sensitivity and specificity were 64.3 % and 72.9%, respectively. Exploratory factor analysis identified 3 dimensions of the scale, with poor fit for the 1-dimensiona
ANALYSIS OF THE EFFECTIVENESS OF COUNSELING AND DIGITAL BOOKLET BY PHARMACIST ON ADHERENCE AND PAIN CONTROL OF CANCER PATIENTS AT DHARMAIS CANCER HOSPITAL
No full textObjective: This study aimed to compare the effectiveness of counseling and digital booklet on the level of treatment adherence through reduced pain scale, Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS-8) scores, and pill count scores in patients with cancer pain using opioid analgesics.
Methods: The author conducted this study at Dharmais Cancer Hospital with a quasi-experimental design. The study sample consisted of 134 respondents who met the inclusion and exclusion criteria, underwent a counseling intervention, and received a digital booklet. The author divided the sample into two groups, the counseling group (n=67) and the digital booklet group (n=67). Adherence level was measured using MMAS-8 and pill count. The pain scale was measured using the Numerical Rating Scale. Those measurements were conducted before the intervention (pre-test) and after 2 weeks of provisioning counseling and receipt of the digital booklet (post-test).
Results: The results showed that each counseling and digital booklet improve adherence (p<0.05) and decrease pain scale (p<0.05). There was a significant difference in changes in the level of adherence (p=0.027) between the two groups. However, there was no significant difference in changes in the pain scale (p=0.132) between the two groups.
Conclusions: The analysis showed a significant difference (p<0.05) between adherence level and pain scale before and after intervention by both counseling and digital booklet. Nevertheless, adherent increasing and pain scale reduction by counseling is better than a digital booklet
Describing knowledge encounters in healthcare: a mixed studies systematic review and development of a classification. Knowledge sources and influences data extraction - final data set
No full textThis data set contains all the studies screened as potentially eligible for: "Describing knowledge encounters in
healthcare: a mixed studies systematic review and development of a classification".The data set includes the following for each paper:
Study
details
1st
Author
Year
Citation
Author contact details
Questions
for author(s)
Potentially
relevant references
Terms
from title / abstract
Design
Study
method(s)
Description
of tool(s)
Validation
of tool(s)
Qual /
Quant / Mixed
Closed
/ open
Cross-sectional
/ Longitudinal
Study
period if longitudinal
Country
Setting
Participant
healthcare group
Participant
numbers
Sources
Types
of knowledge eligible
Sources
of knowledge (raw)
Definitions
/ descriptions of knowledge sources
Categories
of knowledge (if developed)
Influences
Other
contextual data
Influences
on use of different knowledge sources
Theoretical
models developed to explain influences
Quality
Assessment - MMAS
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Newspaper article reconstruction using ant colony optimization and bipartite graph
No full textThe primary information units in a newspaper are the articles. How to segment a newspaper page into individual articles and to recover the reading order of each article, namely newspaper article reconstruction, is known to be challenging due to the complexity of the multi-article page layout. In this paper, we propose a novel article reconstruction approach by solving a series of subtasks: grouping the article bodies, detecting the reading order, associating the title-body pairs and linking article parts scattered in multiple pages. We formulate reading order detection as a traveling salesman problem (TSP), and employ the Max-Min Ant System (MMAS) to solve it. Furthermore, a level-based pheromone mechanism is introduced to improve the efficiency of standard MMAS. Moreover, in sharp contrast to the existing methods, we perform the first two subtasks of article reconstruction in reverse order, that is, we detect the reading order of the text blocks first and then use the content continuity implicitly specified in the reading order to aggregate text blocks of the same article. In this way, we can effectively overcome the limitation of content similarity on article body aggregation. The other two subtasks (associating the title-body pairs, linking article parts scattered in multiple pages), are solved under a unified bipartite graph framework, which models the complex relationships between page objects as one-to-one correspondences, and accomplishes the two subtasks by finding the optimal matching on this graph. During the optimization process, various information sources, including geometric layout, linguistic and semantic content, are deeply mined in MMAS and bipartite graph model to deal with the wide range of complex newspaper layouts. Experimental results on real-world data have demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed method. It has also been adopted in several large-scale newspaper digitalization projects. (C) 2012 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.http://gateway.webofknowledge.com/gateway/Gateway.cgi?GWVersion=2&SrcApp=PARTNER_APP&SrcAuth=LinksAMR&KeyUT=WOS:000319205600004&DestLinkType=FullRecord&DestApp=ALL_WOS&UsrCustomerID=8e1609b174ce4e31116a60747a720701Computer Science, Artificial IntelligenceComputer Science, Interdisciplinary ApplicationsSCI(E)EI3ARTICLE63033-30461
Cost-effectiveness of upper extremity dry needling in the rehabilitation of patients with stroke
No full textIntroduction: Dry needling (DN) has been shown to be effective for the treatment of upper extremity hypertonia in patients with stroke. Purpose: To evaluate the cost-effectiveness of DN in patients with stroke. Methods: A cost-effectiveness analysis was performed in a research study conducted at a Spanish public hospital where patients were classified into two groups with or without DN. Hypertonia was measured using the Modified Modified Ashworth Scale (MMAS), and quality of life (QOL) was assessed using the EuroQoL 5-dimension questionnaire. Data regarding the effects and costs of physiotherapy were presented by calculating the mean and 95% confidence interval. The health outcomes were evaluated considering the rate of responders to the treatment based on the MMAS. Spanish preference weights were used to estimate quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) and incremental cost-utility ratio (ICUR) were calculated to determine the economic value of DN. Results: Eighty patients with stroke in the subacute stage of recovery were selected to participate in this study. Based on the rate of responders, the ICER of the DN group was very low. Despite the sensitivity analysis performed, the results of the ICUR were not encouraging. Discussion: Cost-effectiveness with responder rate results were favourable for the DN group and were confirmed by the sensitivity analysis according to levels of care. In addition, our findings revealed that 4 weeks of treatment could be more cost-effective than 8 weeks. DN treatment of the upper extremity appears to be cost-effective based on the rate of responders measured using the MMAS scale. © The Author(s) 2021
Medication reminder applications to improve adherence in coronary heart disease: A randomised clinical trial
No full text© Author(s) (or their employer(s)) 2019. No commercial re-use. See rights and permissions. Published by BMJ. Objective The aim of the MEDication reminder APPs to improve medication adherence in Coronary Heart Disease Study was to evaluate the effectiveness and feasibility of using publicly available high-quality medication reminder applications (apps) to improve medication adherence compared with usual care in patients with coronary heart disease (CHD). An additional aim was to examine whether an app with additional features improved adherence further. Methods Patients with CHD (n=163) were randomised to one of three groups: (1) usual care, (2) a basic app or (3) an advanced app with interactive/customisable features. The primary analysis compared usual care versus app use on the primary outcome of the 8-item Morisky Medication Adherence Scale (MMAS-8) at 3 months. Secondary outcomes included blood pressure and cholesterol levels. Results The mean age was 57.9 years and 87.7% were male. At 3 months, patients using an app had higher adherence (mean MMAS-8 score 7.11) compared with the usual care group (mean MMAS-8 score 6.63) with a mean difference between groups of 0.47 (95% CI 0.12 to 0.82, p=0.008). There was no significant difference in patients using the basic app versus the advanced app (mean difference 0.16, 95% CI '0.56 to 0.24, p=0.428). There were no significant differences in secondary clinical outcome measures. Conclusion Patients with CHD who used medication reminder apps had better medication adherence compared with usual care, and using apps with additional features did not improve this outcome further. These data suggest medication apps are likely to help patients with chronic health conditions adhere to medicines, but further examination of whether such benefits are sustained is warranted. Clinical trial registration number ACTRN12616000661471; Results
Identifying high risk seafloor areas to bottom trawling in Aotearoa New Zealand to support marine spatial management
No full text\ua9 The Author(s) 2025. Seafloor species play important ecological roles within marine ecosystems, yet many are vulnerable to the impacts of bottom fishing. Despite the known vulnerability of many seafloor taxa, destructive bottom fishing remains prevalent in many parts of the world given demand for wild-caught seafood. Species Distribution Models (SDMs) are increasingly used to estimate the distribution of vulnerable taxa and estimate possible risk of interactions with fishing gears, but most approaches have used a limited number of taxa. In this study, spatial predictions of species distributions for 207 seafloor invertebrate taxa in New Zealand waters were combined with a comprehensive database of functional traits related to bottom trawling to predict areas of high vulnerability. In addition, this study combined functional redundancy and vulnerability scores to identify ‘high combined risk’ areas that covered 182,087 km2 (9.5%) of the study area. The interactions of these areas with current Marine Management Areas (MMAs) and highly fished zones revealed that current MMAs protect 50% of the ‘high combined risk’ areas (91,000 km2), and less than 1% is within fished areas. This leaves a predicted 90,937 km2 (49%) outside current protection, some are close to current MMAs and are potentially of high priority for future marine spatial management. Identifying areas most vulnerable to bottom trawling showcases interactions within previously fished areas (areas that have been fished in the past and could potentially be fished again), as well as highlighting areas for management action. Using different sets of functional traits as a combined approach could also be used to assess other anthropogenic impacts, improving ecosystem-based spatial management by ensuring protection of functions at globally significant scales
Analysis of different MMAS ACO algorithms on unimodal functions and plateaus
No full textRecently, the first rigorous runtime analyses of ACO algorithms appeared, covering variants of the MAX - MIN ant system and their runtime on pseudo-Boolean functions. Interestingly, a variant called 1-ANT is very sensitive to the evaporation factor while Gutjahr and Sebastiani proved partly opposite results for their variant MMASbs. These algorithms differ in their pheromone update mechanisms and, moreover, 1-ANT accepts equally fit solutions in contrast to MMASbs. By analyzing variants of MMASbs, we prove that the different behavior of 1-ANT and MMASbs results from the different pheromone update mechanisms. Building upon results by Gutjahr and Sebastiani, we extend their analyses of MMASbs to the class of unimodal functions and show improved results for test functions using new and specialized techniques; in particular, we present new lower bounds. Finally, we compare MMASbs with a variant that also accepts equally fit solutions as this enables the exploration of plateaus. For well-known plateau functions we prove that this drastically reduces the optimization time. Our findings are complemented by experiments that support our asymptotic analyses and yield additional insights. © The Author(s) 2008.Frank Neumann, Dirk Sudholt, Carsten Wit
