Embedded motivational interviewing combined with a smartphone app to increase physical activity in people with sub-acute low back pain: study protocol of a cluster randomised control trial

Background: Motivational Interviewing is an evidence-based, client-centred counselling technique that has been used effectively to increase physical activity, including for people with low back pain. One barrier to implementing Motivational Interviewing in health care settings more broadly is the extra treatment time with therapists. The aim of this paper is to describe the design of a cluster randomised controlled trial evaluating the effect of an intervention that pairs Motivational Interviewing embedded into usual physiotherapy care with a specifically designed app to increase physical activity in people with sub-acute low back pain. Methods: The study is a cluster randomised controlled in which patients aged over 18 years who have sub-acute low back pain (3–12 weeks duration) are recruited from four public hospital outpatient clinics. Based on the recruitment site, participants either receive usual physiotherapy care or the Motivational Interviewing intervention over 6 consecutive weekly outpatient sessions with a specifically designed app designed to facilitate participant-led physical activity behaviour change in between sessions. Outcome measures assessed at baseline and 7 weeks are: physical activity as measured by accelerometer (primary outcome), and pain-related activity restriction and pain self-efficacy (secondary outcomes). Postintervention interviews with physiotherapists and participants will be conducted as part of a process evaluation. Discussion: This intervention, which comprises trained physiotherapists conducting conversations about increasing physical activity with their patients in a manner consistent with Motivational Interviewing as part of usual care combined with a specifically designed app, has potential to facilitate behaviour change with minimal extra therapist time

Analysis and implementation of the Large Scale Video-on-Demand System

Next Generation Network (NGN) provides multimedia services over broadband based networks, which supports high definition TV (HDTV), and DVD quality video-on-demand content. The video services are thus seen as merging mainly three areas such as computing, communication, and broadcasting. It has numerous advantages and more exploration for the large-scale deployment of video-on-demand system is still needed. This is due to its economic and design constraints. It's need significant initial investments for full service provision. This paper presents different estimation for the different topologies and it require efficient planning for a VOD system network. The methodology investigates the network bandwidth requirements of a VOD system based on centralized servers, and distributed local proxies. Network traffic models are developed to evaluate the VOD system's operational bandwidth requirements for these two network architectures. This paper present an efficient estimation of the of the bandwidth requirement for the different architectures.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figure

Modular Workflow Engine for Distributed Services using Lightweight Java Clients

In this article we introduce the concept and the first implementation of a lightweight client-server-framework as middleware for distributed computing. On the client side an installation without administrative rights or privileged ports can turn any computer into a worker node. Only a Java runtime environment and the JAR files comprising the workflow client are needed. To connect all clients to the engine one open server port is sufficient. The engine submits data to the clients and orchestrates their work by workflow descriptions from a central database. Clients request new task descriptions periodically, thus the system is robust against network failures. In the basic set-up, data up- and downloads are handled via HTTP communication with the server. The performance of the modular system could additionally be improved using dedicated file servers or distributed network file systems. We demonstrate the design features of the proposed engine in real-world applications from mechanical engineering. We have used this system on a compute cluster in design-of-experiment studies, parameter optimisations and robustness validations of finite element structures.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure

Leveraging simulation practice in industry through use of desktop grid middleware

This chapter focuses on the collaborative use of computing resources to support decision making in industry. Through the use of middleware for desktop grid computing, the idle CPU cycles available on existing computing resources can be harvested and used for speeding-up the execution of applications that have “non-trivial” processing requirements. This chapter focuses on the desktop grid middleware BOINC and Condor, and discusses the integration of commercial simulation software together with free-to-download grid middleware so as to offer competitive advantage to organizations that opt for this technology. It is expected that the low-intervention integration approach presented in this chapter (meaning no changes to source code required) will appeal to both simulation practitioners (as simulations can be executed faster, which in turn would mean that more replications and optimization is possible in the same amount of time) and the management (as it can potentially increase the return on investment on existing resources)