Real-World Implementation of Infant Behavioral Sleep Interventions: Results of a Parental Survey

Objective To describe parental practices implementing behavioral sleep intervention (BSI) outside a clinical setting. Study design Parents (n = 652), recruited through a Facebook group designed as a peer support group for parents using BSI, completed an online survey about their experience using BSI with their infant or toddler. Results On average, parents implemented BSI when their infant was 5.6 (±2.77) months. Parents most often used modified (49.5%) or unmodified extinction (34.9%), with fewer using a parental presence approach (15.6%). Regardless of BSI type, more parents endorsed “a great deal of stress” during the first night (42.2%) than 1 week later (5.2%). The duration of infant crying was typically greatest the first night (reported by 45%; M = 43 minutes) and was significantly reduced after 1 week (M = 8.54 minutes). Successful implementation of BSI on the first attempt was reported by 83%, with a median and mode of 7 days until completion (79% by 2 weeks). Regardless of BSI type, after intervention parents reported their infant had less difficulty falling asleep, fewer night awakenings, and were more likely to sleep in their room and/or in their own crib/bed. Conclusions The majority of parents report successfully implementing BSI, with significantly reduced infant crying by the end of 1 week and success within 2 weeks. Few differences were found between behavioral approaches

Brokerage for Quality Assurance and Optimisation of Cloud Services: An Analysis of Key Requirements

As the number of cloud service providers grows and the requirements of cloud service consumers become more complex, the latter will come to depend more and more on the intermediation services of cloud service brokers. Continuous quality assurance and optimisation of services is becoming a mission-critical objective that many consumers will find difficult to address without help from cloud service intermediaries. The Broker@Cloud project envisages a software framework that will make it easier for cloud service intermediaries to address this need, and this paper provides an analysis of key requirements for this framework. We discuss the methodology that we followed to capture these requirements, which involved defining a conceptual service lifecycle model, carrying out a series of Design Thinking workshops, and formalising requirements based on an agile requirements information model. Then, we present the key requirements identified through this process in the form of summarised results

Grid enabled high throughput virtual screening against four different targets implicated in malaria

PCSVInternational audienceAfter having deployed a first data challenge on malaria and a second one on avian flu, respectively in summer 2005 and spring 2006, we are demonstrating here again how efficiently the computational grids can be used to produce massive docking data at a high-throughput. During more than 2 months and a half, we have achieved at least 140 million dockings, representing an average throughput of almost 80,000 dockings per hour. This was made possible by the availability of thousands of CPUs through different infrastructures worldwide. Through the acquired experience, the WISDOM production environment is evolving to enable an easy and fault-tolerant deployment of biological tools; in this case it is the FlexX commercial docking software which is used to dock the whole ZINC database against 4 different targets

Sibling sleep-What can it tell us about parental sleep reports in the context of autism?

Sleep problems are common in families raising children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Clinicians often depend on parent reports of child sleep but minimal research exists to address the accuracy or biases in these reports. To isolate parent-report accuracy (from differences in sleep behaviors), the sleep of younger siblings were assessed within a two-group design. The present study compared parent diary reports of infant sibling sleep to videosomnography and actigraphy. In the high-risk group, families had at least one child with ASD and a younger sibling (n = 33). The low-risk comparison group had no family history of ASD (n = 42). We confirmed comparable sleep behaviors between the groups and used paired t tests, two-one-sided-tests (TOST), and Bland-Altman plots to assess parent report accuracy. The parameters of sleep onset, nighttime sleep duration, awakenings, morning rise time, and daytime sleep duration were evaluated. Diary and videosomnography estimates were comparable for nighttime sleep duration, morning rise time, and awakenings for both groups. Diary and actigraph estimates were less comparable for both groups. Daytime sleep duration estimates had the largest discrepancy with both groups reporting (on average) 40 additional minutes of sleep when compared to actigraphy estimates. In the present study, families raising children with ASD were just as accurate as other families when reporting infant sleep behaviors. Our findings have direct clinical implications and support the use of parent nighttime sleep reports

Polarizing Double Negation Translations

Double-negation translations are used to encode and decode classical proofs in intuitionistic logic. We show that, in the cut-free fragment, we can simplify the translations and introduce fewer negations. To achieve this, we consider the polarization of the formul{\ae}{} and adapt those translation to the different connectives and quantifiers. We show that the embedding results still hold, using a customized version of the focused classical sequent calculus. We also prove the latter equivalent to more usual versions of the sequent calculus. This polarization process allows lighter embeddings, and sheds some light on the relationship between intuitionistic and classical connectives

Les grilles pour le développement médical

PCSV, présenté par V. Breton, à paraître dans les Comptes-Rendu de la ConférenceLe développement récent des sciences et technologies de l'information et de la communication permet aujourd'hui la création de véritables infrastructures pour le calcul et le stockage de données hétérogènes à l'échelle régionale, nationale et internationale. Ces infrastructures, appelées grilles informatiques, permettront bientôt d'utiliser les ressources informatiques mutualisées avec autant de facilité que nous utilisons aujourd'hui l'électricité. L'utilisation des grilles afin d'accélérer la découverte de médicaments est une voie très prometteuse pour l'avenir. Par cette approche in silico, le nombre de molécules ainsi que la vitesse de test peuvent être grandement augmentés induisant un coût moindre de développement de médicaments. Du 11 Juillet au 31 Août 2005, l'expérience WISDOM (Wide In Silico Docking On Malaria) a permis de tester rien moins qu'un million de ligands (médicaments potentiels) pour le traitement du paludisme: 1700 ordinateurs à travers le monde ont ainsi été associés à cette démarche permettant de réaliser en un mois ce qui aurait nécessité 80 ans sur un ordinateur classique. L'analyse des résultats est en cours. Par cette approche, on peut souhaiter également que les maladies orphelines puissent bénéficier d'un intérêt nouveau de la part des industries pharmaceutiques, à travers notamment la baisse du coût de développement d'un médicament, principal obstacle actuellement à leur mobilisation

Large Scale In Silico Screening on Grid Infrastructures

Large-scale grid infrastructures for in silico drug discovery open opportunities of particular interest to neglected and emerging diseases. In 2005 and 2006, we have been able to deploy large scale in silico docking within the framework of the WISDOM initiative against Malaria and Avian Flu requiring about 105 years of CPU on the EGEE, Auvergrid and TWGrid infrastructures. These achievements demonstrated the relevance of large-scale grid infrastructures for the virtual screening by molecular docking. This also allowed evaluating the performances of the grid infrastructures and to identify specific issues raised by large-scale deployment.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures, 2 tables, The Third International Life Science Grid Workshop, LSGrid 2006, Yokohama, Japan, 13-14 october 2006, to appear in the proceeding

Pediatric Videosomnography: Can Signal/Video Processing Distinguish Sleep and Wake States?

The term videosomnography captures a range of video-based methods used to record and subsequently score sleep behaviors (most commonly sleep vs. wake states). Until recently, the time consuming nature of behavioral videosomnography coding has limited its clinical and research applications. However, with recent technological advancements, the use of auto-videosomnography techniques may be a practical and valuable extension of behavioral videosomnography coding. To test an auto-videosomnography system within a pediatric sample, we processed 30 videos of infant/toddler sleep using a series of signal/video-processing techniques. The resulting auto-videosomnography system provided minute-by-minute sleep vs. wake estimates, which were then compared to behaviorally coded videosomnography and actigraphy. Minute-by-minute estimates demonstrated moderate agreement across compared methods (auto-videosomnography with behavioral videosomnography, Cohen's kappa = 0.46; with actigraphy = 0.41). Additionally, auto-videosomnography agreements exhibited high sensitivity for sleep but only about half of the wake minutes were correctly identified. For sleep timing (sleep onset and morning rise time), behavioral videosomnography and auto-videosomnography demonstrated strong agreement. However, nighttime waking agreements were poor across both behavioral videosomnography and actigraphy comparisons. Overall, this study provides preliminary support for the use of an auto-videosomnography system to index sleep onset and morning rise time only, which may have potential telemedicine implications. With replication, auto-videosomnography may be useful for researchers and clinicians as a minimally invasive sleep timing assessment method

Diversity in pediatric behavioral sleep intervention studies

Studies designed to assess the efficacy of behavioral sleep interventions for infants and young children often report sleep improvements, but the generalization to children and families of diverse backgrounds is rarely assessed. The present study describes a systematic review of the racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity of behavioral sleep intervention studies for young children. Thirty-two behavioral sleep intervention studies (5474 children) were identified using PRISMA guidelines. Each study was coded for racial and ethnic composition, parental educational attainment (an index of socioeconomic resources), and country of origin. Racial or ethnic information was obtained for 19 studies (60%). Study participants were primarily White and from predominantly White countries. Overall, 21 (66%) of the included studies provided information on parental education. Most of these studies had samples with moderate to high educational attainment. Behavioral sleep intervention studies to date include samples with insufficient diversity. Overall, this study highlights a critical gap in pediatric sleep intervention research and supports a call to further include families from diverse backgrounds when assessing behavioral sleep interventions