Essays on Health, Health Care Utilization, and Public Insurance

Inadequate prenatal care has long been associated with low birth weight as well as adverse health and economic outcomes. As such, public policy and public health interventions have focused on increasing access to prenatal care with the goal of increasing birth weight. Despite this focus, research has generally found little con-clusive evidence supporting a causal relationship between increased access to prenatal care and substantial gains in birth weight. A small but growing body of work suggests prenatal care may improve future health outcomes independently of birth weight by directly influencing a mother’s health or how she interacts with the health care sys-tem. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I use unique data combining all Medicaid financed births with all subsequent Medicaid claims in South Carolina between 2001 and 2012, to find that prenatal care increases the probability of an infant receiving routine well-child care and decreases the probability of requiring inpatient care within the first year of life. In spite of these findings, my results suggest that prenatal care has only a small, marginally significant impact on an infant’s birth weight I find that a portion of the causal mechanism through which prenatal care acts is by providing health knowledge and that prenatal care and formal education are substitutes in the production of health knowledge. Although the impacts of prenatal care on birth weight and health outcomes at birth have been extensively studied, little is known about the long term impacts of prenatal care on prospective measures of health. In the second chapter of my dissertation, I restrict my data to include all Medicaid financed births between 2001 and 2007 and find that a mother’s utilization of prenatal care increases the probability of her child receiving treatment for an asthma-related diagnosis. Using a count model that allows for unobserved heterogeneity at the individual level, I find evidence that a mother’s usage of prenatal care increases the number of times her child receives primary care and does not impact the frequency with which resource intensive care is utilized for asthma-related conditions. These results suggest that prenatal care may be more likely to impact the prospective management, rather than the underlying presence or severity, of chronic health conditions

Ethics in photojournalism : past, present, and future

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2006.Vita.Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-66).Like writers and editors, photojournalists are held to a standard of ethics. Each publication has a set of rules, sometimes written, sometimes unwritten, that governs what that publication considers to be a truthful and faithful representation of images to the public. These rules cover a wide range of topics such as how a photographer should act while taking pictures, what he or she can and can't photograph, and whether and how an image can be altered in the darkroom or on the computer. This ethical framework evolved over time, influenced by such things as technological capability and community values; and it is continually developing today. This thesis details how photojournalism's ethical system came to be, what the system looks like today, and where it will go in the future. The first chapter chronicles the history of ethics in photojournalism. The second chapter describes current ethical practices through specific case studies. The third and final chapter builds upon the first two and uses technology and policy to examine the trajectory of photojournalistic ethics.by Daniel R. Bersak.S.M

Psychophysiology in games

Psychophysiology is the study of the relationship between psychology and its physiological manifestations. That relationship is of particular importance for both game design and ultimately gameplaying. Players’ psychophysiology offers a gateway towards a better understanding of playing behavior and experience. That knowledge can, in turn, be beneficial for the player as it allows designers to make better games for them; either explicitly by altering the game during play or implicitly during the game design process. This chapter argues for the importance of physiology for the investigation of player affect in games, reviews the current state of the art in sensor technology and outlines the key phases for the application of psychophysiology in games.The work is supported, in part, by the EU-funded FP7 ICT iLearnRWproject (project no: 318803).peer-reviewe

Stability of small-scale UAV helicopters and quadrotors with added payload mass under PID control

The application of rotorcraft to autonomous load carrying and transport is a new frontier for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This task requires that hovering vehicles remain stable and balanced in flight as payload mass is added to the vehicle. If payload is not loaded centered or the vehicle properly trimmed for offset loads, the robot will experience bias forces that must be rejected. In this paper, we explore the effect of dynamic load disturbances introduced by instantaneously increased payload mass and how those affect helicopters and quadrotors under Proportional-Integral-Derivative flight control. We determine stability bounds within which the changing mass-inertia parameters of the system due to the acquired object will not destabilize these aircraft with this standard flight controller. Additionally, we demonstrate experimentally the stability behavior of a helicopter undergoing a range of instantaneous step payload changes

Practical aerial grasping of unstructured objects

We aim to extend the functionality of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) beyond passive observation to active interaction with objects. Of particular interest is grasping objects with hovering robots. This task is difficult due to the unstable dynamics of flying vehicles and limited positional accuracy demonstrated by existing hovering vehicles. Conventional robot grippers require centimetre-level positioning accuracy to successfully grasp objects. Our approach employs passive mechanical compliance and adaptive underactuation in a gripper to allow for large positional displacements between the aircraft and target object. In this paper, we present preliminary analysis and experiments for reliable grasping of unstructured objects with a robot helicopter. Key problems associated with this task are discussed, including hover precision, flight stability in the presence of compliant object contact, and aerodynamic disturbances. We evaluate performance of the initial proof-of-concept prototype and show that this approach to object capture and retrieval is viable

Grasping from the air: Hovering capture and load stability

Abstract — This paper reports recent research efforts to advance the functionality of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) beyond passive observation to active interaction with and manipulation of objects. The archetypical aerial manipulation task — grasping objects during flight — is difficult due to the unstable dynamics of rotorcraft and coupled object-aircraft motion. In this paper, we analyze key challenges encountered when lifting a grasped object and transitioning into laden free-flight. We demonstrate that dynamic load disturbances introduced by the load mass will be rejected by a helicopter with PID flight control. We determine stability bounds in which the changing mass-inertia parameters of the system due to the grasped object will not destabilize this flight controller. The conditions under which transient partial contact mechanics of objects resting on a surface will not induce instability are identified. We demonstrate grasping and retrieval of a variety of objects while hovering, without touching the ground, using the Yale Aerial Manipulator testbed. I

Facial Electromyography-based Adaptive Virtual Reality Gaming for Cognitive Training.

Cognitive training has shown promising results for delivering improvements in human cognition related to attention, problem solving, reading comprehension and information retrieval. However, two frequently cited problems in cognitive training literature are a lack of user engagement with the training programme, and a failure of developed skills to generalise to daily life. This paper introduces a new cognitive training (CT) paradigm designed to address these two limitations by combining the benefits of gamification, virtual reality (VR), and affective adaptation in the development of an engaging, ecologically valid, CT task. Additionally, it incorporates facial electromyography (EMG) as a means of determining user affect while engaged in the CT task. This information is then utilised to dynamically adjust the game’s difficulty in real-time as users play, with the aim of leading them into a state of flow. Affect recognition rates of 64.1% and 76.2%, for valence and arousal respectively, were achieved by classifying a DWT-Haar approximation of the input signal using kNN. The affect-aware VR cognitive training intervention was then evaluated with a control group of older adults. The results obtained substantiate the notion that adaptation techniques can lead to greater feelings of competence and a more appropriate challenge of the user’s skills