Public health and economic costs of investigating a suspected outbreak of Legionnaires' disease.

This paper provides one of the first assessments of the burden of both the public health investigation and the economic costs associated with an apparent outbreak of Legionnaires' disease (LD) in South East London. In addition to epidemiological, microbiological and environmental investigations, we collected data on the staff time and resources committed by the 11 main organizations responsible for managing the outbreak. Of the overall estimated costs of 455,856 pounds, only 14% (64,264 pounds) was spent on investigation and control of the outbreak compared with 86% (391,592 pounds) spent on the hospital treatment of the patients. The time and money spent on public health services in this investigation appear to represent good value for money considering the potential costs of a major outbreak, including the high case-fatality rate in LD generally and the high health-care costs. Further research is needed to determine optimum strategies for the cost-effective use of health system resources in investigations of LD. Whether the threshold for investigation of cases should be based on observed incidence rates or the cost-effectiveness of investigations, or both, should be debated further

Adaptation of the difficulty level in an infant-robot movement contingency study

19th International Workshop of Physical Agents (WAF). Madrid (22-23 Noviembre 2018)ABSTRACT: This paper presents a personalized contingency feedback adaptation system that aims to encourage infants aged 6 to 8 months to gradually increase the peak acceleration of their leg movements. The ultimate challenge is to determine if a socially assistive humanoid robot can guide infant learning using contingent rewards, where the reward threshold is personalized for each infant using a reinforcement learning algorithm. The model learned from the data captured by wearable inertial sensors measuring infant leg movement accelerations in an earlier study. Each infant generated a unique model that determined the behavior of the robot. The presented results were obtained from the distributions of the participants' acceleration peaks and demonstrate that the resulting model is sensitive to the degree of differentiation among the participants; each participant (infant) should have his/her own learned policy.This work was supported by NSF award 1706964 (PI: Smith, Co-PI: Matarić). In addition, this work was developed during an international mobility program at the University of Southern California being also partially funded by the European Union ECHORD++ project (FP7-ICT-601116), the LifeBots project (TIN2015-65686-C5) and THERAPIST project (TIN2012-38079)

Single-centre parental survey of paediatric rehabilitation services for children with cerebral palsy

Cerebral palsy (CP) is the most common childhood motor disability. The dose of usual care for rehabilitation therapies is unknown. The purpose of this study was to describe current dosage of rehabilitation services for children with CP recruited from a paediatric hospital system in the USA. 96 children with CP were included in this cross-sectional survey. Parents reported frequency, intensity, time and type of therapy services. Weekly frequency was the most common. Children with CP received 0.9–1.2 hours/month of each discipline in the educational setting and 1.5–2.0 hours/month in the clinical setting, lower than the recommendations for improvements in motor skills