33 research outputs found
Comprehensive geriatric assessment
Geriatric conditions such as functional impairment and dementia are common and frequently unrecognized or inadequately addressed in older adults. Identifying geriatric conditions by performing a geriatric assessment can help clinicians manage these conditions and prevent or delay their complications.
"Geriatric syndrome" is a term that is often used to refer to common health conditions in older adults that do not fit into distinct organ-based disease categories and often have multifactorial causes. The list includes conditions such as cognitive impairment, delirium, incontinence, malnutrition, falls, gait disorders, pressure ulcers, sleep disorders, sensory deficits, fatigue, and dizziness. These conditions are common in older adults, and they may have a major impact on quality of life and disability. Geriatric syndromes can best be identified by a geriatric assessment.
Although the geriatric assessment is a diagnostic process, the term is often used to include both evaluation and management. Geriatric assessment is sometimes used to refer to evaluation by the individual clinician (usually a primary care clinician or a geriatrician) and at other times is used to refer to a more intensive multidisciplinary program, also known as a comprehensive geriatric assessment (CGA).
This topic will review the indications for CGA, as well as its major components and evidence of its efficacy. General issues of geriatric health maintenance and the assessment of specific geriatric populations are discussed elsewhere.måsjekke
Suitability of linear quadrupole ion traps for large Coulomb crystals
Growing and studying large Coulomb crystals, composed of tens to hundreds of
thousands of ions, in linear quadrupole ion traps presents new challenges for
trap implementation. We consider several trap designs, first comparing the
total driven micromotion amplitude as a function of location within the
trapping volume; total micromotion is an important point of comparison since it
can limit crystal size by transfer of radiofrequency drive energy into thermal
energy. We also compare the axial component of micromotion, which leads to
first-order Doppler shifts along the preferred spectroscopy axis in precision
measurements on large Coulomb crystals. Finally, we compare trapping potential
anharmonicity, which can induce nonlinear resonance heating by shifting normal
mode frequencies onto resonance as a crystal grows. We apply a non-deforming
crystal approximation for simple calculation of these anharmonicity-induced
shifts, allowing a straightforward estimation of when crystal growth can lead
to excitation of different nonlinear heating resonances. In the axial
micromotion and anharmonicity points of comparison, we find significant
differences between the compared trap designs, with an original rotated-endcap
trap performing slightly better than the conventional in-line endcap trap
Daily Activities Diarist: Supporting Aging in Place with Semantically Enriched Narratives
Abstract. The Daily Activities Diarist is an awareness system that supports social connectedness between seniors living alone and their social intimates. The Daily Activities Diarist extracts automatically an Activity-of-Daily-Life (ADL)-journal from data collected through a wireless sensor network installed at the home of the seniors. We describe the design of the system, its implementation and the lessons from two trials lasting 2 weeks each. The paper makes the case for narrative presentation of awareness information and for seamful design of awareness systems of this ilk