Utilization of services provided by village based ethnic minority midwives in mountainous villages of Vietnam

Introduction: Since 2011, the Vietnam’s Ministry of Health implemented the ethnic minority midwives (EMMs) scheme in order to increase the utilization of maternal health services by women from ethnic minorities and those living in hard-to-reach mountainous areas. This paper analyzes the utilization of antenatal, delivery, and postpartum care provided by EMMs and reports the key determinants of utilization of EMM services as perceived by service users. Methods: A structured questionnaire was administered in 2015 to all mothers (n=320) who gave birth to a live-born during a 1-year period in 31 villages which had EMM in two provinces, Dien Bien and Kon Tum. A multivariate logistic regression model was used to examine the association between all potential factors and the use of services provided by EMMs. Results: We found that EMMs provided more antenatal care and postnatal care as compared with delivery services, which corresponded to their job descriptions. The results also showed that utilization of antenatal care provided by EMMs was lower than that of postnatal care. The proportion of those who never heard about EMM was high (24%). Among the mothers who knew about EMM services, 33.4% had antenatal checkups, 20.1% were attended during home deliveries, and 57.3% had postnatal visits by an EMM. Key factors that determined the use of EMM services included knowledge of the location of EMM’s house, being aware about EMMs by health workers, trust in services provided by EMMs, and perception that many others mothers in a village also knew about EMM services. Conclusion: EMM seems to be an important mechanism to ensure assistance during home births and postnatal care for ethnic minority groups, who are often resistant to attend health facilities. Building trust and engaging with communities are the key facilitators to increase the utilization of services provided by EMMs. Communication campaigns to raise awareness about EMMs and to promote their services in the village, particularly by other health workers, represent an important strategy to further improve effectiveness of EMM scheme

Oblivious Robots on Graphs: Exploration

International audienceThis chapter focuses on the problem of exploring a graph by a team of mobile robots endowed with vision. More precisely, we consider here mobile robots operating under the {\tt Look}-{\tt Compute}-{\tt Move} paradigm in discrete environments modeled as graphs. The goal for these robots is to explore the graph in which they are, that is to visit all vertices of the graph

Certified Gathering of Oblivious Mobile Robots: survey of recent results and open problems

International audienceSwarms of mobile robots recently attracted the focus of the Distributed Computing community. One of the fundamental problems in this context is that of gathering the robots: the robots must joint a common location, not known beforehand. Despite its apparent simplicity, this problem proved quite hard to characterise fully, due to many model variants, leading to informal error-prone reasoning.Over the past few years, a significant effort permitted to set up a formal framework, relying on the Coq proof assistant, that was used to provide certified results related to the gathering problem. We survey the main abstractions that permit to reason about oblivious mobile robots that evolve in a bidirectional Euclidean space, the distributed executions they can perform, and the variants of the gathering problem they can solve, while certifying all obtained results. We also hint path the remaining steps to obtain a certified full characterisation of the problem

Peptidoglycan induces nuclear factor-kB activation and cyclooxygenase-2 expression via Ras, Raf-1, and ERK in RAW 264.7 macrophages.

Part 1: Full PapersInternational audienceComposition is a fundamental tool when dealing with complex systems. We study the hierarchical collateral composition which is used to combine self-stabilizing distributed algorithms. The PADEC library is a framework developed with the Coq proof assistant and dedicated to the certification of self-stabilizing algorithms. We enrich PADEC with the composition operator and a sufficient condition to show its correctness. The formal proof of the condition leads us to develop new tools and methods on potentially infinite streams, these latter ones being used to model the algorithms’ executions. The cornerstone has been the definition of the function which removes duplicates from streams

Continuous vs. Discrete Asynchronous Moves: A Certified Approach for Mobile Robots

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Formal Methods for Mobile Robots

International audienceMost existing work in the literature typically ensures the correctness of mobile robot protocols via ad hoc handwritten proofs, which are both cumbersome and error-prone.This paper surveys state-of-the-art results about applying formal methods approaches (namely, model-checking, program synthesis, and proof assistants) to the context of mobile robot networks. Those methods already proved useful for bug-hunting in published literature, designing correct-by-design optimal protocols, and certifying impossibility results and protocols

Genome-wide association study identifies five new susceptibility loci for primary angle closure glaucoma

Primary angle closure glaucoma (PACG) is a major cause of blindness worldwide. We conducted a genome-wide association study (GWAS) followed by replication in a combined total of 10,503 PACG cases and 29,567 controls drawn from 24 countries across Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America. We observed significant evidence of disease association at five new genetic loci upon meta-analysis of all patient collections. These loci are at EPDR1 rs3816415 (odds ratio (OR) = 1.24, P = 5.94 × 10-15), CHAT rs1258267 (OR = 1.22, P = 2.85 × 10-16), GLIS3 rs736893 (OR = 1.18, P = 1.43 × 10-14), FERMT2 rs7494379 (OR = 1.14, P = 3.43 × 10-11), and DPM2-FAM102A rs3739821 (OR = 1.15, P = 8.32 × 10-12). We also confirmed significant association at three previously described loci (P < 5 × 10-8 for each sentinel SNP at PLEKHA7, COL11A1, and PCMTD1-ST18), providing new insights into the biology of PACG