Development and Validation of the Tele-Pulmonary Rehabilitation Acceptance Scale

BACKGROUND: Using telehealth in pulmonary rehabilitation (telerehabilitation) is a new field of health-care practice. To successfully implement a telerehabilitation program, measures of acceptance of this new type of program need to be assessed among potential users. The purpose of this study was to develop a scale to measure acceptance of using telerehabilitation by health-care practitioners and patients. METHODS: Three objectives were met (a) constructing a modified scale of the technology acceptance model, (b) judging the items for content validity, and (c) judging the scale for face validity. Nine experts agreed to participate and evaluate item relevance to theoretical definitions of domains. To establish face validity, 7 health-care practitioners and 5 patients were interviewed to provide feedback about the scale's clarity and ease of reading. RESULTS: The final items were divided into 2 scales that reflected the health-care practitioner and patient responses. Each scale included 3 subscales: perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and behavioral intention. CONCLUSIONS: The 2 scales, each with 3 subscales, exhibited evidence of content validity and face validity. The 17-item telerehabilitation acceptance scale for health-care practitioners and the 13-item telerehabilitation acceptance scale among patients warrant further psychometric testing as valuable measures for pulmonary rehabilitation programs

Health Care Practitioners’ Determinants of Telerehabilitation Acceptance

Background: Pulmonary rehabilitation is a multidisciplinary patient-tailored intervention that aims to improve the physical and psychological condition of people with chronic respiratory diseases. Providing pulmonary rehabilitation (PR) services to the growing population of patients is challenging due to shortages in health care practitioners and pulmonary rehabilitation programs. Telerehabilitation has the potential to address this shortage in practitioners and PR programs as well as improve patients’ participation and adherence. This study’s purpose was to identify and evaluate the influences of intention of health care practitioners to use telerehabilitation. Methods: Data were collected through a self-administered Internet-based survey. Results: Surveys were completed by 222 health care practitioners working in pulmonary rehabilitation with 79% having a positive intention to use telerehabilitation. Specifically, perceived usefulness was a significant individual predictor of positive intentions to use telerehabilitation. Conclusion: Perceived usefulness may be an important factor associated with health care providers’ intent to use telerehabilitation for pulmonary rehabilitation

Uncertainty-aware estimation of population abundance using machine learning

Machine Learning is widely used for mining collections, such as images, sounds, or texts, by classifying their elements into categories. Automatic classification based on supervised learning requires groundtruth datasets for modeling the elements to classify, and for testing the quality of the classification. Because collecting groundtruth is tedious, a method for estimating the potential errors in large datasets based on limited groundtruth is needed. We propose a method that improves classification quality by using limited groundtruth data to extrapolate the po-tential errors in larger datasets. It significantly improves the counting of elements per class. We further propose visualization designs for understanding and evaluating the classification un-certainty. They support end-users in considering the impact of potential misclassifications for interpreting the classification output. This work was developed to address the needs of ecologists studying fish population abundance using computer vision, but generalizes to a larger range of applications. Our method is largely applicable for a variety of Machine Learning technologies, and our visualizations further support their transfer to end-users

Establishing a large prospective clinical cohort in people with head and neck cancer as a biomedical resource: head and neck 5000

BACKGROUND: Head and neck cancer is an important cause of ill health. Survival appears to be improving but the reasons for this are unclear. They could include evolving aetiology, modifications in care, improvements in treatment or changes in lifestyle behaviour. Observational studies are required to explore survival trends and identify outcome predictors. METHODS: We are identifying people with a new diagnosis of head and neck cancer. We obtain consent that includes agreement to collect longitudinal data, store samples and record linkage. Prior to treatment we give participants three questionnaires on health and lifestyle, quality of life and sexual history. We collect blood and saliva samples, complete a clinical data capture form and request a formalin fixed tissue sample. At four and twelve months we complete further data capture forms and send participants further quality of life questionnaires. DISCUSSION: This large clinical cohort of people with head and neck cancer brings together clinical data, patient-reported outcomes and biological samples in a single co-ordinated resource for translational and prognostic research

Narcissism and the strategic pursuit of short-term mating : universal links across 11 world regions of the International Sexuality Description Project-2.

Previous studies have documented links between sub-clinical narcissism and the active pursuit of short-term mating strategies (e.g., unrestricted sociosexuality, marital infidelity, mate poaching). Nearly all of these investigations have relied solely on samples from Western cultures. In the current study, responses from a cross-cultural survey of 30,470 people across 53 nations spanning 11 world regions (North America, Central/South America, Northern Europe, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Middle East, Africa, Oceania, Southeast Asia, and East Asia) were used to evaluate whether narcissism (as measured by the Narcissistic Personality Inventory; NPI) was universally associated with short-term mating. Results revealed narcissism scores (including two broad factors and seven traditional facets as measured by the NPI) were functionally equivalent across cultures, reliably associating with key sexual outcomes (e.g., more active pursuit of short-term mating, intimate partner violence, and sexual aggression) and sex-related personality traits (e.g., higher extraversion and openness to experience). Whereas some features of personality (e.g., subjective well-being) were universally associated with socially adaptive facets of Narcissism (e.g., self-sufficiency), most indicators of short-term mating (e.g., unrestricted sociosexuality and marital infidelity) were universally associated with the socially maladaptive facets of narcissism (e.g., exploitativeness). Discussion addresses limitations of these cross-culturally universal findings and presents suggestions for future research into revealing the precise psychological features of narcissism that facilitate the strategic pursuit of short-term mating

Genome-wide meta-analysis of 241,258 adults accounting for smoking behaviour identifies novel loci for obesity traits

Few genome-wide association studies (GWAS) account for environmental exposures, like smoking, potentially impacting the overall trait variance when investigating the genetic contribution to obesity-related traits. Here, we use GWAS data from 51,080 current smokers and 190,178 nonsmokers (87% European descent) to identify loci influencing BMI and central adiposity, measured as waist circumference and waist-to-hip ratio both adjusted for BMI. We identify 23 novel genetic loci, and 9 loci with convincing evidence of gene-smoking interaction (GxSMK) on obesity-related traits. We show consistent direction of effect for all identified loci and significance for 18 novel and for 5 interaction loci in an independent study sample. These loci highlight novel biological functions, including response to oxidative stress, addictive behaviour, and regulatory functions emphasizing the importance of accounting for environment in genetic analyses. Our results suggest that tobacco smoking may alter the genetic susceptibility to overall adiposity and body fat distribution.Peer reviewe