TRIPLE crowdfunding user research

A demo presentation of the GoTriple crowdfunding solution. Rationale for this research:Setting up successfully a crowdfunding solution requires knowledge for supporting the decision making and an effective delivery.Questions:•What kind of projects would interest the potential users of the crowdfunding service? •Do crowdfunders want feedback after the funding? •Would participants like to get involved in other ways? •What contributes toward trusting the researchers/projects?•Could the career stage of the researcher (junior or senior) have an impact toward funding decisions?<br/

Interactive visualisation of sustainability indicators for water, energy and food innovations

The Water-Energy-Food (WEF) nexus describes the synergies and trade-offs between water, energy and food. Despite the significant attention that the WEF nexus has received in recent years, challenges remain, primarily related to gaps in integrated data, information and knowledge related to the most critical inter-linkages and their dynamics. These WEF nexus complexities and uncertainty make decision-making and future forecasting extremely difficult. Policy makers and other stakeholders are currently faced with the task of understanding longer term environmental impacts and tJhe benefits and limitations of innovations that could be potentially beneficial, such as Anaerobic Digestion as a waste solution or insect protein production. This paper describes an approach to support decision making for local-level innovations within the WEF nexus by creating a set of sustainability indicators and an accompanying interactive visualisation. The indicators were derived from stakeholder consultation processes and workshops, and they were selected to include a much broader assessment than just financial aspects when considering the viability of such innovations. By taking this bottom-up approach and placing stakeholders at the heart of the project, we produced a visualisation tool to support sustainable decision making when considering the implementation of WEF innovations. Considering other, often overlooked factors and giving greater priority to these deepens knowledge and the recognition of influential issues that in conventional processes may be overlooked. This visualisation tool is designed to support decision makers to engage in a exploration of the different interlinkages, and to be the basis of stakeholder dialogue around sustainability. The visualisation tool developed was designed to be easily modifiable in order to be updated with new insights and to include other future innovations

Anaerobic Digestion of food waste:eliciting sustainable water-energy-food nexus practices with Agent Based Modelling and visual analytics

Food waste is a problem for which solutions are recognised but not readily put into practice. What should be the primary objective, reducing or eliminating surplus food production, requires great change within social, cultural and economic structures. The secondary approach of redistributing surplus food to areas of deficit (in terms of socioeconomic groups and/or geographic regions) involves a significant logistical burden, and suffers the same issues as with the elimination of waste. The least desirable, but perhaps most practicable approach, is the use of food waste as a feedstock for Anaerobic Digestion (AD). The strategic adoption of AD can therefore be seen as an important step towards mitigating food waste, but the implementation of efficient AD systems on a large (county/region) scale involves significant complexity. The optimal number, size and location of AD plants, and whether they arecentralised versus decentralised, may be determined by considering factors such as supply and proximity to feedstock, transport links, emission hazards and social impact. Reaching balanced and objective decisions when faced with such disparate criteria is inevitably very difficult. To address this problem we prototype and evaluate a decision support tool for county-scale AD planning. Our approach is a hybridised Agent Based Model (ABM) with a Multi Objective Optimisation. We capture the spatio-temporal dependencies that exist in the water, energy and food systems associated with energy derived from food waste using Agent Based Modelling (ABM). The use of Visual Analytics in the form of Interactive Multi Criteria analysis offers a means to communicate the co-benefits and trade-offs that may emerge, as well as prioritise the AD strategies. Specifically, the method supports exploration of the social, environmental and economic impact of different AD strategies and decisions, linked to current issues, namely AD scale and adoption. The interactive MCA allows users to explore and understand the WEF impact of different implementations and management policies, based on the weighting of criteria. The results highlight a trade-off between transport costs and social acceptability for the AD centralised versus decentralised strategies. When low carbon options are more important, then slow, steady and aggressive decentralised strategies are the closest to the ideal, with centralised aggressive being the furthest from the ideal - i.e. worst option. Conversely, when Energy production is considered with a greater weighting, then aggressive scaling up in a centralised approach is best with slow and steady approaches being further from the ideal. The framework has demonstrated that it permits a space for dialogue and transparent prioritization of AD strategies based on WEF nexus impacts

Comparison of three methods for ascertainment of contact information relevant to respiratory pathogen transmission in encounter networks

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Mathematical models of infection that consider targeted interventions are exquisitely dependent on the assumed mixing patterns of the population. We report on a pilot study designed to assess three different methods (one retrospective, two prospective) for obtaining contact data relevant to the determination of these mixing patterns.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>65 adults were asked to record their social encounters in each location visited during 6 study days using a novel method whereby a change in physical location of the study participant triggered data entry. Using a cross-over design, all participants recorded encounters on 3 days in a paper diary and 3 days using an electronic recording device (PDA). Participants were randomised to first prospective recording method.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Both methods captured more contacts than a pre-study questionnaire, but ascertainment using the paper diary was superior to the PDA (mean difference: 4.52 (95% CI 0.28, 8.77). Paper diaries were found more acceptable to the participants compared with the PDA. Statistical analysis confirms that our results are broadly consistent with those reported from large-scale European based surveys. An association between household size (trend 0.14, 95% CI (0.06, 0.22), <it>P </it>< 0.001) and composition (presence of child 0.37, 95% CI (0.17, 0.56), <it>P </it>< 0.001) and the total number of reported contacts was observed, highlighting the importance of sampling study populations based on household characteristics as well as age. New contacts were still being recorded on the third study day, but compliance had declined, indicating that the optimal number of sample days represents a trade-off between completeness and quality of data for an individual.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The study's location-based reporting design allows greater scope compared to other methods for examining differences in the characteristics of encounters over a range of environments. Improved parameterisation of dynamic transmission models gained from work of this type will aid in the development of more robust decision support tools to assist health policy makers and planners.</p

Influence of Contact Definitions in Assessment of the Relative Importance of Social Settings in Disease Transmission Risk

BACKGROUND: Realistic models of disease transmission incorporating complex population heterogeneities require input from quantitative population mixing studies. We use contact diaries to assess the relative importance of social settings in respiratory pathogen spread using three measures of person contact hours (PCH) as proxies for transmission risk with an aim to inform bipartite network models of respiratory pathogen transmission. METHODS AND FINDINGS: Our survey examines the contact behaviour for a convenience sample of 65 adults, with each encounter classified as occurring in a work, retail, home, social, travel or "other" setting. The diary design allows for extraction of PCH-interaction (cumulative time in face-face conversational or touch interaction with contacts)--analogous to the contact measure used in several existing surveys--as well as PCH-setting (product of time spent in setting and number of people present) and PCH-reach (product of time spent in setting and number of people in close proximity). Heterogeneities in day-dependent distribution of risk across settings are analysed using partitioning and cluster analyses and compared between days and contact measures. Although home is typically the highest-risk setting when PCH measures isolate two-way interactions, its relative importance compared to social and work settings may reduce when adopting a more inclusive contact measure that considers the number and duration of potential exposure events. CONCLUSIONS: Heterogeneities in location-dependent contact behaviour as measured by contact diary studies depend on the adopted contact definition. We find that contact measures isolating face-face conversational or touch interactions suggest that contact in the home dominates, whereas more inclusive contact measures indicate that home and work settings may be of higher importance. In the absence of definitive knowledge of the contact required to facilitate transmission of various respiratory pathogens, it is important for surveys to consider alternative contact measures

Maternal Psychosocial Stress during Pregnancy and Placenta Weight: Evidence from a National Cohort Study

To study in a large-scale cohort with prospective data the associations between psychosocial stress during pregnancy and placenta weight at birth. Animal data suggest that the placenta is involved in stress-related fetal programming.; We defined a priori two types of psychosocial stress during pregnancy, life stress (perceived burdens in major areas of life) and emotional symptoms (e.g. anxiety). We estimated the associations of maternal stress during pregnancy with placenta weight at birth, controlled for length of gestation, by predicting gestational age- and sex-specific z-scores of placenta weight through multiple regression analysis, adjusted for potential confounders (N?=?78,017 singleton pregnancies). Life stress (per increase in stress score by 1, range: 0-18) during pregnancy was associated with increased placenta weight at birth (z-score, reported in 10(-3); B, 14.33; CI, 10.12-18.54). In contrast, emotional symptoms during pregnancy were not associated with placenta weight at birth.; Maternal life stress but not emotional symptoms during pregnancy was associated with increased placenta weight at birth; yet, the association-estimate was rather small. Our results may contribute to a better understanding of the role of the placenta in the regulation of intrauterine processes in response to maternal stress

Self-Reported Time in Bed and Sleep Quality in Association with Internalizing and Externalizing Symptoms in School-Age Youth

This study investigated the relationship between self-reported time in bed and sleep quality in association with self-reported internalizing and externalizing symptoms in a sample of 285 elementary school students (52% female) recruited from a rural Midwestern elementary school. Path models were used to estimate proposed associations, controlling for grade level and gender. Curvilinear associations were found between time in bed and anxiety, depressive symptoms, and irritability. Marginal curvilinear trends were found between time in bed and emotion dysregulation, reactive aggression, and proactive aggression. Sleep quality was negatively associated with anxiety, depressive symptoms, irritability, reactive aggression, and delinquency engagement. Gender and grade differences were found across models. Findings suggest that examining self-reported time in bed (both linear and quadratic) and sleep quality is important for understanding internalizing and externalizing symptoms associated with sleep in school-age youth. Incorporating self-reported sleep assessments into clinical practice and school-based evaluations may have implications for a child’s adjustment

Impacts of biomedical hashtag-based Twitter campaign: #DHPSP utilization for promotion of open innovation in digital health, patient safety, and personalized medicine

The open innovation hub Digital Health and Patient Safety Platform (DHPSP) was recently established with the purpose to invigorate collaborative scientific research and the development of new digital products and personalized solutions aiming to improve human health and patient safety. In this study, we evaluated the effectiveness of a Twitter-based campaign centered on using the hashtag #DHPSP to promote the visibility of the DHPSP initiative. Thus, tweets containing #DHPSP were monitored for five weeks for the period 20.10.2020–24.11.2020 and were analyzed with Symplur Signals (social media analytics tool). In the study period, a total of 11,005 tweets containing #DHPSP were posted by 3020 Twitter users, generating 151,984,378 impressions. Analysis of the healthcare stakeholder-identity of the Twitter users who used #DHPSP revealed that the most of participating user accounts belonged to individuals or doctors, with the top three user locations being the United States (501 users), the United Kingdom (155 users), and India (121 users). Analysis of co-occurring hashtags and the full text of the posted tweets further revealed that the major themes of attention in the #DHPSP Twitter-community were related to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), medicine and health, digital health technologies, and science communication in general. Overall, these results indicate that the #DHPSP initiative achieved high visibility and engaged a large body of Twitter users interested in the DHPSP focus area. Moreover, the conducted campaign resulted in an increase of DHPSP member enrollments and website visitors, and new scientific collaborations were formed. Thus, Twitter campaigns centered on a dedicated hashtag prove to be a highly efficient tool for visibility-promotion, which could be successfully utilized by healthcare-related open innovation platforms or initiatives

Defining Natural History: Assessment of the Ability of College Students to Aid in Characterizing Clinical Progression of Niemann-Pick Disease, Type C

Niemann-Pick Disease, type C (NPC) is a fatal, neurodegenerative, lysosomal storage disorder. It is a rare disease with broad phenotypic spectrum and variable age of onset. These issues make it difficult to develop a universally accepted clinical outcome measure to assess urgently needed therapies. To this end, clinical investigators have defined emerging, disease severity scales. The average time from initial symptom to diagnosis is approximately 4 years. Further, some patients may not travel to specialized clinical centers even after diagnosis. We were therefore interested in investigating whether appropriately trained, community-based assessment of patient records could assist in defining disease progression using clinical severity scores. In this study we evolved a secure, step wise process to show that pre-existing medical records may be correctly assessed by non-clinical practitioners trained to quantify disease progression. Sixty-four undergraduate students at the University of Notre Dame were expertly trained in clinical disease assessment and recognition of major and minor symptoms of NPC. Seven clinical records, randomly selected from a total of thirty seven used to establish a leading clinical severity scale, were correctly assessed to show expected characteristics of linear disease progression. Student assessment of two new records donated by NPC families to our study also revealed linear progression of disease, but both showed accelerated disease progression, relative to the current severity scale, especially at the later stages. Together, these data suggest that college students may be trained in assessment of patient records, and thus provide insight into the natural history of a disease