271 research outputs found
Optimizing the Access to Healthcare Services in Dense Refugee Hosting Urban Areas: A Case for Istanbul
With over 3.5 million refugees, Turkey continues to host the world's largest
refugee population. This introduced several challenges in many areas including
access to healthcare system. Refugees have legal rights to free healthcare
services in Turkey's public hospitals. With the aim of increasing healthcare
access for refugees, we looked at where the lack of infrastructure is felt the
most. Our study attempts to address these problems by assessing whether Migrant
Health Centers' locations are optimal. The aim of this study is to improve
refugees' access to healthcare services in Istanbul by improving the locations
of health facilities available to them. We used call data records provided by
Turk Telekom.Comment: version to submit for D4R competitio
A Radio Search for Galactic Center Planetary Nebulae
Wetensch. publicati
Socio-geography of human mobility: a study using longitudinal mobile phone data
A relationship between people’s mobility and their social networks is presented based on an analysis of calling and mobility traces for one year of anonymized call detail records of over one million mobile phone users in Portugal. We find that about 80% of places visited are within just 20 km of their nearest (geographical) social ties’ locations. This figure rises to 90% at a ‘geo-social radius’ of 45 km. In terms of their travel scope, people are geographically closer to their weak ties than strong ties. Specifically, they are 15% more likely to be at some distance away from their weak ties than strong ties. The likelihood of being at some distance from social ties increases with the population density, and the rates of increase are higher for shorter geo-social radii. In addition, we find that area population density is indicative of geo-social radius where denser areas imply shorter radii. For example, in urban areas such as Lisbon and Porto, the geo-social radius is approximately 7 km and this increases to approximately 15 km for less densely populated areas such as Parades and Santa Maria da Feira
Impact of routine PCV7 (Prevenar) vaccination of infants on the clinical and economic burden of pneumococcal disease in Malaysia
<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Pneumococcal disease is the leading cause of vaccine-preventable death in children younger than 5 years of age worldwide. The World Health Organization recommends pneumococcal conjugate vaccine as a priority for inclusion into national childhood immunization programmes. Pneumococcal vaccine has yet to be included as part of the national vaccination programme in Malaysia although it has been available in the country since 2005. This study sought to estimate the disease burden of pneumococcal disease in Malaysia and to assess the cost effectiveness of routine infant vaccination with PCV7.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>A decision model was adapted taking into consideration prevalence, disease burden, treatment costs and outcomes for pneumococcal disease severe enough to result in a hospital admission. Disease burden were estimated from the medical records of 6 hospitals. Where local data was unavailable, model inputs were obtained from international and regional studies and from focus group discussions. The model incorporated the effects of herd protection on the unvaccinated adult population.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>At current vaccine prices, PCV7 vaccination of 90% of a hypothetical 550,000 birth cohort would incur costs of RM 439.6 million (US10.9 million) to the health system with 11,422.5 life years saved at a cost effectiveness ratio of RM 35,196 (US10,261). This is well below the WHO's threshold for cost effectiveness of public health interventions in Malaysia of RM 71,761 (US$20,922).</p
Pre-formatted written discharge summary—a step towards quality assurance in the emergency department
A Tale of Many Cities: Universal Patterns in Human Urban Mobility
The advent of geographic online social networks such as Foursquare, where users voluntarily signal their current location, opens the door to powerful studies on human movement. In particular the fine granularity of the location data, with GPS accuracy down to 10 meters, and the worldwide scale of Foursquare adoption are unprecedented. In this paper we study urban mobility patterns of people in several metropolitan cities around the globe by analyzing a large set of Foursquare users. Surprisingly, while there are variations in human movement in different cities, our analysis shows that those are predominantly due to different distributions of places across different urban environments. Moreover, a universal law for human mobility is identified, which isolates as a key component the rank-distance, factoring in the number of places between origin and destination, rather than pure physical distance, as considered in some previous works. Building on our findings, we also show how a rank-based movement model accurately captures real human movements in different cities
Mobile Sensing at the Service of Mental Well-being: a Large-scale Longitudinal Study
Measuring mental well-being with mobile sensing has been an increasingly active research topic. Pervasiveness of smartphones combined with the convenience of mobile app distribution platforms (e.g., Google Play) provide a tremendous opportunity to reach out to millions of users. However, the studies at the confluence of mental health and mobile sensing have been longitudinally limited, controlled, or confined to a small number of participants. In this paper we report on what we believe is the largest longitudinal in-the-wild study of mood through smartphones. We describe an Android app to collect participants’ self-reported moods and system triggered experience sampling data while passively measuring their physical activity, sociability, and mobility via their device’s sensors. We report the results of a large-scale analysis of the data collected for about three years from 18; 000 users. The paper makes three primary contributions. First, we show how we used physical and software sensors in smartphones to automatically and accurately identify routines. Then, we demonstrate the strong correlation between these routines and users’ personality, well-being perception, and other psychological variables. Finally, we explore predictability of users’ mood using their passive sensing data. Our findings show that, especially for weekends, mobile sensing can be used to predict users’ mood with an accuracy of about 70%. These results have the potential to impact the design of future mobile apps for mood/behavior tracking and interventions.This work was supported by the EPSRC through Grants UBHAVE
(EP/I032673/1) and GALE (EP/K019392)
The interior of the SNR RX J0852.0-4622 (Vela Jr) at radio wavelengths
Aim: We observed the center of the supernova remnant Vela Jr in radio
continuum in order to search for a counterpart to the compact central X-ray
source CXOU J085201.4-461753, possibly a neutron star candidate which could be
the remnant of the supernova explosion. Method: Observations were made with the
Australia Telescope Compact Array at 13 and 20 cm. Spectral indices were
obtained using flux density correlations of the data which were spatially
filtered to have the same u-v coverage. A multiwavelength search for
counterparts to the compact central X-ray source was made. Results: We compiled
a new catalogue of 31 small diameter radio sources, including the previously
known source PMN J0853-4620, listing the integrated flux densities at 20 cm
and, for half of the sources, the flux densities at 13 cm with the
corresponding spectral indices. All sources are unresolved at the present
angular resolution except for Source 18, which is clearly elongated and lies
strikingly close to CXOU J085201.4-461753. Our observations show no evidence
for the existence of a pulsar wind driven nebula associated with the point
X-ray source. Furthermore, Source 18 has a thermal spectrum with index +0.8 +/-
0.4, and appears to be the counterpart of the optical source Wray 16-30. In
spite of the absence of OIII emission lines as reported in the literature, we
find that this object could be explained as a low emission planetary nebula
belonging to the ``butterfly'' morphological class. Conclusions: We conclude
that if the radio source 18 is actually a planetary nebula, then CXOU
J085201.4-461753 is more likely to be related to it rather than to Vela Jr.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Astronomy and Astrophysic
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