Florida Department of Health Workers’ Response to 2004 Hurricanes: A Qualitative Analysis

OBJECTIVE: Examinations of the demands on public health workers after disaster exposure have been limited. Workers provide emergency care while simultaneously risking injury, damage to personal property, and threats to their own and their family’s safety. We examined the disaster management experiences of 4323 Florida Department of Health workers 9 months after their response to 4 hurricanes and 1 tropical storm during a 7-week period in August and September of 2004. METHODS: Participants completed a self-report questionnaire focused on work performance, mental and physical health, daily functioning, sleep disturbance, physiological arousal, and injury and work demand at the time of the hurricanes, and answered open-ended questions that described their experiences in more detail. RESULTS: A qualitative analysis conducted from the write-in data yielded 4 domains: (1) work/life balance; (2) training for disaster response role; (3) workplace support; and (4) recovery. CONCLUSIONS: Study findings highlighted a number of concerns that are important to public health workers who provide emergency care after a disaster and, in particular, multiple disasters such as during the 2004 hurricane season. The findings also yielded important recommendations for emergency public health preparedness

Battery State-of-Charge Approximation for Energy Harvesting Embedded Systems

Abstract Batteries play an integral role in Wireless Sensor Networks as they provide the energy necessary to operate the individual sensor nodes. In order to extend the network’s lifetime, and theoretically permit continuous operation even for systems with high-energy consumption, environmental energy harvesting has attracted much interest. It has been shown that the motes ’ utility can be improved significantly if run-time knowledge of remaining battery capacity is available. In this work, a light-weight and cost effective approach to approximating the bat-tery state-of-charge (SOC) based on voltage measurements is presented. Despite commonly perceived as inferior to other approaches, a performance evaluation shows that SOC approximations with over 95 % accuracy are possible. It is further shown that battery inefficiencies due to e.g., temperature and aging are taken into consideration despite not explicitly modeling these effects. The approach only requires system input voltage measurements, but benefits from optional current and temperature measurements