Web-based interface system for bedside monitor

From face-to-face consultation to medicine at a distance, technology is changing the way medical services are delivered to the people. We are going into an era where the information is being digitized to be stored in a database. This is done in order to reduce information overlap and redundancy that are the main problems the health care sector are facing right now. More hospitals in other more advanced countries are going paperless. In order to provide better services to the critically ill patients in the ICU or CCU, a data acquisition program is developed for the acquisition of vital signs monitored in the critical care units. This work discusses the work done in extracting the data and signal from patient monitor BSM 8800 to the computer. The data are acquired using RS232C Interface Protocol. The vital signs acquired include oxygen saturation (SaCh), heart rate (HR), electrocardiograph (ECG) signal, non-invasive blood pressure (NIBP), respiration rate (RR), temperature (TEMP) and end tidal carbon dioxide (PETCO2 or ETCO2). Ventricular Premature Contraction (VPC), ST level and arrhythmia information are also acquired and displayed to provide a more thorough information on the condition of the patients. Alarm detection is also programmed so that in critical conditions the vital signs will be displayed in red for extra caution. An ECG user control is designed and embedded in the web page in order to convert and plot the ECG waveform from hexadecimal values sent from the bedside monitor. The user control has been tested its accuracy and proved its validity to reconstruct the original ECG waveform. Basic patient information can also be seen from the graphical user interface (GUI) that has been developed. Physicians and medical practitioners have to register with the system before gaining access to the system and only the physician-in-charge of the patient can see the more intricate details of the patient

Kajian terhadap ketahanan hentaman ke atas konkrit berbusa yang diperkuat dengan serat kelapa sawit

Konkrit berbusa merupakan sejenis konkrit ringan yang mempunyai kebolehkerjaan yang baik dan tidak memerlukan pengetaran untuk proses pemadatan. Umum mengenali konkrit berbusa sebagai bahan binaan yang mempunyai sifat kekuatan yang rendah dan lemah terutama apabila bahan binaan ini dikenakan tenaga hentaman yang tinggi. Namun begitu, konkrit berbusa merupakan bahan yang berpotensi untuk dijadikan sebagai bahan binaan yang berkonsepkan futuristik. Binaan futuristik adalah binaan yang bercirikan ringan, ekonomi, mudah dari segi kerja pembinaan dan yang paling penting adalah mesra alam. Dalam kajian ini, konkrit berbusa ditambah serat buangan pokok kelapa sawit untuk untuk meningkatkan sifat kekuatan atau rapuh. Serat kelapa sawit juga berfungsi mempertingkatkan ketahanan hentaman terutamanya aspek nilai penyerapan tenaga hentaman dan nilai tenaga hentaman. Kandungan peratusan serat kelapa sawit yang digunakan adalah 10%, 20% dan 30% dengan dua ketumpatan konkrit berbusa iaitu 1000kg/m3 dan 1400kg/m3 . Untuk menentukan nilai penyerapan tenaga hentaman dan nilai tenaga hentaman, ujikaji Indentasi dan ujikaji hentaman dilakukan ke atas sampel�sampel yang telah diawet selama 28 hari. Luas bawah graf tegasan-terikan yang diperolehi daripada ujikaji Indentasi merupakan nilai penyerapan tenaga hentaman bagi sampel konkrit berbusa. Untuk ujikaji hentaman, keputusan ujikaji dinilai berdasarkan nilai tenaga hentaman untuk meretakkan sampel yang diperolehi daripada mesin ujikaji dynatup. Secara keseluruhannya, hasil dapatan utama bagi kedua-dua ujikaji menunjukkan sampel yang mengandungi peratusan serat kelapa sawit sebanyak 20% mempunyai nilai penyerapan tenaga hentaman dan nilai tenaga hentaman yang tinggi. Serapan tenaga maksimum adalah sebanyak 4.517MJ/m3 untuk ketumpatan 1400kg/m3 . Ini menunjukkan ketumpatan 1400kg/m3 berupaya menyerap tenaga lebih baik berbanding ketumpatan 1000kg/m3 . Manakala untuk nilai tenaga hentaman maksimum adalah sebanyak 27.229J untuk ketumpatan 1400kg/m3 . Hasil dapatan tersebut menunjukkan ketumpatan 1400kg/m3 dengan peratusan serat sebanyak 20% berupaya mengalas tenaga hentaman yang lebih banyak sebelum sampel retak. Kesimpulannya, peningkatan ketumpatan konkrit berbusa dan pertambahan serat buangan kelapa sawit ke dalam konkrit berbusa dapat meningkatkan ciri ketahanan hentaman konkrit berbusa khususnya aspek nilai penyerapan tenaga hentaman dan nilai tenaga hentaman

Banks, the IMF, and the Asian Crisis

This paper examines the impact of the Asian crisis on bank stocks across four Western countries and six Asian countries. In the second half of 1997, Western banks experienced positive returns. In contrast East Asian bank indices incurred losses in excess of 60% in each of the crisis countries. Most of this poor performance is explained by the exposure of the banks to general stock market movements in their countries. Currency exposures affected banks adversely beyond their stock market impact only in Indonesia and the Philippines. Except for the Korean program, IMF programs had little effect on bank values. The announcement of the Korean program increased shareholder wealth at the U.S. banks with the highest reported exposure in Korea by about 7% and had a favorable effect on bank shareholder wealth in all the countries in our sample but one. There is no evidence that the Korean IMF program had a positive impact on banks without exposure to Korea and hence our results do not support the argument that such programs reduce systemic risk.

Decentralised Control of Adaptive Sampling in Wireless Sensor Networks

The efficient allocation of the limited energy resources of a wireless sensor network in a way that maximises the information value of the data collected is a significant research challenge. Within this context, this paper concentrates on adaptive sampling as a means of focusing a sensor’s energy consumption on obtaining the most important data. Specifically, we develop a principled information metric based upon Fisher information and Gaussian process regression that allows the information content of a sensor’s observations to be expressed. We then use this metric to derive three novel decentralised control algorithms for information-based adaptive sampling which represent a trade-off in computational cost and optimality. These algorithms are evaluated in the context of a deployed sensor network in the domain of flood monitoring. The most computationally efficient of the three is shown to increase the value of information gathered by approximately 83%, 27%, and 8% per day compared to benchmarks that sample in a naive non-adaptive manner, in a uniform non-adaptive manner, and using a state-of-the-art adaptive sampling heuristic (USAC) correspondingly. Moreover, our algorithm collects information whose total value is approximately 75% of the optimal solution (which requires an exponential, and thus impractical, amount of time to compute)

Do Domestic Investors Have an Edge? The Trading Experience of Foreign Investors in Korea

We investigate whether domestic investors have an edge over foreign investors in trading domestic stocks.Using Korean data, we show that foreign money managers pay more than domestic money managers when they buy and receive less when they sell for medium and large trades. The sample average daily trade-weighted disadvantage of foreign money managers is of 21 basis points for purchases and 16 basis points for sales. There is also some evidence that domestic individual investors have an edge over foreign investors. The explanation for these results is that prices move more against foreign investors than against domestic investors before trades.

Do Domestic Investors Have More Valuable Information About Individual Stocks Than Foreign Investors?

Using trade data from Korea from December 1996 to November 1998, we find evidence that domestic individual investors have a short-lived private information advantage for individual stocks over foreign investors, but almost no evidence that domestic institutional investors have such an advantage. Foreign investors trade at worse prices than resident investors for large trades, for smaller stocks, and more so for sales than for purchases. Foreign investors sell to domestic investors before a stock has a large positive abnormal return and buy from domestic investors before a stock has a large negative abnormal return. Using intraday data, the large trades of domestic individual investors have more information than the large trades of foreign investors or of domestic institutional investors.

Financial globalization, governance, and the evolution of the home bias

Standard portfolio theories of the home bias are disconnected from corporate finance theories of insider ownership. We merge the two into what we call the optimal ownership theory of the home bias. The theory has the following components. In countries with poor governance, it is optimal for insiders to own large stakes in corporations and for large shareholders to monitor insiders. Foreign portfolio investors will exhibit a large home bias against such countries because their investment is limited by the shares held by insiders (the "direct effect" of poor governance) and domestic monitoring shareholders ("the indirect effect").> ; Foreigners can also enter as foreign direct investors; if they are from countries with good governance, they have a comparative advantage as insider monitors in countries with poor governance, so that the relative importance of foreign direct investment in total foreign equity investment is negatively related to the quality of governance. Using two datasets, we find strong evidence that the theory can help explain the evolution of the home bias. Using country-level U.S. data, we find that on average the home bias of U.S. investors towards the 46 countries with the largest equity markets did not fall over the past decade, but it decreased the most towards countries in which the ownership by corporate insiders decreased, and the importance of foreign direct investment fell in countries in which ownership by corporate insiders fell. Using firm-level data for Korea, we find evidence of the additional indirect effect of poor governance on portfolio equity investment by foreign investors.Investments, Foreign ; Globalization