The experiences of people with diabetes during covid-19 pandemic lockdown

Little is known about the theoretical foundation underling the response of people with diabetes managing their everyday routines during COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Aim: To explore the experience of people with diabetes during COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in light of the risk perception, response and behavioral change theories. Method: A qualitative descriptive design was employed, and Braun and Clark’s six step analysis were used for thematic analysis. Semi-structured interviews were conducted online using Zoom Videos Communication. Result: Five themes were defined as follows: (1) perceived the threat and faced their fears, (2) appraised the damage, (3) identified the challenges, (4) modified their routine, and (5) identified the strengths that facilitate the efficacy of their response. There were eight sub-themes within the themes. Conclusion: The results of this study may provide an opportunity for nurses to reflect on issues highlighted by the patients regarding more effective communication, knowledge and skill development for people to support self-care during national emergencies. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland

Illuminating Mario Scenes in the Latent Space of a Generative Adversarial Network

Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are quickly becoming a ubiquitous approach to procedurally generating video game levels. While GAN generated levels are stylistically similar to human-authored examples, human designers often want to explore the generative design space of GANs to extract interesting levels. However, human designers find latent vectors opaque and would rather explore along dimensions the designer specifies, such as number of enemies or obstacles. We propose using state-of-the-art quality diversity algorithms designed to optimize continuous spaces, i.e. MAP-Elites with a directional variation operator and Covariance Matrix Adaptation MAP-Elites, to efficiently explore the latent space of a GAN to extract levels that vary across a set of specified gameplay measures. In the benchmark domain of Super Mario Bros, we demonstrate how designers may specify gameplay measures to our system and extract high-quality (playable) levels with a diverse range of level mechanics, while still maintaining stylistic similarity to human authored examples. An online user study shows how the different mechanics of the automatically generated levels affect subjective ratings of their perceived difficulty and appearance.Comment: Accepted to AAAI 202

Interactive IIoT-Based 5DOF Robotic Arm for Upper Limb Telerehabilitation

Significant advancements in contemporary telemedicine applications enforce the demand for effective and intuitive telerehabilitation tools. Telerehabilitation can minimize the distance, travel burden, and costs between rehabilitative patients and therapists. This research introduces an interactive novel telerehabilitation system that integrates the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platform with a robotic manipulator named xARm-5, aiming to deliver rehabilitation therapies to individuals with upper limb dysfunctions. With the proposed system, a therapist can provide upper limb rehab exercises remotely using an augmented reality (AR) user interface (UI) developed using Vuforia Studio, which transmits bidirectional data through the IIoT platform. The proposed system has a stable communication architecture and low teleoperation latency. Experimental results revealed that with the developed telerehabilitation framework, the xArm-5 could be teleoperated from the developed AR platform and/or use a joystick to provide standard upper limb rehab exercises. Besides, with the designed AR-based UI, a therapist can monitor rehab/robot trajectories along with the AR digital twin of the robot, ensuring that the robot is providing passive therapy for shoulder and elbow movements

Molecular Mechanisms, Therapeutic Targets and Pharmacological Interventions: An Update

Muscles are the enriched reservoir of proteins in the body. During any workout or exercise, the demand in the form of energy is essentially required by the muscle. Energy expenditure of skeletal muscle is more dependent on the type of demand. There is particular homeostasis within the body that avoid surplus energy expenditure and this prevents any muscle loss. Muscle atrophy is termed as the loss of skeletal muscle mass due to immobility, malnutrition, medications, aging, cancer cachexia, variety of injuries or diseases that impact the musculoskeletal or nervous system. Hence, atrophy within the skeletal muscle initiates further cause fatigue, pain, muscle weakness, and disability in human subjects. Therefore, starvation and reduced muscle mass further initiate numerous signaling pathways including inflammatory, antioxidant signaling, mitochondria bio-energetic failure, AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK), Sirtuin 1(SIRT1), BDNF/TrkB/PKC, Autophagy, ubiquitin-proteasome systems, etc. Here, in this chapter, we will mention molecular mechanisms involved in therapeutic targets and available Pharmacological Interventions with the latest updates

DBGC:Dimension-Based Generic Convolution Block for Object Recognition

The object recognition concept is being widely used a result of increasing CCTV surveillance and the need for automatic object or activity detection from images or video. Increases in the use of various sensor networks have also raised the need of lightweight process frameworks. Much research has been carried out in this area, but the research scope is colossal as it deals with open-ended problems such as being able to achieve high accuracy in little time using lightweight process frameworks. Convolution Neural Networks and their variants are widely used in various computer vision activities, but most of the architectures of CNN are application-specific. There is always a need for generic architectures with better performance. This paper introduces the Dimension-Based Generic Convolution Block (DBGC), which can be used with any CNN to make the architecture generic and provide a dimension-wise selection of various height, width, and depth kernels. This single unit which uses the separable convolution concept provides multiple combinations using various dimension-based kernels. This single unit can be used for height-based, width-based, or depth-based dimensions; the same unit can even be used for height and width, width and depth, and depth and height dimensions. It can also be used for combinations involving all three dimensions of height, width, and depth. The main novelty of DBGC lies in the dimension selector block included in the proposed architecture. Proposed unoptimized kernel dimensions reduce FLOPs by around one third and also reduce the accuracy by around one half; semi-optimized kernel dimensions yield almost the same or higher accuracy with half the FLOPs of the original architecture, while optimized kernel dimensions provide 5 to 6% higher accuracy with around a 10 M reduction in FLOPs

SSR marker-based DNA fingerprinting of Sub1 introgressed lines in the background of traditional rice varieties of Assam India

350-356Rice varieties are usually characterized by agro-morphological descriptors used for seed certification and seed characterization by following distinctiveness, uniformity, and stability (DUS) test. But in fact, these primary distinguishing morphological descriptors among rice varieties are very limited and hence face problems to distinguish germplasm accessions. Germplasm certification in NBPGR requires a DNA fingerprinting profile to explain germplasm uniqueness compared to existing varieties. Varietal identification has gained a key role worldwide, particularly in plant variety protection. Sixty-two morphological descriptors studies have shown the Sub1 introgressed advanced lines E-6, C-210, C-196, 1189-1 and 1160-1 are distinct from the other varieties for more than 15morphological traits, based on these variations the lines were selected for DNA fingerprinting. About68 SSRs markers were used for DNA fingerprinting in seven genotypes, two of which were parents (Ranjit, Bahadur) and three Sub1 introgressed advanced lines (E6, C210, C196) in Ranjit background, and two Sub1 introgressed advanced lines (1189-1, 1160-1) in Bahadur background. DNA fingerprinting was done on these genotypes of rice using SSR markers. Among the 68 SSR markers, total 65 markers were amplified and three were found not amplified. Out of 65 markersfour of them viz. RM 152, RM 172, RM 251, and RM 346 showed better polymorphism with amplicon size ranges from 155-163 bp, 150-159 bp, 137-147 bp, and 166-175 bp, respectively, and remaining 61 showed monomorphic amplification. Therefore, SSR (Simple-sequence repeats) based DNA fingerprinting helped to differentiate Ranjit, Bahadur, E-6, C-210, C-196, 1189-1, and 1160-1. Hence, the research reveals that newly developed high-yielding Sub1 introgressed advanced lines in the background of traditional Assam rice varieties (Ranjit and Bahadur) are unique in their identity

Comparative transcriptome profiling reveals differential defense responses among Alternaria brassicicola resistant Sinapis alba and susceptible Brassica rapa

Alternaria blight is a devastating disease that causes significant crop losses in oilseed Brassicas every year. Adoption of conventional breeding to generate disease-resistant varieties has so far been unsuccessful due to the lack of suitable resistant source germplasms of cultivated Brassica spp. A thorough understanding of the molecular basis of resistance, as well as the identification of defense-related genes involved in resistance responses in closely related wild germplasms, would substantially aid in disease management. In the current study, a comparative transcriptome profiling was performed using Illumina based RNA-seq to detect differentially expressed genes (DEGs) specifically modulated in response to Alternaria brassicicola infection in resistant Sinapis alba, a close relative of Brassicas, and the highly susceptible Brassica rapa. The analysis revealed that, at 48 hpi (hours post inoculation), 3396 genes were upregulated and 23239 were downregulated, whereas at 72 hpi, 4023 genes were upregulated and 21116 were downregulated. Furthermore, a large number of defense response genes were detected to be specifically regulated as a result of Alternaria infection. The transcriptome data was validated using qPCR-based expression profiling for selected defense-related DEGs, that revealed significantly higher fold change in gene expression in S. alba when compared to B. rapa. Expression of most of the selected genes was elevated across all the time points under study with significantly higher expression towards the later time point of 72 hpi in the resistant germplasm. S. alba activates a stronger defense response reaction against the disease by deploying an array of genes and transcription factors involved in a wide range of biological processes such as pathogen recognition, signal transduction, cell wall modification, antioxidation, transcription regulation, etc. Overall, the study provides new insights on resistance of S. alba against A. brassicicola, which will aid in devising strategies for breeding resistant varieties of oilseed Brassica

Implementation of World Health Organization Integrated Management of Childhood Illnesses (IMCI) Guidelines for the Assessment of Pneumonia in the Under 5s in Rural Malawi

The Cooking and Pneumonia Study (CAPS) is a pragmatic cluster-level randomized controlled trial of the effect of an advanced cookstove intervention on pneumonia in children under the age of 5 years (under 5s) in Malawi (www.capstudy.org). The primary outcome of the trial is the incidence of pneumonia during a two-year follow-up period, as diagnosed by healthcare providers who are using the World Health Organization (WHO) integrated management of childhood illnesses (IMCI) pneumonia assessment protocol and who are blinded to the trial arms. We evaluated the quality of pneumonia assessment in under 5s in this setting via a cross-sectional study of provider-patient encounters at nine outpatient clinics located within the catchment area of 150 village-level clusters enrolled in the trial across the two study locations of Chikhwawa and Karonga, Malawi, between May and June 2015 using the IMCI guidelines as a benchmark. Data were collected using a key equipment checklist, an IMCI pneumonia knowledge test, and a clinical evaluation checklist. The median number of key equipment items available was 6 (range 4 to 7) out of a possible 7. The median score on the IMCI pneumonia knowledge test among 23 clinicians was 75% (range 60% to 89%). Among a total of 176 consultations performed by 15 clinicians, a median of 9 (range 3 to 13) out of 13 clinical evaluation tasks were performed. Overall, the clinicians were adequately equipped for the assessment of sick children, had good knowledge of the IMCI guidelines, and conducted largely thorough clinical evaluations. We recommend the simple pragmatic approach to quality assurance described herein for similar studies conducted in challenging research settings