A Comparative Study to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Crushed Ice Pack Application and Sitz Bath on Episiotomy Pain and Wound Healing Among Postnatal Mothers

An episiotomy is an incision made in the perineum- the tissue between the vaginal opening and the anus during child birth. Pain at the episiotomy site is more distressing for the mother during postnatal period. An ice pack application or warm shallow bath (sitz bath) may increase comfort and promotes healing. The main aim of this present study was to compare the effect of Crushed ice pack application and Sitz bath on episiotomy pain and wound healing among postnatal mothers. A Matched group design was adopted in this study. By using Non probability purposive sampling technique 22 postnatal mothers with episiotomy were selected as samples at Ramakrishna Hospital, Coimbatore and 11mothers were assigned randomly to each group I and group II. Episiotomy pain was assessed by using Numerical Pain Intensity scale and Wound healing was assessed by using Davidson REEDA scale. Group I received crushed ice pack application and Group II received sitz bath. Intervention was given for 10 minutes twice a day for three consecutive days from first postnatal day. Data were analysed by using descriptive and inferential statistical methods. The statistical analysis revealed that the calculated mean scores of episiotomy pain in the group I and group II was1.72 and 2.9 respectively and the mean difference is 1.2 with the standard deviation of group I and group II was 0.64 and 0.53 respectively. The calculated ‘t’ value 11.3 was greater than the table value of 2.086 at 0.05 level of significance. The calculated mean scores of episiotomy wound healing in the group I and group II was 1.54 and 1.81 respectively and the mean difference is 0.27 with the standard deviation of group I and group II was 0.5 and 0.6 respectively. The calculated‘t’ value 2.6 was greater than the table value of 2.086 at 0.05 level of significance. Finally, the study concluded that the crushed ice pack application was more effective than sitz bath in reducing the level of episiotomy pain and promotes wound healing among postnatal mothers

Technique to generate a face and palm vein-based fuzzy vault for a multi-biometric cryptosystem

Template security of biometric systems is a vital issue and needs critical focus. The importance lies in the fact that unlike passwords, stolen biometric templates cannot be revoked. Hence, the biometric templates cannot be stored in plain format and needs strong protection against any forgery. In this paper, we present a technique to generate face and palm vein-based fuzzy vault for multi-biometric cryptosystem. Here, initially the input images are pre-processed using various processes to make images fit for further processing. In our proposed method, the features are extracted from the processed face and palm vein images by finding out unique common points. The chaff points are added to the already extracted points to obtain the combined feature vector. The secret key points which are generated based on the user key input (by using proposed method) are added to the combined feature vector to have the fuzzy vault. For decoding, the multi-modal biometric template from palm vein and face image is constructed and is combined with the stored fuzzy vault to generate the final key. Finally, the experimentation is conducted using the palm vein and face database available in the CASIA and JAFFE database. The evaluation metrics employed are FMR (False Match Ratio) and GMR (Genuine Match Ratio). From the metric values obtained for the proposed system, we can infer that the system has performed well