An Interactive Game with Virtual Reality Immersion to Improve Cultural Sensitivity in Healthcare

Purpose: Biased perceptions of individuals who are not part of one’s in-groups tend to be negative and habitual. Because health care professionals are no less susceptible to biases than are others, the adverse impact of biases on marginalized populations in health care warrants continued attention and amelioration. Method: Two characters, a Syrian refugee with limited English proficiency and a black pregnant woman with a history of opioid use disorder, were developed for an online training simulation that includes an interactive life course experience focused on social determinants of health, and a clinical encounter in a community health center utilizing virtual reality immersion. Pre- and post-survey data were obtained from 158 health professionals who completed the simulation. Results: Post-simulation data indicated increased feelings of compassion toward the patient and decreased expectations about how difficult future encounters with the patient would be. With respect to attribution, after the simulation participants were less inclined to view the patient as primarily responsible for their situation, suggesting less impact of the fundamental attribution error. Conclusion: This training simulation aimed to utilize components of evidence-based prejudice habit breaking interventions, such as learning more about an individual’s life experience to help minimize filling in gaps with stereotyped assumptions. Although training simulations cannot fully replicate or replace the advantages that come with real-world experience, they can heighten awareness in the increase of increasing the cultural sensitivity of clinicians in health care professions for improving health equity

Influence of parametric uncertainties and their interactions on small-signal stability : a case example of parallel-connected active loads in a DC microgrid

Classical stability analysis techniques based on nominal models do not consider the uncertainty of system parameters, their interactions, and nonlinearity, which are important characteristics of practical highly coupled microgrids. In this work, variance-based sensitivity analysis is used to identify parameter combinations that have a significant impact on the small-signal stability of a microgrid featuring two parallel active loads. The analysis indicates that the effectiveness of source-side damping is reduced when resonant frequencies of load input filters become matched. Further results using derivative-based sensitivity analysis reveal that source-side resistance can exhibit drastically different effects on the stability if load input filter resonant frequencies are matched with respect to the case when they are well separated. These behaviours are verified using time-domain switching models

Modeling, analysis and testing of autonomous operation of an inverter-based microgrid

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Enhanced performance analysis of vertical strained-sige impact ionization MOSFET (VESIMOS)

The Vertical Strained Silicon Germanium (SiGe) Impact Ionization MOSFET (VESIMOS) has been successfully developed and analyzed in this paper. VESIMOS device integrates vertical structure concept of Impact Ionization MOSFET (IMOS) and strained technology. The transfer characteristics of VESIMOS revealed an inverse proportionality of supply voltage, VD and sub-threshold, S due to lower breakdown strength of Ge content. However, the Sis in direct proportion to the leakage current. The S=10mV/dec was successfully obtained at threshold voltage, VT=0.9V, with VD=1.75V. This VT is 40% lower than VT for Si-vertical IMOS. The output characteristics goes into saturation for VD more than 2.5V, attributed to the presence of Ge that has high and symmetric impact ionization rates. Electron mobility wasimproved by 40% compared to Si-vertical IMOS and an increase in strain will also increase mobility and reduce further the VT. However, the increase in strain layer thickness, TSiGe, resulted in an increase of VT and lowered the mobility. This is due to the strain relaxation in the SiGe layer. Finally, at high source-drain doping concentration, S/D=2×1018/cm3, the VT dropped to 0.88V, with VD of 1.75V. This is due to high electric field effect in the channel at high doping concentration, which is contrary to the doping effects of conventional MOSFET