Point of Care Healthcare Quality Control for Patients Using Mobile Devices

The advances made in the domain of mobile telecommunications over the last decade offer great potential for developments in many areas. One such area that can benefit from mobile communications is telemedicine, which is the provision of medical assistance, in one form or another, to patients who are geographically separated from the healthcare provider. When a person is ill, individual attention from medical professionals is of the utmost importance until they have returned to full health. However, people who suffer with long term and chronic illnesses may need life long care and often must manage their condition at home. Many chronically ill patients manage their condition themselves and perform ‘self-testing’ with Point of Care Test (POCT) equipment as part of this condition management. When a specimen sample is analysed at home with a POCT device, a result is available to the patient almost immediately, but the result cannot be proven to be plausible for the patient unless it is validated by the hospital systems. In addition to this the hospital is unaware of the patients condition and progress between hospital visits. This research addresses some of the issues and problems that fact patients who use POCT equipment to ‘self-manage’ their condition at home. Using mobile phone technologies and the Java platform, three alternative methods for providing patients with a service of POCT result validation and storage was designed. The implementation and test of these systems, proves that a mobile phone solution to the issues associated with patient self-testing is possible and can greatly contribute to the quality of patient care

Relational Composition of Physical Systems: A Categorical Approach

In this master's thesis, we rigorously develop two frameworks of relational composition of systems using tools from category theory. The first framework addresses port-Hamiltonian systems, which are dynamical systems whose dynamics are connected to flows of energy across a boundary. The second framework addresses thermostatic systems, which are descriptions of equilibria in physical systems using entropy. We also review necessary subjects to develop these frameworks from a category-theoretic viewpoint, including inear algebra, differential geometry, and convex geometry

Design of a wireless system for patient-hospital communciation and result validation in point of care testing

This paper discuses mobile phone (cell phone) and wireless applications for linking patients who manage their healthcare outside the hospital using point of care testing (POCT) to hospital information systems (HIS). Certain medical conditions require patients to manage their healthcare by performing on themselves POC testing and act faithfully on the result. This raises quality control issue, as these POC samples and testing procedures are not independently overseen by professional hospital staff. In hospitals, samples taken by clinicians are validated by hi-tech computerised validation systems to ensure plausibility, before physicians rely on them. Patients in the home must often use results from these POCT to determine medication dosage or to monitor their condition. Thus, there is a need to implement a system of result validation, either locally or by the hospital validation system itself for people testing with POCT devices

Categorical Data Structures for Technical Computing

Many mathematical objects can be represented as functors from finitely-presented categories $\mathsf{C}$ to $\mathsf{Set}$. For instance, graphs are functors to $\mathsf{C}$ from the category with two parallel arrows. Such functors are known informally as $\mathsf{C}$-sets. In this paper, we describe and implement an extension of $\mathsf{C}$-sets having data attributes with fixed types, such as graphs with labeled vertices or real-valued edge weights. We call such structures "acsets," short for "attributed $\mathsf{C}$-sets." Derived from previous work on algebraic databases, acsets are a joint generalization of graphs and data frames. They also encompass more elaborate graph-like objects such as wiring diagrams and Petri nets with rate constants. We develop the mathematical theory of acsets and then describe a generic implementation in the Julia programming language, which uses advanced language features to achieve performance comparable with specialized data structures.Comment: 26 pages, 7 figure

Humor at work: using humor to study organizations as a social process

Humor is usually associated with trivial or non-serious banter; it is however a significant factor in the construction of organizational culture. This work provides an experience based organizational account of how organizations are produced and reproduced, as well as how organizational interaction is coupled with structure. This dissertation is based on two ethnographic studies: the first, a year-long study of a hotel kitchen, and the second, a three-year study of a private boarding school. This long term examination of an organization??s interaction is used to illustrate how organizational interaction produces the duality of organizational structuration overtime. An ethnographic communication-focused approach provides methods for recognizing multiple sites and levels of the Structuration process. As a result, this approach provides a major contribution to understanding the process of Structuration through agents?? actions in the context of their organizational culture

Aspects of slurry management on pig farms.

End of Project ReportThe objectives of manure or slurry management on intensive pig farms are the provision of adequate slurry storage capacity and the efficient recycling of the slurry nutrients for crop production. However, recent surveys of pig slurry dry matter suggest there is excessive dilution of raw pig slurry with water. This has two important implications for management. The first is greater storage capacity will be required due to the increased volume of slurry generated. Slurry storage is expensive. For example, a 350 sow unit adding 10 weeks storage needs to invest £50,000. Secondly, evidence from the literature indicates an improved slurry nitrogen efficiency with the more dilute manure. The results of field trials showed that higher dry matter pig slurries reduced the relative efficiency of pig slurry nitrogen for second cut silage production. This is probably linked to reduced ammonia volatilisation losses, consequent to the less viscous nature of dilute slurry which permits a more rapid infiltration of the ammonium nitrogen into the soil. The use of a band spreader or shallow injection rather than the conventional splash plate were shown to increase the efficiency of pig slurry nitrogen for grass silage production. Therefore, the potential for the higher pig slurry dry matter, required for cost effective storage/ handling costs, to reduce the efficiency of its nitrogen for grass silage production can be partially offset by using band spreaders or shallow injection spreading systems. These have the added advantage of reducing odour emissions from the land spreading operation.Teagasc Walsh Fellowship Programm

Monitoring the ageing of the cardiovascular system

This research developed a way of measuring blood flow through the capillaries and thereby monitoring the health of the endothelium, the inner lining of the blood vessels