A Self-Administered Dietary Assessment Website for Use in Primary Health Care: Usability Testing and Evaluation

A dietary assessment website for use in the primary healthcare setting has been developed. The website allows patients, referred from their GP, to self-report their dietary intake. Data from the website feeds to a dietitian who develops individualised dietary advice for the patient. The aim of this paper is to describe the usability testing of the dietary assessment website with its potential users. Testing was broken into two phases. Forty-two free-living adults with metabolic syndrome volunteered, 17 completed phase one and 10 completed phase two, with a 64% rate of completion. Phase one participants spoke aloud as they progressed through the self-administered dietary assessment website under researcher observation. Observed difficulties in website use and need for assistance was recorded and the website underwent modifications between phases. Only four participants in phase 1 required large amounts of assistance. Phase two participants progressed through the website without observation or using the think-aloud protocol. This simulated the environment in the GP practice within which the website was to be implemented. All participants completed pre- and post-use questionnaires assessing feelings toward use, computer experience and problems encountered. Questionnaires were thematically analysed for relationships between website use and participant feelings. Time taken to use the website was recorded automatically. Website features were grouped into ‘action classes’ e.g. selecting food items, and times taken were calculated for each class. Comparisons (t-tests) were made between the action classes for the two phases. Average time taken to select the food items was 31mins and 24mins for phase one and two respectively. Total time taken was approximately 1 hour and varied by four minutes between phases. Time taken to complete the dietary assessment was comparable to a face-to-face diet history with a dietitian. The website was found to be highly user-friendly with little assistance being required for most levels of computer experience. Dietary management may be overlooked by GPs, yet by offering different methods of accessing dietitians, management may improve

Nutrition in the prevention of chronic disease

Increasing prevalence rates of chronic disease requires a more sophisticated view of the effects of food on health. This review examines the evidence base for the effects of food on health and discusses food based health strategies

Relationships between patient age and BMI and use of a self-administered computerised dietary assessment in a primary healthcare setting

The objective of this paper was to determine relationships between patient age and BMI and use of a self-administered dietary assessment website in the primary healthcare setting. Chi- square and ordinal regression models were used to determine the relationships between age and BMI and computer experience, ownership, and usage from 188 patients using a self-administered dietary assessment website over 12 months. One hundred and twenty-five (66.5%) female and 63 (33.5%) male patients used the website. A total of 72.9% were overweight (BMI425 kg/m2). Advanced/intermediate computer users were 17.1 times more likely to own a computer than beginners or patients who had never used a computer. Patients with a higher BMI were 1.9 times (P ¼ 0.04) more likely to use the computer at home than in the GP practice, and patients aged o35 years and using the computer at home were 16.8 times more likely to be advanced computer users than patients aged 456 years using the computer in the GP practice. Finding innovative ways for overweight patients in the primary healthcare setting to report intakes may include the use of computers. Overweight patients may feel greater comfort having their diet assessed in their own home and any social desirability bias related to food and/or the interviewer may be decreased due to the limited face-to-face contact required

Yang-Mills theory and the ABC conjecture

We establish a precise correspondence between the ABC Conjecture and N=4 super-Yang–Mills theory. This is achieved by combining three ingredients: (i) Elkies’ method of mapping ABC-triples to elliptic curves in his demonstration that ABC implies Mordell/Faltings; (ii) an explicit pair of elliptic curve and associated Belyi map given by Khadjavi–Scharaschkin; and (iii) the fact that the bipartite brane-tiling/dimer model for a gauge theory with toric moduli space is a particular dessin d’enfant in the sense of Grothendieck. We explore this correspondence for the highest quality ABC-triples as well as large samples of random triples. The conjecture itself is mapped to a statement about the fundamental domain of the toroidal compactification of the string realization of N=4 SYM

Computerized dietary assessments compare well with interviewer administered diet histories for patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus in the primary healthcare setting

Using a context-based case-control trial, 41 adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus were randomized into four groups to complete dietary assessments (computerized or interviewer administered) at 0, 2 and 8 weeks and food records at 0 and 2 weeks. Repeatability of reported energy, total fat, saturated, polyunsaturated and monounsaturated fatty acids between the computerized and interviewer administered methods were assessed using repeated measures ANOVA. Paired t-tests and Pearson\u27s correlations determined relative validity of the assessments

The risk relationships between alcohol consumption, alcohol use disorder and alcohol use disorder mortality: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Increasing levels of alcohol use are associated with a risk of developing an alcohol use disorder (AUD), which, in turn, is associated with considerable burden. Our aim was to estimate the risk relationships between alcohol consumption and AUD incidence and mortality. A systematic literature search was conducted, using Medline, Embase, PsycINFO and Web of Science for case-control or cohort studies published between 1 January 2000 and 8 July 2022. These were required to report alcohol consumption, AUD incidence and/or AUD mortality (including 100% alcohol-attributable deaths). The protocol was registered with PROSPERO (CRD42022343201). Dose-response and random-effects meta-analyses were used to determine the risk relationships between alcohol consumption and AUD incidence and mortality and mortality rates in AUD patients, respectively. Of the 5904 reports identified, seven and three studies from high-income countries and Brazil met the inclusion criteria for quantitative and qualitative syntheses, respectively. In addition, two primary US data sources were analyzed. Higher levels of alcohol consumption increased the risk of developing or dying from an AUD exponentially. At an average consumption of four standard drinks (assuming 10 g of pure alcohol/standard drink) per day, the risk of developing an AUD was increased sevenfold [relative risk (RR) = 7.14, 95% confidence interval (CI) = 5.13-9.93] and the risk of dying fourfold (RR = 3.94, 95% CI = 3.53-4.40) compared with current non-drinkers. The mortality rate in AUD patients was 3.13 (95% CI = 1.07-9.13) per 1000 person-years. There are exponential positive risk relationships between alcohol use and both alcohol use disorder incidence and mortality. Even at an average consumption of 20 g/day (about one large beer), the risk of developing an alcohol use disorder (AUD) is nearly threefold that of current non-drinkers and the risk of dying from an AUD is approximately double that of current non-drinkers

Air pollution, lung function and COPD: results from the population-based UK Biobank study

Ambient air pollution increases the risk of respiratory mortality, but evidence for impacts on lung function and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is less well established. The aim was to evaluate whether ambient air pollution is associated with lung function and COPD, and explore potential vulnerability factors.We used UK Biobank data on 303 887 individuals aged 40-69 years, with complete covariate data and valid lung function measures. Cross-sectional analyses examined associations of land use regression-based estimates of particulate matter (particles with a 50% cut-off aerodynamic diameter of 2.5 and 10 µm: PM2.5 and PM10, respectively; and coarse particles with diameter between 2.5 μm and 10 μm: PMcoarse) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) concentrations with forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV1), forced vital capacity (FVC), the FEV1/FVC ratio and COPD (FEV1/FV

LAS BATALLAS FESTIVAS DE ESPANA

Serving individual customer needs at reasonable prices can be a profitable target market in high-wage countries. The dilemma between scale and scope-oriented production is one major research topic within the Cluster of Excellence "Integrative Production Technology for High-Wage Countries" at the RWTH Aachen University. One main objective of this project is to bridge the existing gap between individual manufacturing and mass production. Modularization is a widely accepted approach in tool-based manufacturing processes. In this paper, we propose a flexible design methodology for modular tools and dies. The methodology will assist the design engineer in setting up a series of modularized tools in a conceptually closed manner. The described methodology covers modularization in a broad sense, i.e. it includes hardware modularization as well as modularization of the construction process. The methodology consists of three phases: initiation, analysis and design phase

Who Left the Dogs Out? 3D Animal Reconstruction with Expectation Maximization in the Loop

We introduce an automatic, end-to-end method for recovering the 3D pose and shape of dogs from monocular internet images. The large variation in shape between dog breeds, significant occlusion and low quality of internet images makes this a challenging problem. We learn a richer prior over shapes than previous work, which helps regularize parameter estimation. We demonstrate results on the Stanford Dog dataset, an 'in the wild' dataset of 20,580 dog images for which we have collected 2D joint and silhouette annotations to split for training and evaluation. In order to capture the large shape variety of dogs, we show that the natural variation in the 2D dataset is enough to learn a detailed 3D prior through expectation maximization (EM). As a by-product of training, we generate a new parameterized model (including limb scaling) SMBLD which we release alongside our new annotation dataset StanfordExtra to the research community.GS