Codesigning patient experience measures for and with children and young people with intellectual disability: a study protocol.

Abstract Introduction Children and young people with intellectual disability represent one of the most vulnerable groups in healthcare, yet they remain under-represented in projects to design, develop and/or improve healthcare service delivery. Increasingly, healthcare services are using various codesign and coproduction methodologies to engage children and young people in service delivery improvements. Methods and analysis This study employs an inclusive approach to the study design and execution, including two co-researchers who are young people with intellectual disability on the project team. We will follow an adapted experience-based co-design methodology to enable children and young people with intellectual disability to participate fully in the co-design of a prototype tool for eliciting patient experience data from children and young people with intellectual disability in hospital. Ethics and dissemination This study was granted ethical approval on 1 February 2021 by the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Network Human Research Ethics Committee, reference number 2020/ETH02898. Dissemination plan includes publications, doctoral thesis chapter, educational videos. A summary of findings will be shared with all participants and presented at the organisation quality and safety committee

Codesigning patient experience measures for and with children and young people with intellectual disability: A study protocol

Introduction Children and young people with intellectual disability represent one of the most vulnerable groups in healthcare, yet they remain under-represented in projects to design, develop and/or improve healthcare service delivery. Increasingly, healthcare services are using various codesign and coproduction methodologies to engage children and young people in service delivery improvements. Methods and analysis This study employs an inclusive approach to the study design and execution, including two co-researchers who are young people with intellectual disability on the project team. We will follow an adapted experience-based co-design methodology to enable children and young people with intellectual disability to participate fully in the co-design of a prototype tool for eliciting patient experience data from children and young people with intellectual disability in hospital. Ethics and dissemination This study was granted ethical approval on 1 February 2021 by the Sydney Children's Hospitals Network Human Research Ethics Committee, reference number 2020/ETH02898. Dissemination plan includes publications, doctoral thesis chapter, educational videos. A summary of findings will be shared with all participants and presented at the organisation quality and safety committee

Willingness to Pay towards the Conservation of Ecotourism Resources at Gunung Gede Pangrango National Park, West Java, Indonesia

The objectives of this study are to determine the visitors’ willingness to pay for conservation of the resources at Gunung Gede Pangrango National Park (TNGP), and to determine the satisfaction of visitors towards the use of the ecotourism resources of the park. The dichotomous choice Contingent Valuation Method (CVM) was employed to determine the willingness to pay (WTP). A total of 423 respondents were interviewed face-to-face to collect the data. The results show that most visitors are satisfied with the ecotourism resources in TNGP, many of the visitors have come to TNGP more than once. In order to sustain the benefits derived from the resources at the park, the visitors agree that various organization involved must cooperate to conserve and protect the ecotourism resources. The economic benefit of conservation of the ecotourism resources at TNGP was measured using the visitors’ WTP for higher entrance fee to the park. A logit regression model was used to determine visitors’ willingness to pay. The results indicate that income, gender (male) and residential (urban) were the significant factors that influencing the visitors’ WTP for the entrance fee to TNGP. The mean WTP is found to be RP 7629.77 per visit. It is estimated that in 2004 the benefits of conservation of the ecotourism resources in TNGP amounts to RP 452 million

The potential use of service-oriented infrastructure framework to enable transparent vertical scalability of cloud computing infrastructure

Cloud computing technology has become familiar to most Internet users. Subsequently, there has been an increased growth in the use of cloud computing, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). To ensure that IaaS can easily meet the growing demand, IaaS providers usually increase the capacity of their facilities in a vertical IaaS increase capability and the capacity for local IaaS amenities such as increasing the number of servers, storage and network bandwidth. However, at the same time, horizontal scalability is sometimes not enough and requires additional strategies to ensure that the large number of IaaS service requests can be met. Therefore, strategies requiring horizontal scalability are more complex than the vertical scalability strategies because they involve the interaction of more than one facility at different service centers. To reduce the complexity of the implementation of the horizontal scalability of the IaaS infrastructures, the use of a technology service oriented infrastructure is recommended to ensure that the interaction between two or more different service centers can be done more simply and easily even though it is likely to involve a wide range of communication technologies and different cloud computing management. This is because the service oriented infrastructure acts as a middle man that translates and processes interactions and protocols of different cloud computing infrastructures without the modification of the complex to ensure horizontal scalability can be run easily and smoothly. This paper presents the potential of using a service-oriented infrastructure framework to enable transparent vertical scalability of cloud computing infrastructures by adapting three projects in this research: SLA@SOI consortium, Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI), and OpenStack

Production of 316L Stainless Steel (SS316L) Foam via Slurry Method

Metal foams are a special class of porous materials with novel physical, mechanical, thermal, electrical and acoustic properties. Nowadays, 316L stainless steel (SS316L) foam is considered as one of the attractive metallic materials for biomedical applications due to its excellent mechanical properties, biocompatibility, and corrosion resistance. In this study, SS316L has been used to produce metal foams using the slurry method. The compositions of the SS316L metal powder were 40 wt% and 60 wt%, PEG (3 wt%), CMC (3 wt%) with the remainder distilled water. Polyethylene glycol (PEG) and methylcellulose (CMC) were used as a binder. The raw materials were mixed using a ball milling machine. After that, the polyurethane (PU) foams were immersed in the mixture then dried in the oven for 24 hours. Then, the samples were sintered in a box furnace at 1300oC. In order to characterize the samples, several tests were conducted such as x-ray diffraction (XRD), energy diffraction x-ray (EDX), and morphological analysis (optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy (SEM)). The most suitable composition of SS316L is 60 wt% with a sintering temperature of 1300°C which resulted in large-pored metal foam. The SS316L metal foams were successfully produced using the slurry method. However, the quality of the SS316L metal foam must be improved because it had too low a strength to undergo mechanical testing

Comparison and characterization of different types of durian husk as activated carbon

In this study, characterization of activated carbon (AC) produced from durian husk by chemical activation technique using potassium hydroxide (KOH) as activating agent. Three types of durian husk used were Durian D-2 (DD-2), Durian Kampung (DK) and Duriang Kacing Baju (DKB). All of these durians husk are then carbonized and activated. The particle size of AC is sieved between 300 - 600 mm. The AC is then characterised according to proximate analysis and chemical properties. The proximate analysis is including moisture content, ash content, volatile matter and fixed carbon. The elemental analysis is also done. Commercial adsorbent silica gel was compared with carbon produced by using iodine titration. All types of durian husk shows difference values in physical analysis and almost same characteristics in chemical analysis

Rehabilitation monitoring prototype: Arduino Nano 35 BLE

Nowadays, smart health has been developing in the healthcare system by implementing the Internet of Things. One of the implementations of smart health is remote monitoring systems for rehabilitating patients such as stroke. Today, with the rising Covid-19 pandemic, patients undergoing rehabilitation at home have difficulties meeting with their doctors due to the moving restrictions. The healthcare facilities are focused on treating Covid-19 patients. These restrictions have caused doctors and patients not to meet regularly to collect their data on the rehabilitation progress. This research suggests building a prototype to monitor a post-stroke patient's lower limb strength rehabilitation process by using embedded sensors and microcontrollers. The prototype will measure key components of the rehabilitation process and will be discussed in the later section of this paper

Association between Lactobacillus species and bacterial vaginosis-related bacteria, and bacterial vaginosis scores in pregnant Japanese women

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Bacterial vaginosis (BV), the etiology of which is still uncertain, increases the risk of preterm birth. Recent PCR-based studies suggested that BV is associated with complex vaginal bacterial communities, including many newly recognized bacterial species in non-pregnant women.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>To examine whether these bacteria are also involved in BV in pregnant Japanese women, vaginal fluid samples were taken from 132 women, classified as normal (n = 98), intermediate (n = 21), or BV (n = 13) using the Nugent gram stain criteria, and studied. DNA extracted from these samples was analyzed for bacterial sequences of any <it>Lactobacillus</it>, four <it>Lactobacillus </it>species, and four BV-related bacteria by PCR with primers for 16S ribosomal DNA including a universal <it>Lactobacillus </it>primer, <it>Lactobacillus </it>species-specific primers for <it>L. crispatus</it>, <it>L. jensenii</it>, <it>L. gasseri</it>, and <it>L. iners</it>, and BV-related bacterium-specific primers for BVAB2, <it>Megasphaera</it>, <it>Leptotrichia</it>, and <it>Eggerthella</it>-like bacterium.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The prevalences of <it>L. crispatus</it>, <it>L. jensenii</it>, and <it>L. gasseri </it>were significantly higher, while those of BVAB2, <it>Megasphaera</it>, <it>Leptotrichia</it>, and <it>Eggerthella</it>-like bacterium were significantly lower in the normal group than in the BV group. Unlike other <it>Lactobacillus </it>species, the prevalence of <it>L. iners </it>did not differ between the three groups and women with <it>L. iners </it>were significantly more likely to have BVAB2, <it>Megasphaera, Leptotrichia</it>, and <it>Eggerthella</it>-like bacterium. Linear regression analysis revealed associations of BVAB2 and <it>Megasphaera </it>with Nugent score, and multivariate regression analyses suggested a close relationship between <it>Eggerthella</it>-like bacterium and BV.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The BV-related bacteria, including BVAB2, <it>Megasphaera</it>, <it>Leptotrichia</it>, and <it>Eggerthella</it>-like bacterium, are common in the vagina of pregnant Japanese women with BV. The presence of <it>L. iners </it>may be correlated with vaginal colonization by these BV-related bacteria.</p

Current Status of a Model System: The Gene Gp-9 and Its Association with Social Organization in Fire Ants

The Gp-9 gene in fire ants represents an important model system for studying the evolution of social organization in insects as well as a rich source of information relevant to other major evolutionary topics. An important feature of this system is that polymorphism in social organization is completely associated with allelic variation at Gp-9, such that single-queen colonies (monogyne form) include only inhabitants bearing B-like alleles while multiple-queen colonies (polygyne form) additionally include inhabitants bearing b-like alleles. A recent study of this system by Leal and Ishida (2008) made two major claims, the validity and significance of which we examine here. After reviewing existing literature, analyzing the methods and results of Leal and Ishida (2008), and generating new data from one of their study sites, we conclude that their claim that polygyny can occur in Solenopsis invicta in the U.S.A. in the absence of expression of the b-like allele Gp-9b is unfounded. Moreover, we argue that available information on insect OBPs (the family of proteins to which GP-9 belongs), on the evolutionary/population genetics of Gp-9, and on pheromonal/behavioral control of fire ant colony queen number fails to support their view that GP-9 plays no role in the chemosensory-mediated communication that underpins regulation of social organization. Our analyses lead us to conclude that there are no new reasons to question the existing consensus view of the Gp-9 system outlined in Gotzek and Ross (2007)