Brief oral health promotion intervention among parents of young children to reduce early childhood dental decay

Background: Severe untreated dental decay affects a child’s growth, body weight, quality of life as well as cognitive development, and the effects extend beyond the child to the family, the community and the health care system. Early health behavioural factors, including dietary practices and eating patterns, can play a major role in the initiation and development of oral diseases, particularly dental caries. The parent/caregiver, usually the mother, has a critical role in the adoption of protective health care behaviours and parental feeding practices strongly influence children’s eating behaviours. This study will test if an early oral health promotion intervention through the use of brief motivational interviewing (MI) and anticipatory guidance (AG) approaches can reduce the incidence of early childhood dental decay and obesity. Methods: The study will be a randomised controlled study with parents and their new-born child/ren who are seen at 6–12 weeks of age by a child/community health nurse. Consenting parents will complete a questionnaire on oral health knowledge, behaviours, self-efficacy, oral health fatalism, parenting stress, prenatal and peri-natal health and socio-demographic factors at study commencement and at 12 and 36 months. Each child–parent pair will be allocated to an intervention or a standard care group, using a computer-generated random blocks. The standard group will be managed through the standard early oral health screening program; “lift the lip”. The intervention group will be provided with tailored oral health counselling by oral health consultants trained in MI and AG. Participating children will be examined at 24, and 36 months for the occurrence of dental decay and have their height and weight recorded. Dietary information obtained from a food frequency chart will be used to determine food and dietary patterns. Data analysis will use intention to treat and per protocol analysis and will use tests of independent proportions and means. Multivariate statistical tests will also be used to take account of socio-economic and demographic factors in addition to parental knowledge, behaviour, self-efficacy, and parent/child stress. Discussion: The study will test the effects of an oral health promotion intervention to affect oral health and general health and have the potential to demonstrate the "common risk factor" approach to health promotion.Peter Arrow, Joseph Raheb and Margaret Mille

FE-Simulation des Setzvorganges und der Scherzugbeanspruchbarkeit von Schließringbolzenverbindungen

The joining of different materials and material combinations can be occur either metallic continuity like welding, bonding and soldering or also on a form-fit and frictional continuity like in the screwing and rivets. The mechanical connection offers a large potential to join different materials without thermal loading. The lockbolt (SRB) as a high-strength friction grip fastening system represents in this regard a synthesis between full rivet and screw. They find in practice many applications. Computation references, norms and regulations for a comprehensive employment are only limited available or rather missing completely, that´s why potential users can often not use this alternative joining technology. Analysed are setting behavior and selective strength properties of lockbolts with numeric computations as a contribution to advance the determination of these properties for constructive dimensioning and to compare with experimental results

A Conceptual Framework for Creating and Analyzing Dance Learning Digital Content

As they are mainly based on bodily experiences and embodied knowledge, dance and movement practices present a great diversity and complexity across genre and context. Thus, developing a conceptual framework for archiving, managing, curating and analysing movement data, in order to develop reusable datasets and algorithms for a variety of purposes, remains a challenge. In this work, based on relevant literature on movement representation and existing systems such as Laban Movement Analysis, as well as working with dance experts through workshops, focus groups, and interviews, we propose a conceptual framework for creating, and analysing dance learning content. The conceptual framework has been developed within an interdisciplinary project, that brings together technology and human-computer interaction researchers, computer science engineers, motion capture experts from industry and academia, as well as dance experts with background on four different dance genres: contemporary, ballet, Greek folk, and flamenco. The framework has been applied: a) as a guidance to systematically create a movement library with multimodal recordings for dance education, including four different dance genres, b) as the basis for developing controlled vocabularies of dance for manual and automated annotation, and c) as the conceptual framework to define the requirements for similarity search and feature extraction