Hospitalizations in neonatal intensive care unit at Mahajanga: impacts on parents

Background: Experiencing a birth with a pathology imposes on parents a lot of frustration. Objectives of this study were to describe the general profiles of newborns and to describe the hospitalization’s psychosomatic impact on parents; in intensive care unit of the neonatalogy ward at the mother-child complex at the university Hospital Androva Mahajanga Madagascar.Methods: It was prospective descriptive study, by a survey of parents, among 3 months, from 01st May to 31th July.Results: Were included 102 newborns. Mains reasons of admission are low birth weigth (51.9%), prematurity (42.1%) and perinatal asphyxia (23.5%). One hundred mothers and 90 fathers had answered our survey. Sleep distturance (all parents), negative feelings (70% of fathers and 75% of mothers), depressed mood (52.2% of fathers and 78% of mothers) and guilt (25.5% of fathers and 58% of mothers) were the most prominent psycological manifestations among parents; then somatic manifestations as digestive, cardiovascular type; weight loss was objectified on 33% of fathers.Conclusions: Newborns’s hospitalization is a difficult situation for parents. Caregivers have an important role in enabling the family to build up

Retention and diffusion of radioactive and toxic species on cementitious systems: Main outcome of the CEBAMA project

Cement-based materials are key components in radioactive waste repository barrier systems. To improve the available knowledge base, the European CEBAMA (Cement-based materials) project aimed to provide insight on general processes and phenomena that can be easily transferred to different applications. A bottom up approach was used to study radionuclide retention by cementitious materials, encompassing both individual cement mineral phases and hardened cement pastes. Solubility experiments were conducted with Be, Mo and Se under high pH conditions to provide realistic solubility limits and radionuclide speciation schemes as a prerequisite for meaningful adsorption studies. A number of retention mechanisms were addressed including adsorption, solid solution formation and precipitation of radionuclides within new solid phases formed during cement hydration and evolution. Sorption/desorption experiments were carried out on several anionic radionuclides and/or toxic elements which have received less attention to date, namely: Be, Mo, Tc, I, Se, Cl, Ra and 14C. Solid solution formation between radionuclides in a range of oxidation states (Se, I and Mo) with the main aqueous components (OH−, SO4 −2, Cl−) of cementitious systems on AFm phases were also investigated

Adaptive Gesture Recognition with Variation Estimation for Interactive Systems

This paper presents a gesture recognition/adaptation system for Human Computer Interaction applications that goes beyond activity classification and that, complementary to gesture labeling, characterizes the movement execution. We describe a template-based recognition method that simultaneously aligns the input gesture to the templates using a Sequential Montecarlo inference technique. Contrary to standard template- based methods based on dynamic programming, such as Dynamic Time Warping, the algorithm has an adaptation process that tracks gesture variation in real-time. The method continuously updates, during execution of the gesture, the estimated parameters and recognition results which offers key advantages for continuous human-machine interaction. The technique is evaluated in several different ways: recognition and early recognition are evaluated on a 2D onscreen pen gestures; adaptation is assessed on synthetic data; and both early recognition and adaptation is evaluation in a user study involving 3D free space gestures. The method is not only robust to noise and successfully adapts to parameter variation but also performs recognition as well or better than non-adapting offline template-based methods

Towards a gesture-sound cross-modal analysis

Abstract. This article reports on the exploration of a method based on canonical correlation analysis (CCA) for the analysis of the relationship between gesture and sound in the context of music performance and listening. This method is a first step in the design of an analysis tool for gesture-sound relationships. In this exploration we used motion capture data recorded from subjects performing free hand movements while listening to short sound examples. We assume that even though the relationship between gesture and sound might be more complex, at least part of it can be revealed and quantified by linear multivariate regression applied to the motion capture data and audio descriptors extracted from the sound examples. After outlining the theoretical background, the article shows how the method allows for pertinent reasoning about the relationship between gesture and sound by analysing the data sets recorded from multiple and individual subjects