Towards a methodical framework for comprehensively assessing forest multifunctionality

Funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Grant Number: DFG FOR 891/1-3 National Natural Science Foundation of China. Grant Numbers: 30710103907, 30930005, 31170457, 31210103910 Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) Sino-German Centre for Research Promotion in Beijing. Grant Number: GZ 986Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Prehabilitation of elderly frail or pre-frail patients prior to elective surgery (PRAEP-GO): study protocol for a randomized, controlled, outcome assessor-blinded trial

Background: Frailty is expressed by a reduction in physical capacity, mobility, muscle strength, and endurance. (Pre-) frailty is present in up to 42% of the older surgical population, with an increased risk for peri- and postoperative complications. Consequently, these patients often suffer from a delayed or limited recovery, loss of autonomy and quality of life, and a decrease in functional and cognitive capacities. Since frailty is modifiable, prehabilitation may improve the physiological reserves of patients and reduce the care dependency 12 months after surgery. Methods: Patients >= 70 years old scheduled for elective surgery or intervention will be recruited in this multicenter, randomized controlled study, with a target of 1400 participants with an allocation ratio of 1:1. The intervention consists of (1) a shared decision-making process with the patient, relatives, and an interdisciplinary and interprofessional team and (2) a 3-week multimodal, individualized prehabilitation program including exercise therapy, nutritional intervention, mobility or balance training, and psychosocial interventions and medical assessment. The frequency of the supervised prehabilitation is 5 times/week for 3 weeks. The primary endpoint is defined as the level of care dependency 12 months after surgery or intervention. Discussion: Prehabilitation has been proven to be effective for different populations, including colorectal, transplant, and cardiac surgery patients. In contrast, evidence for prehabilitation in older, frail patients has not been clearly established. To the best of our knowledge, this is currently the largest prehabilitation study on older people with frailty undergoing general elective surgery

Toward a methodical framework for comprehensively assessing forest multifunctionality

Biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) research has extended its scope from communities that are short-lived or reshape their structure annually to structurally complex forest ecosystems. The establishment of tree diversity experiments poses specific methodological challenges for assessing the multiple functions provided by forest ecosystems. In particular, methodological inconsistencies and nonstandardized protocols impede the analysis of multifunctionality within, and comparability across the increasing number of tree diversity experiments. By providing an overview on key methods currently applied in one of the largest forest biodiversity experiments, we show how methods differing in scale and simplicity can be combined to retrieve consistent data allowing novel insights into forest ecosystem functioning. Furthermore, we discuss and develop recommendations for the integration and transferability of diverse methodical approaches to present and future forest biodiversity experiments. We identified four principles that should guide basic decisions concerning method selection for tree diversity experiments and forest BEF research: (1) method selection should be directed toward maximizing data density to increase the number of measured variables in each plot. (2) Methods should cover all relevant scales of the experiment to consider scale dependencies of biodiversity effects. (3) The same variable should be evaluated with the same method across space and time for adequate larger-scale and longer-time data analysis and to reduce errors due to changing measurement protocols. (4) Standardized, practical and rapid methods for assessing biodiversity and ecosystem functions should be promoted to increase comparability among forest BEF experiments. We demonstrate that currently available methods provide us with a sophisticated toolbox to improve a synergistic understanding of forest multifunctionality. However, these methods require further adjustment to the specific requirements of structurally complex and long-lived forest ecosystems. By applying methods connecting relevant scales, trophic levels, and above? and belowground ecosystem compartments, knowledge gain from large tree diversity experiments can be optimized

Direct Interaction Word-Gesture Text Input in Virtual Reality

As Virtual Reality (VR) devices become more affordable and experience a more widespread adoption, applications for this immersive technology become more diverse, increasingly also including text-based uses, such as messaging and text processing. While text input methods for VR have existed for a long time, none have reached the ease-of-use or performance of conventional, physical keyboards. In the absence of physical keyboards, touch-screen devices have adopted word-gesture keyboards, that allow users to input text through smooth motions. In this work, we introduce a word-gesture keyboard for VR that uses direct interaction with a virtual keyboard, to allow a more direct transfer of hand motion. We present a preliminary evaluation with promising results, which suggest usability improvements over more well established methods of text input in VR

The SportSense User Interface for Holistic Tactical Performance Analysis in Football

In today's team sports, the effective and user-friendly support of analysts and coaches in analyzing their team's tactics is essential. In this paper, we present an extended version of SportSense, a tool for searching in sports video by means of sketches, for creating and visualizing statistics of individual players and the entire team, and for visualizing the players' off-ball movement. SportSense has been developed in close collaboration with football coaches

A Flexible Approach to Football Analytics: Assessment, Modeling and Implementation (Abstract)

Quantitative analysis in football is difficult due to the complexity and continuous fluidity of the game. Even though there is an increased accessibility of spatio-temporal data, scientific approaches to extract valuable information are seldomly useful in practice. We propose a new approach to building an information system for football. This approach consists of a method to extract football-specific concepts from interviews, to formalize them in a performance model, and to define and implement the data structures and algorithms in StreamTeam, a framework for the detection of complex (team) events. In this paper we present this approach in detail and provide an example for its use

A Flexible Approach to Football Analytics: Assessment, Modeling and Implementation

Quantitative analysis in football is difficult due to the complexity and continuous fluidity of the game. Even though there is an increased accessibility of spatio-temporal data, scientific approaches to extract valuable information are seldomly useful in practice. We propose a new approach to building an information system for football. This approach consists of a method to extract football-specific concepts from interviews, to formalize them in a performance model, and to define and implement the data structures and algorithms in StreamTeam , a framework for the detection of complex (team) events. In this paper we present this approach in detail and provide an example for its use

StreamTeam-Football: Analyzing Football Matches in Real-Time on the Basis of Position Streams

In recent years, Big Data has become an important topic in many areas of our daily lives, including sports. Almost all professional clubs analyze matches to improve the performance of their teams. However, events are still predominantly captured manually, although many sensor-based and video-based tracking systems exist which provide the positions of the players and the ball in real-time. This manual process is tedious and errorprone. In this paper, we propose STREAMTEAM-FOOTBALL, an open source football analysis application, to fill this gap. STREAMTEAM-FOOTBALL allows to analyze football matches fully automatically and in real-time on the basis of tracked position data using a data stream analysis approach. Our evaluations confirm the effectiveness of our automated analysis and further show the scalability of STREAMTEAM-FOOTBALL by its ability to analyze multiple football matches in parallel