Limbs joint position sense in patients with chronic non-specific back pain

To analyze limbs joint positions’ sense and its relationship with pain intensity and duration in patients with chronic non-specific back pain. Methods: Study design: cross-sectional study. For assessment of patients, the following elements were used: general data collection protocol; evaluation of pain intensity using the Visual Analogue Scale; assessment of limb kinesthesia: determination of reposition precision of a 90-degree flexion angle in shoulder, elbow, hip and knee joints. Subjects. The study included 100 patients (88 women, 12 men) with chronic nonspecific back pain, who met the selection criteria for the study. The average age of patients was 45.9 ± 11.6 years, and it ranged from 19 to 64 years. Results: All participants of the study were found to have diminished upper and lower limbs kinesthesia. The study results showed plausible (p < 0.05) relation between limbs kinesthesia and pain intensity and duration, and these correlations were significantly determined by pain localization. Conclusion: Limb kinesthesia is plausibly related to the manifestation of pain in patients with chronic non-specific back pain.publishersversionPeer reviewe

FACILITATING EMPLOYEE-DRIVEN DIGITAL INNOVATION THROUGH THE USE OF HACKATHONS – A CASE STUDY

Open innovation has challenged and redefined the way organizations approach innovation and interact with stakeholders in the business environment. The democratization of work life has led to an increasing degree of inclusion of ordinary employees in the innovation processes, known as employee-driven innovation. Research on employee-driven innovation has up until now strongly focused on the characteristics and prerequisites for this form of innovation to arise. To a lesser extent, research has looked at how to facilitate the process of employee-driven innovation within organizations. Hackathons have emerged as a structured way to approach innovation in many organizations, especially software companies. In this study, we use a major international software company as a case study to look at the extent to which hackathons can facilitate employee-driven innovation, and especially digital innovation. We name this employee-driven digital innovation for two reasons: 1) because innovation processes are digitally mediated and 2) because the innovation products are also digital. Finally, based on theory from employee-driven innovation, we provide guidelines on how hackathons should be designed to increase the effects of hackathons as an enabler of employee-driven digital innovation

NORDIC WALKING FOR PATIENTS OF TYPE II DIABETES MELLITUS: A CRITICAL REVIEW

Nordic walking (NW) is a particularly health-friendly type of physical activities. Sessions of NW are carried outdoors in “a natural sports hall”. (Upeniece I.2013) Adequate doses of physical activities are a compulsory part of treatment for patients of Type II Diabetes Mellitus. Several research have confirmed the positive effects of physical activities for this particular group of patients. Three of the included works of research (Fritz et al, 2013; Fritz et al, 2011; Gram et al, 2010) had a set research quality in the PEDro database, and it corresponded to high quality (6 points out of 10). All included works of research are randomised controlled works of research. NW activities for 4 months under the supervision an instructor substantially decrease the total amount of fat for patients with Type II Diabetes Mellitus and this reduction also lasted for one year after the sessions. NW activities for 4 months have improved sleep quality and the overall increase of physical activities, which represents a significant element of treatment and preventive measures for patients of Type II Diabetes Mellitus.  NW the course is offered RSU students of medicine, rehabilitation Faculties. The increasing interest about NW in the schools for all ages group. KEYWORDS: Nordic walking, patients, Type II Diabetes Mellitus.DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15181/atee.v1i0.66

Overcoming cultural barriers to being agile in distributed teams

Context: Agile methods in offshored projects have become increasingly popular. Yet, many companies have found that the use of agile methods in coordination with companies located outside the regions of early agile adopters remains challenging. India has received particular attention as the leading destination of offshoring contracts due to significant cultural differences between sides of such contracts. Alarming differences are primarily rooted in the hierarchical business culture of Indian organizations and related command-and-control management behavior styles. Objective: In this study, we attempt to understand whether cultural barriers persist in distributed projects in which Indian engineers work with a more empowering Swedish management, and if so, how to overcome them. The present work is an invited extension of a conference paper. Method: We performed a multiple-case study in a mature agile company located in Sweden and a more hierarchical Indian vendor. We collected data from five group interviews with a total of 34 participants and five workshops with 96 participants in five distributed DevOps teams, including 36 Indian members, whose preferred behavior in different situations we surveyed. Results: We identified twelve cultural barriers, six of which were classified as impediments to agile software development practices, and report on the manifestation of these barriers in five DevOps teams. Finally, we put forward recommendations to overcome the identified barriers and emphasize the importance of cultural training, especially when onboarding new team members. Conclusions: Our findings confirm previously reported behaviors rooted in cultural differences that impede the adoption of agile approaches in offshore collaborations, and identify new barriers not previously reported. In contrast to the existing opinion that cultural characteristics are rigid and unchanging, we found that some barriers present at the beginning of the studied collaboration disappeared over time. Many offshore members reported behaving similarly to their onshore colleagues.acceptedVersio

Tower of Babel Bias: Is There More to Learn about Employee-Driven Digital Innovation?

With its origins in medical sciences, systematic literature reviews (SLRs) have gained popularity and widespread acceptance in a variety of disci-plines. The systematic processes ensure an exhaustive inclusion of all relevant material and strength of conclusions. Three approaches are known to improve the comprehensiveness of SLRs: 1) extending the search with snowballing of references and citations, 2) including “grey literature” (multi-vocal reviews), and 3) verifying the list of included studies with field experts. In this paper, we explore another strategy – inclusion of studies written in languages other than English, the usefulness of which is debated. Our goal is to understand whether the Tower of Babel Bias (exclusion of articles based on language) introduces important gaps in evidence. The results of multilingual extensions an existing SLR on employee-driven innovation that included articles written in Russian language show that the extension provides unique insights and perspectives not elucidated in the research published in English, namely the employee innovativeness. We conclude that multilingual literature reviews may be time-consuming endeavors with very limited return on the invested time but may as well result in enriching the understanding of the topic of interest from a unique perspective, especially with respect to regional peculiarities. Finally, we discuss the challenges related to performing a multilingual review

Improving productivity through corporate hackathons: A multiple case study of two large-scale agile organizations

Software development companies organize hackathons to encourage innovation. Despite many benefits of hackathons, in large-scale agile organizations where many teams work together, stopping the ongoing work results in a significant decrease in the immediate output. Motivated by the need to understand whether and how to run hackathons, we investigated how the practice affects productivity on the individual and organizational levels. By mapping the benefits and challenges to an established productivity framework, we found that hackathons improve developers' satisfaction and well-being, strengthen the company culture, improve performance (as many ideas are tested), increase activity (as the ideas are developed quickly), and improve communication and collaboration (because the social network is strengthened). Addressing managerial concerns, we found that hackathons also increase efficiency and flow because people learn to complete work and make progress quickly, and they build new competence. Finally, with respect to virtual hackathons we found that developers work more in isolation because tasks are split between team members resulting in less collaboration. This means that some important, expected hackathon values in virtual contexts require extra effort and cannot be taken for granted

Anti Retroviral Therapy Associated Mastopathy

Reports about bilateral breast enlargement in patients on antiretroviral therapy are rare. It forms a constituent of the human immunodeficiency virus lipodystrophy syndrome. Often clinical suspicion followed by appropriate imaging evaluation is confirmative. A case of antiretroviral therapy associated mastopathy is therefore presented here so that increased awareness would obviate the need of mastectomy in such cases.  We also emphasise the role of adequate counselling in this scenario in alleviating patients’ anxiety