The influence of the context on mobility in neurological disorders: a wearable technology approach

The evaluation of mobility of patients with neurodegenerative diseases is crucial for healthcare professionals to tailor individual treatments and track disease progression. More individualized treatment has high potential to improve quality of life and mobility, and decrease fall risk. Nowadays mobility is mainly assessed during clinical examinations. However, with the rise of digital wearable technology, it has become possible to quantify mobility objectively in different settings. It is however unclear how mobility data collected in different settings, or more general different contexts, are associated with each other. Therefore, the aim of this dissertation was to understand the influence of context on mobility in older adults and patients with neurodegenerative disorders. The first study revealed that supervised capacity and unsupervised performance measures can substantially differ from each other. Consequently, both measures provide complementary information that can be used to gain a better understanding of daily function. In the second study an algorithm to quantify arm swing was developed and validated. This algorithm was used in the third study, which showed that the effect of dopaminergic medication on arm swing in patients with PD is influenced by medication state and task complexity. We therefore highly recommend to assess patients in different contexts to get a better understanding of the effect of treatment or the disease progression. To be able to assess mobility of patients in different context more wearable sensor-based algorithms are required. With the dataset introduced in the last paper, an indefinite number of additional movement and mobility algorithms can be developed and validated. The development and validation of these algorithms can further move our understanding of the influence of context on mobility forward

Having, Giving, Taking: Understanding China’s Development Cooperation in Africa

Abstract In the last decade or so China has re-emerged as an important actor in the international development cooperation arena at a time when development cooperation was undergoing reflection and critical revaluations in many traditional donor countries. The academic and policy debate on China's re-emergence as a donor has been divided between proponents who saw a new hope for the developing world, where lessons for the developing world could be drawn. Opponents or critics, on the other hand, posed a critical stand against China’s non-adherence to the common standards, principles and practices of traditional donors considered fruits of decades long international development experience. However, despite a myriad of publications on China international development policy and practice, much is still needed to fully grasp its architecture. How is it developed? What motivates it? How's does China conceptualize foreign aid? Does it draw from its own experience as an aid recipient and as a developing country? What are some of the practical implications of Chinese foreign aid? This thesis seeks to answer these questions by drawing heavily on Chinese sources, bringing together various complementary literatures supported by field research in Uganda, a developing country and recipient of Chinese foreign aid and investment and a trade partner. Although, various complementary analytical frameworks were used, the binding concept revolves around the role interaction of the domestic and international forces in shaping China’s foreign aid policy and practices. This contributes to the literature on Chinese foreign aid by filling the gap in the literature on how domestic political forces and their interaction with the international context shape Chinese foreign aid policy and practices. This will be useful when analyzing future trends as the composition and interaction of domestic political forces change, and situations in international context develop

Four domains for concurrency

AbstractWe give four domains for concurrency in a uniform way by means of domain equations. The domains are intended for modelling the four possible combinations of linear time versus branching time, and of interleaving versus noninterleaving concurrency. We use the linear time, noninterleaved domain to give operational and denotational semantics for a simple concurrent language with recursion, and prove that O = D

Anatomy of extraordinary rainfall and flash flood in a Dutch lowland catchment

On 26 August 2010 the eastern part of The Netherlands and the bordering part of Germany were struck by a series of rainfall events lasting for more than a day. Over an area of 740 km2 more than 120 mm of rainfall were observed in 24 h. This extreme event resulted in local flooding of city centres, highways and agricultural fields, and considerable financial loss. In this paper we report on the unprecedented flash flood triggered by this exceptionally heavy rainfall event in the 6.5 km2 Hupsel Brook catchment, which has been the experimental watershed employed by Wageningen University since the 1960s. This study aims to improve our understanding of the dynamics of such lowland flash floods. We present a detailed hydrometeorological analysis of this extreme event, focusing on its synoptic meteorological characteristics, its space-time rainfall dynamics as observed with rain gauges, weather radar and a microwave link, as well as the measured soil moisture, groundwater and discharge response of the catchment. At the Hupsel Brook catchment 160 mm of rainfall was observed in 24 h, corresponding to an estimated return period of well over 1000 years. As a result, discharge at the catchment outlet increased from 4.4 × 10-3 to nearly 5 m3 s-1. Within 7 h discharge rose from 5 × 10-2 to 4.5 m3 s-1. The catchment response can be divided into four phases: (1) soil moisture reservoir filling, (2) groundwater response, (3) surface depression filling and surface runoff and (4) backwater feedback. The first 35 mm of rainfall were stored in the soil without a significant increase in discharge. Relatively dry initial conditions (in comparison to those for past discharge extremes) prevented an even faster and more extreme hydrological response