Benchmarking Intensive Care Physiotherapy Staffing in Australian Tertiary Hospitals

Physiotherapy is an important component in the management of patients in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Existing guidelines on ICU physiotherapy staffing represent European settings and are not contemporary. With no specific recommendations in Australia, medical and nursing staffing guidelines reflected the need to have designated physiotherapy services available and accessible 24 hours a day in ICU. Therefore, this study aimed to pinpoint a guideline for ICU physiotherapy staff allocation by examining the current physiotherapy staff levels in ICU of Australian tertiary hospitals and comparing it with staff levels desired by senior physiotherapy leaders

Implementation and Investigation of a Compact Circular Wide Slot UWB Antenna with Dual Notched Band Characteristics using Stepped Impedance Resonators

A coplanar waveguide (CPW) fed ultra-wideband (UWB) antenna with dual notched band characteristics is presented in this paper. The circular wide slot and circular radiation patch are utilized to broaden the impedance bandwidth of the UWB antenna. The dual notched band functions are achieved by employing two stepped impedance resonators (SIRs) which etched on the circular radiation patch and CPW excitation line, respectively. The two notched bands can be controlled by adjusting the dimensions of the two stepped impedance resonators which give tunable notched band functions. The proposed dual notched band UWB antenna has been designed in details and optimized by means of HFSS. Experimental and numerical results show that the proposed antenna with compact size of 32 × 24 mm2, has an impedance bandwidth range from 2.8 GHz to 13.5 Hz for voltage standing-wave ratio (VSWR) less than 2, except the notch bands 5.0 GHz - 6.2 GHz for HIPERLAN/2 and IEEE 802.11a (5.1 GHz - 5.9 GHz) and 8.0 GHz - 9.3 GHz for satellite and military applications

Efficient Approximation Algorithms for Multi-Antennae Largest Weight Data Retrieval

In a mobile network, wireless data broadcast over $m$ channels (frequencies) is a powerful means for distributed dissemination of data to clients who access the channels through multi-antennae equipped on their mobile devices. The $\delta$-antennae largest weight data retrieval ($\delta$ALWDR) problem is to compute a schedule for downloading a subset of data items that has a maximum total weight using $\delta$ antennae in a given time interval. In this paper, we propose a ratio $1-\frac{1}{e}-\epsilon$ approximation algorithm for the $\delta$-antennae largest weight data retrieval ($\delta$ALWDR) problem that has the same ratio as the known result but a significantly improved time complexity of $O(2^{\frac{1}{\epsilon}}\frac{1}{\epsilon}m^{7}T^{3.5}L)$ from $O(\epsilon^{3.5}m^{\frac{3.5}{\epsilon}}T^{3.5}L)$ when $\delta=1$ \cite{lu2014data}. To our knowledge, our algorithm represents the first ratio $1-\frac{1}{e}-\epsilon$ approximation solution to $\delta$ALWDR for the general case of arbitrary $\delta$. To achieve this, we first give a ratio $1-\frac{1}{e}$ algorithm for the $\gamma$-separated $\delta$ALWDR ($\delta$A$\gamma$LWDR) with runtime $O(m^{7}T^{3.5}L)$, under the assumption that every data item appears at most once in each segment of $\delta$A$\gamma$LWDR, for any input of maximum length $L$ on $m$ channels in $T$ time slots. Then, we show that we can retain the same ratio for $\delta$A$\gamma$LWDR without this assumption at the cost of increased time complexity to $O(2^{\gamma}m^{7}T^{3.5}L)$. This result immediately yields an approximation solution of same ratio and time complexity for $\delta$ALWDR, presenting a significant improvement of the known time complexity of ratio $1-\frac{1}{e}-\epsilon$ approximation to the problem