An Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Communication Scheme for Body Sensor Networks

A high degree of reliability for critical data transmission is required in body sensor networks (BSNs). However, BSNs are usually vulnerable to channel impairments due to body fading effect and RF interference, which may potentially cause data transmission to be unreliable. In this paper, an adaptive and flexible fault-tolerant communication scheme for BSNs, namely AFTCS, is proposed. AFTCS adopts a channel bandwidth reservation strategy to provide reliable data transmission when channel impairments occur. In order to fulfill the reliability requirements of critical sensors, fault-tolerant priority and queue are employed to adaptively adjust the channel bandwidth allocation. Simulation results show that AFTCS can alleviate the effect of channel impairments, while yielding lower packet loss rate and latency for critical sensors at runtime.Comment: 10 figures, 19 page

Patient-centred care and patient autonomy: doctors' views in Chinese hospitals

Background: Patient-centred care and patient autonomy is one of the key factors to better quality of service provision, hence patient outcomes. It enables the development of patients’ trusts which is an important element to a better doctor-patient relationship. Given the increasing number of patient disputes and conflicts between patients and doctors in Chinese public hospital, it is timely to ensure patient-centred care is fully and successfully implemented. However, limited studies have examined the views and practice in different aspects of patient-centred care among doctors in the Chinese public hospitals. Methods: A quantitative approach was adopted by distributing paper-based questionnaires to doctors and patients in two hospitals (Level III and Level II) in Jinan, Shandong province, China. Results: In total, 614 doctors from the surgical and internal medicine units of the two hospitals participated in the survey yielding 90% response rates. The study confirmed the inconsistent views among doctors in terms of their perception and practice in various aspects patient-centred care and patient autonomy regardless of the hospital where they work (category II or category III), their unit speciality (surgical or non-surgical), their gender or seniority. The high proportion of doctors (more than 20%) who did not perceive the importance of patient consultation prior to determining diagnostic and treatment procedure is alarming. This in in part due to the belief held by more than half of the doctors that patients were unable to make rational decisions and their involvement in treatment planning process did not necessarily lead to better treatment outcomes. Conclusion: The study calls for the development of system level policy and organisation wide strategies in encouraging and enabling the practice of patient-centred care and patient autonomy with the purposes of improving the quality of the service provided to patients by Chinese hospitals

Doctors in Chinese public hospitals: demonstration of their professional identities

Background: An increase in the number of medical disputes and violence against doctors indicates a lack of trust in the medical profession by society in Chinese public hospitals. Empirical evidence confirms that one cause is the lack of professional identity demonstrated by doctors. Medical professionals are required to maintain high standards of competence and moral responsibility, and demonstrate qualities such as respect, compassion, integrity, responsiveness to needs, and commitment to sound ethical practice in order to maintain professional privilege. These principles and appropriate professional conduct are the foundation of the professional identity of the medical profession. Methods: A quantitative approach was adopted by distributing paper-based questionnaires to doctors and patients in two hospitals (Level III and Level II) in Jinan, Shandong province, China. Findings: In total, 614 doctors and 1184 inpatients on discharge from the surgical and internal medicine units of the two hospitals participated in the survey yielding 90% response rates. The study confirmed the variation amongst doctors in demonstrating their professionalism in terms of respecting patients’ views and preferences when determining diagnostic procedures and treatment plans, and when making ethical decisions. Although 90% patients indicated that they showed respects to doctors, close to 20% of the doctors disagreed that they received high respect from patients. About 12% of doctors prescribed unnecessary diagnostic procedures to patient for the purpose of generating profit and more than 20% of patients indicated that they gave gifts to doctors in order to receive better treatment. Conclusions: Although about 80% of doctors demonstrated certain aspects of professionalism required by practitioners, the inconsistency across the medical workforce may exacerbate tense doctor-patient relationships. A review of medical curricula and focus of the internship program is required in order to assist medical graduates with forming required professional identity in order to improve patient satisfaction and better clinical outcomes. To be effective, a more systematic approach is recommended

Towards Arbitrary Text-driven Image Manipulation via Space Alignment

The recent GAN inversion methods have been able to successfully invert the real image input to the corresponding editable latent code in StyleGAN. By combining with the language-vision model (CLIP), some text-driven image manipulation methods are proposed. However, these methods require extra costs to perform optimization for a certain image or a new attribute editing mode. To achieve a more efficient editing method, we propose a new Text-driven image Manipulation framework via Space Alignment (TMSA). The Space Alignment module aims to align the same semantic regions in CLIP and StyleGAN spaces. Then, the text input can be directly accessed into the StyleGAN space and be used to find the semantic shift according to the text description. The framework can support arbitrary image editing mode without additional cost. Our work provides the user with an interface to control the attributes of a given image according to text input and get the result in real time. Ex tensive experiments demonstrate our superior performance over prior works.Comment: 8 pages, 12 figure

Global Bifurcation in 2

We consider the systems of (-1)mu(2m)=λu+λv+uf(t,u,v),  t∈(0,1),  u(2i)(0)=u(2i)(1)=0, and 0≤i≤m-1,  (-1)mv(2m)=μu+μv+vg(t, u,v),  t∈(0,1),  v(2i)(0)=v(2i)(1)=0,  0≤i≤m-1, where λ,μ∈R are real parameters. f,g:[0,1]×R2→R are Ck,k≥3 functions and f(t,0,0)=g(t,0,0)=0,t∈[0,1]. It will be shown that if the functions, f and g are “generic” then the solution set of the systems consists of a countable collection of 2-dimensional, Ck manifolds

Morphology-dependent photocatalytic activity of TiO2 crystals

646-651TiO2 crystals with different morphologies have been successfully synthesized by simple hydrothermal method. All samples are characterized carefully by XRD, SEM, TEM, and BET techniques and the morphological effect on the photocatalytic activity of the obtained TiO2 crystals has been evaluated by degrading the pollutant molecules. The experimental results show that the TiO2 samples with different morphologies exhibited different activities to pollutant degradation. The core-shell spheres have exhibited the best photocatalytic activity, with the almost complete degradation of methyl orange (MO) and rhodamine B within 15 min under UV-light irradiation. After 20 min UV-light irradiation, the degradation efficiency of the MO solution is about 68.9%. It can be concluded that a morphological effect is responsible for the photocatalytic performance. The crystals with large BET surface area, the small crystallite size shows the better the photocatalytic performance

Surface-passivated plasmonic nano-pyramids for bulk heterojunction solar cell photocurrent enhancement

This is the published version. ©Copyright 2012 Royal Society of ChemistryWe report that self-assembled gold (Au) nanopyramid arrays can greatly enhance the photocurrent of narrow bandgap organic solar cells using their plasmonic near-field effect. The plasmonic enhanced power conversion efficiency exhibited up to 200% increase under the AM 1.5 solar illumination