Achieving Consensus in the Development of an Online Intervention Designed to Effectively Support Midwives in Work-Related Psychological Distress: Protocol for a Delphi Study

BACKGROUND: The development of an online intervention designed to effectively support midwives in work-related psychological distress will be challenging due to the ethical, practical, and therapeutic issues surrounding its design. Related literature suggests that midwives may require an anonymous, confidential, and therapeutic platform that facilitates amnesty and nonpunitive approaches to remedy ill health. However, it is unclear which requirements may be most salient to midwifery populations. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this paper is to describe the design of a Delphi study, intended to achieve expert consensus on the needs of midwives in work-related psychological distress who may be supported via an online intervention. This protocol may also serve as a research framework for similar studies to be modeled upon. METHODS: A heterogeneous sample of at least thirty experts on psychological well-being and distress associated with midwifery work will be recruited. Their opinions regarding the development of an online intervention designed to support midwives in work-related psychological distress will be collected through 2 rounds of questioning, via the Delphi Technique. When 60% (≥18, assuming the minimum is 30) of panelists score within 2 adjacent points on a 7-point scale, consensus will be acknowledged. This Delphi study protocol will invite both qualitative and quantitative outcomes. RESULTS: This study is currently in development. It is financially supported by a full-time scholarship at the Centre for Technology Enabled Health Research at Coventry University (Coventry, UK). The implementation of this Delphi study is anticipated to occur during the autumn of 2015. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study will direct the development of an online intervention designed to support midwives in work-related psychological distress, summarize expert driven consensus, and direct future research

Effect of Crowd Composition on the Wisdom of Artificial Crowds Metaheuristic

This paper investigates the impact that task difficulty and crowd composition have on the success of the Wisdom of Artificial Crowds metaheuristic. The metaheuristic, which is inspired by the wisdom of crowds phenomenon, combines the intelligence from a group of optimization searches to form a new solution. Unfortunately, the aggregate formed by the metaheuristic is not always better than the best individual solution within the crowd, and little is known about the variables which maximize the metaheuristic\u27s success. Our study offers new insights into the influential factors of artificial crowds and the collective intelligence of multiple optimization searches performed on the same problem. The results show that favoring the opinions of experts (i.e., the better searches) improves the chances of the metaheuristic succeeding by more than 15% when compared to the traditional means of equal weighting. Furthermore, weighting expertise was found to require smaller crowd sizes for the metaheuristic to reach its peak chances of success. Finally, crowd size was discovered to be a critical factor, especially as problem complexity grows or average crowd expertise declines. However, crowd size matters only up to a point, after which the probability of success plateaus

Implementation scenarios for 3DP

There are many ways to implement 3D printing to gain a commercial advantage. This chapter provides a detailed examination of the various business models that are currently being employed within the industry, focusing on home, retail, and outsourced manufacturing bureaus. Subsequently the work considers prospects for future approaches to implementation, exploring a range of potential opportunities that may be employed competitively in the near future