A Novel Interdisciplinary Course in Gerontechnology for Disseminating Computational Thinking

While specialized knowledge and skills are the hallmark of modern society, the size and complexity of contemporary problems often require cooperative effort to analyze and solve. Therefore, experiences with skills, methodologies, and tools for effective interdisciplinary collaboration and structured problem solving are vital for preparing students for future academic and professional success. Meanwhile, computational systems have permeated much of modern professional and personal life, making computational thinking an essential skill for members of modern society. However, formal training in these techniques is primarily limited to students within computer science, mathematics, management of information systems, and engineering. At Iowa State University, we have designed and offered an experimental course to develop undergraduate students’ abilities for interdisciplinary teamwork and to disseminate computational thinking skills to a broader range of students. This novel course was jointly designed and instructed by faculty from the Computer Science Department, Gerontology Program, and Graphic Design Program to incorporate diverse faculty expertise and pedagogical approaches. Students were required to interview real users to identify real-life problems, gather requirements, and assess candidate solutions, which necessitated communication both within the group and with technologically-disinclined users. In-class presentations and wiki-based project websites provided regular practice at disseminating domain expertise to larger interdisciplinary audiences. Workshops, group-based mentoring, peer learning, and guided discovery allowed non-CS majors to learn much more about computer programs and tools, and grading criteria held students individually accountable within their disciplines but also emphasized group collaboration

Characteristics and Outcomes of US Children and Adolescents With Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) Compared With Severe Acute COVID-19

Importance Refinement of criteria for multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C) may inform efforts to improve health outcomes. Objective To compare clinical characteristics and outcomes of children and adolescents with MIS-C vs those with severe coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). Setting, Design, and Participants Case series of 1116 patients aged younger than 21 years hospitalized between March 15 and October 31, 2020, at 66 US hospitals in 31 states. Final date of follow-up was January 5, 2021. Patients with MIS-C had fever, inflammation, multisystem involvement, and positive severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) reverse transcriptase–polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) or antibody test results or recent exposure with no alternate diagnosis. Patients with COVID-19 had positive RT-PCR test results and severe organ system involvement. Exposure SARS-CoV-2. Main Outcomes and Measures Presenting symptoms, organ system complications, laboratory biomarkers, interventions, and clinical outcomes. Multivariable regression was used to compute adjusted risk ratios (aRRs) of factors associated with MIS-C vs COVID-19. Results Of 1116 patients (median age, 9.7 years; 45% female), 539 (48%) were diagnosed with MIS-C and 577 (52%) with COVID-19. Compared with patients with COVID-19, patients with MIS-C were more likely to be 6 to 12 years old (40.8% vs 19.4%; absolute risk difference [RD], 21.4% [95% CI, 16.1%-26.7%]; aRR, 1.51 [95% CI, 1.33-1.72] vs 0-5 years) and non-Hispanic Black (32.3% vs 21.5%; RD, 10.8% [95% CI, 5.6%-16.0%]; aRR, 1.43 [95% CI, 1.17-1.76] vs White). Compared with patients with COVID-19, patients with MIS-C were more likely to have cardiorespiratory involvement (56.0% vs 8.8%; RD, 47.2% [95% CI, 42.4%-52.0%]; aRR, 2.99 [95% CI, 2.55-3.50] vs respiratory involvement), cardiovascular without respiratory involvement (10.6% vs 2.9%; RD, 7.7% [95% CI, 4.7%-10.6%]; aRR, 2.49 [95% CI, 2.05-3.02] vs respiratory involvement), and mucocutaneous without cardiorespiratory involvement (7.1% vs 2.3%; RD, 4.8% [95% CI, 2.3%-7.3%]; aRR, 2.29 [95% CI, 1.84-2.85] vs respiratory involvement). Patients with MIS-C had higher neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio (median, 6.4 vs 2.7, P < .001), higher C-reactive protein level (median, 152 mg/L vs 33 mg/L; P < .001), and lower platelet count (<150 ×103 cells/μL [212/523 {41%} vs 84/486 {17%}, P < .001]). A total of 398 patients (73.8%) with MIS-C and 253 (43.8%) with COVID-19 were admitted to the intensive care unit, and 10 (1.9%) with MIS-C and 8 (1.4%) with COVID-19 died during hospitalization. Among patients with MIS-C with reduced left ventricular systolic function (172/503, 34.2%) and coronary artery aneurysm (57/424, 13.4%), an estimated 91.0% (95% CI, 86.0%-94.7%) and 79.1% (95% CI, 67.1%-89.1%), respectively, normalized within 30 days. Conclusions and Relevance This case series of patients with MIS-C and with COVID-19 identified patterns of clinical presentation and organ system involvement. These patterns may help differentiate between MIS-C and COVID-19

Neurologic Involvement in Children and Adolescents Hospitalized in the United States for COVID-19 or Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome

This article is made available for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic.Importance Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) affects the nervous system in adult patients. The spectrum of neurologic involvement in children and adolescents is unclear. Objective To understand the range and severity of neurologic involvement among children and adolescents associated with COVID-19. Setting, Design, and Participants Case series of patients (age <21 years) hospitalized between March 15, 2020, and December 15, 2020, with positive severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 test result (reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction and/or antibody) at 61 US hospitals in the Overcoming COVID-19 public health registry, including 616 (36%) meeting criteria for multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children. Patients with neurologic involvement had acute neurologic signs, symptoms, or diseases on presentation or during hospitalization. Life-threatening involvement was adjudicated by experts based on clinical and/or neuroradiologic features. Exposures Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2. Main Outcomes and Measures Type and severity of neurologic involvement, laboratory and imaging data, and outcomes (death or survival with new neurologic deficits) at hospital discharge. Results Of 1695 patients (909 [54%] male; median [interquartile range] age, 9.1 [2.4-15.3] years), 365 (22%) from 52 sites had documented neurologic involvement. Patients with neurologic involvement were more likely to have underlying neurologic disorders (81 of 365 [22%]) compared with those without (113 of 1330 [8%]), but a similar number were previously healthy (195 [53%] vs 723 [54%]) and met criteria for multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (126 [35%] vs 490 [37%]). Among those with neurologic involvement, 322 (88%) had transient symptoms and survived, and 43 (12%) developed life-threatening conditions clinically adjudicated to be associated with COVID-19, including severe encephalopathy (n = 15; 5 with splenial lesions), stroke (n = 12), central nervous system infection/demyelination (n = 8), Guillain-Barré syndrome/variants (n = 4), and acute fulminant cerebral edema (n = 4). Compared with those without life-threatening conditions (n = 322), those with life-threatening neurologic conditions had higher neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratios (median, 12.2 vs 4.4) and higher reported frequency of D-dimer greater than 3 μg/mL fibrinogen equivalent units (21 [49%] vs 72 [22%]). Of 43 patients who developed COVID-19–related life-threatening neurologic involvement, 17 survivors (40%) had new neurologic deficits at hospital discharge, and 11 patients (26%) died. Conclusions and Relevance In this study, many children and adolescents hospitalized for COVID-19 or multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children had neurologic involvement, mostly transient symptoms. A range of life-threatening and fatal neurologic conditions associated with COVID-19 infrequently occurred. Effects on long-term neurodevelopmental outcomes are unknown

A service-oriented privacy model for smart home environments

Smart home technology is an application of ubiquitous computing that equips living environments with different types of sensors, actuators, and appliances under computer control to improve the quality of life for inhabitants. Services such as health and behavior monitoring, personalized customization of home operation, control and automation of the environment, and assistance with physical or mental tasks enable inhabitants to live safer, more comfortable, and more independent lives. Many commercial and research efforts are investigating the vast potential that smart homes and related products provide to assist the activities of daily living. However, the resulting efforts frequently suffer from two main limitations that hinder their widespread use. First, resulting products are usually proprietary, offering closed services that are tailored to specific applications and cannot be easily reused or extended by other services in the smart home. Second, the invasiveness of the technology and use of personal information may allow the privacy of the inhabitants to be violated.;We have previously addressed the privacy issue by calling for a privacy policy-based framework [1][2] to control the collection, storage, use and dissemination of personal information in smart home environments. This framework supports several high level goals, including promoting inhabitant awareness of the abilities of devices/services contained in the smart home space, using privacy policies that express the contextual nature of privacy, providing mechanisms and tool support for the authoring, deployment, enforcement, and auditing of privacy policies, as well as creating and verifying policy models to detect conflicts and incorrect specification of privacy policies. In this thesis, we focus on the modeling and verification of policies by proposing a combination of the service-oriented computing and privacy policy paradigms to create a preliminary privacy model for smart homes. We then offer an example scenario and discuss how we employ model checking techniques to verify various aspects of our proposed policy model. The major contributions of this work are four-fold: (1) We extend the notion of personal privacy to include the control of how household objects are used by smart home services. (2) We introduce the use of service-oriented computing to bind resources to the policy space. (3) We define a novel service-oriented privacy policy model that authorizes both the flow of personally sensitive data and the control of environment objects based on inhabitant preferences and various system contexts. (4) We introduce the use of model checking techniques to verify correctness properties of privacy policy models and their enforcement.;The rest of the paper is organized as follows: section 2 gives background information about smart homes, information privacy, policy-based management in distributed systems, and model checking, section 3 presents existing privacy analyses and policy models, section 4 presents our novel privacy model, section 5 illustrates with an example scenario how model checking can be used to verify our privacy model, and section 6 concludes with discussion and future work. Appendix A contains model implementation files, and Appendix B contains property specification files.</p

A Service-Oriented Privacy-Aware System for Medication Safety and Prescription Compliance in Smart Home Environments

Medication management is becoming more complex, and the likelihood of unsafe prescriptions has increased because of the rapid pace of new medications introduced to the market, the trend of modern healthcare towards specialization, and the variety of medication interactions that complicate the prescribing process and patient management of medications. The severity of this problem is magnified when patients require multiple medications or have cognitive impairments. To counter this problem and improve the quality of patient healthcare, we designed and implemented a service-oriented system for medication management that collects and integrates information from patient smart homes, doctor offices and pharmacies to 1) detect adverse reactions among prescribed medications, existing health conditions, and foods, and 2) monitor and promote compliance with prescription instructions. The system is privacy-aware and designed to support information privacy regulations, such as the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).This chapter is published as Álamo, José M. Reyes and Ryan Babbitt, Hen-I Yang, Tanmoy Sarkar, Johnny Wong, and Carl K. Chang. "A Service-Oriented Privacy-Aware System for Medication Safety and Prescription Compliance in Smart Home Environments." In Emerging Pervasive and Ubiquitous Aspects of Information Systems: Cross-Disciplinary Advancements. edited by Symonds, Judith, 198-225. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2011. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-60960-487-5.ch012. Posted with permission

A Novel Interdisciplinary Course in Gerontechnology for Disseminating Computational Thinking

While specialized knowledge and skills are the hallmark of modern society, the size and complexity of contemporary problems often require cooperative effort to analyze and solve. Therefore, experiences with skills, methodologies, and tools for effective interdisciplinary collaboration and structured problem solving are vital for preparing students for future academic and professional success. Meanwhile, computational systems have permeated much of modern professional and personal life, making computational thinking an essential skill for members of modern society. However, formal training in these techniques is primarily limited to students within computer science, mathematics, management of information systems, and engineering. At Iowa State University, we have designed and offered an experimental course to develop undergraduate students’ abilities for interdisciplinary teamwork and to disseminate computational thinking skills to a broader range of students. This novel course was jointly designed and instructed by faculty from the Computer Science Department, Gerontology Program, and Graphic Design Program to incorporate diverse faculty expertise and pedagogical approaches. Students were required to interview real users to identify real-life problems, gather requirements, and assess candidate solutions, which necessitated communication both within the group and with technologically-disinclined users. In-class presentations and wiki-based project websites provided regular practice at disseminating domain expertise to larger interdisciplinary audiences. Workshops, group-based mentoring, peer learning, and guided discovery allowed non-CS majors to learn much more about computer programs and tools, and grading criteria held students individually accountable within their disciplines but also emphasized group collaboration.This conference proceedings was published as 103. Hen-I Yang, Peter Martin, Debra Satterfield, Ryan Babbitt, Johnny Wong, Mack Shelley, and Carl K. Chang, “A Novel Interdisciplinary Course in Gerontechnology for Disseminating Computational Thinking,” pp. T3H-1 to T3H-6 in Proceedings of the 41st Annual Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE 2011). Rapid City, SD: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (2011).978-1-61284-469-5/11.Posted with permission.</p