Design and implementation of CCNY DC microgrid testbed

This paper presents the design, control, energy management, and implementation of the City College of New York (CCNY) direct current (DC) microgrid laboratory testbed. This facility was custom designed and implemented by researchers at CCNY with minimal off-the-shelf components to enable significant flexibility and reconfiguration capability. The microgrid consists of renewable energy resources, energy storage system and controllable loads, and can operate in either a grid-connected or an islanded mode. The design steps, requirements, and results of the developed testbed were discussed. Moreover, several operational scenarios were tested. The experimental results verify the applicability and flexibility of the developed microgrid testbed

Haste makes waste: Decision making in patients with restless legs syndrome with and without augmentation.

OBJECTIVES:To investigate decision making in patients with primary restless legs syndrome (RLS) with and without augmentation treated with dopaminergic medication. METHODS:A total of 64 non-demented RLS patients treated with dopaminergic medication with and without augmentation were included in this study. We used an information sampling task to assess how much evidence participants gather before making a decision. Performance was compared to the results of 21 healthy controls. RESULTS:All patients with and without augmentation gathered less information than healthy controls before making a decision (p<0.001), but there was no difference between the two patient groups (p = 1.0). Furthermore, both patient groups made more irrational decisions (e.g. decisions against the evidence they had at the time) than healthy controls (p≤0.002). In addition, RLS patients with augmentation made significantly more irrational decisions than RLS patients without augmentation (p = 0.037) and controls (p<0.001). CONCLUSIONS:Our results show that RLS patients treated with dopaminergic drugs, regardless of having augmentation or not, jumped to conclusions and decided significantly more often against the evidence they had at the time of their decision. However, those with augmentation performed worse than all other groups and made more often irrational decisions, a phenomenon which is also common in patients with substance abuse or behavioural addictions. Thus, jumping to conclusions and deciding with a higher degree of uncertainty as well as irrational decision making is more common in RLS patients treated with dopaminergic medication particularly in those with augmentation

Screening for idiopathic REM sleep behavior disorder: usefulness of actigraphy

Abstract Study Objectives To evaluate the utility of multimodal low-cost approaches including actigraphy, a wrist-worn device monitoring rest/activity cycles, in identifying patients with idiopathic REM sleep behavior disorder (iRBD). Methods: Seventy patients diagnosed with sleep disorders causing different motor manifestations during sleep (iRBD, sleep apnea, restless legs syndrome) and 20 subjects without any relevant motor manifestation during sleep, underwent video-polysomnography (vPSG) and 2 week actigraphy, completed six validated RBD screening questionnaires, and sleep apps use was assessed. Actigraphy was analyzed automatically, and visually by seven blinded sleep medicine experts who rated as “no,” “possible,” and “probable” RBD. Results: Quantitative actigraphy analysis distinguished patients from controls, but not between patients with different types of motor activity during sleep. Visual actigraphy rating by blinded experts in sleep medicine using pattern recognition identified vPSG confirmed iRBD with 85%–95% sensitivity, 79%–91% specificity, 81%–91% accuracy, 57.7% ± 11.3% positive predictive value, 95.1% ± 3.3% negative predictive value, 6.8 ± 2.2 positive likelihood ratio, 0.14 ± 0.05 negative likelihood ratio and 0.874–0.933 area under the ROC curve (AUC). AUC of the best performing questionnaire was 0.868. Few patients used sleep apps; therefore, their potential utility in the evaluated patients’ groups is limited. Conclusions: Visual analysis of actigraphy using pattern recognition can identify subjects with iRBD, and is able to distinguish iRBD from other motor activities during sleep, even when patients are not aware of the disease in contrast to questionnaires. Therefore, actigraphy can be a reliable screening instrument for RBD potentially useful in the general population

Demographic and clinical data of RLS patients (with and without augmentation) and healthy controls.

<p>Demographic and clinical data of RLS patients (with and without augmentation) and healthy controls.</p

Active information sampling and irrational decisions compared between groups.

<p>Fig 1A. Drawing of beads and irrational decision making. Fig 1B. (RLS-AUG = RLS patients without augmentation; RLS+AUG = RLS patients with augmentation; HC = healthy controls). Box plot showing the median (horizontal line) within a box containing the central 50% of the observations (i.e., the upper and lower limits of the box are the 75^th and the 25^th percentiles) and extremes of the whiskers containing the central 95% of the ordered observations. Outliners are shown as circles.</p