Designing a healthy future: occupational therapy, sustainability and ergonomics

Thesis (O.T.D.)--Boston UniversityOver recent years, there has been documented growth in sustainability efforts (O*NET, 2011; USDOE, 2011; USGBC, 2011) including sustainable development such as green building practices and jobs in the green industry. The United Nations (n.d.) defines sustainable development as development that meets the environmental, economic, and social needs of the current population while taking into account the needs of future generations. While there are known positive benefits of sustainable development to the environment (USGBC, 2011; USEPA, 2012c) and to the people involved with the practices such as green building occupants (National Academy of Sciences, 2007; Heerwagen & Zagreus, 2005; Singh et al., 2010), concerns have also been raised. Studies suggest that if the specific needs of the people directly involved with sustainable development (i.e. occupants of green buildings and schools and workers in green industry jobs) are overlooked, there can be negative consequences related to health, productivity, and satisfaction (Institute of Medicine, 2011; National Academy of Sciences, 2007; Lee and Guerin, 2009; Gambatese, 2011; Kenrick, 2011; Turner, 2006). These issues have given rise to an emerging practice area for occupational therapists (OTs) called "green ergonomics", defined as integration of ergonomics into sustainable development to enhance human performance, productivity, health and well-being, thereby promoting sustainability at both the individual and systems level (Heerwagen & Zagreus, 2005; Miller, 2010; Smahe1, 2010). The goals of occupational therapy, sustainability, and ergonomics intersect in that they all strive to address the overall well-being of a population. Despite the natural fit between these three practice areas and between OT and green ergonomics, there is a void in the occupational therapy literature regarding this intersection and resultant emerging practice area of green ergonomics. It is suspected that this has led to minimal resources to prepare OTs to enter the field, and limited awareness within and outside the profession of the role of OT in green ergonomics. To address this issue, an online continuing education (CE) course has been designed for practicing OTs with both educational and marketing components. The course was developed using best practices in online education and Social Marketing principles (Andreasen, 1994). Careful integration of the evidence to create an effective online learning environment will contribute to a positive learning experience for the students and facilitate the development of knowledge and skills in green ergonomics

Interactive design of complex time-dependent lighting

Visualizing complicated lighting sequences while designing large theatrical productions proves difficult. The author provides some techniques that achieve fast interaction regardless of scene and lighting complexity, even when used with costly rendering algorithms

Implementation and Analysis of an Image-Based Global Illumination Framework for Animated Environments

We describe a new framework for efficiently computing and storing global illumination effects for complex, animated environments. The new framework allows the rapid generation of sequences representing any arbitrary path in a view space within an environment in which both the viewer and objects move. The global illumination is stored as time sequences of range-images at base locations that span the view space. We present algorithms for determining locations for these base images, and the time steps required to adequately capture the effects of object motion. We also present algorithms for computing the global illumination in the base images that exploit spatial and temporal coherence by considering direct and indirect illumination separately. We discuss an initial implementation using the new framework. Results and analysis of our implementation demonstrate the effectiveness of the individual phases of the approach; we conclude with an application of the complete framework to a complex environment that includes object motion

Learning a human-perceived softness measure of virtual 3D objects

We introduce the problem of computing a human-perceived softness measure for virtual 3D objects. As the virtual objects do not exist in the real world, we do not directly consider their physical properties but instead compute the human-perceived softness of the geometric shapes. We collect crowdsourced data where humans rank their perception of the softness of vertex pairs on virtual 3D models. We then compute shape descriptors and use a learning to-rank approach to learn a softness measure mapping any vertex to a softness value. Finally, we demonstrate our framework with a variety of 3D shapes

Safety, tolerability and efficacy of repeated doses of dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine for the prevention and treatment of malaria: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Background Intermittent preventive treatment (IPT) for malaria is used in infants, children, adults and pregnant women. Dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine (DP) is an effective, well tolerated artemisinin-based combination therapy. The long half-life of piperaquine makes it attractive for IPT. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to determine the efficacy and safety of repeated treatment with DP. Methods Following PRISMA guidelines, we searched multiple databases on September 1, 2016 with the terms: “human” AND “dihydroartemisinin-piperaquine” OR “DHA-PPQ.”. Prospective studies of IPT-DP or repeat DP courses for case-management were eligible. Random effects models were used. Findings Eleven studies were included: two repeat treatment studies (one in children <5y and one in pregnant women), and nine IPT trials (five in children <5y; one in schoolchildren; one in adults; two in pregnant women). Comparator interventions included placebo, artemether-lumefantrine, sulfadoxine-pyrimethamine (SP), SP-amodiaquine, SP-piperaquine, SP-chloroquine, and trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole. Of 14,628 participants, 3,935 received multiple DP courses (2-18). Monthly IPT-DP was associated with an 84% reduction in the incidence of malaria parasitaemia measured by microscopy compared to placebo. Monthly IPT-DP was associated with fewer serious adverse events than placebo, daily trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole, or monthly SP. Among 56 IPT-DP recipients (26 children, 30 pregnant women), all QTc intervals were within normal limits, with no significant increase in QTc prolongation with increasing courses of DP. Interpretation Monthly DP appears well-tolerated and effective for IPT. Additional data are needed in pregnancy and to further explore the cardiac safety with monthly dosing. Funding Source Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and NI

Tactile mesh saliency

While the concept of visual saliency has been previously explored in the areas of mesh and image processing, saliency detection also applies to other sensory stimuli. In this paper, we explore the problem of tactile mesh saliency, where we define salient points on a virtual mesh as those that a human is more likely to grasp, press, or touch if the mesh were a real-world object. We solve the problem of taking as input a 3D mesh and computing the relative tactile saliency of every mesh vertex. Since it is difficult to manually define a tactile saliency measure, we introduce a crowdsourcing and learning framework. It is typically easy for humans to provide relative rankings of saliency between vertices rather than absolute values. We thereby collect crowdsourced data of such relative rankings and take a learning-to-rank approach. We develop a new formulation to combine deep learning and learning-to-rank methods to compute a tactile saliency measure. We demonstrate our framework with a variety of 3D meshes and various applications including material suggestion for rendering and fabricatio

Time-Varying Textures

Essentially all computer graphics rendering assumes that the reflectance and texture of surfaces is a static phenomenon. Yet, there is an abundance of materials in nature whose appearance varies dramatically with time, such as cracking paint, growing grass, or ripening banana skins. In this paper, we take a significant step towards addressing this problem, investigating a new class of time-varying textures. We make three contributions. First, we describe the carefully controlled acquisition of datasets of a variety of natural processes including the growth of grass, the accumulation of snow, and the oxidation of copper. Second, we show how to adapt quilting-based methods to time-varying texture synthesis, addressing the important challenges of maintaining temporal coherence, efficient synthesis on large time-varying datasets, and reducing visual artifacts specific to time-varying textures. Finally, we show how simple procedural techniques can be used to control the evolution of the results, such as allowing for a faster growth of grass in well lit (as opposed to shadowed) areas