Verification and Validation of Numerical Modelling Approaches Pertinent to Stomach Modelling

The digestive system is vital to the human body. Over many decades, scientists have been investigating the food breakdown mechanisms inside the stomach through in vivo human and animal studies and in vitro experiments. Due to recent improvements in computing speed and algorithm development, computational modelling has become a viable option to investigate in-body processes. Such in silico models are more easily controlled to investigate individual variables, do not require invasive physical experiments, and can provide valuable insights into the local physics of gastric flow. There is a huge potential for numerical approaches in stomach modelling as they can provide a comprehensive understanding of the complex flow and chemistry in the stomach. However, to make sure the numerical methods are accurate and reliable, rigorous verification and validation are essential as part of model development. A significant focus of this thesis was on verifying and validating the numerical modelling approaches pertinent to stomach modellin

Technical and Behavioral Interventions for Medication Adherence through Mobile Health

In this research, we present a novel intervention, Carrot and Stick, to improve the outcome of one of the self-management tasks, medication adherence (MA), among patients with chronic disease(s). Our design incorporates the growing importance of mobile health (m-health) in Health Information Technology (HIT) with the users’ dependency on mobile phones to facilitate valuable behavioral changes. Drawing on Social Cognitive Theory, Social Exchange Theory, Goal-setting Theory, and people’s dependence on smartphones, we develop the functionalities in our intervention, including positive and negative reinforcement, goal-setting, and social connections. The iterative process of our development follows the Design Science Approach. In the evaluation and validation of our intervention, we not only examine the intervention’s impacts on patients through analytical models and simulation but also demonstrate the possible active support of the intervention from healthcare providers based on the current pay-for-performance (P4P) scheme. Our results suggest that (1) with the help of electronic medication container, appropriate reminder design can reduce the patients’ chances of forgetting doses, overdosing, and intaking doses at the wrong time, (2) positive reinforcement can help increase the probability of the patient achieving expected MA, while negative reinforcement has a further impact that is added to the increment, (3) our intervention can assist the patient in saving more than $600 per year, and (4) under the current P4P scheme, physicians with the exceptional performance or with bad performance are likely to invest in the intervention to change their patients’ behaviors, while physicians with good performance are less likely to participate. Our research is the first to utilize negative reinforcement in intervention design to enhance MA; it is also the first to provide corresponding interventional solutions that are customized according to elements derived from theories. Besides, the focus and understanding of healthcare providers’ involvement in the incentive program can facilitate the adoption, prescription, and implementation of the proposed intervention

Sociodemographic predictors of measles immunization exemption: Washington state, 2013-2018

Background: Measles immunization is one of the school-entry requirements in Washington State, but parents can exempt their children from immunization based on religious, personal- belief and medical reasons. Vaccine hesitancy is a growing issue in the United States. In the 2019 Washington measles outbreak, most cases were unvaccinated children. Methods: We used 2013-2018 measles immunization exemption data from the Washington Department of Public Health to examine the change over time. We used spatial lag regression models to analyze the relationship between economical, race, education and population predictors and school districts-level measles exemption rates. Results: The percentage of students with measles exemption increased to 4.10% in school year 2017-2018. In the spatial lag regression model, measles exemption rate increased with 2.94% for each 10000 USD increase in median household income ( 95%CI: 1.96%-3.41% ). Conclusions: Measles exemptions for students in Washington are more common in areas with a higher income. Public Health Relevance: The 2019 Washington measles outbreak brought concerns to measles vaccination exemptions. In recent years, the proportion of exemptions based on religious and personal belief is rising. But recent data and Washington data were little covered for research. We analyzed exemption data to help future immunization work

Quality of service for video stream over IP networks

Multimedia networking is one of the most exciting developments in today's Internet. Streaming technology; which allows the player to start playing audio/video data immediately instead of waiting for the entire file to be downloaded, presents an attractive vehicle for the distribution of multimedia content over the Internet. However, transmitting real-time streaming audio/video across a network is a very demanding task in that it mandates significant bandwidth and quality-of-service (QoS). Due to the underlying protocols, today's Internet technologies support real-time services only in a best-effort manner. The qualities of the audio/video are very sensitive to the network impairments, such as packet losses, bit-errors, delays and jitters. To understand the challenges that currently face streaming video delivery, this project investigates the impact of network conditions to video QoS. Specifically, a network traffic model to simulate the network communication problems has been established based on a 2-state Markov model - Gilbert model. Integrated with Windows Media technologies, a network impairment emulator was implemented. These software tools provide a way to better understand the relationship between transmission parameters vs. video quality of service in an emulation environment, which may not be easily analyzed over the real IP networks. These relationships would give us insights for deriving optimal criteria to improve the QoS of video streaming.Keywords and Phrases: Internet, IP networks, streaming video, quality of service, Windows Media, packet capture, network impairment emulator, Internet traffic mode

Tumor-on-a-chip model for advancement of anti-cancer nano drug delivery system

Despite explosive growth in the development of nano-drug delivery systems (NDDS) targeting tumors in the last few decades, clinical translation rates are low owing to the lack of efficient models for evaluating and predicting responses. Microfluidics-based tumor-on-a-chip (TOC) systems provide a promising approach to address these challenges. The integrated engineered platforms can recapitulate complex in vivo tumor features at a microscale level, such as the tumor microenvironment, three-dimensional tissue structure, and dynamic culture conditions, thus improving the correlation between results derived from preclinical and clinical trials in evaluating anticancer nanomedicines. The specific focus of this review is to describe recent advances in TOCs for the evaluation of nanomedicine, categorized into six sections based on the drug delivery process: circulation behavior after infusion, endothelial and matrix barriers, tumor uptake, therapeutic efficacy, safety, and resistance. We also discuss current issues and future directions for an end-use perspective of TOCs

Distributed algorithm without iterations for an integrated energy system

Existing energy management methods for integrated energy systems are mostly in distributed communication and computation now, need a large number of iterations, and each time of iteration needs lots of communication and computation. For this reason, on one hand, the iteration may cause energy-delay. On the other hand, iteration will significantly increase the communication and computation burden. The integrated energy systems contain a variety of devices and energy resources (including renewable energy resources), so the communication and computation burden is already very high. If the communication and computation cannot be solved very well, the cost functions of each device need to be much easier to ensure the operation of the system and their systematic error will be much larger. For this reason, the result of optimization will be much worse because of the accuracy of cost functions. The greatest challenge of this issue is to establish an algorithm without iteration. For handling this issue, first, we adopt the theoretical demonstration to prove that if all prices of all devices are the same, the optimization will be realized and the instantaneous price is the one-order derivative. (we assume the relationship between the operating cost and the energy flow of each device as the convex cost functions.) Second, we reshape all cost functions. Third, we change the function to the total of the foregoing functions in the directed annular path and adopt the total function of the hole system to solve the energy price. Last, we use the price to ensure their operating condition. Our theoretical demonstration has already proved the optimization, convergence, the plug and play performance, scalability, and the emergency scheduling performance of the annular partial differential algorithm (APDA)