Use of the terms "Wellbeing" and "Quality of Life" in health sciences: A conceptual framework

Background and Objectives: The assessment of wellbeing is a top priority in health sciences. The aim of this paper is to review the history of the concept of wellbeing and “Quality of Life” (QoL), and to understand the theories and assumptions that guided this field in order to provide a conceptual framework that may eventually facilitate the development of a formal synset (grouping of synonyms and semantically similar terms) of health-related wellbeing Methods: The history of the concept of wellbeing and QoL was reviewed in order to provide a conceptual framework. Results: Huge differences exist on the definition of “Wellbeing” and its relationship with QoL, “Happiness” and “Functioning” in the health context. From a dimensional perspective, health related wellbeing could be regarded as an overarching construct characterised by asymmetrical polarity, where “wellbeing” embeds the concept of “ill-being” as “health” incorporates de concept of “disease”. Conclusions: A common conceptual framework of these terms may eventually facilitate the development of a formal synset of health-related wellbeing. This terminological clarification should be part of a new taxonomy of health-related wellbeing based on the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) framework that may facilitate knowledge transfer across different sectors and semantic interoperability for care management and planningThe research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement numbers 223071 (COURAGE in Europe) and 282586 (ROAMER), from the Instituto de Salud Carlos III-FIS research grant number PS09/00295, and from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation ACI-Promociona (ACI2009-1010 and ACI- 2011-1080). The study was supported by the Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Salud Mental (CIBERSAM), Instituto de Salud Carlos II

Surface Structure Determination of Black Phosphorus Using Photoelectron Diffraction

Atomic structure of single-crystalline black phosphorus was studied by high resolution synchrotron-based photoelectron diffraction (XPD). The results show that the topmost phosphorene layer in the black phosphorus is slightly displaced compared to the bulk structure and presents a small contraction in the direction perpendicular to the surface. Furthermore, the XPD results show the presence of a small buckling among the surface atoms, in agreement with previously reported scanning tunneling microscopy results. The contraction of the surface layer added to the presence of the buckling indicates an uniformity in the size of the sp3 bonds between P atoms at the surface

Three-dimensional virtual bone bank system workflow for structural bone allograft selection: a technical report

Structural bone allograft has been used in bone defect reconstruction during the last fifty years with acceptable results. However, allograft selection methods were based on 2-dimensional templates using X-rays.Thanks to preoperative planning platforms, three dimensional (3D) CT-derived bone models were used to define size and shape comparison between host and donor. The purpose of this study was to describe the workflow of this virtual technique in order to explain how to choose the best allograft using a virtualbone bank system. We measured all bones in a 3D virtual environment determining the best match. The use of a virtual bone banksystem has allowed optimizing the allograft selection in a bone bank, providing more information to the surgeons before surgery.In conclusion, 3D preoperative planning in a virtual environment for allograft selection is an important and helpful tool in order to achieve a good match between host and donor.Fil: Ritacco, Lucas. Hospital Italiano; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Farfalli, Germán Luis. Hospital Italiano; ArgentinaFil: Milano, Federico Edgardo. Hospital Italiano; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; ArgentinaFil: Ayerza, Miguel Ángel. Hospital Italiano; ArgentinaFil: Muscolo, Domingo L.. Hospital Italiano; Argentina. Hospital Italiano; ArgentinaFil: Aponte Tinao, Luis. Hospital Italiano; Argentin

Synchronization in the presence of distributed delays

We study systems of identical coupled oscillators introducing a distribution of delay times in the coupling. For arbitrary network topologies, we show that the frequency and stability of the fully synchronized states depend only on the mean of the delay distribution. However, synchronization dynamics is sensitive to the shape of the distribution. In the presence of coupling delays, the synchronization rate can be maximal for a specific value of the coupling strength.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Applying feature reduction analysis to a PPRLM-multiple Gaussian language identification system

This paper presents the application of a feature selection technique such as LDA to a language identification (LID) system. The baseline system consists of a PPRLM module followed by a multiple-Gaussian classifier. This classifier makes use of acoustic scores and duration features of each input utterance. We applied a dimension reduction of the feature space in order to achieve a faster and easier-trainable system. We imputed missing values of our vectors before projecting them on the new space. Our experiments show a very low performance reduction due to the dimension reduction approach. Using a single dimension projection the error rates we have obtained are about 8.73% taking into account the 22 most significant features

On the testability of WCAG 2.0 for beginners

Web accessibility for people with disabilities is a highly visible area of research in the field of ICT accessibility, including many policy activities across many countries. The commonly accepted guidelines for web accessibility (WCAG 1.0) were published in 1999 and have been extensively used by designers, evaluators and legislators. W3C-WAI published a new version of these guidelines (WCAG 2.0) in December 2008. One of the main goals of WCAG 2.0 was testability, that is, WCAG 2.0 should be either machine testable or reliably human testable. In this paper we present an educational experiment performed during an intensive web accessibility course. The goal of the experiment was to assess the testability of the 25 level-A success criteria of WCAG 2.0 by beginners. To do this, the students had to manually evaluate the accessibility of the same web page. The result was that only eight success criteria could be considered to be reliably human testable when evaluators were beginners. We also compare our experiment with a similar study published recently. Our work is not a conclusive experiment, but it does suggest some parts of WCAG 2.0 to which special attention should be paid when training accessibility evaluator

Physically founded phonon dispersions of few-layer materials, and the case of borophene

An increasing number of theoretical calculations on few-layer materials have been reporting a non-zero sound velocity for all three acoustic phonon modes. In contrast with these reports, here we show that the lowest phonon dispersion branch of atomistically described few-layer materials should be quadratic, and this can have dramatic consequencies on calculated properties, such as the thermal conductivity. By reformulating the interatomic force constants (IFC) in terms of internal coordinates, we find that a delicate balance between the IFCs is responsible for this quadraticity. This balance is hard to obtain in ab-initio calculations even if all the symmetries are numerically enforced a posteriori, but it arises naturally in our approach. We demonstrate the phenomenon in the case of borophene, where a very subtle correction to the ab-initio IFCs yields the physically correct quadratic dispersion, while leaving the rest of the spectrum virtually unmodified. Such quadraticity nevertheless has a major effect on the computed lattice thermal conductivity, which in the case of borophene changes by more than a factor 2, and reverses its anisotropy, when the subtle IFC correction is put in place