Physiology-Aware Rural Ambulance Routing

In emergency patient transport from rural medical facility to center tertiary hospital, real-time monitoring of the patient in the ambulance by a physician expert at the tertiary center is crucial. While telemetry healthcare services using mobile networks may enable remote real-time monitoring of transported patients, physiologic measures and tracking are at least as important and requires the existence of high-fidelity communication coverage. However, the wireless networks along the roads especially in rural areas can range from 4G to low-speed 2G, some parts with communication breakage. From a patient care perspective, transport during critical illness can make route selection patient state dependent. Prompt decisions with the relative advantage of a longer more secure bandwidth route versus a shorter, more rapid transport route but with less secure bandwidth must be made. The trade-off between route selection and the quality of wireless communication is an important optimization problem which unfortunately has remained unaddressed by prior work. In this paper, we propose a novel physiology-aware route scheduling approach for emergency ambulance transport of rural patients with acute, high risk diseases in need of continuous remote monitoring. We mathematically model the problem into an NP-hard graph theory problem, and approximate a solution based on a trade-off between communication coverage and shortest path. We profile communication along two major routes in a large rural hospital settings in Illinois, and use the traces to manifest the concept. Further, we design our algorithms and run preliminary experiments for scalability analysis. We believe that our scheduling techniques can become a compelling aid that enables an always-connected remote monitoring system in emergency patient transfer scenarios aimed to prevent morbidity and mortality with early diagnosis treatment.Comment: 6 pages, The Fifth IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics (ICHI 2017), Park City, Utah, 201

A Mobile Geo-Communication Dataset for Physiology-Aware DASH in Rural Ambulance Transport

Use of telecommunication technologies for remote, continuous monitoring of patients can enhance effectiveness of emergency ambulance care during transport from rural areas to a regional center hospital. However, the communication along the various routes in rural areas may have wide bandwidth ranges from 2G to 4G; some regions may have only lower satellite bandwidth available. Bandwidth fluctuation together with real-time communication of various clinical multimedia pose a major challenge during rural patient ambulance transport.; AB@The availability of a pre-transport route-dependent communication bandwidth database is an important resource in remote monitoring and clinical multimedia transmission in rural ambulance transport. Here, we present a geo-communication dataset from extensive profiling of 4 major US mobile carriers in Illinois, from the rural location of Hoopeston to the central referral hospital center at Urbana. In collaboration with Carle Foundation Hospital, we developed a profiler, and collected various geographical and communication traces for realistic emergency rural ambulance transport scenarios. Our dataset is to support our ongoing work of proposing "physiology-aware DASH", which is particularly useful for adaptive remote monitoring of critically ill patients in emergency rural ambulance transport. It provides insights on ensuring higher Quality of Service (QoS) for most critical clinical multimedia in response to changes in patients' physiological states and bandwidth conditions. Our dataset is available online for research community.Comment: Proceedings of the 8th ACM on Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys'17), Pages 158-163, Taipei, Taiwan, June 20 - 23, 201

Treatment of Hepatitis B in Decompensated Liver Cirrhosis

Chronic hepatitis B infection progresses from an asymptomatic persistently infected state to chronic hepatitis, cirrhosis, decompensated liver disease, and/or hepatocellular carcinoma. About 3% of patients with chronic hepatitis develop cirrhosis yearly, and about 5% of individuals with hepatitis B cirrhosis become decompensated annually. The outcome for patients with decompensated cirrhosis is bleak. Lamivudine, the first oral antiviral agent available for hepatitis B treatment is safe and effective and can improve or stabilize liver disease in patients with advanced cirrhosis and viraemia. Viral resistance restricts its prolonged use. Entecavir and tenofovir are newer agents with excellent resistance profile to date. These and some other antiviral agents are being investigated for optimal use in this rather challenging patient group

The Necessary Evil in Mixed-motivational Systems: The Negative Effect of Entropy in Serious Games

Randomness is common in mixed-motivational system environment. Yet, it is attributable to information deprivation which is not always favored. In this paper, we use the concept entropy to quantitatively capture the rather overlooked influence of randomness embedded in a system. With the use of a serious game, we conducted a study with university students in a classroom setting. We show that entropy has an adverse impact on intention to use. The adverse impact is mediated by perceived control and curiosity. We further demonstrate that people having a strong arousal-avoidance pre-usage state are less prone to the negative effect of entropy. On theoretical implications, the study is among early attempts to examine the negative consequences of information deprivation due to randomness. It shows the mechanisms through which entropy leads to deteriorated intention to use. On practical implications, we suggest that manipulation of pre-usage user states alleviates the adverse impacts of entropy

Salaries of information technology managers; A trend analysis

During the economic boom of the last decade, companies and organizations have to offer lucrative salaries and a wide variety of incentive programs to attract and to retain highly skilled IT workers. While it is true that the economic downturn has affected the dramatic rise in salary trends, determining the worth of an employee as measured by wages will always remain a critical management issue. History has shown that irrespective of economic conditions, salaries will continue to rise. As the economy recovers and given the projected mass exodus of governmental information technology workers in the coming years, managers will need to be ready to deal with the difficult issue of high salary again. This study examines national and regional salary trends of IT managers. Specifically, the salaries examined are for the years 1991 through 2000, the period where salaries were often adjusted because of the imbalance between the supply of and the demand for IT professionals. From the employee who is looking for a reasonable salary package to the employer who must determine a sufficient pay raise to retain an IT manager, the findings and trends reported in this study should be useful and interesting

Schedulability Analysis for Certification-friendly Multicore Systems

This paper presents a new schedulability test for safety-critical software undergoing a transition from single-core to multicore systems - a challenge faced by multiple industries today. Our migration model, consisting of a schedulability test and execution model, is distinguished by three aspects consistent with reducing transition cost. First, it assumes externally-driven scheduling parameters, such as periods and deadlines, remain fixed (and thus known), whereas exact computation times are not. Second, it adopts a globally synchronized conflict-free I/O model that leads to a decoupling between cores, simplifying the schedulability analysis. Third, it employs global priority assignment across all tasks on each core, irrespective of application, where budget constraints on each application ensure isolation. These properties enable us to obtain a utilization bound that places an allowable limit on total task execution times. Evaluation results demonstrate the advantages of our scheduling model over competing resource partitioning approaches, such as Periodic Server and TDMA.Ope

How Does Competition Help Future Learning in Serious Games? An Exploratory Study in Learning Search Engine Optimization

Serious games, many of which are multi-player games, have been commonly used in information technology education and training. Competition can be intuitively associated with games; however, it is not always considered as a necessary attribute of serious games. Particularly, the learning impact results of competition are mixed. Challenge and control are two game attributes that are highly relevant to competition. With the use of a multi-player serious game, SEO War, this study aims to explore the relationships among competition, perceived control, perceived challenge, and self-efficacy in a game-based learning environment. Particularly, it investigates whether competition leads to self-efficacy. It also examines whether perceived challenge and perceived control mediate the relationship between competition and self-efficacy in serious games. This study contributes to the expanding literature on selecting important attributes for serious games, and it advances our understanding of the mechanism of how competition leads to self-efficacy. Moreover, it will help game designers decide on important game attributes through which games can be enhanced