Rate-Privacy in Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper introduces the concept of rate privacy in the context of wireless sensor networks. Our discussion reveals that the concept indeed is of a great importance for the privacy preservation of such networks. As a result, we propose a buffering scheme to protect the rate from adversaries. Simulation results verify the applicability of our approach

Self-esteem, general and sexual self-concepts in blind people

Background: People with visual disability have lower self-esteem and social skills than sighted people. This study was designed to describe self-esteem and general and sexual self-concepts in blind people. Materials and Methods: This was a cross-sectional study, conducted in the Isfahan University of Medical Sciences in 2013-2014. In this study, 138 visually impaired people participated from Isfahan Province Welfare Organization and were interviewed for measuring of self-esteem and self-concept using Eysenck self-esteem and Rogers’ self-concept questionnaires. The correlation between above two variables was measured using Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software by Pearson correlation test. Results: Mean [± standard deviation (SD)] age of patients was 30.9 ± 8 years. The mean (±SD) of general self-concept score was 11 ± 5.83. The mean (±SD) of self-esteem score was 16.62 ± 2.85. Pearson correlation results showed a significant positive correlation between self-esteem and general self-concept (r = 0.19, P = 0.025). The mean of sexual self-concept scores in five subscales (sexual anxiety, sexual self-efficacy, sexual self-esteem, sexual fear, and sexual depression) were correspondingly 11 ± 4.41, 19.53 ± 4.53, 12.96 ± 4.19, 13.48 ± 1.76, and 5.38 ± 2.36. Self-esteem and self-concept had significant positive correlation with sexual anxiety (r = 0.49; P < 0.001) (r =-.23; P < 0.001) and sexual fear (r = 0.25; P = 0.003) (r = 0.18; P = 0.02) and negative correlation with sexual self-efficacy (r =-0.26; P = 0.002) (r =-0.28; P = 0.001) and sexual-esteem (r =-0.34; P < 0.001) (r =-0.34; P < 0.001). Conclusion: Self-esteem and self-concept had significant correlation with sexual anxiety and sexual fear; and negative correlation with sexual self-efficacy and sexual-esteem. © 2015 Journal of Research in Medical Sciences

Design framework:redesign and new multi-user and testing support

The use of models to conceptualize systems is an important part of the process of building Cyber Physical Systems. While designing such systems, which are in general a multi-disciplinary activity, multiple designers are involved in the design decisions. Those decisions most likely are not captured and eventually forgotten after a period. The Design Framework is a visual modeling tool that aims to help architects and designers to documents the design rationales besides the design artifacts. It also helps them to collaborate to design a system together in a multidisciplinary environment. The Design Framework is at the level of a good prototype, but it is not ready for operational application by end-users in industry. One of the main issues with the Design Framework system is a sub-optimal code structure due to the lack of proper design and development approach. The assignment therefore is to reverse engineer the current design of the Design Framework and to come up with a new design. In order to maintain a system in use, presence of a test framework is necessary. Since the Design Framework is used in a multi-disciplinary environment, an improvement in the multi-user support of the system is also needed. In the first part of this report, the redesign of the Design Framework is discussed. To redesign the Design Frame-work, a number of refactoring techniques are applied. As a result, the code complexity is reduced, therefore the maintenance is increased. The second part of the assignment includes multi-user support and testability. The Design Framework manages the changes to design descriptions and maintains the history of the design artifacts. In this respect, it operates similar to version control systems. In the multi-user part of this report, the version controlling aspect of the Design Framework is described and synchronization of data for multi-user is elaborated. Finally some multi-user features are improved and developed. In the testability part of this report, the test support is described. A set of unit tests and end-to-end tests including the test for multi-user support is implemented. Provided test sets and the approaches used to setup test environment makes the Design Framework more stable and maintainable

A general comparetive study in long rod penetration using corrective smoothed particle method

Corrective smoothed particle method (CSPM) has been used to study the dynamic behavior of targets with different materials; AL, ALN and AL-ALN FGM in long rod penetration of an AL projectile. A mixed strength model with sigmoid formulation has been used to describe both yielding and fracture phenomena in the FGM. The strength model includes the JC dynamic yield relation and JHB fracture model with a continuum damage description approach. An efficient renormalization in continuity density approach is used to improve the SPH approximation of boundary physical variables. This study shows that the CSPM method in combination with the proper strength model describing the FGM dynamic behavior, can predict the mixed plastic and brittle response of different materials in long rod penetration problems

On quantifying fault patterns of the mesh interconnect networks

One of the key issues in the design of Multiprocessors System-on-Chip (MP-SoCs), multicomputers, and peerto- peer networks is the development of an efficient communication network to provide high throughput and low latency and its ability to survive beyond the failure of individual components. Generally, the faulty components may be coalesced into fault regions, which are classified into convex and concave shapes. In this paper, we propose a mathematical solution for counting the number of common fault patterns in a 2-D mesh interconnect network including both convex (|-shape, | |-shape, ý-shape) and concave (L-shape, Ushape, T-shape, +-shape, H-shape) regions. The results presented in this paper which have been validated through simulation experiments can play a key role when studying, particularly, the performance analysis of fault-tolerant routing algorithms and measure of a network fault-tolerance expressed as the probability of a disconnection

Mental Health Status of Patients With Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Admitted to Shahid Beheshti Hospital of Kashan, Iran

Background: Planning for providing mental health services to the mentally patients due to brain injury need awareness of mental health status of the patient. Objectives: This study aimed to assess the mental health of patients with mild TBI. Patients and Methods: The descriptive cross-sectional study was performed on 286 patients with mild TBI who were admitted to department of neurosurgery of Shahid Beheshti Hospital, Kashan, Iran, during the first eight months of 2013. Enrolled patients were 15 to 70 years old who able to respond to questionnaires. The Brief Symptom Inventory (BSI) questionnaire is used to assess the mental health status of the patients. The data were presented using logistic regression and descriptive statistics. Results: A total of 286 patients, 79.7% males and 20.3% females with male to female ratio of 4:1, completed the study. Female had significantly higher Global Severity Index (GSI) compared to males. There was a significant association between, psychologic disorders’ symptoms and age (P = 0.00). The mean (SD) of GSI on the Symptom Checklist-90 (SCL-90) was 1.39 (0.58). Conclusions: This study showed that 36% of the patients with mild TBI symptoms had mental health problems. Given the high rates of psychologic disorders among patients with mild TBI, it is necessary to reduce the factors that caused the disorder

Comparing Cognitive Failures and Metacognitive Beliefs in Mild Traumatic Brain Injured Patients and Normal Controls in Kashan

Background: Head trauma is associated with multiple destructive cognitive symptoms and cognitive failure. Cognitive failures include problems with memory, attention and operation. Cognitive failures are considered as a process associated with metacognition. Objectives: This study aimed to compare cognitive failures and metacognitive beliefs in mild Traumatic Brain Injured (TBI) patients and normal controls in Kashan. Patients and Methods: The study was performed on 40 TBI patients referred to the Shahid Beheshti Hospital of Kashan city and 40 normal controls in Kashan. Traumatic brain injured patients and normal controls were selected by convenience sampling. Two groups filled out the demographic sheet, Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ) and Meta-Cognitions Questionnaire 30 (MCQ-30). The data were analyzed by the SPSS-19 software with multivariate analysis of variance. Results: The results of this study showed that there were no significant differences between TBI and controls in total scores and subscales of CFQ and MCQ (F = 0.801, P = 0.61). Conclusions: Based on these findings, it seems that mild brain injuries don't make significant metacognitive problems and cognitive failures

Effectiveness of light pressure stroking massage on pain and fatigue of patients after coronary artery bypass graft surgery-A randomized clinical trial

زمینه و هدف: درد و خستگی از مشکلات شایع بعد از عمل بیماران تحت جراحی پیوند عروق کرونر می باشد. هدف از این مطالعه تعیین تأثیر ماساژ درمانی بر شدت درد و خستگی بعد از عمل بیماران تحت جراحی پیوند عروق کرونر بوده است. روش بررسی: در این مطالعه کارآزمایی بالینی تصادفی سازی شده، تعداد 72 نفر بیمار تحت عمل جراحی قرارگرفته عروق کرونر در بیمارستان شهید چمران شهر اصفهان، انتخاب شدند و بطور تصادفی در دو گروه مداخله و شاهد قرار گرفتند. بیماران گروه مداخله (36 نفر)، ماساژ استروک سطحی 20 دقیقه ای به مدت 4 جلسه در 4 روز پیاپی در روزهای 3 تا 6 بعد از عمل جراحی دریافت کردند و بیماران گروه شاهد تنها مراقبت های روتین را دریافت نمودند. متغیرهای درد و خستگی قبل و بعد از مداخله با استفاده از مقیاس قیاسی دیداری ثبت شدند. یافته ها: نتایج نشان داد که اختلاف معنی داری بین شدت درد و خستگی در دو گروه مداخله و شاهد بعد از انجام مداخله وجود داشته است (0/001>P). بطوریکه کاهش میانگین شدت درد و خستگی از روز اول تا چهارم بعد از عمل در گروه مداخله بیشتر از گروه شاهد بود. نتیجه گیری: استفاده از ماساژ استروک سطحی می تواند باعث کاهش درد و خستگی بعد از عمل بیماران تحت جراحی پیوند عروق کرونر شود و با توجه به سادگی و کم هزینه بودن این روش، شاید بتواند به عنوان مکمل مناسبی برای دارودرمانی و مداخلات بعد از عمل در این بیماران مورد استفاده قرار گیرد

Comparison of Artificial Neural Network and Logistic Regression Models for Prediction of Psychological Symptom Six Months after Mild Traumatic Brain Injury

Background: Nowadays, outcome prediction models using logistic regression (LR) and artificial neural network (ANN) analysis have been developed in many areas of healthcare research. Objectives: In this study, we have compared the performance of multivariable LR and ANN models, in prediction of psychological symptoms six months after mild traumatic brain injury. Methods: In a prospective cohort study, information of 100 mild traumatic brain injury patients, during a six months period between 2014 and 2016 were included. Data were divided into two training (n = 50) and testing (n = 50) groups, randomly. 300 ANNs and LRs were studied in the first group and then the predicted values were compared in the second group using the two final models. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and accuracy rate were used to compare these models. Results: The results showed that accuracy rate for the neural network model was 90.65, while it was 75.96 for the LR model. Conclusions: The ANN models appeared to be more powerful in predicting psychological symptoms versus the LR models