The Relationship between Mothers' Parenting Stress and Spiritual Well-Being and the Behavioral Disorders of Children with Specific Learning Disorders: Mediated by the Quality of Married Life

AbstractIntroduction: Raising children with specific learning disorders (SLDs) is a stressful experience, and one type of stress experienced by the mothers of these children is parenting stress. The present study aimed to investigate the relationship between mothers' parenting stress and spiritual well-being and the behavioral disorders of children with SLDs through the mediating role of quality of married life.Methods: The statistical population of this descriptive-correlational study consisted of all the mothers of children with specific learning disorders (SLDs) in Shiraz (Iran) in 2022. A sample of 218 boys with SLDs and their mothers was conveniently selected. The Parenting Stress Index, the Spiritual Well-Being Scale, the Revised Dyadic Adjustment Scale, and the Child Behavior Checklist were used for data collection. The proposed model was evaluated using structural equation modeling (SEM) in SPSS and AMOS.Results: All the direct paths, except for the path of parenting stress to children's behavioral disorders, were significant (P<0.001). The indirect paths from parenting stress to children's behavioral disorders, mediated by the quality of married life, and the path from spiritual well-being to children's behavioral disorders, mediated by the quality of married life, were also significant (P<0.001).Conclusions: Based on the results, the adjusted final model had an optimal fit and constitutes a major step towards identifying the factors affecting the behavioral disorders of children with SLDs

Dynamic homecare service provisioning: a field test and its results

Providing IT-based care support for elderly at home is proposed as a highly promising appraoch to address the aging population problem. With the emergence of homecare application service providers, a homecare system can be seen as a linked set of services. Configuring and composing existing homecare application services to create new homecare composite applications can reduce the application development cost. The idea even looks more promising if the service provisioning is dynamic, i.e., if applications can update their behaviors with respect to the contextual changes without or with minimum manpower. Dynamic service provisioning can play an important role to accept homecare systems in practical settings. This motivated us to develop a Dynamic Homecare Service Provisioning (DHSP) platform to address the homecare context changes in an effective and efficient manner. As a proof of concept, we have developed a software prototype of our platform. The prototype was subsequently used in a real-world field test at a care institution in the Netherlands to validate the approach. This paper describes the design of the field test and reflects on the outcome of the validation experiments

“Individual” in Education according to the Fundamentals of Existence Philosophy: Emphasizing Ideas by Buber and Kierkegaard

This study aims to explain the place of individual as wellas the ways to maintain individuality in education according to theideas of existence thinkers. Putting emphasis on individualitycould be taken as one of the most significant basics of existencephilosophy. Existence philosophy has been applied widely invarious fields including education. The existence thinkers believethat today the individuality of human being has been lost amongthe masses and it has been invaded. This study, by applying thecomparative analysis method and philosophical inquiry,recommends that the teacher should establish a one to oneinteraction with students through a Socratic method and s/heshould provide the background for students to become self. Thisgoal could be achieved through methods such as changing theteacher-students pattern of interaction to teacher-student,decreasing the number of students in a classroom, taking thestandpoint of students by the teacher so that the teacher is able toreach an improved understanding of the students

Service Tailoring: Towards Personalized homecare Systems

Health monitoring and healthcare provisioning for the elderly at home have received increasingly attention. Since each elderly person is unique, with a unique lifestyle, living environment and health condition, personalization is an essential feature of homecare software services. Service tailoring, which is creating a new service to meet individual requirements may be achieved in a cost-effective and time-efficient manner if new services can be configured and composed from already existing services. In this paper, we propose an effective service tailoring process and architecture to personalize homecare services according to the individual care-receiver’s needs. In addition, we present a scenario to highlight the need for service tailoring and to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach

Tetracycline aptamer-controlled regulation of pre-mRNA splicing in yeast

Splicing of pre-mRNA is a critical step in mRNA maturation and disturbances cause several genetic disorders. We apply the synthetic tetracycline (tc)-binding riboswitch to establish a gene expression system for conditional tc-dependent control of pre-mRNA splicing in yeast. Efficient regulation is obtained when the aptamer is inserted close to the 5′splice site (SS) with the consensus sequence of the SS located within the aptamer stem. Structural probing indicates limited spontaneous cleavage within this stem in the absence of the ligand. Addition of tc leads to tightening of the stem and the whole aptamer structure which probably prevents recognition of the 5′SS. Combination of more then one aptamer-regulated intron increases the extent of regulation leading to highly efficient conditional gene expression systems. Our findings highlight the potential of direct RNA–ligand interaction for regulation of gene expression

Personalized Service Creation by Non-technical Users in the Homecare Domain

AbstractOne of the conditions for the successful introduction of ICT-based homecare services is to allow non-technical persons such as home nurses to personalize these services. We refer to this process of homecare service personalization as service tailoring. Service tailoring can be done by configuring and composing previously developed and deployed service building blocks. In this paper, we describe an approach that employs predefined information of care-receivers, called user profile, to hide most of the technical details from care-givers who do the service tailoring. First, we define the information to be included in a user profile and patterns that represent composition structures corresponding to common homecare tasks experienced in homecare. Then, we define how the service tailoring process can exploit information contained in the predefined user profiles. After that, we illustrate the approach with a tailoring scenario

Compressive Strength of Mineral Trioxide Aggregate and Calcium-enriched Mixture Cement Mixed with Propylene Glycol

Introduction: The aim of the present study was to evaluate and compare the compressive strength (CS) of mineral trioxide aggregate (MTA) and calcium-enriched mixture (CEM) cement when mixed with propylene glycol (PG). Methods and Materials: Twenty four custom-made split molds with 5 holes in each were prepared. Molds were allocated into eight groups (n=15 holes) as follows: Groups 1,5: CEM and MTA mixed with PG (100%), Groups 2,6: CEM and MTA mixed with PG (20% )+CEM or MTA liquid (80%) respectively, Groups 3,7: CEM and MTA mixed with PG (50% )+CEM or MTA liquid (50% ) respectively, Groups 4,8: CEM and MTA mixed with CEM or MTA liquid respectively as control groups. All specimens were kept in 37°C in an incubator and the compressive strength was evaluated after 7 days. Data were analyzed using the Kruskal Wallis and Dunne tests. The level of significance was set at 0.05. Results: In all concentration of PG, MTA samples showed better results than CEM cement. In CEM samples, adding 20% PG could significantly increase the compressive strength in comparison with control group and 100% PG (P=0.047 and P=0.011, respectively). In MTA samples, adding 100% and 50% PG significantly increased the compressive strength of the cement in comparison with control group (P=0.037 and, P=0.005, respectively). Conclusion: Considering the limitations of the present study, appropriate concentration of PG could improve the CS of MTA and CEM cement.Keywords: Calcium-Enriched Mixture Cement; Compressive Strength; Mineral Trioxide Aggregate; Propylene Glyco

Risk driven requirements specification (RiDeRS) of IT-based homecare systems

Use of IT in providing homecare services to elderly people is expected to reduce the workload of care-providers. It is also expected that this will increase the quality of services by providing services round-the-clock and will support independent living of the elderly. However, ITbased care systems can also introduce new types of risks such as those related to availability and accountability. This can possibly lead to a decline of using such expensive IT-based homecare systems in practice. In order to prevent this, we propose a method to identify potential risks of using such a system, and to specify additional requirements of the system to mitigate or prevent these risks. We validate the usability and potential utility of our approach by three experiments using a case from the homecare domain. We discuss whether the proposed approach can be generalized for use in the wider class of adaptive critical systems