Earticle

The present study is to investigate the analysis of experiments on the information systems for the improving self-management after intracranial hemorrhage surgery. The subjects of this paper were 136 patients who had visited a general hospital located in Metropolitan area. The pairwise t-test was done to compare the before and after application effect of self-management after intracranial hemorrhage surgery. The results of this study are as follows. Firstly, in terms of respondents which have suffered from headache, subjects’ score(54.92±4.18) after application by information systems significantly decreased than subjects(73.92±3.26) before application(t=2.49, p=.000) Secondly, for self-management, the change of follow-up survey showed higher level in the experimental group than the control group, regardless of the time elapsed of 8 weeks after application by information systems as compared with previous status. Therefore, this paper showed that health improving behaviors using the information systems as measurement tools was a good way to enhance the practice rate of self-management in patients after intracranial hemorrhage surgery.

Strychnos nux-vomica belonging to family Loganiaceae. Carbohydrate, protein, oil, steroid, alkaloid, resin, strychnine and brucine were detected in phytochemical screening. It is anticipated that lipid peroxidation may provide scientific rationale for the use of S. nux-vomica as an antidiabetic plant. There is a need to develop bio-technological approach for raising nursery plants of S. nux-vomica as per International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) criteria. Different concentration of growth hormones to break seed dormancy, four pre treatments, different size of polythene bags, root trainer, and impact of potting mixture on the growth were adopted to determine the best treatments. The results indicated that the seed dormancy was broken when seeds were treated with 40 ppm concentration of GA3 or 100 ppm concentration of IBA hormones and soaking with warm water, the best size of polythene bag was used as medium size of polythene (25x11 cm), the best size of root trainer was used as medium cup root trainer (187 cm3), and the best potting mixture was found to be farm yard manure (FYM) with soil and sand in ratio of 1:1:1. Statistical analysis was also adopted to determine of significance levels.

Because of global climate change, mosquitos which are vectors for the dengue virus (DENV) are increasing in population and the incidence of dengue fever and dengue hemorrhagic fever is increasing every year in countries not only in the subtropics but also in other regions worldwide. There are 4 subtypes of DENV, each differing in infectivity and virulence. This study compared and analyzed genetic variation in the genomic sequences of DENV subtypes 1 and 2. The results showed that while non-synonymous codon variation was high in DENV-1, synonymous codon variation was also high in DENV-2. Additionally, there were differences in the genetic variation in each subtype according to the year or region, and incidence levels increased during periods when sequence variation was high. The results of this study can be used to compare the subtype-specific genetic variation characteristics of DENV to predict the incidence rates and sequence variations of DENV according to the region or year.

Professional female free divers (Haenyeo) in Korea have been exposed to breathing in the water without any respiratory equipment and are increasingly aging. However, data on their general health status are scarce. A total of 733 electronic medical records of 480 professional female free divers who visited the emergency department from July 2012 to June 2013 were analyzed. Their mean age was 74.3 years, and 87.4% were 65 years or older. Most women had one or more comorbid conditions and were taking medication. The most common discharge diagnosis based on the International Classification of Disease-10 was symptomsand abnormal clinical and laboratory findings. Furthermore, 12.3% had a discharge diagnosis related to injury, and almost half of the injuries were caused by slip down. Older professional female free divers were more likely to have comorbid conditions and take medication, and have discharge diagnoses related to slip-down injury, and digestive, respiratory, and circulatory conditions more frequently. Therefore, specific symptoms related to diving and various age-related aspects such as injury prevention and chronic disease management should be considered in developing a health program for professional female free divers.

The paper explains the method of detection of QRS complex from ECG signal using wavelet transform.By using MATLABtool, we can detect QRS complex which further helps us in diagnosis of various disease i.e. related to heart, when QRS complexes were detected then each complex was used to find the peaks of the waves like Q,R& S.

Masticatory function affects energy expenditure, heart rate, working memory, choice reaction time, and psychological arousal. In other words, masticatory function is closely related to cognitive processing ability. It also influences concentration and stress. The purpose of this study was to determine whether masticatory exercise training using chewing gum can improve cognitive function and stress. The participants were recruited from Sahmyook University and were divided into a masticatory exercise group (n = 15) and a control group (n = 15) by having each of the subjects take out one card from a box containing two types of cards representing the study groups. This study used sugar-free chewing gum with xylitol for the masticatory exercise. Cognitive function and stress were assessed before and after the masticatory exercise. The Memorizing Numbers (MN), Finding a Picture by Name (FPN), and Match Card (MC) components of the COMCOG® test were used to assess cognitive function, which is closely linked to memory, attention, and concentration. Stress was measured using the SA-3000P® system. COMCOG® component scores and stress resistance (SR) and stress index (SI) scores were assessed before and after the training. The groups significantly differed in MN, FPN, MC, SR, and SI scores (p < 0.05). These findings suggest that masticatory exercise using chewing gum improves cognitive function and reduces stress.

In this paper, we presented a dual secure digital image watermarking algorithm based on Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWT), Lifting Wavelet Transforms (LWT) and Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) using Genetic Algorithm (GA) for medical images. The natural image is chosen as cover image and is decomposed up to three levels using discrete wavelet transform. The medical image is chosen as a watermark. The GA is used while embed and extract the watermark. The encryption is proposed to be effected using RSA and AES encryption algorithms. A Graphical User Interface (GUI) which enables the user to have ease of operation in loading the image, watermark it, encrypt it and also retrieve the original image whenever necessary is also designed and presented in this paper. Peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) and normalized correlation coefficient (NC) are computed to measure the image quality of the proposed technique. Experimental results show that the proposed watermarking technique has good imperceptibility and robustness against to salt & pepper noise attack.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the recognition of medical direction in emergency medical service personnel in Jeju. The survey, which contained basic characteristics and 10 questions on medical direction using a five-point Likert scale, was conducted in 180 subjects. The sample included 156 men (86.7%), and the mean age was 37.1 ± 6.1 years. On comparing qualification license according to gender, it was found that most men were first responders (48.1%), while most women were nurses (62.5%), showing a significant difference (p<0.001). The need for medical direction in emergency situations was 4.5 ± 0.6 in men, and 4.8 ± 0.4 in women (p=0.026). In addition, the prediction degree of medical direction was 3.7 ± 0.7 in men, and 4.0 ± 0.4in women, showing a significant difference (p=0.017).There were differences of recognition of medical direction according to qualification license. EMT-basics and first responders exhibited a relative lack of professionalism, had higher scores on the need for medical direction during transportation, expectation of and satisfaction regarding medical direction, and efficacy of medical direction while handling severely ill patients. However, they had lower scores in the prediction and accomplishment of medical direction. In contrast, EMT-intermediates and nurses showed higher scores on the expectation of and satisfaction regarding medical direction. In conclusion, based on the experience and qualification license of the emergency medical service personnel, establishment of different educational programs and medical direction systems should be considered, to improve the recognition of medical direction in the community.

Soft Computing is a consortium of methodologies which works synergistically and provides an ability to make decision from reliable data or expert’s experience. Nowadays different types of soft computing techniques such as neural network, fuzzy logic, genetic algorithm and hybrid system are largely used in medical areas. In this paper, algorithm for analysis of lung infection is presented. The main focus is to develop system architecture to find probable disease stage patient may have. Severity level of disease is determined by using rule base method. The algorithm uses output of Rulebase and entered by user to determine level of infection.

4 kinds of implants with different fastening methods with the fixture of equally selected diameter 3.6 mm, length 15 mm and abutment of diameter5.0mm, length 5.7mm and fastened and fixed with the force of 30N·cm and then fatigue test was carried out by using tensile and compression tester (858 Bionix, MTS, USA). According to the fatigue test results, all 4 types of implants met the fatigue test standard of withstanding the load of 5 × 106 Cycles in more than 250N, dental implant testing criteria of Korean Food & Drug Administration medical device standard. 4 kinds of implant fixture and abutment fatigue test results with different fastening methods showed statistically significant differences (p<0.001).

The study is an analysis of nursing students using high fidelity simulators to practice nursing interventions for hypoglycemia and respiratory distress. The subjects are third-year university nursing students who handled 55 teams of hypoglycemia and 70 teams of respiratory distress syndrome. The subject group (hypoglycemia and respiratory distress syndrome) had one hour of education and experienced self-education for a week. After this, their behavior in practice sessions were recorded on video and reviewed. Data was analyzed via SPSS 21.0. The subjects’ nursing ability was measured with independent t-test. As a result of study, the simulation with hypoglycemia had the highest ‘Intervention’ scores (2.58±0.37) and the simulation with respiratory distress syndrome had the highest ‘Assessment’ (2.29±0.36). Also, the hypoglycemia group score was significantly higher than that of the respiratory distress syndrome group on nursing performance ability (t=-5.65, p<.001).

The concentration of the naturally occurring radionuclides 226Ra, 232Th and 40K have been measured in Clay (C), gypsum (G), limestone (L), sand (S), brick (B), soil (So), cement (Ce), which are used as building materials in Assiut, Egypt, using gamma spectrometry employing a 3×3 inch scintillation NaI (Tl) detector. The radium equivalent activity (Raeq), indoor gamma absorbed dose rate (D), annual effective dose (An), (AUI), alpha index (Iα), gamma index (Iγ), external radiation hazard index (Hex), internal radiation hazard index (Hin), representative level index (RLI), excess lifetime cancer risk (ELCR) and annual gonadal dose equivalent (AGDE) associated with the natural radionuclides are calculated to assess the radiation hazard of the natural radioactivity in the building materials. Basic statistics (skewness and Kurtosis) and frequency distributions for all radionuclides were used to describe the statistical characteristics of the radionuclide activities.

This study examined the association between social support and maternal-fetal attachment and explored the mediating effect of self-esteem on this relationship in unmarried pregnant women in Korea. Data were collected from 105 unmarried, pregnant, Korean women who were residents of 15 welfare facilities. Social support, self-esteem, and maternal-fetal attachment were assessed using structured questionnaires. The mediating effect of self-esteem was analyzed using linear regressions and a Sobel test. Self-esteem partially mediated the relationship between social support and maternal-fetal attachment. Results from this study suggest that interventions focusing on both social support and self-esteem might be more useful for increasing maternal-fetal attachment in this population than interventions that only target either social support or self-esteem.

The quality of the protein structure can be determined by physical and chemical properties, therefore it has been used to distinguish native or native like structure from other predicted structures. In this study, the machine learning classification models are explored with six physical and chemical properties to classify the root mean square deviation (RMSD) of the protein structure in absence of its true native state and each protein structure lies between 0A˚ to 6A˚ RMSD space. Physical and chemical properties used in this paper are total surface area, Euclidean distance, total empirical energy, secondary structure penalty, residue length, and pair number. There are total 24294 decoys, having 4919 native structures. Artificial bee colony algorithm is used to determine the feature importance. The K-fold cross validation is used to measure the robustness of the best classification model. The results show that random forest method outperforms other machine learning models in the classification of protein structure prediction with sensitivity of 0.72 and accuracy of 70.33% on testing data set. The data set used in the study is available at http://bit.ly/RMSD-Classification-DS.

By analyzing homosexuality-related dissertations for theology degree in Korea, this research aims to understand theology research trend on homosexuality, spread the correct awareness of homosexuality, and become a basic data to develop a program for homosexuals. Using 28 theology dissertations published in Korea from the database in the National Assembly Electronic Library, this research analyzed research design, keywords, specific majors of researchers, and research contents by research design. For research design of theology dissertations on homosexuality in Korea, literature review was the most common as it was used in 25 dissertations, followed by 2 surveys and 1 case study. Next, keywords were divided into sex, religions, and others. In the distribution of researchers’ majors, practical theology and systemized theology were the most common. In research content by research design, Christian ethical perspective research was the most common with 8 dissertations, 5 biblical perspective, 4 pastoral counseling perspective, 3 theological perspective, 2 each for legalization of homosexuality and other research, and 1 cultural perspective in literature review research. Although there were few results and dissertations that analyzed theology research on homosexuality in Korea and many studies that repeated similar concepts in a limited research design, broad opinions on homosexuality could be obtained through studies that cited various references related to homosexuality. Based on this research, it is suggested to develop an intervention program for homosexuals that fit the survey on their internal characteristics and the sociocultural elements of Korea in the future.

This study investigated the effect of Neuromuscular Electrical Stimulation (NMES) on the loudness, pitch and quality of the voice of the males diagnosed with dysphagia by stroke. NMES was conducted on experimental group of 15 patients for 2 months repeatedly while compensatory strategies for dysphagia were performed on control group of 15 patients. Loudness, pitch (F₀) and quality (Jitter, Shimmer, NNE; Normalized Noise Energy) of the voice was measured by using acoustic-phonetic analysis. For statistical test, difference in voice change after the treatments was compared by using analysis of covariance (ANCOVA). As the result of analysis, NMES and compensatory strategies had significant difference in intensity, jitter and shimmer (p<.05) while they did not in pitch and NNE. After the intervention of NMES, voice loudness of the subjects was enhanced and periodicity of vocal cord vibration (Jitter, Shimmer) was stabilized. The results of this study imply that NMES may have effect on enhancement of voice loudness and stabilization of periodicity of vocal cord vibration.

Internet of Things is an emerging trend that will take existing health care sector to a new dimension. IOT based e-health products like Smart Infusion Pumps, Smart Monitoring, & Health TV will provide the edge over the existing traditional methods used in healthcare sector. The e–Health solutions provided through IoT devices are more accurate and accountable in context of IoT landscape, which provides various challenges along with exciting opportunities in the industry. Healthcare sector is not about just affordability, access & quality but also about financial & social aspects. Therefore, different Business Models have been developed by different enterprises for Transforming Health systems so as to create real time use and impact for the users especially patients, their families & communities where they belongs the centre of care. The main purpose behind every business model is to generate money in terms of profit. It is nothing but an organized structure where a company knows about its key partners, customers, resources, channels & revenue as well as cost structure. This in turns gives a picture about what an enterprise is, what are its strategies, its competitors etc. Better model showcase the enterprise their possibilities, competencies & responsiveness with the customers as well as clients.

This study aims to grasp the current condition of handovers of practical tasks among nursing students as well as specific items of handovers and the communication clarity. A questionnaire-based survey was conducted on handover experience among 137 individuals who had experience of clinical practice and were senior students at three nursing colleges located in A, B, and C districts. Among then, 27 were chosen for convenience sampling, and their statements were recorded for a descriptive analysis. It turned out that 10.2% of the respondents took an education course of handovers as part of their practical trainings, and that the level of self-confidence for handovers was 2.91±2.12 points. The preferred education methods about handovers included simulations (40.9%), role plays (24.8%), and lectures (13.9%) in the order. In the SBAR-based analysis of handover items, it turned out that there were few statements on vital signs (40.7%) and advice (59.3%), and that the clarity in communication of handover contents was of the middle level as high as 2.30 (±0.42) points. The findings of this study indicate the necessity of education on handovers as part of practical training for nursing students as well as efforts to enhance the clarity of communication in utilization of specific SBAR tools.

Palm vein recognition is a part of physiological biometric uses blood vessel structure for the identification. The blood transfusion from body parts to heart is made by the blood vein. The blood vein carries de-oxygenated hemoglobin that can be sensed under near infrared light. The pattern classification proposes a design cycle to build a system for recognition. The image database was obtained from Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The experimentation was carried on palm vein image captured under near infrared light. The distance metric computation was done and stored in the form of the template. The paper discuss about the experimentation of Euclidean distance metric on the palm vein feature extracted binary image using Gabor filter and canny edge detection.

This was a qualitative study designed to explore the daily lives of Korean sister-in-laws who took an immigrant woman through an international marriage as their new family member. The focus of this study was to discover what difficulties they had and what experiences affected them. Subjects were six Korean sister-in-laws, selected by snowball sampling. Data were collected from May 1 through August 31, 2013, using the ethnographic research method. A 1-to 2-hour session of in-depth, face-to-face interviews and informatory observation were conducted for each subject. The data were analyzed by an ethnographic study through an ongoing process. As a result, the data were organized into 6 categories, 14 main thematic domains and 31 properties. The categories included: “Blaming the sister-in-law who is different from what was expected,” “Afraid of suffering damage from her,” “Acknowledging the way of life of her own,” “Understanding her as the same woman,” “Accepting her as my family member” and “Being in harmony with her through trust and love.” The Korean sisters-in-law in this study turned out to accept the immigrant woman as their family member through 14 main thematic domains. Korean sister-in-laws empathize with their foreign sister-in-laws because they are in the same circumstances as women, and love for the foreign sisters-in-law begins to germinate in the sisters-in-law as supporters through a stage of accepting them as their new family members. It is noted that this experience leads the families to healthy and stable harmony.

The aim of this study was to classify the advanced nursing practices of infection control nurse practitioners (ICNPs) and to measure the time and frequency of these practices to calculate the workload. Nineteen practices were classified as advanced nursing practices of ICNPs. The categories for the main activities of the ICNPs were management, surveillance and epidemic investigation, and education and training. The calculated relative value scale (RVS) scores for the advanced nursing practices ranged from 100 to 386.1, with an average of 266.7 points. The mean score of the frequency of the practices was 2.63 on a 5-point Likert scale. It was noted that 9 of the practices can be completed within 60 minutes, while 10 practices take over 60 minutes. The practices of ICNPs are considered to be cost-effective in decreasing healthcare-associated infections and improving the quality of healthcare services in hospitals. Therefore, the creation of an advanced nurse practitioner system for infection control is necessary.

In order to obtain more value added products, a product quality control is essentially required Many studies show that quality of agriculture products may be reduced from many sources. In this paper I express Technological Strategies uses Sony cyber-shot DSC W350 camera to captured symptoms of Brassica sp. diseased leaf images and sort out the diseases using support vector machine. There is a need to classify and regrow them for the use of future generations. So it is very indispensable to develop a spontaneous system to identify species correctly. This paper proposes an algorithm for recognition of diseased leaf and show the name of disease through image processing and classification technique using Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. The K-Mean Clustering method is used for Segmentation and Gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) is used for the feature extraction in leaves. The work is carried out using 2 species of leaves in MATLAB environment.

Heart rate is one of the important vital signs that monitor cardiovascular disease or control exercise intensity. There are a lot of studies to use heart rate to monitor people’s health status and provide rapid feedback. However, these studies are usually limited to monitor heart rates for an individual at a time. In this paper, we develop a system to allow simultaneous heart rate monitoring for several users who are wearing a wearable heart-rate monitor using an Android smart phone. It provides several useful functions such as setting the candidates to be monitored, monitoring heart rates by graph views, alternating graph views over several users by window touching, and storing and retrieving heart rates on the fly.

This study carries out the analysis by using raw data of the 2010 National Health and Nutrition Survey. 8,313 people are selected as final subjects and PASW 18.0 statistical program was used for the analysis. Allergic diseases were used in the analysis by dividing them into atopic dermatitis and AR and the presence or absence of permanent tooth caries experience and presence or absence of periodontal disease were used as oral health-related variables. As a result, atopic dermatitis was found to be related to permanent tooth caries experience and AR to a periodontal disease.

As patient populations in South Korea become increasingly diverse, health care professionals have to look for innovative ways to communicate effectively across cultures, languages, and health literacy levels. This study proposed the creation of a smart phone application content for use in healthcare setting for patients who cannot express themselves in Korean. The promising features of the smart phone application includes: medical translations in 13 languages; translations about immediate medical necessities, symptoms, medical history or ask questions regarding medical treatment. Hospitals, clinics and health care professionals can use this application to ensure an effective patient-healthcare professional communication.

To examine the effect of a program to encourage fluid intake in institutionalized elderly people. A non-equivalent control group pre- and post-time series design was used. Data were analyzed with the SPSS program by t-test, chi-square test, and repeated measures ANOVA. Elderly people in the experimental group showed significantly better outcomes in terms of body weight reduction, skin moisture levels, and fluid intake and output compared with elderly people in the control group. Elderly people in the experimental group also showed significantly better outcomes in comparison with elderly people in the control group in relation to urinalysis including odor, pH, specific gravity, osmolality, color, white blood cell count, and bacteriuria. A hydration management program could be one of the most effective nursing strategies to ultimately enhance the quality of life and health of institutionalized elderly people.

In today’s word skin diseases and lesions have become one among the most common diseases that people suffer across various age groups. Typical skin illnesses that people suffer throughout the world and more particularly in developing countries are Bacterial Skin infections, Fungal skin infection, Eczema and Scabies. Identification of the influential clinical symptoms that help in the diagnosis of these illnesses in early phase of the illness would aid in designing effective public health management. Keeping this as our main objective, this paper describes the two predictive models for our multiclass classification problem. The models are developed using popular soft computing techniques namely Artificial Neural Network and Support Vector Machine. These two approaches are applied on the multi class classification dataset and some comparative inferences are generated using F-scores.

Identification of the disease-causal genomic variants that alter human phenotypes, particularly those that lead to diseases, is the central goal of human genetics studies. In the past decade, genome-wide studies have identified several hundreds of common variants associated with complex human diseases and traits. Despite these successes, most of the common variants only have a small individual contribution to the estimated heritability underlying common diseases and traits. Many explanations for these missing heritabilities have been suggested, including rare variants, structural variants, regulatory variants, and epigenetic variants. Recent advances in high-throughput technologies have provided an opportunity to construct comprehensive maps of genetic variation, including the several million single nucleotide variants, thousands of small insertion or deletion events, and thousands of structural variants, in both the protein-coding and noncoding regions of the human genome without time and cost limitations. The present review describes current bioinformatics tools for identifying deleterious variants in protein-coding regions based on the evolutionary and functional constraints of human proteins.

In this paper, a PID model-based adaptive robust control method is proposed in order to design a high performance robust controller in the presence of structured (parametric) uncertainties and unstructured uncertainties. The approach improves performance by using the advantages of sliding mode control, adaptive control, and PID controller, while the disadvantages attributed to these methods are remedied by each other. This is achieved without increasing the complexities of the overall design and analysis of the control system (controller). The proposed controller attenuates the effect of model uncertainties from both structured uncertainties and unstructured uncertainties. Thus, transient performance and final tracking accuracy is guaranteed by proper design of the controller. Therefore, asymptotic tracking (or zero final tracking error) can be achieved without using high-gain feedback. The design is conceptually simple and is reliable in applications because of its high performance and strong robustness.