Earticle

A series of forearm pronation and supination motor tasks (FPSMT) has been developed to quantitatively assess various primary motor symptoms such as resting tremor, bradykinesia, rigidity, and posture disturbance using an accelerometer built into a smartphone, which is portable, comfortable and cost-effective. The FPSMT has two series of tasks, Flat and Up, which differ according to initial forearm posture. The results from 33 subjects including 6 PD patients showed sensitivities and specificities greater than 85% in rating of primary motor symptoms. This suggests that FPSMT could be used to collect forearm motor-related information on a daily basis, allowing for early diagnosis of patients with PD and also for constantly informing physicians about their patients’ clinical status so as to quickly readjust and personalize treatment plans and minimize side effects.

Epilepsy is a perilous neurological disease covering about 4-5% of total population of the world. Its main characteristics are seizures which occur due to certain disturbance in brain function. During epileptic seizures the patient is unaware of their physical as well as mental condition and hence physical injury may occur. Proper health care must be provided to the patients and this can be achieved only if the seizures are detected correctly in time. In this dissertation work, a system is designed using wavelet decomposition method and different training algorithms to train the neural network for classification of the EEG signals. The system was tested and compared with Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. The system accuracy comes out to be 99.97%.

To address global warming caused by increased CO2 emissions, many studies on CO2 reduction have been conducted worldwide. In carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, the mineral carbonation process causes CO2 to react with particular metals or compounds to stably fix CO2. Many relevant studies have been performed on this capture process. Based on research describing photosynthetic bacteria that fix CO2 in the process of producing H2 under light irritation, this study combines ceramics with photosynthetic bacteria to develop a material capable of reducing environmental CO2. To investigate the possible combinations this study conducted experiments on ceramic materials of hardened cement pastes and lightweight aggregates made using waste from the Korean Y power plant. The photosynthetic bacteria Rhodopseudomonas pentothenatexigens AE8-5 was used and cultivated in a standard culturing medium. To examine the CO2 reduction rate, a 165 mL sealable glass bottle was used and CO2 was injected through the rubber lid using a syringe. Ceramic specimens were placed in the medium with the photosynthetic bacteria, and then were cultured in a shaking incubator at 25-30°C, a pH of 7, 6000 lux irradiation, and a shaking rate of 120 RPM. After the injection of the bacteria, gas chromatography-thermal conductivity detection analysis was performed on the gases in the bottles, and the presence of CO2 was confirmed. When 30 g of the ceramic aggregate with a low reaction rate with CO2 was used and the photosynthetic bacteria were irradiated, the CO2 concentration was reduced by ~40%. It is necessary to address the amount of ceramic material used and the shaking friction generated in order for uniform light irradiation when the ceramic is combined with photosynthetic bacteria. The results demonstrated that materials combining photosynthetic bacteria and ceramic are applicable for future studies.

The red tide organisms occurring at seashores in Korea damage the marine fish-raising industry every summer. Several methods to prevent the occurrence of red tide organisms, therefore, have been tried; one of them is to filter out red tide organisms using a membrane filled with porous ceramic bodies, allowing only fresh seawater to pass into a fish farm. When this method is used for long period of time, however, the problem of marine bio-fouling can develop on the surfaces of the porous ceramic body, deteriorating the filtering function of the porous bodies. In this paper, the influences of the zeta potential, water absorption and surface roughness of porous ceramics on marine bio-fouling have been inspected. In order to control the above three factors, three kinds of ceramic powders, alumina, titania and zirconia, were coated on the porous bodies. As a result, the water absorption and the surface roughness of the porous ceramics were found to be equally important factors in preventing bio-fouling, while the zeta potential of the specimens did not show a prominent effect. In detail, the water absorption of specimens was an effective factor in the early stages of bio-fouling for about one month; on the other hand, the surface roughness of the specimen was a main factor that could be used to control the amount of bio-fouling after one month. Among the three ceramic powders used as coatings, alumina, by imparting lower water absorption and higher surface roughness to the specimens, proved to be the optimum one to prevent marine bio-fouling.

This paper studies the synchronization of SA and AV Node Oscillators using PSO optimized RBF-based controllers systems. High levels of control activities may excite unmodeled dynamics of a system. This matter changes the rules of controlling the system and achieving an acceptable control performance. In fact, the objective here is to reach a trade-off between tracking performance and parametric uncertainty. Two methods are proposed to synchronize the general forms of Van Der Pol (VDP) Model and their performance. These methods use the radial basis function (RBF)- based neural controllers for this purpose. The first method uses a standard RBF neural controller. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is used to derive and optimize the parameters of the RBF controller. In the second method, with the aim of increasing the robustness of the RBF controller, an error integral term is added to the equations of RBF neural network. For this method, the coefficients of the error integral component and the parameters of RBF neural network are also derived and optimized via PSO algorithm. For better comparison, simulation results show the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed methods in both performances in comparison with SMC controller.

Purpose: Purpose of this descriptive research is to examine the correlation of alexithymia, anger and binge eating behavior of university students to prepare the basic data to develop nursing intervention which could be helpful to control anger and binge eating behavior. Method: Study subjects were targeting 412 university students and the correlation between alexithymia, anger and binge eating behavior was analyzed using Pearson‘s Correlation. Results: Alexithymia, anger and binge eating behavior showed significant correlation. Higher the alexithymia is so higher was anger and binge eating behavior. So we must develop nursing intervention for alexithymia.

Ventricular fibrillation is one of the most common causes of sudden cardiac arrest in adults. A lot of research has been done on ventricular fibrillation. However, that research draws conclusions from animal studies and they could not induce artificial ventricular fibrillation in human subjects. This paper looks at whether there is a difference between ventricular fibrillations in animal models and in human models, with comparisons of ventricular fibrillation obtained from the two groups. This study compares and analyzes electrocardiography (ECG) wave forms as electrical bio-signals of the two groups, in which the histogram of gradient (HOG) and auto-associative multilayer perceptrons (AAMLP) are applied for feature extraction and pattern analysis, repsectively, of the bio-signals. The characteristics of electrical signals in animal ventricular fibrillation and those in human ventricular fibrillation are conclusively similar and it is reasonable to adapt the results obtained from animal research to clinical practices.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships between nurse staffing and patient outcomes including inpatient mortality and length of hospital stay. Data were obtained from the '2008 Korea National Patients Survey' conducted by the Korea Institute for Health and Social Affairs. The study sample consisted of inpatients with surgical cerebrovascular diseases (n= 728). Nurse staffing was measured using 2 indicators: number of beds per nurse and number of inpatient days per nurse. Hospital characteristics included size, location, ownership, and physician staffing. Patient characteristics were age, gender, primary diagnosis, admission route, type of surgery, and primary payer. Patient outcomes were mortality during hospitalization and length of hospital stay. After controlling for hospital and patient characteristics, the relationships of nurse staffing to inpatient mortality and length of hospital stay were analyzed by multilevel analysis. Nurse staffing was not significantly associated with inpatient mortality. Higher nurse staffing was related to a decrease in length of hospital stay. The study findings suggested that higher nurse staffing might decrease length of hospital stay, which could increase efficiency and profits in providing hospital services. Government and nursing policies are required to ensure adequate nurse staffing in hospitals.

Carbon management is a serious concern confronting the world today. The importance of carbon sequestration in tree biomass has long been recognized, but few attempts have been made to estimate tree biomass accumulation and its contribution to sequestration of carbon on mined areas. Carbon sequestration rates vary by tree species, soil type, regional climate, and topography and management practice. We quantified biomass accumulation and carbon sequestration by Azadirachta indica A. Juss raised on coal mine overburden at Singrauli, Madhya Pradesh, India, adopting non harvest methods. A. indica, of the family Meliaceae, is one of the most widely distributed and multipurpose tree species occurring in dry regions of the country. Growth data were collected for 115 trees (>5 cm DBH) covering the overburden plantations of Northern Coal Field Limited, Singrauli (India). Plantation varied from 2-18 years. Significant correlations were identified between basal area and volume, DBH and volume and basal area and total biomass.

The objective of this study is to identify the experiences of tennis elbow patients’ uses of alternative therapies through a study of their experience. This study used an inductive descriptive research method, which tries to reveal experiences through analysis of description of human experiences as a qualitative research method. Information providers (participants) were a total of five patients, who visited an Oriental Medicine Hospital to receive alternative therapies through surgical and non-surgical treatments, complaining of decrease in muscle strength, muscle contracture and abnormal stress on the elbow joint due to tennis elbow among those who play tennis as a hobby. The data were collected from June to October 2014 for 6 months until they were theoretically saturated. With the participants’ permission got digital audio recording of in depth interviews and observation for data collection. The number of the concepts finally drawn through a data analysis were 32 out of 102, and 13 sub-categories and 9 upper categories were drawn. This study will understand the experiences of tennis elbow and the results of the study will be used as the basic data for the development of independent nursing interventions using alternative therapies in Korean culture. This study suggests the application of the results as Korean nursing interventions studied with various methods to understand the patients, including the areas of public health and nursing for family and community in the future.

This study was conducted with the aim of providing baseline data for the establishment of policies for system enhancement, by identifying the influences of work satisfaction and job stress on turnover intention within the nursing force in the Comprehensive Nursing Service ward, a newly adopted service, and the General ward. The study subjects were nurses in the General and Comprehensive Nursing Service wards at two hospitals in Seoul, and one in Gyeonggi region. The survey was conducted in the form of a self-administered questionnaire. The study discovered no significant disparities between the two groups, with regard to the salience of the variables, namely, turnover intention and work satisfaction and job stress levels. In both groups, there was a significant negative correlation between work satisfaction level and turnover intention, and between turnover intention and job stress level. Moreover, in both groups, work satisfaction and job stress levels had significant influences on turnover intention. In conclusion, to enable the establishment of the Comprehensive Nursing Service ward system as an effective healthcare management system, nurses’ work satisfaction and job stress levels must become critical factors of consideration. It is necessary for the system to evolve into a form that is satisfactory to patients, families, and nurses.

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is a vital biomedical signal for diagnosing heart diseases, but now it has many other applications like stress recognition, biometric recognition etc. but ECG signal gets noisy from various sources like as muscle noise, electrode artifacts, baseline drift noise and respiration. As wavelet transform shows a good performance in de-noising the ECG signal, however the selection of appropriate mother wavelet functions and number of wavelet decomposition levels is still an issue to remove the various kinds of noises from the input signal. It is essential to denoise the ECG signal to get appropriate features of ECG signal.This research work analyze and compare the removal of noise and distortion in ECG signal using five wavelets(Daubechies, Coiflet, Haar, Biorthogonal and Symmlet) with four thresholding rules(SURE, Hybrid,Universal and Minimax) and various decomposition levels using Fuzzy Inference System .The parameters used for performance analysis are Signal to Noise Ratio,Mean Square Error(MSE) and variance.

This study was done to construct and test a structural model to explain health risk be-havior of adolescents. Data for this study were secondary data from the 2010 Korea Adolescent Health Survey based and 7,187 middle and high school students who partici-pated. Data were analyzed using SPSS 18.0 and AMOS 19.0 programs. The result showed that Risk behavior of physical activity & sleep is directly affected by 2 variables (27.6%), Risk behavior of smoking & drinking is directly affected by 1 variable (0.9%). The results of this study, indicate that adolescents’ health risk behavior is affected by many factors with complicate correlations suggesting further study compare youth health risk behaviors in a variety of environments.

Biomethanation is a feasible method to generate the biogas from organic waste like food waste, human waste, night soil waste, cow dung etc. The night soil waste and animal waste has bad odor in nature and it produces some infection to operators, so we implement the automation in biomethanation plant. This plant has four major processes like waste collection and mixing, digestion, gas collection and gas distribution. These above processes are controlled by manually, hence it produces some problems and errors, to overcome this problem, and we proposed an automatic control system for biomethanation plant. In this system the overall process are controlled by programmable logic controller and field instruments. And also these processes are controlled and monitored by SCADA using wonderware intouch software.

This study attempted to examine the level of foreign students’ knowledge, attitude, and preventive behavior toward tuberculosis, and examine relationship between each variable. The results of study are as follows. First, 5.5% of participants have been infected with tuberculosis. In case of 23.7% of these participants, there were persons infected with tuberculosis around them. 59.6% of participants received a health education relating to tuberculosis Second, 44.9% of participants answered correctly regarding the knowledge about tuberculosis in total; 35.1% of them answered correctly regarding the knowledge relating to the symptoms of tuberculosis, and the percentage was the lowest. It was shown that a score in attitude towards tuberculosis was 56.99±6.933 on a scale of 75, and a score in preventive behavior towards tuberculosis was an average of 59.61±7.634 on a scale of 75. Third, in an analysis of Pearson's correlation among knowledge about tuberculosis, attitude towards tuberculosis, and preventive behavior towards tuberculosis, it was verified that there was a positive correlation . An attitude towards tuberculosis had a positive mediating effect in the relationship regarding the effect of total score in knowledge towards tuberculosis (p<.05). The above results suggest that the tuberculosis management for a growing number of foreign students is urgent, and a health education program that can change the perception and attitude toward tuberculosis needs to be developed.

From the recent diversity of face recognition applications, it can be concluded that studies on face recognition are being actively conducted. However, high-performance algorithms sometimes cannot be adopted because of environmental reasons such as pose variation of targets or lighting conditions at the outdoor CCTV. Further, a low-resolution CCTV image cannot be used for an appearance-based high-performance method. Therefore, we consider pixel-based face recognition methods as CCTV applications. Before applying the methods, a Retinex-based illumination normalization method is used. The methods are applied with various facial poses, and three kinds of face recognition methods are comparatively analyzed in this paper. The experimental results showed that linear discriminant analysis exhibited the best performance as the matching method taking into consideration various facial poses.

Bacteriological, physicochemical and heavy metal analyses of treated water supply to the Kumasi Metropolis from the Barekese Headwork was carried out. Samples from BK4 and BK6 have their turbidity higher than the WHO acceptable limits for drinking water but the pH recorded were all within the limits of 6.5 to 8.5. Conductivity varied from 250.20 μS/cm at Asuofua (BK1) to 368.11 μS/cm at KNUST Campus (BK7). The TDS of both headwork and households were all below the standard of 1000mg/l. Calcium hardness was from 44.80 mg/L at site BK1 to 72.10 mg/L at BK6 whilst Magnesium hardness recorded 18.90 mg/L at BK5 to 30.20 mg/L also at the headwork. There was no statistical difference between the samples collected from the headwork and the other sampling sites in its total hardness (p > 0.05). Samples from BK2, BK4 and BK6 recorded Pb concentrations above the recommended limit. Ca, Mn, Fe and Mg on the hand, were all present but within the acceptable limit. The results indicated that water supplied to households in the Metropolis was potable in its physicochemical and trace metal quality except samples from BK4 and BK6 which recorded both total and faecal coliforms with the highest count being 41.20 cfu/100ml at BK4.

The Purpose of this study was to investigate the actual status and knowledge about hospice among nursing students in Korea. The collected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, t-test and one-way ANOVA. 433 participants completed surveys. The results demonstrated that high level of hospice knowledge was found in most of nursing students whereas very low scores found in detailed and professional contents including side effects of analgesics and care for rest. Greater knowledge of hospice was associated with age, grade, necessity perception about hospice and main provider of hospice. Most of the respondents were aware of hospice and replied that the role of nurses in hospice was recognized with huge significance. Therefore, professional and systematic hospice education should be opened as a single course in nursing curriculum and included contents such as analgesics and care for rest. This would help nursing students to understand of hospice care and enable terminal patients to provide high quality hospice care.

Korea Traditional Medicine is popular in use among Korean public but there exist few available health information systems on the internet. A computerized self-checking diagnosis system is proposed to reduce the social cost by monitoring health status with simple symptom checking procedures especially for Korea Traditional Medicine users. Methods: Based on the national reports for disease/symptoms of Korea Traditional Medicine, we build a reliable database and devise an intelligent inference engine using Fuzzy ART Clustering. The implemented system gives five most probable diseases a user might have with respect to symptoms given by the user. Thus, in this paper, we propose a self-diagnosis system of Korean traditional medicine based on Korean Standard Causes of Death Disease Classification Index(KCD) and Fuzzy ART/inference method. Since this is for self-diagnosis, our system has graphical user-friendly interface that accepts symptoms of user from a certain part of body where the user feels inconvenient. Inference results are verified by Korea Traditional Medicine doctors as sufficiently accurate and easy to use.

The ECG (electrocardiogram) is a system that provides patient’s critical heart activity. The adaptive electrocardiogram filter will be designed to reduce noise caused by external systems & body artifacts. This paper aims to help to reduce the noise interference in the ECG signals and better diagnose results. Some of the most common examples of noise that the ECG filter would need to remove in order to give useful results includes power line interference, motion artifacts, muscle contraction, electrode contact noise and interference caused due other electronic equipment. ECG signals are weak and easily susceptible to noise and interference. In this paper I have presented an implementation of Least Mean Squares (LMS).

This study was conducted to determine the emotional intelligence, emotional labor and burnout among psychological nurses. The subjects were 200 psychological nurses working at 5 mental hospitals in C & D city. The self-reported questionnaires were administered to psychological nurses and data were analyzed with SPSS 19.0. Results were as follows: The burnout was negative correlation with emotional intelligence, burnout was positive correlation with emotional labor. The burnout of psychological nurses was significantly different according to age and job satisfaction. The significant explanatory variables of burnout were emotional intelligence, emotional labor, job satisfaction, and experience of move unit. Explanatory power was 36.5% . The findings suggested that the intervention program of burnout should be developed in order to improve psychological support, manage emotional Intelligence and reduce emotional labor among psychological nurses.

This study was conducted on 48 senior citizens with mild cognitive impairments and it aims at examining changes in the blood-homocysteine levels and cognitive functions after taking vitamins orally. For analysis, Chi-Square test, Fisher’s Exact test and independent t-test, Repeated Measure ANOVA, Contrast test, Repeated Measure ANCOVA, and Wilks’ lambda test were carried out. In result, when senior citizens with mild cognitive impairments took vitamin pills, the blood-homocysteine level continuously reduced in week 4, week 8 and week 12, and cognitive functions continuously increased every week. Such results show that by having senior citizens with mild cognitive impairments orally take vitamin pills, which are relatively cheap and easy to take compared to other methods, it can prevent addition drop in cognitive functions and prevent dementia.

Image processing is a technique developed by computer and Information technology scientist and being used in all field of research including medical sciences. The focus of this paper is the use of image processing in tumor detection from the brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). For the brain tumor detection, Computed Tomography (CT) and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) are the prominent imaging techniques, but most of the experts prefer MRI over CT. The traditional method of tumor detection in MRI images is a manual inspection which provides variations in the results when analyzed by different experts, therefore, in view of the limitations of the manual analysis of MRI, there is a need for an automated system that can produce globally acceptable and accurate results. There is enough amount of published literature available to replace the manual inspection process of MRI images with the digital computer system using image processing techniques. In this paper, we have provided a review of digital image processing techniques in the context of brain MRI processing and critically analyzed them for the identification of the gaps and limitations of the techniques so that the gaps can be filled and limitations of various techniques can be improved for precise and better results.

Recently, the clinical and healthcare recommending service is required in medical center for the clinical diagnosis and plan of treatment in connection with cardiovascula disease. We propose a method of the clinical and healthcare recommending service based on cardiovascula disease pattern analysis for medical treatment service. We use SVM(Support Vector Machine) to segment the clinical historical data, to join patients’ clinical test data with input vectors of multi-parametric features, cardiovascula disease code, input factors and finally forms clusters of the clinical historical data based on electronic medical record. Then, we make an application on the clinical and healthcare recommending service for cardiovascula disease treatment information of cardiovascula patients to reduce patients’ search effort to get the curing information and the diagnosis for recovering their health, to improve the accuracy for the clinical and healthcare recommending service. We carry out experiments with data set of medical center to measure its performance. We report some of the experimental results.

For treating the chronic illnesses, the best choice of drug delivery might be the controlled drug delivery systems. Nanoscaled drug delivery systems like nanofibres, nanoparticles are in the advancement of the controlled drug delivery system. Nanofibres are being a good choice due to its advantages like high drug loading and encapsulation efficiency. The present study is concerned with the synthesis of simple electrospunned nanofibres of Chitosan (CHI)/Polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) blended with Hydroxy ethyl cellulose (HEC) which will be preloaded with a model chemotherapeutic agent 5-Fluorouracil (5-FU) before electrospinning. HEC is chosen for its capability of enhancing the nanofiber formation since it is used as the thickening agents in several fields. The various mixture proportions of HEC and PVA blends were tried to form electrospunned fibers and characterized usingFT-IT, SEM, TGA and UV-VIS (for drug release study). The data output strengthening that HEC might be used to get the optimum nanofibre in the CHI/PVA nanofibre preparation which may be useful for controlled releasing of the drugs like 5-FU for treating colo-rectal cancer like chronic illnesses.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has enhanced human life including in health care. Consequently, professional workers in the field of health services are required to improve productivity, accuracy, efficiency and service. The use of ICT for health purposes is known as e-Health. The development of e-Health can use the grid technology for resource sharing and interoperability. The technology can process a very large data for parallel computation. It can also be used to facilitate health practitioners and researchers in the field of health, including to find a new virus, discovery new drugs, disease, an image of organs and to determine the actions for a patient. As an archipelago country where many health services centers distributed in the country, Indonesia needs an appropriate model of e-Health Grid. AS preliminary study, this paper proposes an e-Health Grid network topology based on the province in Indonesia.

Purpose: The objective of this study was to identify the factors related to atopic dermatitis and its prevalence among Korean adults, and to examine the relationship of vitamin D levels to AD prevalence. Methods: Combined data from the 2008-2013 Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey were analyzed by using the chi-squared test and multivariable logistic regression. Results: AD prevalence among 27,860 Korean adults was 2.7% and varied significantly with age, body mass index, and vitamin D levels, as well as presence of asthma, depression, and stress. Vitamin D deficiency and insufficiency were found in 66.8% and 27.5%, respectively. Only 5.7% had sufficient vitamin D levels. Age and asthma were factors associated with an increased prevalence of AD in those with vitamin D deficiency (7.57 times and 2.87 times, respectively), and insufficiency (4.42 times and 2.58 times). However, there were no such risk factors in patients with sufficient vitamin D levels. Conclusion: This study showed that patients with higher vitamin D levels have decreased AD prevalence despite risk factors. Development of an intervention program including lifestyle improvement is suggested.