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Institute
Aim: The aim of this study was to give an overview of family caregiver satisfaction within the home palliative care situation in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
Design: A cross-sectional study.
Methods: An anonymous questionnaire, with seven validated scales, and comprising of 71 items, was used. The items investigated perceived needs and burdens of families within a home-based palliative care situation.
The satisfaction of the family caregivers with the services delivered by palliative care teams was measured by the FAMCARE-2 Scale. Descriptive statistics and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) were performed.
Results: A convenience sample of 106 family members agreed to participate in the study. Overall, we found high satisfaction within our sample. There was high satisfaction with how the services respected the dignity of families, and how they provided comfort to patients. Satisfaction was lower with regard to information about patients.
Conclusion: High or low satisfaction with palliative care, tells us little about the quality of services. The high satisfaction within this study could be interpreted as a sign that palliative care was important to families at the time of availability. Regular and continuous assessment can serve to inform the continuous quality of care provision for patients and their families.
The usage of high-level synthesis (HLS) tools for FPGAs has increased significantly over the last years since they matured and allow software programmers to take advantage of reconfigurable hardware technology.
Most HLS tools employ methods to optimize for loops, e. g. by unrolling or pipelining them. But there is hardly any work on the optimization of while loops. This comes at no surprise since most while loops have loop-carried dependences involving the loop condition which result in large recurrence cycles in the dataflow graphs. Therefore typical while loops cannot be parallelized or pipelined.
We propose a novel transformation which allows to optimize while loops nested within a for loop. By interchanging the two loops, it is possible to pipeline (and thereby parallelize) the inner loop, resulting in a reduced execution time. We present two case studies on different hardware platforms and show the speedup factors - compared to a host processor and to an unoptimized hardware implementation - achieved by our while loop optimization method.
The interdisciplinary research project TiP.De - Theatre in Dementia Health Care aims at identifying the effects of theatre pedagogy on quality of life of people with dementia in two German nursing homes.
The mixed-methods intervention study measures cognitive impairment, quality of life in daily living and agitation in a pre-post-comparison, as well as emotional reactions during the theatre pedagogical interventions of the participants.
The intervention is expected to have a positive impact on cognitive impairment, quality of life, agitation and relationship between the participants and the assisting nursing home staff. Further data analysis will show correlations between specific items.
The results and the theatre pedagogy concept for people with dementia will be published, so that theatre pedagogues are able to implement the concept in other nursing homes. The nursing situation, communication and work experience of nurses, as well as quality of life of people with dementia are going to be positively affected.
MusicPhysio: 1st International Conference on Physiotherapy/Occupational Therapy and Musicians Health
(2017)
This paper introduces and empirically illustrates a pedagogical approach to teaching Public Relations (PR) in higher education. The approach is based on the Communities of Practice theory (Wenger, 1998). Based on this theory and for the purposes of this paper, learning is perceived as (1) a participation in a practice of (2) a social community and (3) the understanding of this practice. The pedagogical approach to teaching PR entails the facilitation of these three elements. The approach is illustrated through a case study. The authors conducted an international undergraduate course to teach students how to conduct a social media campaign to raise engagement for social issues. Twenty students from Netherlands and Germany enrolled. The paper offers an integrated understanding of theory and practice (see Wenger, 1998, p. 48). It contrasts many current approaches in PR education, which tend to differentiate between PR theory and practice. PR educators are encouraged to facilitate an equal negotiation between theory and practice and to enable students to match whatever is theorised with practice and whatever is practiced with theory.
The Internet of Things (IoT) relies on sensor devices to measure real-world phenomena in order to provide IoT services. The sensor readings are shared with multiple entities, such as IoT services, other IoT devices or other third parties. The collected data may be sensitive and include personal information. To protect the privacy of the users, the data needs to be protected through an encryption algorithm. For sharing cryptographic cipher-texts with a group of users Attribute-Based Encryption (ABE) is well suited, as it does not require to create group keys. However, the creation of ABE cipher-texts is slow when executed on resource constraint devices, such as IoT sensors. In this paper, we present a modification of an ABE scheme, which not only allows to encrypt data efficiently using ABE, but also reduces the size of the cipher-text, that must be transmitted by the sensor. We also show how our modification can be used to realise an instantaneous key revocation mechanism.
The Osnabrueck University of Applied Sciences has initiated a project to investigate whether and how dual study programs or even elements of it can be integrated into South African university study programs. The present part of the investigation presents the expert assessments of the demands and requirements for dual study programs and, based on a company survey, the existing level of information.
The significance of dual study programs in South Africa is still low, only a few company specific approaches exist, mostly in internationally operating companies. Nevertheless, closer cooperation and more company orientated learning is required. The willingness to participate in dual study programs was confirmed from all surveyed companies. Dual courses seems to be particularly suitable for technical disciplines, but are also suitable for some business courses.
In idea creation and assessment processes the accruement and the description of an idea are mostly allocated to a fixed point in time, defined as the end of the generating process and the start of the idea assessment. This static approach does not fit the reality in industrial idea processes. A dynamic approach for idea assessment is therefore introduced. An idea is not seen as a static but as a dynamic state, characterized by different degrees of maturity. Maturity is understood as a measure of the assessability of the individual evaluation characteristics.
Based on Crosby’s maturity model and on classical Capability Maturity Models, a new Idea Maturity Model (IMM) has been developed and is introduced for the first time. The five Idea Maturity Levels (IML) are named Initial, Awareness, Appraisability, Valuation, and Realisability and harmonize well with other maturity models. The levels are described by general characteristics, although the development of the maturity model focussed on new product or service development. The compatibility of the IMM with idea assessment processes and conditions in organisations and companies has been checked.
Incidence of Tube Feeding in 7174 Newly Admitted Nursing Home Residents With and Without Dementias
(2015)
Background:
Tube feeding is a common form of long-term nutritional support, especially for nursing home residents, of whom many have dementia.
Objective:
Estimating the incidence of feeding tube placement in nursing home residents with and without dementia.
Methods:
Using claims data, we studied a cohort of newly admitted nursing home residents aged 65 years and older between 2004 and 2009. Analyses were stratified by dementia. We estimated incidence rates and performed multivariate Cox regression analyses.
Results:
The study cohort included 7174 nursing home residents. Over a mean follow-up of 1.3 years, 273 people received a feeding tube. The incidence per 1000 person-years was 28.4, with higher estimates for patients with dementia. When adjusting for age, sex, and level of care as a time-dependent covariate, influence of dementia decreased to a nonsignificant hazard ratio.
Conclusion:
It seems that not dementia itself but the overall clinical condition might be a predictor of tube feeding placement.