Search results for: Youth friendly health services
618 Statistical Analysis of Interferon-γ for the Effectiveness of an Anti-Tuberculous Treatment
Authors: Shishen Xie, Yingda L. Xie
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Tuberculosis (TB) is a potentially serious infectious disease that remains a health concern. The Interferon Gamma Release Assay (IGRA) is a blood test to find out if an individual is tuberculous positive or negative. This study applies statistical analysis to the clinical data of interferon-gamma levels of seventy-three subjects who diagnosed pulmonary TB in an anti-tuberculous treatment. Data analysis is performed to determine if there is a significant decline in interferon-gamma levels for the subjects during a period of six months, and to infer if the anti-tuberculous treatment is effective.Keywords: Data analysis, interferon gamma release assay, statistical methods, tuberculosis infection.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1956617 The Effect of Organizational Commitment and Burnout on Organizational Cynicism: A Field Study in the Healthcare Industry
Authors: A. Beduk, K. Eryesil, O. Esmen
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The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between organizational commitment which is defined as a strong belief in and acceptance of the organization’s goals and values, and burnout syndrome and organizational cynicism. Accordingly, a field research based on survey method was conducted on the employees of a health institution operating in the province of Konya. The findings of the research show that there is a positive statistically significant relationship between organizational cynicism and burnout while there is a negative statistically significant relationship between organizational commitment and burnout. Furthermore, it has been also realized that there is a negative and statistically significant relationship between organizational commitment and organizational cynicism.Keywords: Burnout, organizational commitment, organizational cynicism, healthcare management.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2659616 Study of Polyphenol Profile and Antioxidant Capacity in Italian Ancient Apple Varieties by Liquid Chromatography
Authors: A. M. Tarola, R. Preti, A. M. Girelli, P. Campana
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Safeguarding, studying and enhancing biodiversity play an important and indispensable role in re-launching agriculture. The ancient local varieties are therefore a precious resource for genetic and health improvement. In order to protect biodiversity through the recovery and valorization of autochthonous varieties, in this study we analyzed 12 samples of four ancient apple cultivars representative of Friuli Venezia Giulia, selected by local farmers who work on a project for the recovery of ancient apple cultivars. The aim of this study is to evaluate the polyphenolic profile and the antioxidant capacity that characterize the organoleptic and functional qualities of this fruit species, besides having beneficial properties for health. In particular, for each variety, the following compounds were analyzed, both in the skins and in the pulp: gallic acid, catechin, chlorogenic acid, epicatechin, caffeic acid, coumaric acid, ferulic acid, rutin, phlorizin, phloretin and quercetin to highlight any differences in the edible parts of the apple. The analysis of individual phenolic compounds was performed by High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) coupled with a diode array UV detector (DAD), the antioxidant capacity was estimated using an in vitro essay based on a Free Radical Scavenging Method and the total phenolic compounds was determined using the Folin-Ciocalteau method. From the results, it is evident that the catechins are the most present polyphenols, reaching a value of 140-200 μg/g in the pulp and of 400-500 μg/g in the skin, with the prevalence of epicatechin. Catechins and phlorizin, a dihydrohalcone typical of apples, are always contained in larger quantities in the peel. Total phenolic compounds content was positively correlated with antioxidant activity in apple pulp (r2 = 0,850) and peel (r2 = 0,820). Comparing the results, differences between the varieties analyzed and between the edible parts (pulp and peel) of the apple were highlighted. In particular, apple peel is richer in polyphenolic compounds than pulp and flavonols are exclusively present in the peel. In conclusion, polyphenols, being antioxidant substances, have confirmed the benefits of fruit in the diet, especially as a prevention and treatment for degenerative diseases. They demonstrated to be also a good marker for the characterization of different apple cultivars. The importance of protecting biodiversity in agriculture was also highlighted through the exploitation of native products and ancient varieties of apples now forgotten.
Keywords: Apple, biodiversity, polyphenols, antioxidant activity, HPLC-DAD, characterization.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 831615 The State-of-Art Environmental Impact Assessment: An Overview
Authors: Tsolmon Tumenjargal, Muhammad Hassan Khalil, Wu Yao Guo
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The research on the effectiveness of environmental assessment (EA) is a milestone effort to evaluate the state of the field, including many contributors related with a lot of countries since more than two decades. In the 1960s, there was a surge of interest between modern industrialized countries over unexpected opposite effects of technical invention. The interest led to choice of approaches for assessing and prediction the impressions of technology and advancement for social and economic, state health and safety, solidity and the circumstances. These are consisting of risk assessment, technology assessment, environmental impact assessment and costbenefit analysis. In this research contribution, the authors have described the research status for environmental assessment in cumulative environmental system. This article discusses the methods for cumulative effect assessment (CEA).
Keywords: Cumulative effect assessment, Environmental impact assessment.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1701614 Continual Improvement with Integrated Management System
Authors: Sharareh Mirsaeidi Farahani , Gholamreza Chitsaz
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Management Systems are powerful tools for businesses to manage quality , environmental and occupational health and safety requirements . where once these systems were considered as stand alone control mechanisms , industry is now opting to increase the efficiency of these documented systems through a more integrated approach . System integration offers a significant step forward, where there are similarities between system components , reducing duplication and adminstration costs and increasing efficiency . At first , this paper reviews integrated management system structure and its benefits. The second part of this paper focuses on the one example implementation of such a system at Imam Khomeini Hospital and in final part of the paper will be discuss outcomes of that proccess .Keywords: environmental management , Integratedmanagement systems, occupational healt and safetymanagement , quality management.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 3243613 The Ongoing Impact of Secondary Stressors on Businesses in Northern Ireland Affected by Flood Events
Authors: Jill Stephenson, Marie Vaganay, Robert Cameron, Caoimhe McGurk, Neil Hewitt
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Purpose: The key aim of the research was to identify the secondary stressors experienced by businesses affected by single or repeated flooding and to determine to what extent businesses were affected by these stressors, along with any resulting impact on health. Additionally the research aimed to establish the likelihood of businesses being re-exposed to the secondary stressors through assessing awareness of flood risk, implementation of property protection measures and level of community resilience. Design/methodology/approach: The chosen research method involved the distribution of a questionnaire survey to businesses affected by either single or repeated flood events. The questionnaire included the Impact of Event Scale (a 15-item self-report measure which assesses subjective distress caused by traumatic events). Findings: 55 completed questionnaires were returned by flood impacted businesses. 89% of the businesses had sustained internal flooding, while 11% had experienced external flooding. The results established that the key secondary stressors experienced by businesses, in order of priority, were: flood damage, fear of reoccurring flooding, prevention of access to the premise/closure, loss of income, repair works, length of closure and insurance issues. There was a lack of preparedness for potential future floods and consequent vulnerability to the emergence of secondary stressors among flood affected businesses, as flood resistance or flood resilience measures had only been implemented by 11% and 13% respectively. In relation to the psychological repercussions, the Impact of Event scores suggested that potential prevalence of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was noted among 8 out of 55 respondents (l5%). Originality/value: The results improve understanding of the enduring repercussions of flood events on businesses, indicating that not only residents may be susceptible to the detrimental health impacts of flood events and single flood events may be just as likely as reoccurring flooding to contribute to ongoing stress. Lack of financial resources is a possible explanation for the lack of implementation of property protection measures among businesses, despite 49% experiencing flooding on multiple occasions. Therefore it is recommended that policymakers should consider potential sources of financial support or grants towards flood defences for flood impacted businesses. Any form of assistance should be made available to businesses at the earliest opportunity as there was no significant association between the time of the last flood event and the likelihood of experiencing PTSD symptoms.
Keywords: Flood event, flood resilience, flood resistance, PTSD, secondary stressors.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1784612 A Taxonomy of Internal Attacks in Wireless Sensor Network
Authors: Muhammad R Ahmed, Xu Huang, Dharmendra Sharma
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Developments in communication technologies especially in wireless have enabled the progress of low-cost and lowpower wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The features of such WSN are holding minimal energy, weak computational capabilities, wireless communication and an open-medium nature where sensors are deployed. WSN is underpinned by application driven such as military applications, the health sector, etc. Due to the intrinsic nature of the network and application scenario, WSNs are vulnerable to many attacks externally and internally. In this paper we have focused on the types of internal attacks of WSNs based on OSI model and discussed some security requirements, characterizers and challenges of WSNs, by which to contribute to the WSN-s security research.Keywords: Wireless sensor network, internal attacks, security, OSI model.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 3024611 An Approach for the Prediction of Cardiovascular Diseases
Authors: Nebi Gedik
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Regardless of age or gender, cardiovascular illnesses are a serious health concern because of things like poor eating habits, stress, a sedentary lifestyle, hard work schedules, alcohol use, and weight. It tends to happen suddenly and has a high rate of recurrence. Machine learning models can be implemented to assist healthcare systems in the accurate detection and diagnosis of cardiovascular disease (CVD) in patients. Improved heart failure prediction is one of the primary goals of researchers using the heart disease dataset. The purpose of this study is to identify the feature or features that offer the best classification prediction for CVD detection. The support vector machine classifier is used to compare each feature's performance. It has been determined which feature produces the best results.
Keywords: Cardiovascular disease, feature extraction, supervised learning, support vector machine.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 170610 Broadening of Raw Materials in the Steel Industry, by Recycling and Recovery Wastes
Authors: A. Todorut, T. Heput
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In technological processes, in addition to the main product, result a large amount of materials, called wastes, but due to the possibilities of recovery, by means of recycling and reusing it can fit in the category of by-products. These large amounts of dust from the steel industry are a major problem in terms of environmental and human health, landscape, etc. Solving these problems, the impressive amounts of waste can be done through their proper management and recovery for every type of waste. In this article it was watched the capitalizing through pelleting and briquetting of small and powdery waste aiming to obtain the sponge iron as raw material, used in blast furnaces and electric arc furnaces. The data have been processed in the Excel spreadsheet program, being presented in the form of diagrams.Keywords: Agglomeration, industry, iron, pellets, wastes.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1546609 Chemical Characterization of Submicron Aerosol in Kanpur Region: a Source Apportionment Study
Authors: A. Chakraborty, T. Gupta
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Several studies have shown the association between ambient particulate matter (PM) and adverse health effects and climate change, thus highlighting the need to limit the anthropogenic sources of PM. PM Exposure is commonly monitored as mass concentration of PM10 (particle aerodynamic diameter < 10μm) or PM2.5 (particle aerodynamic diameter < 2.5μm), although increasing toxicity with decreasing aerodynamic diameter has been reported due to increased surface area and enhanced chemical reactivity with other species. Additionally, the light scattering properties of PM increases with decreasing size. Hence, it is important to study the chemical characterization of finer fraction of the particulate matter and to identify their sources so that they can be controlled appropriately to a large extent at the sources before reaching to the receptors.Keywords: PM1, PCA, source apportionment.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1651608 Adoption of Lean Thinking and Service Improvement for Care Home Service
Authors: Chuang-Chun Chiou
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Ageing population is a global trend; therefore the need of care service has been increasing dramatically. There are three basic forms of service delivered to the elderly: institution, community, and home. Particularly, the institutional service can be seen as an extension of medical service. The nursing home or so-called care home which is equipped with professional staff and facilities can provide a variety of service including rehabilitation service, short-term care, and long term care. Similar to hospital and other health care service, care home service do need to provide quality and cost-effective service to satisfy the dwellers. The main purpose of this paper is to show how lean thinking and service innovation can be applied to care home operation. The issues and key factors of implementing lean practice are discussed.
Keywords: Lean, Service improvement, SERVQUAL, Care home service.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 3173607 Analysis of Control by Flattening of the Welded Tubes
Authors: Hannachi Med Tahar, H. Djebaili, B. Daheche
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In this approach, we have tried to describe the flattening of welded tubes, and its experimental application. The test is carried out at the (National product processing company dishes and tubes production). Usually, the final products (tubes) undergo a series of non-destructive inspection online and offline welding, and obviously destructive mechanical testing (bending, flattening, flaring, etc.). For this and for the purpose of implementing the flattening test, which applies to the processing of round tubes in other forms, it took four sections of welded tubes draft (before stretching hot) and welded tubes finished (after drawing hot and annealing), it was also noted the report 'health' flattened tubes must not show or crack or tear. The test is considered poor if it reveals a lack of ductility of the metal.
Keywords: Flattening, destructive testing, tube drafts, finished tube, Castem 2001.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1275606 Optimizing Usability Testing with Collaborative Method in an E-Commerce Ecosystem
Authors: Markandeya Kunchi
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Usability testing (UT) is one of the vital steps in the User-centred design (UCD) process when designing a product. In an e-commerce ecosystem, UT becomes primary as new products, features, and services are launched very frequently. And, there are losses attached to the company if an unusable and inefficient product is put out to market and is rejected by customers. This paper tries to answer why UT is important in the product life-cycle of an E-commerce ecosystem. Secondary user research was conducted to find out work patterns, development methods, type of stakeholders, and technology constraints, etc. of a typical E-commerce company. Qualitative user interviews were conducted with product managers and designers to find out the structure, project planning, product management method and role of the design team in a mid-level company. The paper tries to address the usual apprehensions of the company to inculcate UT within the team. As well, it stresses upon factors like monetary resources, lack of usability expert, narrow timelines, and lack of understanding of higher management as some primary reasons. Outsourcing UT to vendors is also very prevalent with mid-level e-commerce companies, but it has its own severe repercussions like very little team involvement, huge cost, misinterpretation of the findings, elongated timelines, and lack of empathy towards the customer, etc. The shortfalls of the unavailability of a UT process in place within the team and conducting UT through vendors are bad user experiences for customers while interacting with the product, badly designed products which are neither useful and nor utilitarian. As a result, companies see dipping conversions rates in apps and websites, huge bounce rates and increased uninstall rates. Thus, there was a need for a more lean UT system in place which could solve all these issues for the company. This paper highlights on optimizing the UT process with a collaborative method. The degree of optimization and structure of collaborative method is the highlight of this paper. Collaborative method of UT is one in which the centralised design team of the company takes for conducting and analysing the UT. The UT is usually a formative kind where designers take findings into account and uses in the ideation process. The success of collaborative method of UT is due to its ability to sync with the product management method employed by the company or team. The collaborative methods focus on engaging various teams (design, marketing, product, administration, IT, etc.) each with its own defined roles and responsibility in conducting a smooth UT with users In-house. The paper finally highlights the positive results of collaborative UT method after conducting more than 100 In-lab interviews with users across the different lines of businesses. Some of which are the improvement of interaction between stakeholders and the design team, empathy towards users, improved design iteration, better sanity check of design solutions, optimization of time and money, effective and efficient design solution. The future scope of collaborative UT is to make this method leaner, by reducing the number of days to complete the entire project starting from planning between teams to publishing the UT report.
Keywords: Usability testing, collaborative method, e-commerce, product management method.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 668605 Investigation of the Effect of Nano-Alumina Particles on Adsorption Property of Acrylic Fiber
Authors: Mehdi Ketabchi, Shallah Alijanlo
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The flue gas from fossil fuels combustion contains harmful pollutants dangerous for human health and environment. One of the air pollution control methods to restrict the emission of these pollutants is based on using the nanoparticle in adsorption process. In the present research, gamma nano-alumina particle is added to polyacrylonitrile (PAN) polymer through simple loading method, and the adsorption capacity of the wet spun fiber is investigated. The results of exposure the fiber to the acid gases including SO2, CO, NO2, NO, and CO2 show the noticeable increase of gas adsorption capacity on fiber contains nanoparticle. The research has been conducted in Acrylic II Plant of Polyacryl Iran Corporation.Keywords: Acrylic fiber, adsorbent, wet spun, polyacryl company, gamma nano-alumina.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 699604 The Cracks Propagation Monitoring of a Cantilever Beam Using Modal Analysis
Authors: Morteza Raki, Abolghasem Zabihollah, Omid Askari
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Cantilever beam is a simplified sample of a lot of mechanical components used in a wide range of applications, including many industries such as gas turbine blade. Due to the nature of the operating conditions, beams are subject to variety of damages especially crack propagates. Crack propagation may lead to catastrophic failure during operation. Therefore, online detection of crack presence and its propagation is very important and may reduce possible significant cost of the whole system failure. This paper aims to investigate the effect of cracks presence and crack propagation on one end fixed beam`s vibration. A finite element model will be developed for the blade in which the modal response of the structure with and without crack will be studied.Keywords: Blade, crack propagation, health monitoring, modal analysis.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2003603 Impact of Reproductive Technologies on Women’s Lives in New Delhi: A Study from Feminist Perspective
Authors: Zairunisha
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This paper is concerned with the ways in which Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) affect women’s lives and perceptions regarding their infertility, contraception and reproductive health. The paper is based on a qualitative feminist survey study to explore and analyze issues arising from the use of ARTs by women in New Delhi, the capital of India. A rapid growth in the number of fertility clinics has been noticed recently. A critical analysis of interviews revealed that these technologies are used and developed for making profits at the cost of women’s lives. In this way, these technologies are influencing and changing the traditional patterns of motherhood requiring a rethinking about new ways of reproduction introduced through the use of ARTs.Keywords: Assisted reproductive technologies, new ways reproduction, voluntary and involuntary choice, women.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2283602 The Care Management Network as an Effective Intervention in Mitigating the Risks of Hypertension
Authors: Feng-Chuan Pan, Fang-Yue Liu
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Hospitals in southern Hualien teamed with the Hypertension Joint Care Network. Working with the network, the team provided a special designed health education to the individual who had been identified as a hypertension patient in the outpatient department. Some metabolism improvements achieved. This is a retrospective study by purposively taking 106 patients from a hospital between 2008 and 2010. Records of before and after education intervention of the objects was collected and analyzed to see the how the intervention affected the patients- hypertension control via clinical parameter monitoring. The results showed that the clinical indicators, the LDL-C, the cholesterol and the systolic blood pressure were significantly improved. The study provides evidence for the effectiveness of the network in controlling hypertension.Keywords: hypertension, joint care management network, cardiovascular diseases, metabolic syndrome.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1729601 Consideration Factors of Moving to a New Destination for Coastland Residents Under Global Warming
Authors: Ya-Fen Lee, Yun-Yao Chi, Cing-Hong Hung
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Because of the global warming and the rising sea level, residents living in southwestern coastland, Taiwan are faced with the submerged land and may move to higher elevation area. It is desirable to discuss the key consideration factor for selecting the migration location under five dimensions of ಯ security”, “health”, “convenience”, “comfort” and “socio-economic” based on the document reviews. This paper uses the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and the questionnaire survey. The analysis results show that the convenience is the most key factor for residents in Taiwan.
Keywords: Global warming, migration, structural equation modelling, questionnaire survey.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1366600 Designing a Rescue System for Earthquake-Stricken Area with the Aim of Facilitation and Accelerating Accessibilities (Case Study: City of Tehran)
Authors: Naeleh Motamedi, Masoud Mahmoudkhan Shirazi, Nima Nouraei
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Natural disasters, including earthquake, kill many people around the world every year. Society rescue actions, which start after the earthquake and are called LAST in abbreviation, include locating, access, stabilization and transportation. In the present article, we have studied the process of local accessibility to the injured and transporting them to health care centers. With regard the heavy traffic load due to earthquake, the destruction of connecting roads and bridges and the heavy debris in alleys and street, which put the lives of the injured and the people buried under the debris in danger, accelerating the rescue actions and facilitating the accessibilities are of great importance, obviously. Tehran, the capital of Iran, is among the crowded cities in the world and is the center of extensive economic, political, cultural and social activities. Tehran has a population of about 9.5 millions and because of the immigration of people from the surrounding cities. Furthermore, considering the fact that Tehran is located on two important and large faults, a 6 Richter magnitude earthquake in this city could lead to the greatest catastrophe during the entire human history. The present study is a kind of review and a major part of the required information for it, has been obtained from libraries all of the rescue vehicles around the world, including rescue helicopters, ambulances, fire fighting vehicles and rescue boats, and their applied technology, and also the robots specifically designed for the rescue system and the advantages and disadvantages of them, have been investigated. The studies show that there is a significant relationship between the rescue team-s arrival time at the incident zone and the number of saved people; so that, if the duration of burial under debris 30 minutes, the probability of survival is %99.3, after a day is %81, after 2days is %19 and after 5days is %7.4. The exiting transport systems all have some defects. If these defects are removed, more people could be saved each hour and the preparedness against natural disasters is increased. In this study, transport system has been designed for the rescue team and the injured; which could carry the rescue team to the incident zone and the injured to the health care centers. In addition, this system is able to fly in the air and move on the earth as well; so that the destruction of roads and the heavy traffic load could not prevent the rescue team from arriving early at the incident zone. The system also has the equipment required firebird for debris removing, optimum transport of the injured and first aid.
Keywords: earthquake, accelerating, accessibilities transportation, rescue system
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1569599 Review of Carbon Materials: Application in Alternative Energy Sources and Catalysis
Authors: Marita Pigłowska, Beata Kurc, Maciej Galiński
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The application of carbon materials in the branches of the electrochemical industry shows an increasing tendency each year due to the many interesting properties they possess. These are, among others, a well-developed specific surface, porosity, high sorption capacity, good adsorption properties, low bulk density, electrical conductivity and chemical resistance. All these properties allow for their effective use, among others in supercapacitors, which can store electric charges of the order of 100 F due to carbon electrodes constituting the capacitor plates. Coals (including expanded graphite, carbon black, graphite carbon fibers, activated carbon) are commonly used in electrochemical methods of removing oil derivatives from water after tanker disasters, e.g., phenols and their derivatives by their electrochemical anodic oxidation. Phenol can occupy practically the entire surface of carbon material and leave the water clean of hydrophobic impurities. Regeneration of such electrodes is also not complicated, it is carried out by electrochemical methods consisting in unblocking the pores and reducing resistances, and thus their reactivation for subsequent adsorption processes. Graphite is commonly used as an anode material in lithium-ion cells, while due to the limited capacity it offers (372 mAh g-1), new solutions are sought that meet both capacitive, efficiency and economic criteria. Increasingly, biodegradable materials, green materials, biomass, waste (including agricultural waste) are used in order to reuse them and reduce greenhouse effects and, above all, to meet the biodegradability criterion necessary for the production of lithium-ion cells as chemical power sources. The most common of these materials are cellulose, starch, wheat, rice, and corn waste, e.g., from agricultural, paper and pharmaceutical production. Such products are subjected to appropriate treatments depending on the desired application (including chemical, thermal, electrochemical). Starch is a biodegradable polysaccharide that consists of polymeric units such as amylose and amylopectin that build an ordered (linear) and amorphous (branched) structure of the polymer. Carbon is also used as a catalyst. Elemental carbon has become available in many nano-structured forms representing the hybridization combinations found in the primary carbon allotropes, and the materials can be enriched with a large number of surface functional groups. There are many examples of catalytic applications of coal in the literature, but the development of this field has been hampered by the lack of a conceptual approach combining structure and function and a lack of understanding of material synthesis. In the context of catalytic applications, the integrity of carbon environmental management properties and parameters such as metal conductivity range and bond sequence management should be characterized. Such data, along with surface and textured information, can form the basis for the provision of network support services.
Keywords: carbon materials, catalysis, BET, capacitors, lithium ion cell
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1166598 Safety Practices among Bus Operators during Wee Hour Operations
Authors: M.R. Osman, F. Abas, M.S. Noh, A. Mohamad Suffian, O. Ilhamah, H.Z. Zarir, A.B. Wahida, P. Noor Faradila, M.F. Siti Atiqah
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Safety Health and Environment Code of Practice (SHE COP) was developed to help road transportation operators to manage its operation in a systematic and safe manner. A study was conducted to determine the effectiveness of SHE COP implementation during non-OPS period. The objective of the study is to evaluate the implementations of SHE COP among bus operators during wee hour operations. The data was collected by completing a set of checklist after observing the activities during pre departure, during the trip, and upon arrival. The results show that there are seven widely practiced SHE COP elements. 22% of the buses have average speed exceeding the maximum permissible speed on the highways (90 km/h), with 13% of the buses were travelling at the speed of more than 100 km/h. The statistical analysis shows that there is only one significant association which relates speeding with prior presence of enforcement officers.Keywords: Safety practices, speeding, wee hour.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1563597 Evaluation of Disease Risk Variables in the Control of Bovine Tuberculosis
Authors: Berrin Şentürk
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In this study, due to the recurrence of bovine tuberculosis, in the same areas, the risk factors for the disease were determined and evaluated at the local level. This study was carried out in 32 farms where the disease was detected in the district and center of Samsun province in 2014. Predetermined risk factors, such as farm, environmental and economic risks, were investigated with the survey method. It was predetermined that risks in the three groups are similar to the risk variables of the disease on the global scale. These risk factors that increase the susceptibility of the infection must be understood by the herd owners. The risk-based contagious disease management system approach should be applied for bovine tuberculosis by farmers, animal health professionals and public and private sector decision makers.Keywords: Bovine tuberculosis, disease management, control, outbreak, risk analysis.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1124596 Machine Learning Framework: Competitive Intelligence and Key Drivers Identification of Market Share Trends among Healthcare Facilities
Authors: A. Appe, B. Poluparthi, L. Kasivajjula, U. Mv, S. Bagadi, P. Modi, A. Singh, H. Gunupudi, S. Troiano, J. Paul, J. Stovall, J. Yamamoto
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The necessity of data-driven decisions in healthcare strategy formulation is rapidly increasing. A reliable framework which helps identify factors impacting a healthcare provider facility or a hospital (from here on termed as facility) market share is of key importance. This pilot study aims at developing a data-driven machine learning-regression framework which aids strategists in formulating key decisions to improve the facility’s market share which in turn impacts in improving the quality of healthcare services. The US (United States) healthcare business is chosen for the study, and the data spanning 60 key facilities in Washington State and about 3 years of historical data are considered. In the current analysis, market share is termed as the ratio of the facility’s encounters to the total encounters among the group of potential competitor facilities. The current study proposes a two-pronged approach of competitor identification and regression approach to evaluate and predict market share, respectively. Leveraged model agnostic technique, SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations), to quantify the relative importance of features impacting the market share. Typical techniques in literature to quantify the degree of competitiveness among facilities use an empirical method to calculate a competitive factor to interpret the severity of competition. The proposed method identifies a pool of competitors, develops Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) and feature level word vectors, and evaluates the key connected components at the facility level. This technique is robust since it is data-driven, which minimizes the bias from empirical techniques. The DAGs factor in partial correlations at various segregations and key demographics of facilities along with a placeholder to factor in various business rules (for e.g., quantifying the patient exchanges, provider references, and sister facilities). Identified are the multiple groups of competitors among facilities. Leveraging the competitors' identified developed and fine-tuned Random Forest Regression model to predict the market share. To identify key drivers of market share at an overall level, permutation feature importance of the attributes was calculated. For relative quantification of features at a facility level, incorporated SHAP, a model agnostic explainer. This helped to identify and rank the attributes at each facility which impacts the market share. This approach proposes an amalgamation of the two popular and efficient modeling practices, viz., machine learning with graphs and tree-based regression techniques to reduce the bias. With these, we helped to drive strategic business decisions.
Keywords: Competition, DAGs, hospital, healthcare, machine learning, market share, random forest, SHAP.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 284595 Wireless Sensor Network: Characteristics and Architectures
Authors: Muhammad R Ahmed, Xu Huang, Dharmandra Sharma, Hongyan Cui
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An information procuring and processing emerging technology wireless sensor network (WSN) Consists of autonomous nodes with versatile devices underpinned by applications. Nodes are equipped with different capabilities such as sensing, computing, actuation and wireless communications etc. based on application requirements. A WSN application ranges from military implementation in the battlefield, environmental monitoring, health sector as well as emergency response of surveillance. The nodes are deployed independently to cooperatively monitor the physical and environmental conditions. The architecture of WSN differs based on the application requirements and focus on low cost, flexibility, fault tolerance capability, deployment process as well as conserve energy. In this paper we have present the characteristics, architecture design objective and architecture of WSNKeywords: wireless sensor network, characteristics, architecture
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 7807594 Towards Medical Device Maintenance Workflow Monitoring
Authors: Beatriz López, Joaquim Meléndez, Heiko Wissel, Henning Haase, Kathleen Laatz, Oliver S. Grosser
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Concerning the inpatient care the present situation is characterized by intense charges of medical technology into the clinical daily routine and an ever stronger integration of special techniques into the clinical workflow. Medical technology is by now an integral part of health care according to consisting general accepted standards. Purchase and operation thereby represent an important economic position and both are subject of everyday optimisation attempts. For this purpose by now exists a huge number of tools which conduce more likely to a complexness of the problem by a comprehensive implementation. In this paper the advantages of an integrative information-workflow on the life-cycle-management in the region of medical technology are shown.Keywords: Medical equipment maintenance, maintenanceworkflow, medical equipment management, optimisation ofworkflow.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 3116593 Using RASCAL Code to Analyze the Postulated UF6 Fire Accident
Authors: J. R. Wang, Y. Chiang, W. S. Hsu, S. H. Chen, J. H. Yang, S. W. Chen, C. Shih, Y. F. Chang, Y. H. Huang, B. R. Shen
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In this research, the RASCAL code was used to simulate and analyze the postulated UF6 fire accident which may occur in the Institute of Nuclear Energy Research (INER). There are four main steps in this research. In the first step, the UF6 data of INER were collected. In the second step, the RASCAL analysis methodology and model was established by using these data. Third, this RASCAL model was used to perform the simulation and analysis of the postulated UF6 fire accident. Three cases were simulated and analyzed in this step. Finally, the analysis results of RASCAL were compared with the hazardous levels of the chemicals. According to the compared results of three cases, Case 3 has the maximum danger in human health.
Keywords: RASCAL, UF6, Safety, Hydrogen fluoride.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 870592 Automatic Real-Patient Medical Data De-Identification for Research Purposes
Authors: Petr Vcelak, Jana Kleckova
Abstract:
Our Medicine-oriented research is based on a medical data set of real patients. It is a security problem to share patient private data with peoples other than clinician or hospital staff. We have to remove person identification information from medical data. The medical data without private data are available after a de-identification process for any research purposes. In this paper, we introduce an universal automatic rule-based de-identification application to do all this stuff on an heterogeneous medical data. A patient private identification is replaced by an unique identification number, even in burnedin annotation in pixel data. The identical identification is used for all patient medical data, so it keeps relationships in a data. Hospital can take an advantage of a research feedback based on results.Keywords: DASTA, De-identification, DICOM, Health Level Seven, Medical data, OCR, Personal data
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1642591 Investigation of Heating Behaviour of E-textile Structures
Authors: H. Sezgin, S. Kursun Bahadır, Y. E. Boke, F. Kalaoğlu
Abstract:
By textile science incorporating with electronic industry, developed textile products start to take part in different areas such as industry, military, space, medical etc. for health, protection, defense, communication and automation. Electronic textiles (e-textiles) are fabrics that contain electronics and interconnections with them. In this study, two types of base yarns (cotton and acrylic) and three types of conductive steel yarns with different linear resistance values (14Ω/m, 30Ω/m, 70Ω/m) were used to investigate the effect of base yarn type and linear resistance of conductive yarns on thermal behavior of e-textile structures. Thermal behavior of samples was examined by thermal camera.
Keywords: Conductive yarn, e-textiles, smart textiles, thermal analysis.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 2341590 Data Analysis Techniques for Predictive Maintenance on Fleet of Heavy-Duty Vehicles
Authors: Antonis Sideris, Elias Chlis Kalogeropoulos, Konstantia Moirogiorgou
Abstract:
The present study proposes a methodology for the efficient daily management of fleet vehicles and construction machinery. The application covers the area of remote monitoring of heavy-duty vehicles operation parameters, where specific sensor data are stored and examined in order to provide information about the vehicle’s health. The vehicle diagnostics allow the user to inspect whether maintenance tasks need to be performed before a fault occurs. A properly designed machine learning model is proposed for the detection of two different types of faults through classification. Cross validation is used and the accuracy of the trained model is checked with the confusion matrix.
Keywords: Fault detection, feature selection, machine learning, predictive maintenance.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 781589 Two and Three Layer Lamination of Nanofiber
Authors: Roman Knizek, Denisa Karhankova, Ludmila Fridrichova
Abstract:
For their exceptional properties nanofibers, respectively, nanofiber layers are achieving an increasingly wider range of uses. Nowadays nanofibers are used mainly in the field of air filtration where they are removing submicron particles, bacteria, and viruses. Their efficiency is not changed in time, and the power consumption is much lower than that of electrically charged filters. Nanofibers are primarily used for converting and storage of energy in both air and liquid filtration, in food and packaging, protecting the environment, but also in health care which is made possible by their newly discovered properties. However, a major problem of the nanofiber layer is practically zero abrasion resistance; it is, therefore, necessary to laminate the nanofiber layer with another suitable material. Unfortunately, lamination of nanofiber layers is a major problem since the nanofiber layer contains small pores through which it is very difficult for adhesion to pass through. Therefore, there is still only a small percentage of products with these unique fibers 5.
Keywords: Nanofiber layer, nanomembrane, lamination, electrospinning.
Procedia APA BibTeX Chicago EndNote Harvard JSON MLA RIS XML ISO 690 PDF Downloads 1344