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Background: The development of mobile interventions for noncommunicable diseases has increased in recent years. However, there is a dearth of apps for patients with peripheral arterial disease (PAD), who frequently have an impaired ability to walk.
Objective: Using a patient-centered approach for the development of mobile interventions, we aim to describe the needs and requirements of patients with PAD regarding the overall care situation and the use of mobile interventions to perform supervised exercise therapy (SET).
Methods: A questionnaire survey was conducted in addition to a clinical examination at the vascular outpatient clinic of the West-German Heart and Vascular Center of the University Clinic Essen in Germany. Patients with diagnosed PAD were asked to answer questions on sociodemographic characteristics, PAD-related need for support, satisfaction with their health care situation, smartphone and app use, and requirements for the design of mobile interventions to support SET.
Results: Overall, a need for better support of patients with diagnosed PAD was identified. In total, 59.2% (n=180) expressed their desire for more support for their disease. Patients (n=304) had a mean age of 67 years and half of them (n=157, 51.6%) were smartphone users. We noted an interest in smartphone-supported SET, even for people who did not currently use a smartphone. “Information,” “feedback,” “choosing goals,” and “interaction with physicians and therapists” were rated the most relevant components of a potential app.
Conclusions: A need for the support of patients with PAD was determined. This was particularly evident with regard to disease literacy and the performance of SET. Based on a detailed description of patient characteristics, proposals for the design of mobile interventions adapted to the needs and requirements of patients can be derived.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is a human rights framework in the context of multi-level governance child protection policies central to social work education and practice (United Nations, 1989). In line with this statement, children’s rights-based education introduces undergraduate social work students to the principles of the CRC, namely participation, protection, harm prevention and provision, to facilitate knowledge acquisition by building core competencies for critical practice (IFSW, 2002). It equips social workers with analytical and advocacy skills that foster critical thinking and creativity in the juxtaposition between child protection, autonomy and self-determination.
This chapter provides insights for social work education to locate and analyse the underlying casualties of social problems using a problem and resource framework, the w-questions (Geiser, 2015). The framework is used to develop theory driven social work interventions as illustrated against the backdrop the anonymised case study, Amira, an accompanied child asylum seeker in Austria (Fritsche, Glawischnig, & Wolfsegg, 2019). Correspondingly, CRC is addressed along a continuum between human needs fulfilment and human right entitlements (Obrecht, 2009; IFSW, 2002; Ife, 2012). The concept of need is understood as tension in our concrete biological and psychological bio-values and states (Obrecht, 2009, p. 27). The assertion is that when children lack support or are obstructed from achieving their equal right to education due to social, cultural or economic barriers, this exacerbates social marginalisation because it deprives them of membership in the school social system. Social marginalisation thwarts the fulfilment of needs and weakens social cohesion by causing alienation and anomie (Mayrhofer, 2015). The tentative conclusion is that knowledge and practice models that link human needs and children’s rights equip social workers with the expertise to reduce children’s vulnerability whilst strengthening their protection, autonomy and self-determination.
For a given set of banks, how big can losses in bad economic or financial scenarios possibly get, and what are these bad scenarios? These are the two central questions of stress tests for banks and the banking system. Current stress tests select stress scenarios in a way which might leave aside many dangerous scenarios and thus create an illusion of safety; and which might consider highly implausible scenarios and thus trigger a false alarm. We show how to select scenarios systematically for a banking system in a context of multiple credit exposures. We demonstrate the application of our method in an example on the Spanish and Italian residential real estate exposures of European banks. Compared to the EBA 2016 stress test our method produces scenarios which are equally plausible as the EBA stress scenario but yield considerably worse system wide losses.
Wir untersuchen Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede partizipativer Projekte auf Gemeindeebene in der Bodenseeregion. Ziel dabei ist es, einerseits Chancen und Stolpersteine von partizipativen Projekten für Gemeinden zu identifizieren. Andererseits entwickeln wir den Resilienzbegriff aus Psychologie und BWL weiter für Gemeinden und fragen uns, wie Partizipation die Resilienz einer Gemeinde beeinflusst.
Seit einigen Jahren beschäftigen sich immer mehr Autor*innen mit der Frage, welche Handreichungen Mitarbeitende im Gesundheitssystem brauchen, um adäquater auf die Bedürfnisse älterer LGBTQI* Personen einzugehen, deren (pflegerische) Anliegen nicht erkannt werden, von schwer zu überwindenden Barrieren im Gesundheitssystem berichten und die sich diskriminiert fühlen. Der Fokus der Publikationen liegt auf der sexuellen Orientierung und / oder der Genderidentität, einem Teilaspekt der Identität einer Person. Je nach Kontext und Personen sind andere Teilidentitäten, wie z.B. Familienstatus, Alter, Ethnizität, Teilhabe an sozialen Gruppen unterschiedlich stark berücksichtigt. In einer qualitativen Studie wurden, unter Integration der autoethnographischen Methode, acht Männer zwischen 53 und 75 Jahren aus den Niederlanden und Deutschland in autobiografischen-narrativen Interviews befragt, inwiefern die Coronapandemie ihre Vorstellungen vom gesunden Altern verändert hat. Alle Männer hatten komplexe Biografien, gekennzeichnet von Partnerverlust, Arbeitslosigkeit, Altersfragen, familiären und gesundheitlichen Herausforderungen neben anderen identitätsstiftenden Faktoren. Aber alle identifizierten sich seit ihrer Jugend mit ihrer sexuellen oder Genderidentität, hatten aus vielen Krisen gelernt und sorgten mit einem für sich klaren Management, dass sie auch im Alter gesund bleiben würden – Autonomie stand hoch im Kurs! Die Person nicht nur auf die Zugehörigkeit zur LGBTQI* Gruppe zu reduzieren, sondern in ihrer gesamten Identität in den Gesundheitseinrichtungen zu berücksichtigen kennzeichnet eine adäquate Pflege.
Electric cell-substrate impedance spectroscopy (ECIS) enables non-invasive and continuous read-out of electrical parameters of living tissue. The aim of the current study was to investigate the performance of interdigitated sensors with 50 μm electrode width and 50 μm inter-electrode distance made of gold, aluminium, and titanium for monitoring the barrier properties of epithelial cells in tissue culture. At first, the measurement performance of the photolithographic fabricated sensors was characterized by defined reference electrolytes. The sensors were used to monitor the electrical properties of two adherent epithelial barrier tissue models: renal proximal tubular LLC-PK1 cells, representing a normal functional transporting epithelium, and human cervical cancer-derived HeLa cells, forming non-transporting cancerous epithelial tissue. Then, the impedance spectra obtained were analysed by numerically fitting the parameters of the two different models to the measured impedance spectrum. Aluminium sensors proved to be as sensitive and consistent in repeated online-recordings for continuous cell growth and differentiation monitoring assensors made of gold, the standard electrode material. Titanium electrodes exhibited an elevated intrinsic ohmic resistance incomparison to gold reflecting its lower electric conductivity. Analysis of impedance spectra through applying models and numerical data fitting enabled the detailed investigation of the development and properties of a functional transporting epithelial tissue using either gold or aluminium sensors. The result of the data obtained, supports the consideration of aluminium and titanium sensor materials as potential alternatives to gold sensors for advanced application of ECIS spectroscopy.
Over the last years, polymers have gained great attention as substrate material, because of the possibility to produce low-cost sensors in a high-throughput manner or for rapid prototyping and the wide variety of polymeric materials available with different features (like transparency, flexibility, stretchability, etc.). For almost all biosensing applications, the interaction between biomolecules (for example, antibodies, proteins or enzymes) and the employed substrate surface is highly important. In order to realize an effective biomolecule immobilization on polymers, different surface activation techniques, including chemical and physical methods, exist. Among them, plasma treatment offers an easy, fast and effective activation of the surfaces by micro/nanotexturing and generating functional groups (including carboxylic acids, amines, esters, aldehydes or hydroxyl groups). Hence, here we present a systematic and comprehensive plasma activation study of various polymeric surfaces by optimizing different parameters, including power, time, substrate temperature and gas composition. Thereby, the highest immobilization efficiency along with a homogenous biomolecule distribution is achieved with a 5-min plasma treatment under a gas composition of 50% oxygen and nitrogen, at a power of 1000 W and a substrate temperature of 80 C. These results are also confirmed by different surface characterization methods, including SEM, XPS and contact angle measurements.
Design and optimization of 1x2N Y-branch optical splitters for telecommunication applications
(2020)
This paper presents the design and optimization of 1x2N Y-branch optical splitters for telecom applications. A waveguide channel profile, used in the splitter design, is based on a standard silica-on-silicon material platform. Except for the lengths of the used Y-branches, design parameters such as port pitch between the waveguides and simulation parameters for all splitters were considered fixed. For every Y-branch splitter, insertion loss, non-uniformity, and background crosstalk are calculated. According to the minimum insertion loss and minimum non-uniformity, the optimum length for each Y-branch is determined. Finally, the individual Y-branches are cascade joined to design various Y-branch optical splitters, from 1x2 to 1x64.
Clathrate hydrates, or hydrates for short, are inclusion compounds in which water molecules form a hydrogen-bonded host lattice that accommodates the guest molecules. While vast amounts of hydrates are known to exist in seafloor sediments and in the permafrost on Earth, these occurrences might be dwarfed by the amounts of hydrates occurring in space and on celestial bodies. Since methane is the primary guest molecule in most of the natural occurrences on Earth, hydrates are considered a promising source of energy. Moreover, the ability of one volume of hydrate to store about 170 volumes of gas, make hydrates a promising functional material for various industrial applications. While the static properties of hydrates are reasonably well known, the dynamics of hydrate formation and decomposition are insufficiently understood. For instance, the stochastic period of hydrate nucleation, the memory effect, and the self-preservation phenomenon complicate the development of predictive models of hydrate dynamics. Additionally, the influence of meso- and macroscopic defects as well as the roles of mass and heat transport on different length scales remain to be clarified.
Due to its non-invasive and non-destructive nature and the high spatial resolution of approx. 1µm or even less, micro-computed X-ray attenuation tomography ( µCT ) seems to be the perfect method for the study of the evolving structures of forming or decomposing hydrates on the meso- and macroscopic length scale. However, for the naturally occurring hydrates of low atomic number guests the contrast between hydrate, ice, and liquid water is typically very weak because of similar X-ray attenuation coefficients. So far, good contrast was only restricted to synchrotron beamline experiments which utilize the phase information of monochromatic X-rays.
In this thesis it is shown that with the help of a newly developed sample cell, a contrast between the hydrate and the ice phase sufficiently good for the reliable segmentation of the materials can also be achieved in conventional tube-based µCT. An accurate pressure and temperature management, i.e., the added functionality of the cell, further allows for cross-correlation of structural and thermodynamic data. The capability of this µCT setup is demonstrated in a series of studies on the formation and decomposition of hydrates which yield new insights for the development of a novel route to hydrate synthesis. At last, this thesis points towards possibilities how better models of hydrate formation and decomposition can be developed with the aid of µCT and computer simulations.
Post-operative isoflurane has been observed to be present in the end-tidal breath of patients who have undergone major surgery, for several weeks after the surgical procedures. A major new noncontrolled, non-randomized, and open-label approved study will recruit patients undergoing various surgeries under different inhalation anaesthetics, with two key objectives, namely to record the washout characteristics following surgery, and to investigate the influence of a patient’s health and the duration and type of surgery on elimination. In preparation for this breath study using proton transfer reaction time-of-flight mass spectrometry (PTR-TOF-MS), it is important to identify first the analytical product ions that need to be monitored and under what operating conditions. In this first paper of this new research programme, we present extensive PTR-TOF-MS studies of three major
anaesthetics used worldwide, desflurane (CF3CHFOCHF2), sevoflurane ((CF3)2CHOCH2F), and isoflurane (CF3CHClOCHF2) and a fourth one, which is used less extensively, enflurane (CHF2OCF2CHFCl), but is of interest because it is an isomer of isoflurane. Product ions are identified as a function of reduced electric field (E/N) over the range of approximately 80 Td to 210 Td, and the effects of operating the drift tube under ‘normal’ or ‘humid’ conditions on the intensities of the product ions are presented. To aid in the analyses, density functional theory (DFT) calculations of the proton affinities and the gas-phase basicities of the anaesthetics have been determined. Calculated energies for the ion-molecule reaction pathways leading to key product ions, identified as ideal for monitoring the inhalation anaesthetics in breath with a high sensitivity and selectivity, are also presented.