LLukas22/scidocs huggingface dataset:
Evaluating User Perceptions of Mobile Medication Management Applications With Older Adults: A Usability Study

BACKGROUND
Medication nonadherence has a significant impact on the health and wellbeing of individuals with chronic disease. Several mobile medication management applications are available to help users track, remember, and read about their medication therapy.


OBJECTIVE
The objective of this study was to explore the usability and usefulness of existing medication management applications for older adults.


METHODS
We recruited 35 participants aged 50 and over to participate in a 2-hour usability session. The average age ranged from 52-78 years (mean 67 years) and 71% (25/35) of participants were female. Each participant was provided with an iPad loaded with four medication management applications: MyMedRec, DrugHub, Pillboxie, and PocketPharmacist. These applications were evaluated using the 10 item System Usability Scale (SUS) and visual analog scale. An investigator-moderated 30-minute discussion followed, and was recorded. We used a grounded theory (GT) approach to analyze qualitative data.


RESULTS
When assessing mobile medication management applications, participants struggled to think of a need for the applications in their own lives. Many were satisfied with their current management system and proposed future use only if cognition and health declined. Most participants felt capable of using the applications after a period of time and training, but were frustrated by their initial experiences with the applications. The early experiences of participants highlighted the benefits of linear navigation and clear wording (eg, "undo" vs "cancel") when designing for older users. While there was no order effect, participants attributed their poor performance to the order in which they tried the applications. They also described being a part of a technology generation that did not encounter the computer until adulthood. Of the four applications, PocketPharmacist was found to be the least usable with a score of 42/100 (P<.0001) though it offered a drug interaction feature that was among the favorite features of participants. The usability scores for MyMedRec (56/100), DrugHub (57/100), and Pillboxie (52/100) were not significantly different and participants preferred MyMedRec and DrugHub for their simple, linear interfaces.


CONCLUSIONS
With training, adults aged 50 and over can be capable and interested in using mHealth applications for their medication management. However, in order to adopt such technology, they must find a need that their current medication management system cannot fill. Interface diversity and multimodal reminder methods should be considered to increase usability for older adults. Lastly, regulation or the involvement of older adults in development may help to alleviate generation bias and mistrust for applications.
Laryngeal preservation in ENT oncology. Retrospective series of 246 patients managed in the Caen University Hospital and François Baclesse Cancer Care Center between 1998 and 2008.

OBJECTIVES
A 10-year retrospective study investigated factors for survival and laryngeal preservation in advanced laryngeal, hypopharyngeal or epilaryngeal neoplasia.


MATERIAL AND METHOD
Two hundred and forty-six patients with advanced cancer of the larynx (17.48%), hypopharynx (48.78%) or epilarynx (33.74%) undergoing primary organ-sparing treatment were included from 1998 to 2008. Treatment comprised chemotherapy followed by radiation therapy for 92.68% of patients, isolated radiation therapy for 1.6% and concomitant or sequential radiation-chemotherapy for 5.7%. General health status, history and tumor status were recorded. Factors influencing survival were analyzed by Kaplan-Meier estimator, log-rank test and Cox models.


RESULTS
Median overall survival of the population was 2.3 years and median laryngeal preservation 0.99 years in male patients and 2 years in female patients. Survival correlated significantly with body mass index (BMI; P=0.0004), WHO performance status (P=0.0064), alcohol consumption (P=0.0004) and cessation (P<0.0001) and also T stage (P=0.0038), initial laryngeal mobility (P=0.0002) and post-chemotherapy assessment (P<0.0001). Survival with functional larynx correlated with baseline BMI at first consultation (P=0.016), baseline WHO grade (P=0.0005), laryngeal mobility (P<0.0001), T staging (P=0.0009), and T and/or N chemotherapy response to a classical organ preservation protocol (P<0.0001).


CONCLUSION
Over and above established criteria, the present study highlighted the importance of general health and nutritional status during treatment.
Communicating emotions and mental states to robots in a real time parallel framework using Laban movement analysis

This paper presents a parallel real time framework for emotions and mental states extraction and recognition from video fragments of human movements. In the experimental setup human hands are tracked by evaluation of moving skin-colored objects. The tracking analysis demonstrates that acceleration and frequency characteristics of the traced objects are relevant for classification of the emotional expressiveness of human movements. The outcomes of the emotional and mental states recognition are cross-validatedwith the analysis of two independent certifiedmovement analysts (CMA’s) who use the Laban movement analysis (LMA) method. We argue that LMA based computer analysis can serve as a common language for expressing and interpreting emotional movements between robots and humans, and in that way it resembles the common coding principle between action and perception by humans and primates that is embodied by themirror neuron system. The solution is part of a larger project on interaction between a human and a humanoid robot with the aim of training social behavioral skills to autistic children with robots acting in a natural environment. © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Efficacy and safety of once-daily NVA237 in patients with moderate-to-severe COPD: the GLOW1 trial

BACKGROUND
NVA237 is a once-daily dry-powder formulation of the long-acting muscarinic antagonist glycopyrronium bromide in development for the treatment of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). The glycopyrronium bromide in COPD airways clinical study 1 (GLOW1) evaluated the efficacy, safety and tolerability of NVA237 in patients with moderate-to-severe COPD.


METHODS
Patients with COPD with a smoking history of ≥ 10 pack-years, post-bronchodilator forced expiratory volume in 1 second (FEV1) < 80% and ≥ 30% predicted normal and FEV1/forced vital capacity < 0.70 were enrolled. Patients were randomized to double-blind treatment with NVA237 50 μg once daily or placebo for 26 weeks with inhaled/intranasal corticosteroids or H1 antagonists permitted in patients stabilized on them prior to study entry. The primary outcome measure was trough FEV1 at Week 12.


RESULTS
A total of 822 patients were randomized to NVA237 (n = 552) or placebo (n = 270). Least squares mean (± standard error) trough FEV1 at Week 12 was significantly higher in patients receiving NVA237 (1.408 ± 0.0105 L), versus placebo (1.301 ± 0.0137 L; treatment difference 108 ± 14.8 mL, p < 0.001). Significant improvements in trough FEV1 were apparent at the end of Day 1 and sustained through Week 26. FEV1 was significantly improved in the NVA237 group versus placebo throughout the 24-hour periods on Day 1 and at Weeks 12 and 26, and at all other visits and timepoints. Transition dyspnoea index focal scores and St. George's Respiratory Questionnaire scores were significantly improved with NVA237 versus placebo at Week 26, with treatment differences of 1.04 (p < 0.001) and -2.81 (p = 0.004), respectively. NVA237 significantly reduced the risk of first moderate/severe COPD exacerbation by 31% (p = 0.023) and use of rescue medication by 0.46 puffs per day (p = 0.005), versus placebo. NVA237 was well tolerated and had an acceptable safety profile, with a low frequency of cardiac and typical antimuscarinic adverse effects.


CONCLUSIONS
Once-daily NVA237 was safe and well tolerated and provided rapid, sustained improvements in lung function, improvements in dyspnoea, and health-related quality of life, and reduced the risk of exacerbations and the use of rescue medication.


TRIAL REGISTRATION
ClinicalTrials.gov: NCT01005901.
Mindfulness-based stress reduction for stress management in healthy people: a review and meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND
Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) is a clinically standardized meditation that has shown consistent efficacy for many mental and physical disorders. Less attention has been given to the possible benefits that it may have in healthy subjects. The aim of the present review and meta-analysis is to better investigate current evidence about the efficacy of MBSR in healthy subjects, with a particular focus on its benefits for stress reduction.


MATERIALS AND METHODS
A literature search was conducted using MEDLINE (PubMed), the ISI Web of Knowledge, the Cochrane database, and the references of retrieved articles. The search included articles written in English published prior to September 2008, and identified ten, mainly low-quality, studies. Cohen's d effect size between meditators and controls on stress reduction and spirituality enhancement values were calculated.


RESULTS
MBSR showed a nonspecific effect on stress reduction in comparison to an inactive control, both in reducing stress and in enhancing spirituality values, and a possible specific effect compared to an intervention designed to be structurally equivalent to the meditation program. A direct comparison study between MBSR and standard relaxation training found that both treatments were equally able to reduce stress. Furthermore, MBSR was able to reduce ruminative thinking and trait anxiety, as well as to increase empathy and self-compassion.


CONCLUSIONS
MBSR is able to reduce stress levels in healthy people. However, important limitations of the included studies as well as the paucity of evidence about possible specific effects of MBSR in comparison to other nonspecific treatments underline the necessity of further research.
A Hybrid Text Classification Approach Using KNN And SVM

Text classification is the process of assigning text documents based on certain categories. A classifier is used to define the appropriate class for each text document based on the input algorithm used for classification. Due to the emerging trends in the field of internet and computers ,billions of text data are processed at a given time and so there is a need for organizing these data to provide easy storage and accessing .Many text classification approaches were developed for effectively solving the problem of identifying and classifying these data .In this project a new text document classifier is proposed by integrating the nearest neighbor classification approach with the support vector machine(SVM) training algorithm. The proposed SVM-NN approach aims to reduce the impact of parameters in classification accuracy. In the training stage, the SVM is utilized to reduce the training samples for each of the available categories to their support vectors (SVs).The SVs from different categories are used as the training data of nearest neighbor classification algorithm in which the similarity measures or distance function is used to calculate the which class does the testing data belongs and which also reduce time consumption. Keywords— Machine Learning,Text document classification, Nearest Neighbor, Support Vector Machine, Distance function
Activation of electrical triggers of atrial fibrillation in hyperthyroidism.

CONTEXT
A shortening of the atrial refractory period has been considered as the main mechanism for the increased risk of atrial fibrillation in hyperthyroidism. However, other important factors may be involved.


OBJECTIVE
Our objective was to determine the activity of abnormal supraventricular electrical depolarizations in response to elevated thyroid hormones in patients without structural heart disease.


PATIENTS AND DESIGN
Twenty-eight patients (25 females, three males, mean age 43+/-11 yr) with newly diagnosed and untreated hyperthyroidism were enrolled in a prospective trial after exclusion of heart disease. Patients were followed up for 16 +/- 6 months and studied at baseline and 6 months after normalization of serum TSH levels.


MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
The incidence of abnormal premature supraventricular depolarizations (SVPD) and the number of episodes of supraventricular tachycardia was defined as primary outcome measurements before the start of the study. In addition, heart rate oscillations (turbulence) after premature depolarizations and heart rate variability were compared at baseline and follow-up.


RESULTS
SVPDs decreased from 59 +/- 29 to 21 +/- 8 per 24 h (P = 0.003), very early SVPDs (so called P on T) decreased from 36 +/- 24 to 3 +/- 1 per 24 h (P < 0.0001), respectively, and nonsustained supraventricular tachycardias decreased from 22 +/- 11 to 0.5 +/- 0.2 per 24 h (P = 0.01) after normalization of serum thyrotropin levels. The hyperthyroid phase was characterized by an increased heart rate (93 +/- 14 vs. 79 +/- 8 beats/min, P < 0.0001) and a decreased turbulence slope (3.6 vs. 9.2, P = 0.003), consistent with decreased vagal tone. This was confirmed by a significant decrease of heart rate variability.


CONCLUSION
Hyperthyroidism is associated with an increased supraventricular ectopic activity in patients with normal hearts. The activation of these arrhythmogenic foci by elevated thyroid hormones may be an important causal link between hyperthyroidism and atrial fibrillation.
Topical imiquimod for acyclovir-unresponsive herpes simplex virus 2 infection.

A 34-year-old Hispanic man who had been diagnosed as having human immunodeficiency virus 5 years earlier presented with a 5-month history of herpes simplex virus (HSV) 2 infection of the penis. His CD4 cell count was 200/μL, and his viral load was undetectable. He had been receiving highly active antiretroviral therapy for 11 months. Before he developed HSV-2 infection, he had no history of genital herpes infection. Treatment was begun with acyclovir (400 mg 3 times daily for 1 month), with no improvement. Subsequently, the patient was treated with valacyclovir hydrochloride (1 g twice daily for 4 weeks) and then with famciclovir (500 mg 3 times daily for 4 weeks). Despite these multiple treatment attempts, he experienced no improvement and remained culture positive for HSV-2 (Figure 1).
Beating the blues after Cancer: randomised controlled trial of a tele-based psychological intervention for high distress patients and carers

The diagnosis and treatment of cancer is a major life stress such that approximately 35% of patients experience persistent clinically significant distress and carers often experience even higher distress than patients. This paper presents the design of a two arm randomised controlled trial with patients and carers who have elevated psychological distress comparing minimal contact self management vs. an individualised tele-based cognitive behavioural intervention. 140 patients and 140 carers per condition (560 participants in total) will been recruited after being identified as high distress through caller screening at two community-based cancer helplines and randomised to 1) a single 30-minute telephone support and education session with a nurse counsellor with self management materials 2) a tele-based psychologist delivered five session individualised cognitive behavioural intervention. Session components will include stress reduction, problem-solving, cognitive challenging and enhancing relationship support and will be delivered weekly. Participants will be assessed at baseline and 3, 6 and 12 months after recruitment. Outcome measures include: anxiety and depression, cancer specific distress, unmet psychological supportive care needs, positive adjustment, overall Quality of life. The study will provide recommendations about the efficacy and potential economic value of minimal contact self management vs. tele-based psychologist delivered cognitive behavioural intervention to facilitate better psychosocial adjustment and mental health for people with cancer and their carers. ACTRN12609000301268.
Structural Analysis of Hypertexts: Identifying Hierarchies and Useful Metrics

Hypertext users often suffer from the “lost in hyperspace” problem: disorientation from too many jumps while traversing a complex network. One solution to this problem is improved authoring to create more comprehensible structures. This paper proposes several authoring tools, based on hypertext structure analysis.
In many hypertext systems authors are encouraged to create hierarchical structures, but when writing, the hierarchy is lost because of the inclusion of cross-reference links. The first part of this paper looks at ways of recovering lost hierarchies and finding new ones, offering authors different views of the same hypertext. The second part helps authors by identifying properties of the hypertext document. Multiple metrics are developed including compactness and stratum. Compactness indicates the intrinsic connectedness of the hypertext, and stratum reveals to what degree the hypertext is organized so that some nodes must be read before others.
Several existing hypertexts are used to illustrate the benefits of each technique. The collection of techniques provides a multifaceted view of the hypertext, which should allow authors to reduce undesired structural complexity and create documents that readers can traverse more easily.
Prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV in Kenya: challenges to implementation

BACKGROUND
The prevention of mother-to-child transmission of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is lauded as one of the more successful HIV prevention measures. However, despite some gains in the prevention of mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) in sub-Saharan Africa, mother-to-child transmission rates are still high. In Kenya, mother-to-child transmission is considered one of the greatest health challenges and scaling up PMTCT services is crucial to its elimination by 2015. However, guideline implementation faces barriers that challenge scale-up of services. The objective of this paper is to identify barriers to PMTCT implementation in the context of a randomized control trial on the use of structured mobile phone messages in PMTCT.


METHODS
The preliminary analysis presented here is based on survey data collected during enrolment in PMTCT services at one of two health facilities in Nairobi, Kenya, with overall number of antenatal care (ANC) visits determined from 48 hour follow up data.


RESULTS
Data was collected for 503 women. Despite significant differences in the type of facility and sample characteristics between sites, all women presented to care at 20 weeks gestation or later and 88.8% attended less than four ANC visits. PMTCT counselling at first visit had high coverage (86%), however less than a third of women (31.34%) reported receiving contraception counselling. Although 60.8% of women had reportedly disclosed their status to their partners, only 40% were aware of their partner's status. Very few women had been tested for TB (10%) or received single dose nevirapine during their first antenatal care appointment (20%).


CONCLUSION
Revised PMTCT guidelines aim to reduce the inequity between PMTCT services in high and low resource settings in efforts to eliminate mother-to-child transmission. However, guideline implementation in low resource settings continues to be confronted with challenges related to late presentation, less than four ANC visits, low screening rates for opportunistic infections, and limited contraception counselling. These challenges are further complicated by lack of disclosure to partners. Effective scale up and implementation of PMTCT services requires that such ongoing program challenges be identified and appropriately addressed within the local context.
Recognition of Bengali Handwritten Characters Using Skeletal Convexity and Dynamic Programming

The main challenge in recognizing handwritten characters is to handle large-scale shape variations in the handwriting of different individuals. In this paper, we present a novel handwritten character recognition method based on the structural shape of a character irrespective of the viewing direction on the 2D plane. Structural shape of a character is described by different skeletal convexities of character strokes. Such skeletal convexity acts as an invariant feature for character recognition. Longest common subsequence matching is used for recognition. We have tested out method on a benchmark dataset of handwritten Bengali character images. Preliminary results demonstrate the efficacy of our approach.
A general algorithm for exploration with Gaussian processes in complex, unknown environments

We propose a novel algorithm for efficient exploration with a single agent in unknown environments, populated with static obstacles. Every next position is computed by employing environment inference on top of path planning. The path planning process that ensures obstacle avoidance uses a modified version of the A* algorithm [1] and the inference is performed by direct sensing and by predicting values at yet-not-visited positions using Gaussian processes. We have validated our algorithm with densely measured data of an indoor magnetic field with significant spatial variations in different obstacle setups. Additionally, it is shown that it outperforms a previously developed algorithm [2], for obstacle-free scenarios, and the random movement of the agent.
SUrgical versus PERcutaneous Bypass: SUPERB-trial; Heparin-bonded endoluminal versus surgical femoro-popliteal bypass: study protocol for a randomized controlled trial

BACKGROUND
Endovascular treatment options for the superficial femoral artery are evolving rapidly. For long lesions, the venous femoropopliteal bypass considered to be superior above the prosthetic bypass. An endoluminal bypass, however, may provide equal patency rates compared to the prosthetic above knee bypass. The introduction of heparin-bonded endografts may further improve patency rates. The SUrgical versus PERcutaneous Bypass (SuperB) study is designed to assess whether a heparin-bonded endoluminal bypass provides equal patency rates compared to the venous bypass and to prove that it is associated with improved quality of life, related to a decreased complication rate, or not.


METHODS/DESIGN
Two-hundred-twenty-two patients with peripheral arterial occlusive disease, category 3-6 according to Rutherford, will be randomized in two treatment arms; 1. the surgical femoro-popliteal bypass, venous whenever possible, and 2. the heparin-bonded endoluminal bypass. The power analysis was based on a non-inferiority principle, with an effect size of 90% and 10% margins (alpha 5%, power 80%). Patients will be recruited from 5 teaching hospitals in the Netherlands during a 2-year period. The primary endpoint is primary patency and quality of life evaluated by the RAND-36 questionnaire and the Walking Impairment Questionnaire. Secondary endpoints include secondary patency, freedom-from-TLR and complications.


DISCUSSION
The SuperB trial is a multicentre randomized controlled trial designed to show non-inferiority in patency rates of the heparin-bonded endograft compared to the surgical bypass for treatment of long SFA lesions, and to prove a better quality of life using the heparin bonded-endograft compared to surgically treatment, related to a reduction in complications.


TRIAL REGISTRATION
Clinicaltrials: NCT01220245.