Bakgrund: Kronisk obstruktiv lungsjukdom (KOL) är en världsomfattande sjukdom. År 2012 dog mer än tre miljoner människor världen över till följd av sjukdomen. Av de dödsfall som sker till följd av sjukdomen, sker 90 % i låg- och medelinkomstländer. Den huvudsakliga orsaken till att sjukdomen utvecklas är rökning. Sjukdomen kan leda till b.la. depression, utmattning, ångest och smärta. Sjuksköterskans arbete innefattar att tillgodose basala och specifika omvårdnadsbehov. KASAM (känslan av sammanhang) består av tre dimensioner begriplighet, hanterbarhet och meningsfullhet. Alla dessa bidrar till en känsla av sammanhang. Syfte: Att beskriva upplevelsen av att leva med kronisk obstruktiv lungsjukdom (KOL). Metod: Litteraturöversikten genomfördes med hjälp av 11 kvalitativa artiklar. Artiklarna analyserades med hjälp av Fribergs femstegsmodell. Resultat: Fem teman framkom, Upplevd andfåddhet, Upplevd påverkan av aktivitetsförmågan, Upplevd ensamhet och social isolering, Upplevd meningslöshet och suicidala tankar och Upplevd kontroll. KOL är en svår sjukdom som involverar många olika negativa känslor. Rädsla, panik, ångest och depression var förekommande. Slutsatser: KOL är en sjukdom som innefattar många negativa känslor och medför problem som påverkar hela livet i stor utsträckning. De som är drabbade av KOL kunde ha en låg känsla av sammanhang. Dessa fynd ger sjuksköterskan en viktig insikt i de upplevelser vårdtagarna upplever i sin sjukdom. / Background: COPD is a worldwide disease. Year 2012 more than three million people died as a result of the disease worldwide. Of the deaths that occur as a result of the disease, 90 % occur in low- and middle-wealth countries. The main cause of the illness is smoking. The disease can lead to for instance depression, fatigue, anxiety and pain. The nurse profession involves satisfying basic and specific nursing needs. SOC (sense of coherence) is comprised of three dimensions of comprehensibility, manageability and meaningfulness. All these contribute to a sense of coherence. Aim: To describe the experience of living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) Method: Literature review was conducted using 11 qualitative articles. The articles were analysed with Friberg´s five-stage model. Results: Five themes emerged, Perceived breathlessness, Perceived loneliness and social isolation, Perceived meaninglessness and suicidal thoughts and Perceived control. These themes indicate that COPD is a difficult disease involving many different negative emotions. Fear, panic, anxiety and depression were frequent. Conclusion: COPD is a disease involving many negative feelings and poses problems that effects the entire life extensively. Those who are afflicted with COPD could have a low sense of coherence. These findings give nurses an important insight into the experiences patients have in their illness.

Many cutting-edge computer and electronic products are powered by advanced Systems-on-Chip (SoC). Advanced SoCs encompass superb performance together with large number of functions. This is achieved by efficient integration of huge number of transistors. Such very large scale integration is enabled by a core-based design paradigm as well as deep-submicron and 3D-stacked-IC technologies. These technologies are susceptible to reliability and testing complications caused by thermal issues. Three crucial thermal issues related to temperature variations, temperature gradients, and temperature cycling are addressed in this thesis. Existing test scheduling techniques rely on temperature simulations to generate schedules that meet thermal constraints such as overheating prevention. The difference between the simulated temperatures and the actual temperatures is called temperature error. This error, for past technologies, is negligible. However, advanced SoCs experience large errors due to large process variations. Such large errors have costly consequences, such as overheating, and must be taken care of. This thesis presents an adaptive approach to generate test schedules that handle such temperature errors. Advanced SoCs manufactured as 3D stacked ICs experience large temperature gradients. Temperature gradients accelerate certain early-life defect mechanisms. These mechanisms can be artificially accelerated using gradient-based, burn-in like, operations so that the defects are detected before shipping. Moreover, temperature gradients exacerbate some delay-related defects. In order to detect such defects, testing must be performed when appropriate temperature-gradients are enforced. A schedule-based technique that enforces the temperature-gradients for burn-in like operations is proposed in this thesis. This technique is further developed to support testing for delay-related defects while appropriate gradients are enforced. The last thermal issue addressed by this thesis is related to temperature cycling. Temperature cycling test procedures are usually applied to safety-critical applications to detect cycling-related early-life failures. Such failures affect advanced SoCs, particularly through-silicon-via structures in 3D-stacked-ICs. An efficient schedule-based cycling-test technique that combines cycling acceleration with testing is proposed in this thesis. The proposed technique fits into existing 3D testing procedures and does not require temperature chambers. Therefore, the overall cycling acceleration and testing cost can be drastically reduced. All the proposed techniques have been implemented and evaluated with extensive experiments based on ITC’02 benchmarks as well as a number of 3D stacked ICs. Experiments show that the proposed techniques work effectively and reduce the costs, in particular the costs related to addressing thermal issues and early-life failures. We have also developed a fast temperature simulation technique based on a closed-form solution for the temperature equations. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed simulation technique reduces the schedule generation time by more than half.

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Battery Management System (BMS) is an essential part in battery powered applications where large battery packs are in use. BMS ensures protection, controlling, supervision and accurate state estimation of battery pack to provide efficient energy management. However the particular application determines the accuracy and requirements of BMS where it has to implement; in electric vehicles (EVs) accuracy cannot be compromised. The software part of BMS estimates the states of the battery pack and takes the best possible decision. In EVs one of the key tasks of BMS’s software part is to provide the actual state of charge (SOC), which represents a crucial parameter to be determined, especially in lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4) batteries, due to the presence of the high hysteresis behavior in the open circuit voltage than other kind of lithium batteries. This hysteresis phenomena appears with two different voltage curves during the charging and discharging process. The value of the voltage that the battery is going to assume during the off-loading operation depends on several factors, such as temperature, loop direction and ageing. In this research work, hybrid method is implemented in which advantages of several methods are achieved by implementing one technique combined with another. In this work SOC is calculated from coulomb counting method and in order to correct the error of SOC, an hysteresis model is developed and used due to presence of hysteresis effect in LiFePO4 batteries. An hysteresis model of the open circuit voltage (OCV) for a LiFePO4 cell is developed and implemented in MATLAB/Simulink© in order to reproduce the voltage response of the battery when no current from the cell is required (no load condition). Then the difference of estimated voltage and measured voltage is taken in order to correct the error of SOC calculated from coulomb counting or current integration method. To develop the hysteresis model which can reproduce the same voltage behavior, lot of experiments have been carried out practically in order to see the hysteresis voltage response and to see that how voltage curve change with the variation of temperature, ageing and loop direction. At the end model is validated with different driving profiles at different ambient temperatures.

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Research on psychosocial health in social work isn't developed enough. Instead, there's much more research on psychosocial unhealth. What about social workers, the unhealth is often related to the situation at work and the work environment. The aim of this study was to "during interviews understand the factors which social workers experience as important to maintain their own psychosocial health in the life situations". With hermeneutic method the particular interest was directed on how the participants experienced and explained their psychosocial health on the basis of their life situations, and the results was analyzed with Antonovsky's (1991/2005) perspective directed on health and Sense of Coherence (SOC). In the study, we used a qualitative form of interviews which allowed our participants to answer with their own words and from how they interpreted the questions. We have made interviews with eight social workers in a average municipality in Sweden. The results are shown qualitatively in current text. With our interest in social workers´ psychosocial health, we have understood that it's complicated to make a partition line between the life at work and the private life when it comes to the social workers´ experiences of factors that helps to maintain psychosocial health. Instead, it's about to understand the social worker's psychosocial health as a whole, on the basis of the work as well as the private life. In comparison to research on psychosocial unhealth, our participants said that it's especially the private life, rather than the life at work, that influences and sometimes even controls the psychosocial health in general. Nevertheless, there were plural factors at work which were experienced as especially important to maintain the psychosocial health, for example a "good director", "good colleagues", "ability to let go of the liability for clients" and a working situation where you "work two together" plus "experience and knowledge" from the whole life situations. In private life, and in addition to work, the experiences were about "enriching leisure time", social support from friends and family and the ability to make "reasonable demands and limits for yourself" in private life as well as at work.

Avec la complexité croissante des systèmes sur puce, de nouveaux défis ne cessent d’émerger dans la conception de ces systèmes en matière de vérification formelle et de synthèse de haut niveau. Plusieurs travaux autour de SystemC, considéré comme la norme pour la conception au niveau système, sont en cours afin de relever ces nouveaux défis. Cependant, à cause du modèle de concurrence complexe de SystemC, relever ces défis reste toujours une tâche difficile. Ainsi, nous pensons qu’il est primordial de partir sur de meilleures bases en utilisant un modèle de concurrence plus efficace. Par conséquent, dans cette thèse, nous étudions une méthodologie de conception qui offre une meilleure abstraction pour modéliser des composants parallèles en se basant sur le concept de transaction. Nous montrons comment, grâce au raisonnement simple que procure le concept de transaction, il devient plus facile d’appliquer la vérification formelle, le raffinement incrémental et la synthèse de haut niveau. Dans le but d’évaluer l’efficacité de cette méthodologie, nous avons fixé l’objectif d’optimiser la vitesse de simulation d’un modèle transactionnel en profitant d’une machine multicoeur. Nous présentons ainsi l’environnement de modélisation et de simulation parallèle que nous avons développé. Nous étudions différentes stratégies d’ordonnancement en matière de parallélisme et de surcoût de synchronisation. Une expérimentation faite sur un modèle du transmetteur Wi-Fi 802.11a a permis d’atteindre une accélération d’environ 1.8 en utilisant deux threads. Avec 8 threads, bien que la charge de travail des différentes transactions n’était pas importante, nous avons pu atteindre une accélération d’environ 4.6, ce qui est un résultat très prometteur. / With the increasing complexity of SoCs, new challenges continue to emerge in the design of these systems in terms of formal verification and high-level synthesis. Several research efforts around SystemC, considered the de facto standard for system-level design, are underway to meet these new challenges. However, because of the complex concurrency model of SystemC, these challenges remain difficult tasks. Thus, we believe it is important to continue on a better footing by using a more effective concurrency model. Therefore, in this thesis, we study a design methodology that provides a better abstraction for modeling parallel components based on the concept of transaction. We show how, through simple reasoning about transactions, it becomes easier to apply formal verification, incremental refinement and high-level synthesis. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of this methodology, we set the goal to optimize the simulation speed of a transactional model by taking advantage of a multicore machine. We present a modeling and parallel simulation environment that we developed. We study different scheduling strategies in terms of parallelism and synchronization overhead. An experiment made on a Wi-Fi 802.11a transmitter model achieved a speed up of about 1.8 using two threads. With 8 threads, although the workload of individual transactions was not significant, we could reach a speed up equal to 4.6 which is a very promising result.

Soil organic carbon (SOC) concentrations and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are not uniform across the landscape, but assemble in "hotspots" in specific areas. These differences are mainly driven by human-induced activities such as agricultural management. 40-50% of the Earth's land surface is under agricultural land-use, for instance cropland, managed grassland and permanent crops including agro-forestry and bio-energy crops. Furthermore, 62% of the global soil C stock is SOC and the soil stores more than 3 times more C than the atmosphere. Thus, C sequestration in agricultural soil has a potentially important role in increasing SOC storage and GHG mitigation, and there is considerable interest in understanding the effects of agricultural management on SOC and GHG fluxes in both grasslands and croplands, in order to better assess the uncertainty and vulnerability of terrestrial SOC reservoirs. For the sake of discovering the agricultural management practices relating to the effective and sustainable C sequestration in agricultural lands in Europe, simulating future terrestrial C stocks and GHG budgets under varied agricultural management systems in major European ecosystems is essential. Using models is a useful method with the purpose of this and abundant studies have carried out. However, many model results have not been validated with reliable observed long-term data, while other studies have reported a strong impact of model initialisation on model result. Nevertheless, predictions of annual to decadal variability in the European terrestrial C and GHG ressources largely rely on model results. Consequently, finding the most appropriate and comprehensive model initialisation method for obtaining reliable model simulations became important, especially for process-based ecosystem models. In recent years, Zimmermann et al. (2007) have succeed in initialising the Rothamsted Carbon model (RothC) using a physical and chemical soil fractionation method. For that reason, we hypothesised that measured detailed SOC data would be useful to initialise ecosystem models, and this hypothesis should be tested for different process-based models and agricultural land-use and management. (...)

This study focuses on the use of animals in social work from the perspective of social workers. The purpose of this study is to examine social workers’ experiences of animal assisted social work and how social workers view the integration of animals in various fields of social work. The research is based on a qualitative method and four semi-structured interviews were conducted with social workers. The theories incorporated in the study are Attachment Theory and Sense of Coherence (SOC). The following results are presented: Social workers are considered to have a more comprehensive understanding of clients compared to their associates who do not hold a degree in Social Work. The Social Work Programme prepares you for work in various roles in numerous work places and the social workers claim to sympathise with the many aspects which affect clients. Some of the positive aspects of incorporating animals in social work include opportunities to experience the outdoors and exercise when spending time with the animals but also the additional satisfaction of being able to offer clients these benefits. The social workers are aware of potential safety risks in handling and associating with the animals and these safety risks appear to have a negative impact on animal assisted social work. According to the social workers, animal allergies can be minimized and should not be the focal point. SOC and its three components – Comprehensibility, Manageability and Meaningfulness have been applied to the social workers experiences of animal assisted social work and their experiences shared indicate that animals can hold properties of an attachment figure. Animals have a calming effect on clients, and assist in the connection between social worker and client.