Problem formulation. The European Commission considers that health care providers and potential payers may need further evidence of mobile health (mHealth) clinical and economic benefits and despite there are hundreds of mHealth initiatives, most of them did not move beyond the pilot phase.   Purpose. This thesis aims at analyzing how can mHealth companies contribute towards solving existing health care challenges while becoming successful businesses in such an immature market. The expected results are a set of empirical evidences for companies and investors interested in this relatively new industry for the development of successful businesses, products and services.   Literature. The authors have explored classic theories and models on market entry, business and strategy development in combination with recent studies on health care, Internet and mHealth economy and ecosystem.   Methods. A qualitative multiple case study has been conducted. An analytical framework with propositions derived from the literature analysis guide the empirical study of two organizations that have successfully developed mHealth solutions in two countries with different socio-economic situations: China and Spain. Organization A is a health care and lifestyle company from Beijing responsible for a successful app with 80 million users that has brought 45 million USD investment. Organization B is the first intrapreneurial public organization born within a hospital in Madrid and committed to make knowledge available to patients and health care professionals through ICT. After a set of interviews with executive representatives and project managers, a pattern-matching analysis has been used to extract inferences and to identify correlations and deviations from literature research.   Key findings. The main conclusion of this thesis work is that mHealth is clearly a profitable blue ocean industry nowadays with lots of business opportunities to explore, room for competition and complex challenges to solve. On one side, mHealth is presented as a disruptive industry expected to cause a big impact in health care by contributing to solve costs and quality problems although there is little evidence on such benefits. On the other side, privacy, security, regulations, governments’ decisions and reluctant health care professionals become the main barriers for adoption. The outlook for the future of mHealth proves that it will be fundamental to count with multidisciplinary teams of professionals, geographically distributed health centers and technological platforms with secure and standardized communications. All these will not be possible without a general mindset change from government, administrators, regulators and health care professionals to incentivize and foster new mobile health technologies treating them as an ally rather than a threat.

Not available / text

The colonisation of freshly sawn Corsican pine lumber by sapstain and mould fungi was investigated at a sawmill in Hampshire, UK. Three repeat trials encompassing the different seasons of the year were carried out over two years. Results show that fungal colonisation of sawn lumber is dependent on the effect of time of year. Sawlogs were stored for different intervals up to 16 weeks before conversion to boards. Boards were then stored for up to 12 weeks after milling and sampled every 4 weeks to determine the effect of timber ageing on fungal colonisation up to 28 weeks after felling. The metabolic activity of wood cells over the period after felling of the original tree was also measured. It was evident that the defacement of boards reached maximum levels after 12 weeks exposure irrespective of seasonal influences. Initial levels of fungal growth on lumber were reduced if the boards were milled from logs stored for a period prior to conversion. Investigations into the metabolic activity of the wood cells revealed significant levels of respiration taking place up to 28 weeks after felling of the original tree including 12 weeks post-conversion into boards. Boards were used to make a nested stack arrangement allowing plastic tanks top be placed in the centre. The tanks contained a sub-sample of the full-size boards in order to investigate insect activity and effects of gammairradiation. A total of 115 insect species representing 16 of the 34 British orders were collected during the trials. Seventy-two percent of these insects were collected from within the stacks of lumber and investigations using sealed tanks containing boards showed that the insects could influence the fungal colonisation of sawn lumber. Despite the relatively short length of the trials, a succession of insect colonisation from fungivores through to predators and detritivores was recorded. Boards, which were sterilised by gamma-irradiation, were preferentially colonised by mould fungi and subsequent internal staining was confined to the outer surface. Trials with short-length billets allowed the wood-colonising ability of selected sapstain fungi to be investigated under controlled conditions following sterilisation by gamma-irradiation or autoclaving, and storage at 30°C and 20°C. Lesion formation in gamma-irradiated tissue was solely due to the fungus potentially conditioning the wood for colonisation. Colonisation studies also revealed that different fungi exhibit different strategies enabling them to infect timber. Pathogenic species demonstrated a relatively fast initial growth rate to establish themselves before triggering any host anti-fungal responses in the wood. The characteristic lesions created in the billets were investigated using light and electron microscopy to reveal hyphal invasion and or/ wood cell modifications. Respiratory activity of the lesions was elucidated using radioactively labelled glucose allowing the metabolic pathways to be ascertained and demonstrated that wood tissue in the apparently healthy regions adjacent to the lesions reacted as if infected. Future work considers the possibility of biocontrol, using insects in combination with gamma-irradiation of sawn lumber and also further investigations into the reaction zones produced by the fungus growing in the wood.

Not available / text

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

A recent hypothesis for explaining blue-green eggs in birds suggests that they may be a sexually selected signal of female (and thus nestling) quality that males use to make parental investment decisions. Although this hypothesis has found mixed correlational support in a few species, well-controlled experimental support has been lacking in non-cavity-nesting species with vivid blue eggs. In this study, we isolate the influence of egg colour on male behaviour by replacing natural American robin Turdus migratorius clutches with four artificial eggs (all of the same colour) representing extremes in natural colour intensity. After incubation, three unrelated nestlings were fostered into each experimental nest immediately after the normal incubation period and parental behaviour was monitored when nestlings were 3, 6, and 9 days old. For the youngest nestlings, male provisioning rate significantly increased in the dark egg treatment, but the effect of egg colour disappeared at the older nestling stages. This result remains significant when controlling for variation in female behaviour. Male feeding rate at unmanipulated nests was also significantly related to natural egg colour. These results suggest that blue-green egg colour acts as post-mating signal of female quality in at least some cup-nesting species, but does not exclude the possibility that the blue-green pigment also serves other adaptive purposes. / Thesis (Master, Biology) -- Queen's University, 2009-05-28 13:21:06.941

No description available.

The aim of this research is to investigate the application of nonlinear programming techniques to multipurpose reservoir systems. A multipurpose multiple reservoir operation problem is a typical nonlinear large scale optimization problem. The currently applied techniques overcome the nonlinearity and dimensionality problems through simplification. To model the problem more closely, a successful trial is made in this study to apply the most efficient and suitable nonlinear programming techniques. Although research in large scale nonlinear optimization has been in recent'years a major subject of interest within the mathematical programming community, its application to reservoir systems is very limited. As a result of these activities software packages, as Lancelot, have been developed. Lancelot is a general purpose software package designed for solving large-scale nonlinear optimization problems. It uses Augmented Lagrangian and Conjugate Gradient methods. This software is used here successfully to solve an optimization problem formulated for a major river system, the Blue Nile in Sudan. The system has two in series reservoirs used for hydropower generation, maintaining minimum downstream flows and irrigation. For optimization, some features of the system have been modelled. These are sedimentation, evaporation, demand and flow. To represent the effect of sedimentation a model is fitted and verified. To include the effect of evaporation a model that estimates the total evaporation losses is fitted using Penman approach and verified using water balance. To cope with flow uncertainty the Blue Nile flow has been modelled. ARMA(1,1) has given the best fitting. Irrigation requirements have been estimated using Penman- Monteith approach. Efficiency of water use has been investigated and other possible demand scenarios resulting from efficient water use are obtained. The results of flow and demand modelling are used as direct input to the optimization model while sedimentation and evaporation models are incorporated in the model. The objective of this model is to maximise power benefits on condition that certain irrigation and downstream requirements be met. To solve this problem a double precision version of Lancelot was installed in a hp-UNIX system. For the problem a specification and a standard input format, SEF, files were written and put under the same directory with Lancelot to run the program. The problem was solved successfully in few minutes. The solution includes values for the objective function, decision variables (releases and storage volumes), penalty parameter, Lagrange multipliers and slack variables. The optimization output is affected by reservoir sedimentation. Therefore the developed optimization and sedimentation models have been linked to investigate sedimentation effect on optimization on output along the course of reservoir operation. Results have shown that this approach can be used to investigate the effect of sedimentation on reservoir optimum output. In, a multipurpose reservoir system, the optimization output for one purpose is affected by the efficiency of water use for other purposes. Therefore the effect of efficient water use in irrigation on power benefits is investigated. Results have shown an increment in benefits due to using irrigation water efficiently. This approach can be applied to systems where priority is given for one purpose over the others.