Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is the middle ground between normal, age-appropriate memory impairment, and dementia. Whereas patients with MCI are able to cope with the memory deficit, those with dementia are not: Their memory impairment and other cognitive deficits are of sufficient magnitude to interfere with the patients’ ability to cope independently with daily activities. In both MCI and dementia, there is evidence of declining cognitive functions from a previously higher level of functioning. In both the conditions, there is also an evidence of dysfunction in one or more cognitive domains. There are two subtypes of MCI depending on whether memory is predominantly affected: amnestic type and nonamnestic/behavioral type. Not all patients with MCI transition to dementia, some recover. In this case scenario, we present a 68-year-old man with MCI who lives with his wife. They are getting ready to host dinner. His wife asks him to vacuum the dining room while she runs an urgent errand. We describe how this simple task vacuuming a room ended in a catastrophe with the patient spending the night in jail and his wife hospitalized. We discuss what went wrong in the patient/wife interaction and how the catastrophic ending could have been avoided.

Choices are often difficult to make by patients with Alzheimer Dementia. They often become acutely confused when faced with too many options because they are not able to retain in their working memory enough information about the various individual choices available. In this case study, we describe how an essentially simple benign task (choosing a dress to wear) can rapidly escalate and result in a catastrophic outcome. We examine what went wrong in the patient/caregiver interaction and how that potentially catastrophic situation could have been avoided or defused.

Part of the session “Navigating Narrative: Women’s Complex Agency in Claiming Self and Family Wellness.” Communication and cross-disciplinary researchers have directed attention to the reciprocal influence of narrative with experiences of illness and wellness (e.g., Arthur Frank, Carolyn Ellis, Barbara Sharf, Patricia Geist-Martin, Lynn Harter, Art Bochner, Bud Goodall). Indeed, stories are increasingly the points of focus across a broad range of disciplines studying topics such as global health, marginalized communities and feminist standpoints, geriatric health/care, nursing experience, health message promotion, family caregiving, patient agency, holistic wellness, adolescent well-being, aging, and women’s reproductive health, among numerous others. Grounded in these interests, this panel looks at interconnections among gender, health/illness/well-being, and narrative, with particular attention to how women’s experiences of health and care influence and are influenced by the stories told by them and about them. Looking beneath what may be readily apparent, panelists examine well-being- and health-related narrative to identify variables of wellness that seem empowering but are not, appear disempowering but are not, look generic and broadly applicable but are not, and present as inevitable or despairing but are not.

Book Summary: Beyond New Media: Discourse and Critique in a Polymediated Age examines a host of differing positions on media in order to explore how those positions can inform one another and build a basis for future engagements with media theory, research, and practice. Herbig, Herrmann, and Tyma have brought together a number of media scholars with differing paradigmatic backgrounds to debate the relative applicability of existing theories and in doing so develop a new approach: polymediation. Each contributor’s disciplinary background is diverse, spanning interpersonal communication, media studies, organizational communication, instructional design, rhetoric, mass communication, gender studies, popular culture studies, informatics, and persuasion. Although each of these scholars brings with them a unique perspective on media’s role in people’s lives, what binds them together is the belief that meaningful discourse about media must be an ongoing conversation that is open to critique and revision in a rapidly changing mediated culture. By studying media in a polymediated way, Beyond New Media addresses more completely our complex relationship to media(tion) in our everyday lives.

This NCA Public Program addressed health, health care, and understandings about health in the Appalachian region, an area where residents face a disproportionately high incidence of poor health and unique barriers to health. The program took place in the East Tennessee Room of the D.P. Culp Center on the campus of East Tennessee State University. The moderated panel included scholars in Communication, Community Health, Nursing, and Appalachian Studies, as well as community practitioners.

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Part of the presentation “Navigating Narrative: Women’s Complex Agency in Claiming Self and Family Wellness.” Communication and cross-disciplinary researchers have directed attention to the reciprocal influence of narrative with experiences of illness and wellness (e.g., Arthur Frank, Carolyn Ellis, Barbara Sharf, Patricia Geist-Martin, Lynn Harter, Art Bochner, Bud Goodall). Indeed, stories are increasingly the points of focus across a broad range of disciplines studying topics such as global health, marginalized communities and feminist standpoints, geriatric health/care, nursing experience, health message promotion, family caregiving, patient agency, holistic wellness, adolescent well-being, aging, and women’s reproductive health, among numerous others. Grounded in these interests, this panel looks at interconnections among gender, health/illness/well-being, and narrative, with particular attention to how women’s experiences of health and care influence and are influenced by the stories told by them and about them. Looking beneath what may be readily apparent, panelists examine well-being- and health-related narrative to identify variables of wellness that seem empowering but are not, appear disempowering but are not, look generic and broadly applicable but are not, and present as inevitable or despairing but are not.

No description available.

Power quality has a great effect on the operation of system loads. To analyze its effects and the possible economic losses due to system disturbances, there is an immediate need of a power quality monitoring system. With an effective communication system, network disturbance data can be gathered and analyzed efficiently such that outage duration and its consequent losses can be reduced. This thesis presents communication network performance simulation results of different types of communication schemes used in a power quality monitoring system. Discrete event simulation method is used to study the end-to-end delay times of different communication architectures. Based on these simulation results, system designers can choose the best option to meet their data communication requirements in power quality monitoring.

Migrating from a wired to a wireless implementation for communication system used in industrial applications is a logical move to avoid the many shortcomings associated with wires. When operated under harsh environments, those wires can break and could cause not only damage to the system but also endanger human lives. However, it is not well documented how well a wireless protocol can work under such harsh industrial environments. This thesis attempts to answer this research question in the point of view of gauging the performance of a wireless protocol under the influence of electromagnetic noise. More specifically, the type of noise signal that is the focus of this investigation is the random, pulsed type (e.g., discharges caused by sparking) that creates a hyperbolic broadband disturbance in the frequency domain. Consequently, a fractal noise model is used to study noise of this nature. The steps toward achieving this goal include: requirements gathering, wireless technology selection; noise modelling and synthesis; real noise capture and analysis to validate the chosen noise model; high-frequency fractal noise emulation in hardware; the use of a novel noise injection method for empirical work; and the conducting of a controlled synthetic noise-to-wireless node performance evaluation to obtain performance measure in the form of packet error rate (PER). Performance data in terms of PER versus signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for various nodes separation have been collected. There were three significant findings: the obtained performance curves follow the standard 'S' trend; for a specific desired reliability (denoted by a certain PER), the SNR at the transmitter needs to be boosted as the correlation of the noise being present increases; and the maximum distance between nodes separation for a certain reliability to be achieved depends exponentially with the transmitter‟s SNR. The relationship in the third finding assists in placement of wireless nodes, which in turn can determine the minimum amount of wireless nodes required for an industrial system to reach the desired system reliability, thus boasting network cost saving.