This paper presents a method for pedestrian activity classification and gait analysis based on the microelectromechanical-systems inertial measurement unit (IMU). The work targets two groups of applications, including the following: 1) human activity classification and 2) joint human activity and gait-phase classification. In the latter case, the gait phase is defined as a substate of a specific gait cycle, i.e., the states of the body between the stance and swing phases. We model the pedestrian motion with a continuous hidden Markov model (HMM) in which the output density functions are assumed to be Gaussian mixture models. For the joint activity and gait-phase classification, motivated by the cyclical nature of the IMU measurements, each individual activity is modeled by a "circular HMM." For both the proposed classification methods, proper feature vectors are extracted from the IMU measurements. In this paper, we report the results of conducted experiments where the IMU was mounted on the humans' chests. This permits the potential application of the current study in camera-aided inertial navigation for positioning and personal assistance for future research works. Five classes of activity, including walking, running, going upstairs, going downstairs, and standing, are considered in the experiments. The performance of the proposed methods is illustrated in various ways, and as an objective measure, the confusion matrix is computed and reported. The achieved relative figure of merits using the collected data validates the reliability of the proposed methods for the desired applications. / <p>QC 20130114</p>

The pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) has been described as a stressful place for parents of critically ill children. Research to date has examined parents’ needs and stressors with a child in PICU. There is a paucity of research examining the experience for parents of a child who is transferred from the PICU to the hospital ward. Open-ended interviews were conducted with 10 parents within 24-48 hours after transfer from a PICU to a hospital ward at a children’s hospital in Canada to understand this experience. Parents revealed that the experience involved a search for comfort through transitions as expressed through the themes of: ‘being a parent with a critically ill child is exhausting’, ‘being kept in the know’, ‘feeling supported by others’, and ‘being transferred’. The findings from this study can help nurses and other health professionals working with parents to support them through the transition from PICU. Recommendations are made for the inclusion of family-centered care practices to assist parents through transitions.

It has been theorized that muscles generate more force on bone than body weight alone and therefore it is likely that muscle contraction drives and sustains bone adaptation (Frost 1999). Purpose: To investigate the relationship between the timing and tempo of peak growth velocities of lean tissue (LT) and bone mineral content (BMC) in boys and girls at three sites using data derived from individual growth curves. Methods: 72 boys and 70 girls were fitted with growth curves that had a distinguishable peak. Height and weight were measured for each participant and tissue assessment was performed annually using DXA. Factorial ANOVAs were completed to analyse data for differences in age, while forward regression analyses was used between LT and BMC. Results: The peak growth velocity for lean occurred significantly (P<0.05) earlier than the peak growth velocity for bone at all locations except the legs. There was a difference (P<0.001) between genders in the age of peak for both lean tissue and bone tissue at all locations with females peak growth occurring before that of males. When aligned by PHV a significant difference (P<0.05) in the timing of PBMCV was found between the arms and the legs with the peak in bone growth in the legs occurring significantly before peak bone growth in the arms. PLTV was independently associated with PBMCV at the arms (r2= .71, p<0.001), legs (r2= .53, p<0.001) and trunk (r2= .52, p<0.001). Conclusion: In conclusion, LT growth precedes BMC growth and after controlling for gender, size and maturity the magnitude of LT growth is associated with BMC growth. The findings of this study are in support the Muscle-bone Unit (Frost and Schoenau, 2000), which theorizes that localised muscle action is a driving force for bone growth. Future studies are needed to analyse bone strength as it relates to local muscle strength and usage while controlling for confounding variables.

This paper investigates the purchasing power parity (PPP) hypothesis using panel data. Under PPP the real exchange rate is stationary around a constant mean. Recent panel data unit root tests are employed to test the PPP proposition where, under the conventional null hypothesis of a unit root, the real exchange rate is not stationary and PPP does not hold. In this case, as the time period t + n approaches infinity, its variance relative to period t will also approach infinity. The usual alternative in unit root tests is stationarity around a constant mean or a linear trend. The paper brings innovation into the PPP and panel unit root testing literature by allowing for possible nonlinear deterministic trends in the alternative hypothesis (as advanced by Cushman (2004)). If the null hypothesis is rejected in favour of the alternative of a non-linear trend, PPP still does not hold, but does at least revert back to a meaningful, stable long-run equilibrium. Given this non-linear trend, the variance of the real exchange rate as t + n approaches infinity, conditional on that trend, remains finite. Overall, evidence for stationarity in exchange rates is found in four out of six panels under consideration, including both support for stationary processes with no trend or a linear trend as well as for processes following a non-linear deterministic trend, in particular at time orders 5 and 6. The rejections are, in fact, most consistent at the nonlinear orders. Given nonlinear trends, PPP as usually defined does not hold, despite the rejection of unit roots. It is also found that stronger evidence for stable long-run equilibria in real exchange rates appears when the German Deutschmark is chosen as a base currency instead of the US Dollar. Finally, it appears that a very recent panel unit root test that takes account of cross-sectional dependencies delivers more consistent and sensible results.

Electromyographic (EMG) signal decomposition is the process of resolving an EMG signal into its component motor unit potential trains (MUPTs). The extracted MUPTs can aid in the diagnosis of neuromuscular disorders and the study of the neural control of movement, but only if they are valid trains. Before using decomposition results and the motor unit potential (MUP) shape and motor unit (MU) firing pattern information related to each active MU for either clinical or research purposes the fact that the extracted MUPTs are valid needs to be confirmed. The existing MUPT validation methods are either time consuming or related to operator experience and skill. More importantly, they cannot be executed during automatic decomposition of EMG signals to assist with improving decomposition results. To overcome these issues, in this thesis the possibility of developing automatic MUPT validation algorithms has been explored. Several methods based on a combination of feature extraction techniques, cluster validation methods, supervised classification algorithms, and multiple classifier fusion techniques were developed. The developed methods, in general, use either the MU firing pattern or MUP-shape consistency of a MUPT, or both, to estimate its overall validity. The performance of the developed systems was evaluated using a variety of MUPTs obtained from the decomposition of several simulated and real intramuscular EMG signals. Based on the results achieved, the methods that use only shape or only firing pattern information had higher generalization error than the systems that use both types of information. For the classifiers that use MU firing pattern information of a MUPT to determine its validity, the accuracy for invalid trains decreases as the number of missed-classification errors in trains increases. Likewise, for the methods that use MUP-shape information of a MUPT to determine its validity, the classification accuracy for invalid trains decreases as the within-train similarity of the invalid trains increase. Of the systems that use both shape and firing pattern information, those that separately estimate MU firing pattern validity and MUP-shape validity and then estimate the overall validity of a train by fusing these two indices using trainable fusion methods performed better than the single classifier scheme that estimates MUPT validity using a single classifier, especially for the real data used. Overall, the multi-classifier constructed using trainable logistic regression to aggregate base classifier outputs had the best performance with overall accuracy of 99.4% and 98.8% for simulated and real data, respectively. The possibility of formulating an algorithm for automated editing MUPTs contaminated with a high number of false-classification errors (FCEs) during decomposition was also investigated. Ultimately, a robust method was developed for this purpose. Using a supervised classifier and MU firing pattern information provided by each MUPT, the developed algorithm first determines whether a given train is contaminated by a high number of FCEs and needs to be edited. For contaminated MUPTs, the method uses both MU firing pattern and MUP shape information to detect MUPs that were erroneously assigned to the train. Evaluation based on simulated and real MU firing patterns, shows that contaminated MUPTs could be detected with 84% and 81% accuracy for simulated and real data, respectively. For a given contaminated MUPT, the algorithm on average correctly classified around 92.1% of the MUPs of the MUPT. The effectiveness of using the developed MUPT validation systems and the MUPT editing methods during EMG signal decomposition was investigated by integrating these algorithms into a certainty-based EMG signal decomposition algorithm. Overall, the decomposition accuracy for 32 simulated and 30 real EMG signals was improved by 7.5% (from 86.7% to 94.2%) and 3.4% (from 95.7% to 99.1%), respectively. A significant improvement was also achieved in correctly estimating the number of MUPTs represented in a set of detected MUPs. The simulated and real EMG signals used were comprised of 3–11 and 3–15 MUPTs, respectively.

Actualmente, los sistemas encastados están creciendo a un ritmo impresionante y proporcionan cada vez aplicaciones más sofisticadas. Un conjunto de creciente importancia son los sistemas multimedia portátiles de tiempo real y los sistemas de comunicación de procesado digital de señal: teléfonos móviles, PDAs, cámaras digitales, consolas portátiles de juegos, terminales multimedia, netbooks, etc. Estos sistemas requieren computación específica de alto rendimiento, generalmente con restricciones de tiempo real y calidad de servicio (Quality of Service - QoS), que han de ejecutarse con un nivel bajo de consumo para extender la vida de la batería y evitar el calentamiento del dispositivo. También se requiere una arquitectura flexible para satisfacer las restricciones del "time-to-market". En consecuencia, los sistemas encastados necesitan una solución programable, de bajo consumo y alta capacidad de computación para satisfacer todos los requerimientos.Las arquitecturas de tipo Very Long Instruction Word parecen una buena solución ya que proporcionan el suficiente rendimiento a bajo consumo con la programabilidad requerida. Estas arquitecturas se asientan sobre el esfuerzo del compilador para extraer el paralelismo disponible a nivel datos y de instrucciones para mantener las unidades computacionales ocupadas todo el rato. Con la densidad de los transistores doblando cada 18 meses, están emergiendo arquitecturas cada vez más complejas con un alto número de recursos computacionales ejecutándose en paralelo. Con esta, cada vez mayor, computación paralela, el acceso a los datos se está convirtiendo en el mayor impedimento que limita la posible extracción del paralelismo. Para aliviar este problema, en las actuales arquitecturas, una unidad especial trabaja en paralelo con los principales elementos computacionales para asegurar una eficiente transmisión de datos: la Unidad Generadora de Direcciones (Address Generator Unit), que puede implementarse de diferentes formas.El propósito de esta tesis es probar que optimizar el proceso de la generación de direcciones es una manera eficiente de solucionar el proceso de acceder a los datos al mismo tiempo que disminuye el tiempo de ejecución y el consumo de energía.Esta tesis evalúa la efectividad de los diferentes dispositivos que actualmente se usan en los sistemas encastados, argumenta el uso de procesadores de tipo "very long instruction word" y presenta la infraestructura de compilador y exploración arquitectural usada en los experimentos. Esta tesis también presenta una clasificación sistemática de los generadores de direcciones, un repaso de las diferentes técnicas de optimización actuales acorde con esta clasificación y una metodología, usando técnicas ya publicadas, sistemática y óptima que reduce gradualmente la energía necesitada. También se introduce el entorno de trabajo que permite una exploración arquitectural sistemática y los métodos usados para obtener una unidad de generación de direcciones. Los resultados de este unidad de generación de direcciones reconfigurable se muestran en diferentes aplicaciones de referencia (benchmarks) y la metodología sistemática se muestra en una aplicación completa real. / Nowadays Embedded Systems are growing at an impressive rate and provide more and more sophisticated applications. An increasingly important set of embedded systems are real-time portable multimedia and digital signal processing communication systems: cellular phones, PDAs, digital cameras, handheld gaming consoles, multimedia terminals, netbooks, etc. These systems require high performance specific computations, usually with real-time and Quality of Service (QoS) constraints, which should run at a low energy level to extend battery life and avoid heating. A flexible system architecture is also required to successfully meet short time-to-market restrictions. Hence, embedded systems need a programmable, low power and high performance solution in order to deal with these requirements.Very Long Instruction Word architectures seem a good solution for providing enough computational performance at low-power with the required programmability to speed the time-to-market. Those architectures rely on compiler effort to exploit the available instruction and data parallelism to keep the data path busy all the time. With the density of transistors doubling each 18 months, more and more complex architectures with a high number of computational resources running in parallel are emerging. With this increasing parallel computation, the access to data is becoming the main bottleneck that limits the available parallelism. To alleviate this problem, in current embedded architectures, a special unit works in parallel with the main computing elements to ensure efficient feed and storage of the data: the Address Generator Unit, which comes in many flavors. The purpose of this dissertation is to prove that optimizing the process of address generation is an effective way of solving the problem of accessing data while decreasing execution time and energy consumption.As a first step, this thesis evaluates the effectiveness of different state-of-the-art devices commonly used in the embedded domain, argues for the use of very long instruction word processors and presents the compiler and architecture framework used for our experiments. This thesis also presents a systematic classification of address generators, a review of literature according to the classification of the different optimizations on the address generation process and a step-wise methodology that gradually reduces energy reusing techniques that already have been published. The systematic architecture exploration framework and methods used to obtain a reconfigurable address generation unit are also introduced.Results of the reconfigurable address generator unit are shown on several benchmarks and applications, and the complete step-wise methodology is demonstrated on a real-life example.

The main goal of this thesis was to discover the relationships between MU characteristics and MUP features. To reach this goal, several features explaining the anatomical structure of the muscle were introduced. Additionally, features representing specific properties of the EMG signal detected from that muscle, were defined. Since information regarding the underlying anatomy was not available from real data, a physiologically based muscle model was used to extract the required features. This muscle model stands out from others, by providing similar acquisition schemes as the ones utilized by physicians in real clinical settings and by modelling the interactions among different volume conductor factors and the collection of MUs in the muscle in a realistic way. Having the features ready, several relationship discovery techniques were used, to reveal relationships between MU features and MUP features. To interpret the results obtained from the correlation analysis and pattern discovery techniques properly, several algorithms and new statistics were defined. The results obtained from correlation analysis and pattern discovery technique were similar to each other, and suggested that to maximize the inter-relationships between MUP features and MU features, MUPs could be filtered based on their slope values, specifically MUPs with slopes lower than 0. 6 v/s could be excluded. Additionally PDT results showed that high slope MUPs were not as informative about the underlying MU and could be excluded to maximize the relationships between MUP features and MU characteristics. Certain MUP features were determined to be highly related to certain MU characteristics. MUP <em>area</em> and <em>duration</em> were shown to be the best representative feature for the MU size and <em>average fiber density</em>, respectively. For the distribution of fiber diameter in the MU, <em>duration</em> and <em>number of turns</em> were determined to reflect <em>mean fiber diameter</em> and <em>stdv of fiber diameter</em> the best, correspondingly.

The purpose of this study has been to examine the unit manager’s perspective on making Lex Sarah-notifications. The study has been carries out by six semi structured interviews with persons in leading positions of the elderly from three different municipalities. They were asked about different circumstances that affects the problems with Lex Sarah. The results indicates that the unit manager’s act on elder abuse from the complex mechanisms that exist within the organization. The study results shows that the unit manager’s in the daily tasks are doing their work and solve problems regarding the risk of elder abuse that occur over time, but circumstances will determine if its documented prescribed by a Lex Sarah. The conclusion is that the unit manager’s of the elderly is limited by the circumstances and processes within the organization and that it affects them to lift up and report abuse among the elderly.

Föreliggande studie syftar till att i en kommun undersöka förvaltningars allmänna upplevelser och åsikter kring samverkan och kommunikation som sker mellan dem och arbetsgivarenheten. Vi har i studien valt att med en kvalitativ ansats inhämta empiriskt material genom att genomföra intervjuer med nio respondenter fördelat på olika förvaltningar inom organisationen.Genom kvalitativa intervjuer har fyra frågeställningar besvarats. För det första vilka åsikter och uppfattningar förvaltningarna har på samverkan mellan dem och arbetsgivarenheten. För det andra vilka åsikter och uppfattningar förvaltningarna har på kommunikationen mellan dem och arbetsgivarenheten. Det tredje vilka positiva samt negativa faktorer som förvaltningarna upplever att det finns kring samverkan och kommunikation mellan dem och arbetsgivarenheten. För det fjärde vilka faktorer som påverkar förvaltningarnas behov av samverkan och kommunikation med arbetsgivarenheten.Studiens resultat visar att kommunikation är en stor del av arbetet som samverkan sker kring i organisationen. Förvaltningarna anser att det är viktigt med en gemensam dialog kring de beslut som fattas inom organisationen för att känna delaktighet och få insyn i organisationen. Varför det är viktigt med en god dialog mellan förvaltningar och arbetsgivarenheten har även till stor del att göra med att arbetsgivarenheten i många ärenden sitter på spetskompetensen. Att förvaltningarna måste kommunicera med arbetsgivarenheten för att få del av arbetsgivarenheten kompetens ses generellt inte som ett hinder i arbetet. Intervjudata ger intryck av att detta kan bero på att organisationens har goda strukturella förutsättningar för att skapa en god samverkan. / This present study aims to within a public sector investigate a public management’s general experiences and opinions about collaboration and communication that occurs between them and the employer unit. We have chosen to study with a qualitative approach to obtain empirical data by conducting interviews using eight respondents broken down by different public managements within the organization.Through our interviews four questions were answered. Firstly experiences regarding views and opinions on the collaboration between the public managements and the employer unit. Secondly from the public managements point of view, the views and opinions that the public management might have on the communication that occurs between them and the employer unit. Thirdly the positive and negative factors experienced by the public management regarding collaboration and communication between them and the employer unit. Fourthly what factors affect the public management’s needs regarding collaboration and communication towards the employer unit.Our results demonstrate that communication is a major part of the work that involves the need of collaboration. The public management’s opinion is that it is important to have a dialogue about the decisions taken within the organization to feel involved and gain an insight into the organization. It’s also important for the public managements to have a good dialogue with the employer unit because the employer unit in many cases has the excellence of specific knowledge. This study shows that the public managements generally don’t look at the requirement of collaborating and communication with the employer unit as an obstacle. Why that is might be because of the organization has good structural conditions, which seems to have a good formula if you look to the interview responses.

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