Nurses’ reactions to alarms in a neonatal intensive care unit

Neonatal intensive care units (NICUs), like other intensive care units, are intended to provide immediate responses to any change in the patients condition. Patient-monitoring alarms and alarms from other medical equipment are very common in these units, and most alarms have no clinical significance. This study addresses the question of how alarms affect nurses actions by measuring the occurrence of alarms from different causes in a NICU, recording the nurses reactions, and analyzing the relationship between the alarms and the actions. The results show that nurses often do not respond directly to alarms, but, rather, use them as additional sources of information in their ongoing flow of actions. The probabilities for their responding to an alarm depend on the causes of the alarm, its duration, and the characteristics of the patient. These findings support the view that experienced nurses dynamically adjust their activities according to the information they receive from alarm systems and other sources, and that they combine their reactive actions with the periodic performance of routine tasks.     

Finding the focus of expansion and estimating range using optical flow images and a matched filter

The focus of expansion plays an important role in many vision applications such as three-dimensional reconstruction, range estimation, time-to-impact computation, and obstacle avoidance. Most current techniques are based on correspondence or on accurate flow estimation and are therefore considered computationally heavy. This paper presents an efficient technique to find the focus of expansion from optical flow. The technique utilizes a specially designed matched filter that does not require an exact estimation of the optical flow but rather can use a low-quality estimation of it. In addition, based on the location of the focus of expansion and its immediate neighborhood, the paper suggests a way to estimate the range to the focus of expansion. Based on the experimental results, the technique has proved to be both accurate and efficient.Received: 26 January 2003, Accepted: 18 March 2004, Published online: 14 September 2004 Correspondence to: Didi Sazbon     

On tangible user interfaces,humans and spatiality

Like the prehistoric twig and stone, tangible user interfaces (TUIs) are objects manipulated by humans. Tangible user interface success will depend on how well they exploit spatiality, the intuitive spatial skills humans have with the objects they use. In this paper, we carefully examine the relationship between humans and physical objects, and related previous research. From this examination, we distill a set of observations and turn these into heuristics for incorporation of spatiality into TUI application design, a cornerstone for their success. Following this line of thought, we identify spatial TUIs, the subset of TUIs that mediate interaction with shape, space and structure. We then examine several existing spatial TUIs using our heuristics.     

Effects of design flow and treatment level on construction and operation costs of municipal wastewater treatment plants and their implications on policy making

Construction costs of 55 municipal wastewater treatment plants in Israel (secondary, advanced secondary, and advanced treatment) were analysed in order to derive cost functions expressing the effects of design flow and treatment level on construction costs. Three equations were derived (statistically significant, p<0.01), one for each treatment level. These indicate that economy of scale may become weaker as treatment level rises. Analysis of the distribution of construction costs revealed negative correlation (p<0.05) between the proportional cost of civil engineering and design flow, positive correlation (p<0.05) between the proportional cost of elecromechanical equipment and design flow, and no correlation between the proportional cost of electricity and control and design flow. Operation costs were found to be 20–70% more sensitive than construction costs to treatment level. The share of operation costs as part of the total annual costs was found to increase both with design flow and treatment level, whereas the share of construction costs concurrently decreased. The implication of the findings on policy, and consequently on treatment plants performance is discussed in the last part of the paper.     

Laser-Based Printing: From Liquids to Microstructures

Assembly of materials into microstructures under laser guidance is attracting wide attention. The ability to pattern various materials and form 2D and 3D structures with micron/sub-micron resolution and less energy and material waste compared with standard top-down methods make laser-based printing promising for many applications, for example medical devices, sensors, and microelectronics. Assembly from liquids provides a smaller feature size than powders and has advantages over other states of matter in terms of relatively simple setup, easy handling, and recycling. However, the simplicity of the setup conceals a variety of underlying mechanisms, which cannot be identified simply according to the starting or resulting materials. This progress report surveys the various mechanisms according to the source of the material—preformed or locally synthesized. Within each category, methods are defined according to the driving force of material deposition. The advantages and limitations of each method are critically discussed, and the methods are compared, shedding light on future directions and developments required to advance this field.