Toward Better Understanding of Task Difficulty during Physicians’ Interaction with Electronic Health Record System (EHRs)

ABSTRACT

The goal of this study was to assess the relationship of task difficulty and mental effort with performance during physicians’ interaction with electronic health records (EHRs). A total of 38 physicians were asked to identify abnormal results and take follow-up action to “close the loop” on care delivery. Task difficulty was quantified via task-flow strategies and computer mouse-click patterns. Mental effort was quantified using eye movements based on changes in pupillary dilations (task evoked pupillary response or TEPR) and blink rate. Performance was quantified based on commission errors (error vs. no-error). Results indicated that physicians had different task-flow strategies; however, with improved awareness of the patient status, they exhibited an optimal task-flow strategy. Overall, performance was related to task-flow strategies, computer mouse-click patterns, and blink rate, indicating that physicians had lower task-difficulty and experienced lower mental effort with improved awareness of patient follow-up status. This is an important finding demonstrating that task-flows are a dominant predictor of physician performance when comparing between EHR designs. On the contrary, mouse-click patterns and blink rate are both useful predictors of physician performance when assessment was done within an EHR.     

Fast response fringe‐field switching mode liquid crystal development for shutter glass 3D

A type of fast response time (RT) liquid crystal (LC) was developed to adopt in fringe‐field switching (FFS) mode for shutter glass 3D display device, the average gray to gray level (GTG) RT can reduce from 7.43 ms to 4.48 ms at a refreshing rate of 60 Hz, and the transmittance can increase by 15.4% compared with conventional LC based on the same cell gap. Meanwhile, the correlation among optical efficiency, correlative color temperature (CCT) of module and retardation of LC for FFS mode was studied. Transmittance is proportional to the retardation of LC; however, the CCT is inversely proportional to the retardation. The fast response LC can keep almost the original optical efficiency and CCT.     

Bare finger 3D air‐touch system with embedded multiwavelength optical sensor arrays for mobile 3D displays

A camera‐free 3D air‐touch system was proposed. Hovering, air swiping, and 3D gestures for further interaction with the floated 3D images on the mobile display were demonstrated. By embedding multiwavelength optical sensors into the display pixels and adding angular‐scanning illuminators with multiwavelength on the edge of the display, the flat panel can sense images reflected by a bare finger from different heights. In addition, three axis (x, y, z) information of the reflected image of the fingertip can be calculated. Finally, the proposed 3D air‐touch system was successfully demonstrated on a 4‐inch mobile 3D display.     

An efficient joint channel assignment and QoS routing protocol for IEEE 802.11 multi-radio multi-channel wireless mesh networks

With the emerging of video, voice over IP (VoIP) and other real-time multimedia services, more and more people pay attention to quality of service (QoS) issues in terms of the bandwidth, delay and jitter, etc. As one effective way of broadband wireless access, it has become imperative for wireless mesh networks (WMNs) to provide QoS guarantee. Existing works mostly modify QoS architecture dedicated for ad hoc or sensor networks, and focus on single radio and single channel case. Meanwhile, they study the QoS routing or MAC protocol from view of isolated layer. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-layer QoS-aware routing protocol on OLSR (CLQ-OLSR) to support real-time multimedia communication by efficiently exploiting multi-radio and multi-channel method. By constructing multi-layer virtual logical mapping over physical topology, we implement two sets of routing mechanisms, physical modified OLSR protocol (M-OLSR) and logical routing, to accommodate network traffic. The proposed CLQ-OLSR is based on a distributed bandwidth estimation scheme, implemented at each node for estimating the available bandwidth on each associated channel. By piggybacking the bandwidth information in HELLO and topology control (TC) messages, each node disseminates information of topology and available bandwidth to other nodes in the whole network in an efficient way. From topology and bandwidth information, the optimized path can be identified. Finally, we conduct extensive simulation to verify the performance of CLQ-OLSR in different scenarios on QualNet platform. The results demonstrate that our proposed CLQ-OLSR outperforms single radio OLSR, multi-radio OLSR and OLSR with differentiated services (DiffServ) in terms of network aggregate throughput, end-to-end packet delivery ratio, delay and delay jitter with reasonable message overheads and hardware costs. In particular, the network aggregate throughput for CLQ-OLSR can almost be improved by 300% compared with the single radio case.     

Speech authentication by semi-fragile speech watermarking utilizing analysis by synthesis and spectral distortion optimization

This paper proposes an improved semi-fragile speech watermarking scheme by quantization of linear prediction (LP) parameters, i.e., the inverse sine (IS) parameters. The spectral distortion due to watermark embedding is controlled to meet the ‘transparency’ criterion in speech coding. A modified bit allocation algorithm combined with watermarking is developed to determine the quantization step so that the ‘transparency’ requirement is satisfied. Due to the statistical nature, the LP coefficients estimated from the watermarked speech signal are different from the watermarked LP coefficients even in the absence of attacks. This effect is the cause of increase in decoding error and minimum authentication length. To tackle this problem, an Analysis by Synthesis (AbS) scheme is developed to reduce the difference between the estimated LP coefficients and the watermarked ones. The watermark detection threshold and minimum authentication length are then derived according to the probability of error and the signal to noise ratio (SNR) requirements. Experimental results show that the proposed AbS based method can effectively reduce the difference between the watermarked IS parameter and the extracted IS parameter when there is no attacks. In addition, the modified bit allocation algorithm can automatically find the appropriate quantization step used in the odd-even modulation so that the transparency requirement is satisfied.     

Financial time series forecasting using LPP and SVM optimized by PSO

In this paper, a predicting model is constructed to forecast stock market behavior with the aid of locality preserving projection, particle swarm optimization, and a support vector machine. First, four stock market technique variables are selected as the input feature, and a slide window is used to obtain the input raw data of the model. Second, the locality preserving projection method is utilized to reduce the dimension of the raw data and to extract the intrinsic feature to improve the performance of the predicting model. Finally, a support vector machine optimized using particle swarm optimization is applied to forecast the next day’s price movement. The proposed model is used with the Shanghai stock market index and the Dow Jones index, and experimental results show that the proposed model performs better than other models in the areas of prediction accuracy rate and profit.     

Streamflow Simulation by SWAT Using Different Precipitation Sources in Large Arid Basins with Scarce Raingauges

Streamflow from the mountains is the main source of water for the lower plain in arid regions. Accurate simulation of streamflow is of great importance to the arid ecosystem. However, many large arid drainage basins in northwestern China have low density of precipitation stations, which makes the streamflow modeling and prediction very difficult. Based on raingauge data and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) data combined with raingauge data, different approaches were explored for spatializing precipitation in large area with scarce raingauges. Spatialized precipitation was then input into Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT), a semi-distributed hydrological model, to simulate streamflow. Results from a case study in the Manas river basin showed that simulated hydrographs using both the approaches are able to reproduce the watershed hydrological behavior. Moreover, statistical assessment indicated that hydrological model driven by the spatialized precipitation based on radar combined with raingauge data performed better than that based on gauge data. Radar precipitation estimator can provide a practical data source for hydrological modeling at a basin scale where the raingauge network is sparse.     

内蒙古牧区节水灌溉项目建设模式和运行管理机制研究

通过研究2001—2009年在内蒙古自治区实施的197项牧区节水灌溉项目的建设模式和运行管理情况得出：家庭灌溉饲草料地建设模式、集体开发建设模式和饲草料基地集约开发模式是适合于内蒙古牧区的三种比较成功的建设模式;根据工程产权归属确定的国有管理或灌溉服务组织、联户集体经营、用水合作社、公司和牧户联合经营、单户或企业承包经营等多元化的管理形式有利于工程后期的管理和运行,适合内蒙古牧区的生产现状;同时也存在着建设难度较大、建设管理成本相对较高、配套资金制约工程建设标准、运行管理机制不健全、牧区水利社会化服务体系不完善和重建轻管的问题。     

不同灌溉量对退化草地的生态恢复作用

在希拉穆仁草原进行了为期3年的草地灌溉试验,对测试的试验地在灌溉3年期间及停灌后1年内进行了植被调查和土壤种子库发芽试验,结果表明：一是灌溉可以明显提高草地植被的生产性能且不同灌溉量间并无明显差异。当停止灌溉后,原灌溉样地的植被生产性能均略低于无灌溉对照区,且不同灌溉量间也无明显差异。二是不同灌溉量样地植被物种组成与无灌溉对照区的Bray-curtis相似性系数始终保持在0.8左右,表明灌溉期间群落结构并未发生很大变化。当停止灌溉后,原灌溉样地与无灌溉对照区的Bray-curtis相似性系数下降为充足灌溉区0.61和中度灌溉区0.55,表明灌溉对植物的生存策略有一定的影响且不同灌溉量基本相同。三是土壤中的种子总数量有所增加,但物种的数量有所减少。充足灌溉样地土壤种子库情况略差于无灌溉对照区,中度灌溉样地则略好于无灌溉对照区,表明不同灌溉量对植物的繁殖策略有一定的影响。     

广州市中心城区污泥处置项目管理的实践探索

针对广州市中心城区污泥处置项目存在的若干问题,探索了价格审核、过程监管、地磅精确计量以及转运联单制度、外运单位与处置单位相对分离制度、价量联动制度以及安全生产等管理措施,有效解决了污泥的外运处置问题及突发性事件,确保了污水处理系统的正常运行.在实践管理中,提出了广州市中心城区污泥处置应尽快建设集中式的污泥处理处置中心和污泥处理数据库管理中心的管理思路,使污泥项目管理常规化、数字化和网络化.