Emergency egress for the elderly in care home fire situations

Practitioners are continuing to develop egress modelling software for the design of the built environment. These models require data about human behaviour and factors for calibration, validation and verification. This study aims to address the specific data and knowledge gap: emergency egress of the elderly. Such data are difficult to collect given privacy and consent concerns, with strong relationships generally being required between residences and researchers. Through the observation of nine fire drills at six Canadian long-term care (LTC) and retirement homes, specific evacuation actions and behaviour were observed for 37 staff members and information about the evacuation of 56 residents was collected. These drills demonstrated that emergency egress in LTC and retirement homes is highly staff dependent with 72% of residents recorded requiring full assistance at all stages of movement in evacuation, and that the type of announced/unannounced drill and level of resident care will affect the type of data collected. The development of travel speed and pre-movement is discussed subject to limitation with qualitative behavioural insights of residents that were observed. This study provides valuable methodological discussion on how to conduct behavioural studies in similar highly restricted research environments. Specific attention is given to understanding the considerations that must be made when using fire drills as data sources, and the impact that these can have on using such data for modelling. This study may inform the initial setup and programming of evacuation models from an actions and behavioural perspectives of staff members and residents.     

Dynamic replication factor model for Linux containers-based cloud systems

The Journal of Supercomputing - Infrastructure-as-a-service container-based virtualization is gaining interest as a platform for running distributed applications. With increasing scale of cloud...     

Defining Dry Eye from a Clinical Perspective

Over the past decades, the number of patients with dry eye disease (DED) has increased dramatically. The incidence of DED is higher in Asia than in Europe and North America, suggesting the involvement of cultural or racial factors in DED etiology. Although many definitions of DED have been used, discrepancies exist between the various definitions of dry eye disease (DED) used across the globe. This article presents a clinical consensus on the definition of DED, as formulated in four meetings with global DED experts. The proposed new definition is as follows: “Dry eye is a multifactorial disease characterized by a persistently unstable and/or deficient tear film (TF) causing discomfort and/or visual impairment, accompanied by variable degrees of ocular surface epitheliopathy, inflammation and neurosensory abnormalities.” The key criteria for the diagnosis of DED are unstable TF, inflammation, ocular discomfort and visual impairment. This definition also recommends the assessment of ocular surface epitheliopathy and neurosensory abnormalities in each patient with suspected DED. It is easily applicable in clinical practice and should help practitioners diagnose DED consistently. This consensus definition of DED should also help to guide research and clinical trials that, to date, have been hampered by the lack of an established surrogate endpoint.     

A Tool Support for Reusing ELAN Rule-Based Components

The adaptation of software components developed for a specific application in order to generate reusable components often includes some kind of generalization. This generalization may be carried out, for instance, by the renaming of some identifiers or by its parameterization. In our work, we are specially interested in the generalization by parameterization of algebraic specification components. Generalization and some other transformations on algebraic specifications are being integrated in the FERUS tool. This tool was initially developed for the Common Algebraic Specification Language, called CASL, and we show in the paper its adaptation to the new version of the rule-based programming language ELAN.     

Family, peer, and neighborhood influences on academic achievement among African-American adolescents: one-year prospective effects

Using a 1-year prospective design, this study examined the influence of family status variables (family income, parental education, family structure), parenting variables (maternal support and restrictive control), peer support, and neighborhood risk on the school performance of 120 African American junior high school students. In addition to main effects of these variables, neighborhood risk was examined as a moderator of the effects of parenting and peer support. Family status variables were not predictive of adolescent school performance as indexed by self-reported grade point average. Maternal support at Time 1 was prospectively related to adolescent grades at Time 2. Neighborhood risk was related to lower grades, while peer support predicted better grades in the prospective analyses. Neighborhood risk also moderated the effects of maternal restrictive control and peer support on adolescent grades in prospective analyses. These findings highlight the importance of an ecological approach to the problem of academic underachievement within the African American Community.     

Effects of mechanical interactions on the hydrostatic stress in randomly distributed rubber particles in an amorphous polymer matrix

The equivalent inclusion method (EIM) assuming linear elasticity is used to calculate the mechanical interactions between spherical rubber particles in an amorphous matrix, as in a rubber toughened polymer. The influences of the various calculation parameters are examined and it is shown that the method can provide reliable results with regard to the level of hydrostatic stress in the particles. Damage of the material is simulated by replacing the most stressed particles by voids. Numerical simulations for several hundreds of interacting particles give information on the kinetics and spatial organisation of the damage. It appears that, as the volume fraction of particles increases from 10 to 20%, the spatial configuration of the damage evolves from a localised to a diffuse mode. These results are discussed in relation to the efficiency of rubber toughening.     

In situ regeneration of the Ni-based catalytic reformer of a 5 kW PEMFC system

The paper reports the results of on-site regeneration catalytic bed of the natural gas reformer in a 5 kW PEM fuel cell system. The Ni catalyst previously poisoned by sulphur from the available natural gas, could be re-activated by injection of pure water steam, following the method developed for industrial reformers using the same metal catalyst: this method was shown to be perfectly efficient, provided no natural gas was fed during the operation. Results of the tests conducted are presented and discussed in relation to published data on S-sorption on Ni surfaces.     

High accuracy path tracking for vehicles in presence of sliding: Application to farm vehicle automatic guidance for agricultural tasks

When designing an accurate automated guidance system for vehicles, a major problem is sliding and pseudo-sliding effects. This is especially the case in agricultural applications, where five-centimetre accuracy with respect to the desired trajectory is required, although the vehicles are moving on slippery ground. It has been established that RTK GPS was a very suitable sensor to achieve automated guidance with such high precision: several control laws have been designed for vehicles equipped with this sensor, and provide the expected guidance accuracy as long as the vehicles do not slide. In previous work, further control developments have been proposed to take sliding into account: guidance accuracy in slippery environments has been shown to be preserved, except transiently at the beginning/end of curves. In this paper, the design of this control law is first recalled and discussed. A Model Predictive Control method is then applied in order to preserve accuracy of guidance even during these curvature transitions. Finally, the overall control scheme is implemented, and improvements with respect to previous guidance laws are demonstrated through full-scale experiments.     

Agent-oriented techniques for network supervision

This paper presents the results of the Réseau futé (smart net) project, the goal of which is to use distributed AI and multi-agent techniques for network management and supervision. More precisely, these techniques have been applied to the partial automation of the dynamic processing (what is known about a network is always incomplete and can change at any time) of alarms and of various event notifications received by network management platforms. The system that we propose is able for example to automatically handle some alarms or to filter events of no-interest for a given operator. To achieve this goal, an assistant, or interface agent according to the model proposed by Patti Maes [MK93], has been realized. The goal of the assistant is first to learn, by observation, the behavior of the network supervision operator and second to reproduce such a behavior when the conditions in which the behavior has been learned are detected again. The learned information are stored using chronicles [Gha94]. A chronicle is a data-structure allowing programmers to represent sequences of events while taking temporal knowledge into account. Our assistant has been implemented and tested within Magenta which is a program, written in Smalltalk, that simulates (in a simplified way) a network management platform. This program respects roughly the gdmo and cmis standards.