Examining Evidence of Wellbeing indicators: A Practical Method of Assessment

Office of Technology Assessment health program

International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care ◽

10.1017/s0266462309090382 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 25 (S1) ◽

pp. 28-32 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

David Banta ◽

Clyde J. Behney

Keyword(s):

Technology Assessment ◽

Health Program ◽

Practical Method ◽

Health Technology ◽

Public Healthcare ◽

Efficacy And Safety ◽

Accessible Information ◽

Office Of Technology Assessment ◽

Method Of Assessment ◽

The U.S

The U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) established a health program in 1975. During the next few years, OTA's health program published a series of reports dealing with different aspects of health technology assessment (HTA) in some depth. The key report in this series concerned the efficacy and safety of health technology, which in many ways played a ground-breaking role. It pointed out the pervasive lack of accessible information on efficacy and safety, despite more-than-adequate methods of assessment. It also pointed to many problems that resulted from this lack, and the limited use of such information in clinical practice and policy making. It promoted synthesis of existing literature as a practical method of assessment. Other key reports developed other aspects of HTA, including cost-effectiveness. These reports are generally considered to have shaped the field of HTA at least into the 1990s. OTA also pioneered the use of HTA in determining what preventive services to cover in public healthcare programs.

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Review Paper: Assessing ‘road-friendliness’: A review

Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers Part D Journal of Automobile Engineering ◽

10.1243/0954407971526588 ◽

1997 ◽

Vol 211 (6) ◽

pp. 455-475 ◽

Cited By ~ 18

Author(s):

T E C Potter ◽

D Cebon ◽

D J Cole

Keyword(s):

Damage Index ◽

Practical Method ◽

Test Duration ◽

Type Approval ◽

Road Roughness ◽

Approval Procedure ◽

Method Of Assessment ◽

Testing Speed ◽

Damage Criteria ◽

Standard Tractor

This paper is concerned with assessing the dynamic tyre forces generated by articulated heavy goods vehicles for road damaging potential. Various factors are discussed, including: (a) general testing methodologies; (b) road damage issues such as ‘spatial repeatability’ of dynamic tyre forces and road damage criteria; (c) vehicle response issues, such as test duration and sampling details, road roughness, testing speed, wheel-base filtering, tractor—trailer interaction, suspension maintenance and ‘indirect’ testing methods; and (d) implementation issues. It is concluded that the most practical method of assessment testing would be to use a ‘type approval’ test to measure the vehicle's peformance when coupled to a standard trailer or tractor unit, combined with anual inspections of hydraulic damper integrity. The type approval procedure should use simple single-axle laboratory tests to estimate the parameters of a generic mathematical model of each vehicle unit. Numerical simulations of the tractor and standard trailer (or trailer and standard tractor) should be used to determine the vehicle's response to a variety of typical road input conditions. These responses should than be assessed using realistic road damage criteria to determine an ‘in-service’ road damage index.

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Measuring lunchtime consumption in school cafeterias: a validation study of the use of digital photography

Public Health Nutrition ◽

10.1017/s136898001900048x ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 22 (10) ◽

pp. 1745-1754 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Mariel Marcano-Olivier ◽

Mihela Erjavec ◽

Pauline J Horne ◽

Simon Viktor ◽

Ruth Pearson

Keyword(s):

Secondary School ◽

Practical Method ◽

Image Capture ◽

Nutrition Research ◽

North Wales ◽

Final Sample ◽

West Midlands ◽

School Sample ◽

Method Of Assessment ◽

School Cafeterias

AbstractObjectiveThe present study tested the validity of a digital image-capture measure of food consumption suitable for use in busy school cafeterias.DesignLunches were photographed pre- and post-consumption, and food items were weighed pre- and post-consumption for comparison.SettingA small research team recorded children’s lunchtime consumption in one primary and one secondary school over seven working days.ParticipantsA primary-school sample of 121 children from North Wales and a secondary-school sample of 124 children from the West Midlands, UK, were utilised. Nineteen children were excluded because of incomplete data, leaving a final sample of 239 participants.ResultsResults indicated that (i) consumption estimates based on images were accurate, yielding only small differences between the weight- and image-based judgements (median bias=0·15–1·64 g, equating to 0·45–3·42 % of consumed weight) and (ii) good levels of inter-rater agreement were achieved, ranging from moderate to near perfect (Cohen’sκ=0·535–0·819). This confirmed that consumption estimates derived from digital images were accurate and could be used in lieu of objective weighed measures.ConclusionsOur protocol minimised disruption to daily lunchtime routine, kept the attrition low, and enabled better agreement between measures and raters than was the case in the existing literature. Accurate measurements are a necessary tool for all those engaged in nutrition research, intervention evaluation, prevention and public health work. We conclude that our simple and practical method of assessment could be used with children across a range of settings, ages and lunch types.

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Method and Criteria for Assessing Sustainable Development

The Journal of Social Sciences Research ◽

10.32861/jssr.spi5.181.187 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 181-187

Keyword(s):

Sustainable Development ◽

Practical Method ◽

Single Equation ◽

Control Group ◽

State Spaces ◽

The Sustainable Development ◽

Development Models ◽

Scientific Task ◽

The Stability ◽

Method Of Assessment

The article is aimed at solving the urgent scientific task of creating new methods for an integrated assessment of the sustainable development of socio-economic objects, in particular, countries, regions and cities. A practical method of assessment is proposed, which allows to form ideas about the vector of sustainable development of objects. The construction of development models is based on the use of the principle of the corresponding states, according to which the positions of objects in multidimensional state spaces can be described by a single equation if an effective scale is constructed for comparing the states among themselves in a set of indicators. It is shown that the study of the features of sustainable development of countries, regions and cities can be performed by the method of cluster analysis of data with the subsequent construction of such scales. For comparison of objects it is suggested to use the reference vector of development, which is constructed for the control group of objects that are the most developed in terms of indicators of achieving the goals of sustainable development. Socio-econometric scales are proposed for assessing the development of regions, as well as criteria characterizing the stability of their development. As a realization of the method, a comparative analysis of the development of the regions of Russia on 13 indicators of sustainable development was carried out.

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The role of differential phase contrast in electron microscopy

Proceedings, annual meeting, Electron Microscopy Society of America ◽

10.1017/s0424820100108027 ◽

1978 ◽

Vol 36 (1) ◽

pp. 176-177

Author(s):

E.M. Waddell ◽

J.N. Chapman ◽

R.P. Ferrier

Keyword(s):

Phase Contrast ◽

Practical Method ◽

Position Vector ◽

Differential Phase ◽

Pure Phase ◽

Differential Phase Contrast ◽

The Difference ◽

Image Position ◽

First Moment

Dekkers and de Lang (1977) have discussed a practical method of realising differential phase contrast in a STEM. The method involves taking the difference signal from two semi-circular detectors placed symmetrically about the optic axis and subtending the same angle (2α) at the specimen as that of the cone of illumination. Such a system, or an obvious generalisation of it, namely a quadrant detector, has the characteristic of responding to the gradient of the phase of the specimen transmittance. In this paper we shall compare the performance of this type of system with that of a first moment detector (Waddell et al.1977).For a first moment detector the response function R(k) is of the form R(k) = ck where c is a constant, k is a position vector in the detector plane and the vector nature of R(k)indicates that two signals are produced. This type of system would produce an image signal given bywhere the specimen transmittance is given by a (r) exp (iϕ (r), r is a position vector in object space, ro the position of the probe, ⊛ represents a convolution integral and it has been assumed that we have a coherent probe, with a complex disturbance of the form b(r-ro) exp (iζ (r-ro)). Thus the image signal for a pure phase object imaged in a STEM using a first moment detector is b2 ⊛ ▽ø. Note that this puts no restrictions on the magnitude of the variation of the phase function, but does assume an infinite detector.

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