scholarly journals Feasibility of Frailty Assessment Integrated with Cardiac Implantable Electronic Device Clinic Follow-up: A Pilot Investigation

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 233372142098734
Author(s):  
Abdel Albakri ◽  
Ariela Orkaby ◽  
Michael A. Rosenberg

Background: The concept of frailty was originally created to explain why individuals of the same age have differing risk of disease, and it has since been found to be negatively associated with outcomes for a wide range of medical conditions, including cardiovascular disease and cardiac procedures. Although numerous risk scores and assessment tools have been proposed, opportunities for practical assessment of frailty remain limited. In this pilot study, we examine the feasibility of using routine follow-up of patients with cardiac implantable electronic devices (CIEDs) for assessment of frailty. Methods: From September 2017 through March 2018, 49 consecutive patients seen in CIED clinic were enrolled. Among the frailty assessments performed at the clinic visit included a 4-meter walk time, FRAIL scale calculation, Rockwood Frailty score assessment by another treating provider, mini-cog assessment, and analysis of daily activity measures on the CIED. Results: Among the three device manufacturers of patients’ CIEDs, only Boston Scientific released analyzable activity time series data. On nine patients in whom daily activity data could be analyzed, there was no difference in mean daily activity (148.3 ± 31.9 vs. 100.1 ± 25.1 min/day, p = .27) between patients with and without an abnormal frailty or cognitive assessment, although interestingly, those with an abnormal assessment had a higher standard deviation of activity per day (52.6 ± 5.9 vs. 31.4 ± 4.7 min/day, p = .03). Conclusion: It is possible that a higher variation in daily activity over the course of a year could be a better indicator of frailty or cognitive impairment than average daily activity.

Author(s):  
Edward J. Oughton

Space weather is a collective term for different solar or space phenomena that can detrimentally affect technology. However, current understanding of space weather hazards is still relatively embryonic in comparison to terrestrial natural hazards such as hurricanes, earthquakes, or tsunamis. Indeed, certain types of space weather such as large Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs) are an archetypal example of a low-probability, high-severity hazard. Few major events, short time-series data, and the lack of consensus regarding the potential impacts on critical infrastructure have hampered the economic impact assessment of space weather. Yet, space weather has the potential to disrupt a wide range of Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) systems including electricity transmission, satellite communications and positioning, aviation, and rail transportation. In the early 21st century, there has been growing interest in these potential economic and societal impacts. Estimates range from millions of dollars of equipment damage from the Quebec 1989 event, to some analysts asserting that losses will be in the billions of dollars in the wider economy from potential future disaster scenarios. Hence, the origin and development of the socioeconomic evaluation of space weather is tracked, from 1989 to 2017, and future research directions for the field are articulated. Since 1989, many economic analyzes of space weather hazards have often completely overlooked the physical impacts on infrastructure assets and the topology of different infrastructure networks. Moreover, too many studies have relied on qualitative assumptions about the vulnerability of CNI. By modeling both the vulnerability of critical infrastructure and the socioeconomic impacts of failure, the total potential impacts of space weather can be estimated, providing vital information for decision makers in government and industry. Efforts on this subject have historically been relatively piecemeal, which has led to little exploration of model sensitivities, particularly in relation to different assumption sets about infrastructure failure and restoration. Improvements may be expedited in this research area by open-sourcing model code, increasing the existing level of data sharing, and improving multidisciplinary research collaborations between scientists, engineers, and economists.


Author(s):  
Frank Dobbin ◽  
Alexandra Kalev

Corporations have implemented a wide range of equal opportunity and diversity programs since the 1960s. This chapter reviews studies of the origins of these programs, surveys that assess the popularity of different programs, and research on the effects of programs on the workforce. Human resources managers championed several waves of innovations: corporate equal opportunity policies and recruitment and training programs in the 1960s; bureaucratic hiring and promotion policies and grievance mechanisms in the 1970s; diversity training, networking, and mentoring programs in the 1980s; and work/family and sexual harassment programs in the 1990s and beyond. It was those managers who designed equal opportunity and diversity programs, not lawyers or judges or government bureaucrats, thus corporate take-up of the programs remains very uneven. Statistical analyses of time-series data on the effects of corporate diversity measures reveal several patterns. Initiatives designed to quash managerial bias, through diversity training, diversity performance evaluations, and bureaucratic rules, have been broadly ineffective. By contrast, innovations designed to engage managers in promoting workforce integration—mentoring programs, diversity taskforces, and full-time diversity staffers—have led to increases in diversity in the most difficult job to integrate, management. The research has clear implications for corporate and public policy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 109 (11) ◽  
pp. 2029-2061
Author(s):  
Zahraa S. Abdallah ◽  
Mohamed Medhat Gaber

Abstract Time series classification (TSC) is a challenging task that attracted many researchers in the last few years. One main challenge in TSC is the diversity of domains where time series data come from. Thus, there is no “one model that fits all” in TSC. Some algorithms are very accurate in classifying a specific type of time series when the whole series is considered, while some only target the existence/non-existence of specific patterns/shapelets. Yet other techniques focus on the frequency of occurrences of discriminating patterns/features. This paper presents a new classification technique that addresses the inherent diversity problem in TSC using a nature-inspired method. The technique is stimulated by how flies look at the world through “compound eyes” that are made up of thousands of lenses, called ommatidia. Each ommatidium is an eye with its own lens, and thousands of them together create a broad field of vision. The developed technique similarly uses different lenses and representations to look at the time series, and then combines them for broader visibility. These lenses have been created through hyper-parameterisation of symbolic representations (Piecewise Aggregate and Fourier approximations). The algorithm builds a random forest for each lens, then performs soft dynamic voting for classifying new instances using the most confident eyes, i.e., forests. We evaluate the new technique, coined Co-eye, using the recently released extended version of UCR archive, containing more than 100 datasets across a wide range of domains. The results show the benefits of bringing together different perspectives reflecting on the accuracy and robustness of Co-eye in comparison to other state-of-the-art techniques.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (17) ◽  
pp. 2843
Author(s):  
Meijiao Zhong ◽  
Xinjian Shan ◽  
Xuemin Zhang ◽  
Chunyan Qu ◽  
Xiao Guo ◽  
...  

Taking the 2017 Mw6.5 Jiuzhaigou earthquake as a case study, ionospheric disturbances (i.e., total electron content and TEC) and thermal infrared (TIR) anomalies were simultaneously investigated. The characteristics of the temperature of brightness blackbody (TBB), medium-wave infrared brightness (MIB), and outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) were extracted and compared with the characteristics of ionospheric TEC. We observed different relationships among the three types of TIR radiation according to seismic or aseismic conditions. A wide range of positive TEC anomalies occurred southern to the epicenter. The area to the south of the Huarong mountain fracture, which contained the maximum TEC anomaly amplitudes, overlapped one of the regions with notable TIR anomalies. We observed three stages of increasing TIR radiation, with ionospheric TEC anomalies appearing after each stage, for the first time. There was also high spatial correspondence between both TIR and TEC anomalies and the regional geological structure. Together with the time series data, these results suggest that TEC anomaly genesis might be related to increasing TIR.


2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 227-237 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Kubiak ◽  
Cornelia Jonas

Abstract. Patterns of psychological variables in time have been of interest to research from the beginning. This is particularly true for ambulatory monitoring research, where large (cross-sectional) time-series datasets are often the matter of investigation. Common methods for identifying cyclic variations include spectral analyses of time-series data or time-domain based strategies, which also allow for modeling cyclic components. Though the prerequisites of these sophisticated procedures, such as interval-scaled time-series variables, are seldom met, their usage is common. In contrast to the time-series approach, methods from a different field of statistics, directional or circular statistics, offer another opportunity for the detection of patterns in time, where fewer prerequisites have to be met. These approaches are commonly used in biology or geostatistics. They offer a wide range of analytical strategies to examine “circular data,” i.e., data where period of measurement is rotationally invariant (e.g., directions on the compass or daily hours ranging from 0 to 24, 24 being the same as 0). In psychology, however, circular statistics are hardly known at all. In the present paper, we intend to give a succinct introduction into the rationale of circular statistics and describe how this approach can be used for the detection of patterns in time, contrasting it with time-series analysis. We report data from a monitoring study, where mood and social interactions were assessed for 4 weeks in order to illustrate the use of circular statistics. Both the results of periodogram analyses and circular statistics-based results are reported. Advantages and possible pitfalls of the circular statistics approach are highlighted concluding that ambulatory assessment research can benefit from strategies borrowed from circular statistics.


Author(s):  
Trung Duy Pham ◽  
Dat Tran ◽  
Wanli Ma

In the biomedical and healthcare fields, the ownership protection of the outsourced data is becoming a challenging issue in sharing the data between data owners and data mining experts to extract hidden knowledge and patterns. Watermarking has been proved as a right-protection mechanism that provides detectable evidence for the legal ownership of a shared dataset, without compromising its usability under a wide range of data mining for digital data in different formats such as audio, video, image, relational database, text and software. Time series biomedical data such as Electroencephalography (EEG) or Electrocardiography (ECG) is valuable and costly in healthcare, which need to have owner protection when sharing or transmission in data mining application. However, this issue related to kind of data has only been investigated in little previous research as its characteristics and requirements. This paper proposes an optimized watermarking scheme to protect ownership for biomedical and healthcare systems in data mining. To achieve the highest possible robustness without losing watermark transparency, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique is used to optimize quantization steps to find a suitable one. Experimental results on EEG data show that the proposed scheme provides good imperceptibility and more robust against various signal processing techniques and common attacks such as noise addition, low-pass filtering, and re-sampling.


Today, with an enormous generation and availability of time series data and streaming data, there is an increasing need for an automatic analyzing architecture to get fast interpretations and results. One of the significant potentiality of streaming analytics is to train and model each stream with unsupervised Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to detect anomalous behaviors, fuzzy patterns, and accidents in real-time. If executed reliably, each anomaly detection can be highly valuable for the application. In this paper, we propose a dynamic threshold setting system denoted as Thresh-Learner, mainly for the Internet of Things (IoT) applications that require anomaly detection. The proposed model enables a wide range of real-life applications where there is a necessity to set up a dynamic threshold over the streaming data to avoid anomalies, accidents or sending alerts to distant monitoring stations. We took the major problem of anomalies and accidents in coal mines due to coal fires and explosions. This results in loss of life due to the lack of automated alarming systems. We propose Thresh-Learner, a general purpose implementation for setting dynamic thresholds. We illustrate it through the Smart Helmet for coal mine workers which seamlessly integrates monitoring, analyzing and dynamic thresholds using IoT and analysis on the cloud.


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 012002
Author(s):  
Dimitris K Iakovidis ◽  
Melanie Ooi ◽  
Ye Chow Kuang ◽  
Serge Demidenko ◽  
Alexandr Shestakov ◽  
...  

Abstract Signal processing is a fundamental component of almost any sensor-enabled system, with a wide range of applications across different scientific disciplines. Time series data, images, and video sequences comprise representative forms of signals that can be enhanced and analysed for information extraction and quantification. The recent advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning are shifting the research attention towards intelligent, data-driven, signal processing. This roadmap presents a critical overview of the state-of-the-art methods and applications aiming to highlight future challenges and research opportunities towards next generation measurement systems. It covers a broad spectrum of topics ranging from basic to industrial research, organized in concise thematic sections that reflect the trends and the impacts of current and future developments per research field. Furthermore, it offers guidance to researchers and funding agencies in identifying new prospects.


2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (9) ◽  
pp. 1461-1467 ◽  
Author(s):  
David A Raichlen ◽  
Yann C Klimentidis ◽  
Chiu-Hsieh Hsu ◽  
Gene E Alexander

Abstract Background Accelerometers are included in a wide range of devices that monitor and track physical activity for health-related applications. However, the clinical utility of the information embedded in their rich time-series data has been greatly understudied and has yet to be fully realized. Here, we examine the potential for fractal complexity of actigraphy data to serve as a clinical biomarker for mortality risk. Methods We use detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) to analyze actigraphy data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES; n = 11,694). The DFA method measures fractal complexity (signal self-affinity across time-scales) as correlations between the amplitude of signal fluctuations in time-series data across a range of time-scales. The slope, α, relating the fluctuation amplitudes to the time-scales over which they were measured describes the complexity of the signal. Results Fractal complexity of physical activity (α) decreased significantly with age (p = 1.29E−6) and was lower in women compared with men (p = 1.79E−4). Higher levels of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity in older adults and in women were associated with greater fractal complexity. In adults aged 50–79 years, lower fractal complexity of activity (α) was associated with greater mortality (hazard ratio = 0.64; 95% confidence interval = 0.49–0.82) after adjusting for age, exercise engagement, chronic diseases, and other covariates associated with mortality. Conclusions Wearable accelerometers can provide a noninvasive biomarker of physiological aging and mortality risk after adjusting for other factors strongly associated with mortality. Thus, this fractal analysis of accelerometer signals provides a novel clinical application for wearable accelerometers, advancing efforts for remote monitoring of physiological health by clinicians.


2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (5) ◽  
pp. 551-561 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lakshman Abhilash ◽  
Vasu Sheeba

Research on circadian rhythms often requires researchers to estimate period, robustness/power, and phase of the rhythm. These are important to estimate, owing to the fact that they act as readouts of different features of the underlying clock. The commonly used tools, to this end, suffer from being very expensive, having very limited interactivity, being very cumbersome to use, or a combination of these. As a step toward remedying the inaccessibility to users who may not be able to afford them and to ease the analysis of biological time-series data, we have written RhythmicAlly, an open-source program using R and Shiny that has the following advantages: (1) it is free, (2) it allows subjective marking of phases on actograms, (3) it provides high interactivity with graphs, (4) it allows visualization and storing of data for a batch of individuals simultaneously, and (5) it does what other free programs do but with fewer mouse clicks, thereby being more efficient and user-friendly. Moreover, our program can be used for a wide range of ultradian, circadian, and infradian rhythms from a variety of organisms, some examples of which are described here. The first version of RhythmicAlly is available on Github, and we aim to maintain the program with subsequent versions having updated methods of visualizing and analyzing time-series data.


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