Background The aim of this study was to asses results obtained from a range of commonly performed lower extremity “open and closed” chain kinetic tests used for predicting foot function and correlate these test findings to data obtained from the Zebris WinFDM-T system. When performed correctly these tests are thought to be indicators of lower extremity function. Podiatrists frequently perform e...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is warning against the use of laparoscopic power morcellators in the majority of women undergoing myomectomy or hysterectomy for the treatment of leiomyomas because of the concern for inadvertent spread of tumor cells if an undiagnosed cancer were present. The authors, representing a 45-member review group, reviewed the current literature to formulate...

Workplaces are stages for work experiences. There is a need to understand the experience as a definitive factor in workplace management. However the ways to investigate the experience are many and there are many perspectives to approach the methods. This paper aims to answer the question how to asses the work environments from the user perspective, as part of user experience? The methods for us...

Inheritance is the main theme of schema design for the object-oriented software and object-oriented database. This notion supports the class hierarchy design and captures the is-a relationship between a class and its subclass. It contributes to good properties of modularity, reusability and incremental design Cox86][Meyer88]. self-inheritance. Unfortunately, for a class hierarchy with cyclic in...

We discuss the design and implementation of the prototype of an avatar-based health system aimed at providing people access to an effective behavior change intervention which can help them to find and cultivate motivation to change unhealthy lifestyles. An empathic Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA) delivers the intervention. The health dialog is directed by a computational model of Motivation...

In this paper, a decision support system based on the ontology knowledge for Critical Infrastructure security assessment is presented. The ontology provides vulnerabilities, threats and safeguards classification and their relationships with other security aspects. Such knowledge is used to build Bayesian network, which is used to asses the severity level of the detected threats. Described appro...

In this work, the main ideas involved in the design of overlapping and multi-overlapping controllers via the Inclusion Principle are discussed and illustrated in the context of the Structural Vibration Control of tall buildings under seismic excitation. A detailed theoretical background on the Inclusion Principle and the design of overlapping controllers is provided. Overlapping and multi-overl...

Prototyping distributed applications can be extremely useful in evaluating a design, and also in understanding the effect of different parameters on the performance of an application. Architecture Analysis and Design Language provide adequate syntax and semantics to express and support distributed embedded systems. This paper studies a general methodology and an associated tool for building and...

In this paper, we present the first results of our empirical analysis for the actual use that is made of metadata in Learning Object Repositories, more specifically in the ARIADNE Knowledge Pool System (KPS). We analyze metadata information provided by indexers when they introduce new learning objects into the KPS. This gives a clear indication about their understanding of metadata elements, va...

The Rashi inquiry learning environment for human biology was evaluated using a new instrument for assessing gains in scientific inquiry skills. The instrument was designed to be sensitive to the small pre-post skill gains that are hypothesized for short learning interventions. It is also designed to be scored with less effort than the verbal protocol analysis methods most often used to asses hi...