Background. A multidimensional, brief, and flexible stroke-specific health-related quality of life (HRQOL) measure is still needed. The aim was to develop a shortened version of the HRQOLISP-102, a multiculturally generated measure with excellent psychometric properties. Methods. Participants included 100 (Ibadan, Nigeria) and 103 (Berlin, Germany) stroke patients compared to 100 (Ibadan) and 5...

Flexible, wearable sensing devices can yield important information about the underlying physiology of a human subject for applications in real-time health and fitness monitoring. Despite significant progress in the fabrication of flexible biosensors that naturally comply with the epidermis, most designs measure only a small number of physical or electrophysiological parameters, and neglect the ...

A new approach is presented for determining the rigid regions in proteins and the flexible joints between them. The short-range forces in proteins are modeled as constraints and we use a recently developed formalism from graph theory to analyze flexibility in the bond network. Forces included in the analysis are the covalent bond-stretching and bond-bending forces, salt bridges, and hydrogen bo...

Although flexible processes are deemed critical for many companies and constitute a key concern of business process management, there is a lack of approaches for valuating process flexibility from an economic perspective and for determining an appropriate level of process flexibility. Today, companies do not know how flexible their processes should be. While generally advocating balanced invest...

Lithium batteries are widely used in notebook computers, mobile phones, 3C electronic products, and electric vehicles. However, under a high charge/discharge rate, the internal temperature of lithium battery may rise sharply, thus causing safety problems. On the other hand, when the lithium battery is overcharged, the voltage and current may be affected, resulting in battery instability. This s...

BACKGROUND To measure the effects of real-time visualisation during urethrocystoscopy on pain in patients who underwent ambulatory urethrocystoscopy. METHODS An observational study was designed. From June 2012 to June 2013 patients who had ambulatory urethrocystoscopy participated in the study. In order to measure pain perception we used a numeric rating scale (NRS) 0 to 10. Additional data w...

While SMT systems can learn to translate multiword expressions (MWEs) from parallel text, they typically have no notion of non-compositionality, and thus overgeneralise translations that are only used in certain contexts. This paper describes a novel approach to measure the flexibility of a phrase pair, i.e. its tendency to occur in many contexts, in contrast to phrase pairs that are only valid...

Nine macroeconomic variables are forecast in a real-time scenario using a variety of flexible specification, fixed specification, linear, and nonlinear econometric models. All models are allowed to evolve through time, and our analysis focuses on model selection and performance. In the context of real-time forecasts, flexible specification models (including linear ARX and nonlinear artificial n...

Colorectal cancer is the third most frequent cancer, yet screening rates for this cancer remain low. This study was designed to identify factors associated with family physicians' rates of recommending or providing flexible sigmoidoscopy. We applied a behavioral model consisting of three components: physician attitude toward providing the test, facilitating conditions, and reinforcing condition...