background: resistive inspiratory muscle training (rimt) is a well-known technique for rehabilitation of patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (copd). incentive spirometry is another technique with potential viability for this application, but there is limited evidence in support of its efficacy in the rehabilitation of copd patients. aim: the objective of this study was to compar...

Medicare provides incentive reimbursements to health maintenance organizations (HMOs) which enroll Medicare beneficiaries on a risk option and provide care at a lower cost than expected. The incentive reimbursements are tied to an actuarial calculation of Medicare Adjusted Average Per Capita Cost (AAPCC). The AAPCC adjusts for a number of variables which affect Medicare reimbursements and for w...

Misrepresenting private information is often costly, for technological, legal, or psychological reasons. I develop a model of strategic information transmission based on Crawford and Sobel (1982) (CS), but with a convex cost of lying or misreporting. There are three main results. First, I prove that a sequence of monotone equilibria converges to a CS equilibrium as the cost of misreporting shri...

BACKGROUND Evidence regarding the effectiveness of incentive spirometry (ISy) on postoperative pulmonary outcomes after thoracic, cardiac and abdominal surgery remains inconclusive. This is attributed to various methodological issues inherent in ISy trials. Patient compliance has also been highlighted as a possible confounding factor; however, the status of evidence regarding patient compliance...

A smartphone-based tidal volume (V(T)) estimator was recently introduced by our research group, where an Android application provides a chest movement signal whose peak-to-peak amplitude is highly correlated with reference V(T) measured by a spirometer. We found a Normalized Root Mean Squared Error (NRMSE) of 14.998% ± 5.171% (mean ± SD) when the smartphone measures were calibrated using spirom...

The objective of the present study was to evaluate incentive spirometers using volume- (Coach and Voldyne) and flow-oriented (Triflo II and Respirex) devices. Sixteen healthy subjects, 24 +/- 4 years, 62 +/- 12 kg, were studied. Respiratory variables were obtained by respiratory inductive plethysmography, with subjects in a semi-reclined position (45 masculine). Tidal volume, respiratory freque...