Exploration and mapping belongs to the fundamental tasks of mobile robots. In the past, many approaches have used occupancy grid maps to represent the environment during the map building process. Occupancy grids, however, are based on the assumption that each cell is either occupied or free. In this paper we introduce coverage maps as an alternative way of representing the environment of a robo...

A quality improvement project was initiated on Ivory ward, a functional older adult psychiatric inpatient ward at Newham Centre for Mental Health, part of the East London NHS Foundation Trust. The project was started by staff on the ward after it had come to their attention that their ward had the highest bed occupancy and length of stay across similar wards in the trust. The mean bed occupancy...

The traditional model of acute medical care involves the admission of patients to hospital to be assessed by a consultant and facilitate access to investigation and treatment. This model has, however, led to a number of problems. Firstly, there is high bed occupancy which restricts access and increases the risk of healthcare-acquired infection. Secondly, only limited training opportunities are ...

This article presents a case study of how one health system-Health First, in Brevard County, Florida-addressed resource challenges by using Lean thinking enabled by information technology. Examining Health First provides an opportunity to learn about how one hospital system addressed these challenges by making fundamental changes in their operations, in advance of the shift toward accountable c...

We construct a stochastic patch occupancy metapopulation model that incorporates variation in habitat quality and an Allee-like effect. Using some basic results from stochastic ordering, we investigate the effect of habitat degradation on the persistence of the metapopulation. In particular, we show that for a metapopulation with Allee-effect habitat degradation can cause a dramatic decrease in...

Managing operations of the aircraft approach process and analyzing runway landing capacity, utilization and related risks require detailed insight into the stochastic characteristics of the process. These characteristics can be represented by probability distributions. The focus of this study is analyzing landings on a runway operating independent of other runways making it as a single runway. ...

Planning for mass gatherings involves health system preparedness based on an understanding of natural and technological hazards identified through prior risk assessment. We present the expected hazards reported by health administrators of the host cities for the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil and discuss the hazards considering minimal available public hospital beds in the 12 cities at the time ...

An individual's identification of his retirement situation does not necessarily coincide with the retirement concept as defined by objective measures. Self-evaluation of retirement status by respondents to the Retirement History Study has been analyzed to discover to what extent their subjective assessment of retirement matched the situation predicted by objective measures. For those completely...