Strategies, effectiveness and rationale of vector-borne disease control in the pastoralist system of south-western Uganda

In Uganda, control of vector-borne diseases is mainly in form of vector control, and chemotherapy. There have been reports that acaricides are being misused in the pastoralist systems in Uganda. This is because of the belief by scientists that intensive application of acaricide is uneconomical and unsustainable particularly in the indigenous cattle. The objective of this study was to investigate the strategies, rationale and effectiveness of vector-borne disease control by pastoralists. To systematically carry out these investigations, a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods was used, in both the collection and the analysis of data. Cattle keepers were found to control tick-borne diseases (TBDs) mainly through spraying, in contrast with the control of trypanosomosis for which the main method of control was by chemotherapy. The majority of herders applied acaricides weekly and used an acaricide of lower strength than recommended by the manufacturers. They used very little acaricide wash, and spraying was preferred to dipping. Furthermore, pastoralists either treated sick animals themselves or did nothing at all, rather than using veterinary personnel. Oxytetracycline (OTC) was the drug commonly used in the treatment of TBDs. Nevertheless, although pastoralists may not have been following recommended practices in their control of ticks and tick-borne diseases, they were neither wasteful nor uneconomical and their methods appeared to be effective. Trypanosomosis was not a problem either in Sembabule or Mbarara district. Those who used trypanocides were found to use more drugs than were necessary.

Reach & grasp therapy: Design and control of a 9-DOF robotic neuro-rehabilitation system

This paper presents the Gentle/G integrated system for reach & grasp therapy retraining following brain injury. The design, control and integration of an experimental grasp assistance unit is described for use in robot assisted stroke rehabilitation. The grasp assist unit is intended to work with the hardware and software of the Gentle/S robot although the hardware could be adapted to other rehabilitation applications. When used with the Gentle/S robot a total of 6 active and 3 passive degrees of freedom are available to provide active, active assist or passive grasp retraining in combination with reaching movements in a reach-grasp-transfer-release sequence.

Integrable Hamiltonian systems defined on the Lie groups SO(3) and SU(2): an application to the attitude control of a spacecraft

This paper considers left-invariant control systems defined on the Lie groups SU(2) and SO(3). Such systems have a number of applications in both classical and quantum control problems. The purpose of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, the optimal control problem for a system varying on these Lie Groups, with cost that is quadratic in control is lifted to their Hamiltonian vector fields through the Maximum principle of optimal control and explicitly solved. Secondly, the control systems are integrated down to the level of the group to give the solutions for the optimal paths corresponding to the optimal controls. In addition it is shown here that integrating these equations on the Lie algebra su(2) gives simpler solutions than when these are integrated on the Lie algebra so(3).

Hybrid fault detection and isolation in an heater bank of an HVAC system

In this work a hybrid technique that includes probabilistic and optimization based methods is presented. The method is applied, both in simulation and by means of real-time experiments, to the heating unit of a Heating, Ventilation Air Conditioning (HVAC) system. It is shown that the addition of the probabilistic approach improves the fault diagnosis accuracy.

Development and application of a novel algorithm for steady-state optimising control using dynamic information

A novel optimising controller is designed that leads a slow process from a sub-optimal operational condition to the steady-state optimum in a continuous way based on dynamic information. Using standard results from optimisation theory and discrete optimal control, the solution of a steady-state optimisation problem is achieved by solving a receding-horizon optimal control problem which uses derivative and state information from the plant via a shadow model and a state-space identifier. The paper analyzes the steady-state optimality of the procedure, develops algorithms with and without control rate constraints and applies the procedure to a high fidelity simulation study of a distillation column optimisation.

Imbalanced functional link between executive control network and reward network explain the online-game seeking behaviors in Internet gaming disorder

Literatures have shown that Internet gaming disorder (IGD) subjects show impaired executive control and enhanced reward sensitivities than healthy controls. However, how these two networks jointly affect the valuation process and drive IGD subjects' online-game-seeking behaviors remains unknown. Thirty-five IGD and 36 healthy controls underwent a resting-states scan in the MRI scanner. Functional connectivity (FC) was examined within control and reward network seeds regions, respectively. Nucleus accumbens (NAcc) was selected as the node to find the interactions between these two networks. IGD subjects show decreased FC in the executive control network and increased FC in the reward network when comparing with the healthy controls. When examining the correlations between the NAcc and the executive control/reward networks, the link between the NAcc - executive control network is negatively related with the link between NAcc - reward network. The changes (decrease/increase) in IGD subjects' brain synchrony in control/reward networks suggest the inefficient/overly processing within neural circuitry underlying these processes. The inverse proportion between control network and reward network in IGD suggest that impairments in executive control lead to inefficient inhibition of enhanced cravings to excessive online game playing. This might shed light on the mechanistic understanding of IGD.