Laboratory analyses for evaluation of platelet disorders and platelet concentrates

High quality of platelet analytics requires specialized knowledge and skills. It was applied to analyze platelet activation and aggregation responses in a prospective controlled study of patients with Finnish type of amyloidosis. The 20 patients with AGel amyloidosis displayed a delayed and more profound platelet shape change than healthy siblings and healthy volunteers, which may be related to altered fragmentation of mutated gelsolin during platelet activation. Alterations in platelet shape change have not been reported in association with platelet disorders. In the rare Bernard-Soulier syndrome with Asn45Ser mutation of glycoprotein (GP) IX, the diagnostic defect in the expression of GPIb-IX-V complex was characterized in seven Finnish patients, also an internationally exceptionally large patient series. When measuring thrombopoietin in serial samples of amniotic fluid and cord blood of 15 pregnant women with confirmed or suspected fetal alloimmune thrombocytopenia, the lower limit of detection could be extended. The results approved that thrombopoietin is present already in amniotic fluid. The application of various non-invasive means for diagnosing thrombocytopenia (TP) revealed that techniques for estimating the proportion of young, i.e. large platelets, such as direct measurement of reticulated platelets and the mean platelet size, would be useful for evaluating platelet kinetics in a given patient. Due to different kinetics between thrombopoietin and increase of young platelets in circulation, these measurements may have most predictive value when measured from simultaneous samples. Platelet autoantibodies were present not only in isolated autoimmune TP but also in patients without TP where disappearance of platelets might be compensated by increased production. The autoantibodies may also persist after TP has been cured. Simultaneous demonstration of increased young platelets (or increased mean platelet volume) in peripheral blood and the presence of platelet associated IgG specificities to major glycoproteins (GPIb-IX and GPIIb-IIIa) may be considered diagnostic for autoimmune TP. Measurement of a soluble marker as a sign of thrombin activation and proceeding deterioration of platelet components was applied to analyze the alterations under several stress factors (storage, transportation and lack of continuous shaking under controlled conditions) of platelet products. The GPV measured as a soluble factor in platelet storage medium showed good correlation with an array of other measurements commonly applied in characterization of stored platelets. The benefits of measuring soluble analyte in a quantitative assay were evident.

IASDR 2015 Interplay Exhibition 2-5 NOV 2015

It has been said that we are living in a golden age of innovation. New products, systems and services aimed to enable a better future, have emerged from novel interconnections between design and design research with science, technology and the arts. These intersections are now, more than ever, catalysts that enrich daily activities for health and safety, education, personal computing, entertainment and sustainability, to name a few. Interactive functions made possible by new materials, technology, and emerging manufacturing solutions demonstrate an ongoing interplay between cross-disciplinary knowledge and research. Such interactive interplay bring up questions concerning: (i) how art and design provide a focus for developing design solutions and research in technology; (ii) how theories emerging from the interactions of cross-disciplinary knowledge inform both the practice and research of design and (iii) how research and design work together in a mutually beneficial way. The IASDR2015 INTERPLAY EXHIBITION provides some examples of these interconnections of design research with science, technology and the arts. This is done through the presentation of objects, artefacts and demonstrations that are contextualised into everyday activities across various areas including health, education, safety, furniture, fashion and wearable design. The exhibits provide a setting to explore the various ways in which design research interacts across discipline knowledge and approaches to stimulate innovation. In education, Designing South African Children’s Health Education as Generative Play (A Bennett, F Cassim, M van der Merwe, K van Zijil, and M Ribbens) presents a set of toolkits that resulted from design research entailing generative play. The toolkits are systems that engender pleasure and responsibility, and are aimed at cultivating South African’s youth awareness of nutrition, hygiene, disease awareness and prevention, and social health. In safety, AVAnav: Avalanche Rescue Helmet (Jason Germany) delivers an interactive system as a tool to contribute to reduce the time to locate buried avalanche victims. Helmet-mounted this system responds to the contextual needs of rescuers and has since led to further design research on the interface design of rescuing devices. In apparel design and manufacturing, Shrinking Violets: Fashion design for disassembly (Alice Payne) proposes a design for disassembly through the use of beautiful reversible mono-material garments that interactively responds to the challenges of garment construction in the fashion industry, capturing the metaphor for the interplay between technology and craft in the fashion manufacturing industry. Harvest: A biotextile future (Dean Brough and Alice Payne), explores the interplay of biotechnology, materiality and textile design in the creation of sustainable, biodegradable vegan textile through the process of a symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOBY). SCOBY is a pellicle curd that can be harvested, machine washed, dried and cut into a variety of designs and texture combinations. The exploration of smart materials, wearable design and micro-electronics led to creative and aesthetically coherent stimulus-reactive jewellery; Symbiotic Microcosms: Crafting Digital Interaction (K Vones). This creation aims to bridge the gap between craft practitioner and scientific discovery, proposing a move towards the notion of a post-human body, where wearable design is seen as potential ground for new human-computer interactions, affording the development of visually engaging multifunctional enhancements. In furniture design, Smart Assistive chair for older adults (Chao Zhao) demonstrates how cross-disciplinary knowledge interacting with design strategies provide solution that employed new technological developments in older aged care, and the participation of multiple stakeholders: designers, health care system and community based health systems. In health, Molecular diagnosis system for newborns deafness genetic screening (Chao Zhao) presents an ambitious and complex project that includes a medical device aimed at resolving a number of challenges: technical feasibility for city and rural contexts, compatibility with standard laboratory and hospital systems, access to health system, and support the work of different hospital specialists. The interplay between cross-disciplines is evident in this work, demonstrating how design research moves forward through technology developments. These works exemplify the intersection between domains as a means to innovation. Novel design problems are identified as design intersects with the various areas. Research informs this process, and in different ways. We see the background investigation into the contextualising domain (e.g. on-snow studies, garment recycling, South African health concerns, the post human body) to identify gaps in the area and design criteria; the technologies and materials reviews (e.g. AR, biotextiles) to offer plausible technical means to solve these, as well as design criteria. Theoretical reviews can also inform the design (e.g. play, flow). These work together to equip the design practitioner with a robust set of ‘tools’ for design innovation – tools that are based in research. The process identifies innovative opportunity and criteria for design and this, in turn, provides a means for evaluating the success of the design outcomes. Such an approach has the potential to come full circle between research and design – where the design can function as an exemplar, evidencing how the research-articulated problems can be solved. Core to this, however, is the evaluation of the design outcome itself and identifying knowledge outcomes. In some cases, this is fairly straightforward that is, easily measurable. For example the efficacy of Jason Germany’s helmet can be determined by measuring the reduced response time in the rescuer. Similarly the improved ability to recycle Payne’s panel garments can be clearly determined by comparing it to those recycling processes (and her identified criteria of separating textile elements!); while the sustainability and durability of the Brough & Payne’s biotextile can be assessed by documenting the growth and decay processes, or comparative strength studies. There are however situations where knowledge outcomes and insights are not so easily determined. Many of the works here are open-ended in their nature, as they emphasise the holistic experience of one or more designs, in context: “the end result of the art activity that provides the health benefit or outcome but rather, the value lies in the delivery and experience of the activity” (Bennet et al.) Similarly, reconfiguring layers of laser cut silk in Payne’s Shrinking Violets constitutes a customisable, creative process of clothing oneself since it “could be layered to create multiple visual effects”. Symbiotic Microcosms also has room for facilitating experience, as the work is described to facilitate “serendipitous discovery”. These examples show the diverse emphasis of enquiry as on the experience versus the product. Open-ended experiences are ambiguous, multifaceted and differ from person to person and moment to moment (Eco 1962). Determining the success is not always clear or immediately discernible; it may also not be the most useful question to ask. Rather, research that seeks to understand the nature of the experience afforded by the artefact is most useful in these situations. It can inform the design practitioner by helping them with subsequent re-design as well as potentially being generalizable to other designers and design contexts. Bennett et. al exemplify how this may be approached from a theoretical perspective. This work is concerned with facilitating engaging experiences to educate and, ultimately impact on that community. The research is concerned with the nature of that experience as well, and in order to do so the authors have employed theoretical lenses – here these are of flow, pleasure, play. An alternative or complementary approach to using theory, is using qualitative studies such as interviews with users to ask them about what they experienced? Here the user insights become evidence for generalising across, potentially revealing insight into relevant concerns – such as the range of possible ‘playful’ or experiences that may be afforded, or the situation that preceded a ‘serendipitous discovery’. As shown, IASDR2015 INTERPLAY EXHIBITION provides a platform for exploration, discussion and interrogation around the interplay of design research across diverse domains. We look forward with excitement as IASDR continues to bring research and design together, and as our communities of practitioners continue to push the envelope of what is design and how this can be expanded and better understood with research to foster new work and ultimately, stimulate innovation.

Middle aged wasps mate through most of the year, without regard to body size, ovarian development and nestmateship: a laboratory study of the primitively eusocial wasp Ropalidia marginata

We studied the mating behaviour of the primi-tively eusocial wasp Ropalidia marginata and the factors that may influence sperm transfer. By introducing a male and a female R. marginata into ventilated transparent plastic boxes, we were able to observe mating behaviour, and it involved mounting and short or long conjugation of the wasps. Dissection of female wasps after the observation indicated that long conjugation is a good behavioural predictor of sperm transfer. This finding makes it possible to obtain mated females without dissecting them every time. We tested the effect of age, season, relatedness, body size and female's ovarian status on mating. Under laboratory conditions, mating success declined rapidly below and above the ages 5-20 days. Within this age range mating success was significantly low in December compared to other months tested. There was no nestmate discrimination, and there was no influence of male and female body size or of the ovarian state of the female on the probability of sperm transfer.

Seeing and hearing speech, sounds, and signs: functional magnetic resonance studies on fluent and dyslexic readers

Speech has both auditory and visual components (heard speech sounds and seen articulatory gestures). During all perception, selective attention facilitates efficient information processing and enables concentration on high-priority stimuli. Auditory and visual sensory systems interact at multiple processing levels during speech perception and, further, the classical motor speech regions seem also to participate in speech perception. Auditory, visual, and motor-articulatory processes may thus work in parallel during speech perception, their use possibly depending on the information available and the individual characteristics of the observer. Because of their subtle speech perception difficulties possibly stemming from disturbances at elemental levels of sensory processing, dyslexic readers may rely more on motor-articulatory speech perception strategies than do fluent readers. This thesis aimed to investigate the neural mechanisms of speech perception and selective attention in fluent and dyslexic readers. We conducted four functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments, during which subjects perceived articulatory gestures, speech sounds, and other auditory and visual stimuli. Gradient echo-planar images depicting blood oxygenation level-dependent contrast were acquired during stimulus presentation to indirectly measure brain hemodynamic activation. Lip-reading activated the primary auditory cortex, and selective attention to visual speech gestures enhanced activity within the left secondary auditory cortex. Attention to non-speech sounds enhanced auditory cortex activity bilaterally; this effect showed modulation by sound presentation rate. A comparison between fluent and dyslexic readers' brain hemodynamic activity during audiovisual speech perception revealed stronger activation of predominantly motor speech areas in dyslexic readers during a contrast test that allowed exploration of the processing of phonetic features extracted from auditory and visual speech. The results show that visual speech perception modulates hemodynamic activity within auditory cortex areas once considered unimodal, and suggest that the left secondary auditory cortex specifically participates in extracting the linguistic content of seen articulatory gestures. They are strong evidence for the importance of attention as a modulator of auditory cortex function during both sound processing and visual speech perception, and point out the nature of attention as an interactive process (influenced by stimulus-driven effects). Further, they suggest heightened reliance on motor-articulatory and visual speech perception strategies among dyslexic readers, possibly compensating for their auditory speech perception difficulties.

Enhancing sensor network lifetime using interactive communication

We are concerned with maximizing the lifetime of a data-gathering wireless sensor network consisting of set of nodes directly communicating with a base-station. We model this scenario as the m-message interactive communication between multiple correlated informants (sensor nodes) and a recipient (base-station). With this framework, we show that m-message interactive communication can indeed enhance network lifetime. Both worst-case and average-case performances are considered.

Hanle-Zeeman redistribution matrix. I. Classical theory expressions in the laboratory frame

Polarized scattering in spectral lines is governed by a 4; 4 matrix that describes how the Stokes vector is scattered and redistributed in frequency and direction. Here we develop the theory for this redistribution matrix in the presence of magnetic fields of arbitrary strength and direction. This general magnetic field case is called the Hanle- Zeeman regime, since it covers both of the partially overlapping weak- and strong- field regimes in which the Hanle and Zeeman effects dominate the scattering polarization. In this general regime, the angle-frequency correlations that describe the so-called partial frequency redistribution (PRD) are intimately coupled to the polarization properties. We develop the theory for the PRD redistribution matrix in this general case and explore its detailed mathematical properties and symmetries for the case of a J = 0 -> 1 -> 0 scattering transition, which can be treated in terms of time-dependent classical oscillator theory. It is shown how the redistribution matrix can be expressed as a linear superposition of coherent and noncoherent parts, each of which contain the magnetic redistribution functions that resemble the well- known Hummer- type functions. We also show how the classical theory can be extended to treat atomic and molecular scattering transitions for any combinations of quantum numbers.

Temperature monitoring of nonanaesthetised patients in a cardiac catheterisation laboratory

Aim and objectives To identify the prevalence that temperature reduced by more than 1°C from pre to post-procedure in a sample of non-anaesthetised patients undergoing procedures in a cardiac catheterisation laboratory. Background Advances in medical technology are minimising the invasiveness of diagnostic tests and treatments for disease, which is correspondingly increasing the number of medical procedures performed without sedation or anaesthesia. Procedural areas in which medical procedures are performed without anaesthesia are typically kept at a cool temperature for staff comfort. As such, there is a need to inform nursing practices in regard to the thermal management of non-anaesthetised patients undergoing procedures in surgical or procedural environments. Design Single-site observational study Methods Patients were included if they had undergone an elective procedure without sedation or anaesthesia in a cardiac catheterisation laboratory. Ambient room temperature was maintained between 18°C and 20°C. Passive warming with heated cotton blankets was applied. Nurses measured body temperature and thermal comfort before and after 342 procedures. Results Mean change in temperature was -0.08°C (Standard deviation 0.43). The reduction in temperature was more than 1°C after 11 procedures (3.2%). One patient whose temperature had reduced more than 1°C after their procedure reported thermal discomfort. A total of 12 patients were observed to be shivering post-procedure (3.6%). No demographic or clinical characteristics were associated with reduction in temperature of more than 1°C from pre to post-procedure. Conclusions Significant reduction in body temperature was rare in our sample of non-anaesthetised patients. Relevance to clinical practice Similar results would likely be found in other procedural contexts during procedures conducted in settings with comparable room temperatures where passive warming can also be applied with limited skin exposure.

Interactive Distributed Source Coding in Asymmetric Communication Scenarios

We provide a new unified framework, called "multiple correlated informants - single recipient" communication, to address the variations of the traditional Distributed Source Coding (DSC) problem. Different combinations of the assumptions about the communication scenarios and the objectives of communication result in different variations of the DSC problem. For each of these variations, the complexities of communication and computation of the optimal solution is determined by the combination of the underlying assumptions. In the proposed framework, we address the asymmetric, interactive, and lossless variant of the DSC problem, with various objectives of communication and provide optimal solutions for those. Also, we consider both, the worst-case and average-case scenarios.

HealthMap: A cluster randomised trial of interactive health plans and self-management support to prevent coronary heart disease in people with HIV

Background The leading causes of morbidity and mortality for people in high-income countries living with HIV are now non-AIDS malignancies, cardiovascular disease and other non-communicable diseases associated with ageing. This protocol describes the trial of HealthMap, a model of care for people with HIV (PWHIV) that includes use of an interactive shared health record and self-management support. The aims of the HealthMap trial are to evaluate engagement of PWHIV and healthcare providers with the model, and its effectiveness for reducing coronary heart disease risk, enhancing self-management, and improving mental health and quality of life of PWHIV. Methods/Design The study is a two-arm cluster randomised trial involving HIV clinical sites in several states in Australia. Doctors will be randomised to the HealthMap model (immediate arm) or to proceed with usual care (deferred arm). People with HIV whose doctors are randomised to the immediate arm receive 1) new opportunities to discuss their health status and goals with their HIV doctor using a HealthMap shared health record; 2) access to their own health record from home; 3) access to health coaching delivered by telephone and online; and 4) access to a peer moderated online group chat programme. Data will be collected from participating PWHIV (n = 710) at baseline, 6 months, and 12 months and from participating doctors (n = 60) at baseline and 12 months. The control arm will be offered the HealthMap intervention at the end of the trial. The primary study outcomes, measured at 12 months, are 1) 10-year risk of non-fatal acute myocardial infarction or coronary heart disease death as estimated by a Framingham Heart Study risk equation; and 2) Positive and Active Engagement in Life Scale from the Health Education Impact Questionnaire (heiQ). Discussion The study will determine the viability and utility of a novel technology-supported model of care for maintaining the health and wellbeing of people with HIV. If shown to be effective, the HealthMap model may provide a generalisable, scalable and sustainable system for supporting the care needs of people with HIV, addressing issues of equity of access. Trial registration Universal Trial Number (UTN) U111111506489; ClinicalTrial.gov Id NCT02178930 submitted 29 June 2014

Learning experiences in a giant interactive environment: Insights from The Cube

In November 2012, Queensland University of Technology in Australia launched a giant interactive learning environment known as The Cube. This article reports a phenomenographic investigation into visitors’ different experiences of learning in The Cube. At present very little is known about people’s learning experience in spaces featuring large interactive screens. We observed many visitors to The Cube and interviewed 26 people. Our analysis identified critical variation across the visitors’ experience of learning in The Cube. The findings are discussed as the learning strategy (in terms of Absorption, Exploration, Isolation and Collaboration); and the content learned (in terms of Technology, Skills and Topics). Other findings presented here are dimensions of the learning strategy and the content learned, with differing perspectives on each dimension. These outcomes provide early insights into the potential of giant interactive environments to enhance learning approaches and guide the design of innovative learning spaces in higher education.

Visibility volumes for interactive path optimization

We describe a real-time system that supports design of optimal flight paths over terrains. These paths either maximize view coverage or minimize vehicle exposure to ground. A volume-rendered display of multi-viewpoint visibility and a haptic interface assists the user in selecting, assessing, and refining the computed flight path. We design a three-dimensional scalar field representing the visibility of a point above the terrain, describe an efficient algorithm to compute the visibility field, and develop visual and haptic schemes to interact with the visibility field. Given the origin and destination, the desired flight path is computed using an efficient simulation of an articulated rope under the influence of the visibility gradient. The simulation framework also accepts user input, via the haptic interface, thereby allowing manual refinement of the flight path.

Future chemistry teachers use of knowledge dimensions and high-order cognitive skills in pre-laboratory concept maps

This poster describes a pilot case study, which aim is to study how future chemistry teachers use knowledge dimensions and high-order cognitive skills (HOCS) in their pre-laboratory concept maps to support chemistry laboratory work. The research data consisted of 168 pre-laboratory concept maps that 29 students constructed as a part of their chemistry laboratory studies. Concept maps were analyzed by using a theory based content analysis through Anderson & Krathwohls' learning taxonomy (2001). This study implicates that novice concept mapper students use all knowledge dimensions and applying, analyzing and evaluating HOCS to support the pre-laboratory work.

Pressure sensor based tsunami detection system: A laboratory study

In this paper, we present the study and implementation of a low-cost system to detect the occurrences of tsunamis at significantly smaller laboratory scale. The implementation is easily scalable for real-time deployment. Information reported in this paper includes the experimentally recorded response from the pressure sensor giving an indication as well as an alarm at remote place for the detection of water turbulence similar to the case of tsunami. It has been found that the system developed works very well in the laboratory scale.