Narrow Results

The deterioration of specific topological network measures that quantify different features of whole-brain functional network organization can be considered a marker for awareness impairment. Such topological measures reflect the functional interactions of multiple brain structures, which support the integration of different sensorimotor information subtending awareness. However, conventional, single-layer, graph theoretical analysis (GTA)-based approaches cannot always reliably differentiate patients with Disorders of Consciousness (DoC). Using multiplex and multilayer network analyses of frequency-specific and area-specific networks, we investigated functional connectivity during resting-state EEG in 17 patients with Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome (UWS) and 15 with Minimally Conscious State (MCS). Multiplex and multilayer network metrics indicated the deterioration and heterogeneity of functional networks and, particularly, the frontal-parietal (FP), as the discriminant between patients with MCS and UWS. These data were not appreciable when considering each individual frequency-specific network. The distinctive properties of multiplex/multilayer network metrics and individual frequency-specific network metrics further suggest the value of integrating the networks as opposed to analyzing frequency-specific network metrics one at a time. The hub vulnerability of these regions was positively correlated with the behavioral responsiveness, thus strengthening the clinically-based differential diagnosis. Therefore, it may be beneficial to adopt both multiplex and multilayer network analyses when expanding the conventional GTA-based analyses in the differential diagnosis of patients with DoC. Multiplex analysis differentiated patients at a group level, whereas the multilayer analysis offered complementary information to differentiate patients with DoC individually. Although further studies are necessary to confirm our preliminary findings, these results contribute to the issue of DoC differential diagnosis and may help in guiding patient-tailored management.

We discuss the dynamics of a susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model with local awareness in networks. Individual awareness to the infectious disease is characterized by a general function of epidemic information in its neighborhood. We build a high-accuracy approximate equation governing the spreading dynamics and derive an approximate epidemic threshold above which the epidemic spreads over the whole network. Our results extend the previous work and show that the epidemic threshold is dependent on the awareness function in terms of one infectious neighbor. Interestingly, when a pow-law awareness function is chosen, the epidemic threshold can emerge in infinite networks.

Vector-borne disease malaria is transmitted to humans by arthropod vectors (mosquitoes) and contributes significantly to the global disease burden. TV and social media play a key role to disseminate awareness among people by broadcasting awareness programs. In this paper, a nonlinear model is formulated and analyzed in which cumulative number of advertisements through TV and social media is taken as dynamical variable that propagates awareness among people to control the prevalence of vector-borne disease. The human population is partitioned into susceptible, infected and aware classes, while the vector population is divided into susceptible and infected classes. Humans become infected and new cases arise when bitten by infected vectors (mosquitoes) and susceptible vectors get infected as they bite infected humans. The feasibility of equilibria is justified and their stability conditions are discussed. A crucial parameter, basic reproduction number, which measures the disease transmission potentiality is obtained. Bifurcation analysis is performed by varying the sensitive parameters, and it is found that the proposed system shows different kinds of bifurcations, such as transcritical bifurcation, saddle-node bifurcation and Hopf bifurcation, etc. The analysis of the model shows that reduction in vector population due to intervention of people of aware class would not efficiently reduce the infective cases, rather we have to minimize the transmission rates anyhow, to control the disease outbreak.

This paper aims to explore two crucial aspects of collaborative work and learning: on the one hand, the importance of enabling collaborative learning applications to capture and structure the information generated by group activity and, on the other hand, to extract the relevant knowledge in order to provide learners and tutors with efficient awareness, feedback and support with regards to group performance and collaboration. To this end, in this paper we first propose a conceptual model for data analysis and management that identifies and classifies the many kinds of indicators that describe collaboration and learning into high-level aspects of collaboration. Then, we provide a computational platform that, at a first step, collects and classifies both the event information generated asynchronously from the users' actions and the labeled dialogues from the synchronous collaboration according to these indicators. This information is then analyzed in next steps to eventually extract and present to participants the relevant knowledge about the collaboration. The ultimate aim of this platform is to efficiently embed information and knowledge into collaborative learning applications. We eventually suggest a generalization of our approach to be used in diverse collaborative learning situations and domains.

To foster innovation and competition, an increasing number of software teams are becoming distributed. Such a distribution makes continuous collaboration and continuous awareness support a necessity and also a great challenge. Traditional desktop-based approaches are insufficient for the requirements of continuous awareness. In software development practice, an awareness tool on mobile devices is also desirable for team members to obtain the awareness information continuously. This paper addresses how to effectively present collaborative development activities using aesthetic visualization on mobile screens. Our approach supports multiple views suitable for software developers as well as team leaders. A baseline usability experiment and an eye-tracking experiment have evaluated the effectiveness and usability of the visualization method.

There have been concerting policy and legal initiatives to mitigate the privacy harm resulting from badly designed software technology. But one main challenge to realizing these initiatives is the difficulty in translating proposed principles and regulations into concrete and verifiable evidence in technology. This is partly due to the lack of systematic techniques and tools to address privacy in the software design, hence making it difficult for the designer to measure disclosure risk in a more intuitive way, taking into account the privacy objective that matters to each end user. To bridge this gap, we propose a framework for verifying the satisfaction of user privacy objectives in software design. Our approach is based on the (un)awareness that users acquire when information is disclosed, as it relates to the communication properties of objects in a design. This property is used to determine the expected privacy utility that users will derive from the design for a specified privacy objective. We demonstrate through case studies how this approach can help designers determine which design decision undermines users’ privacy expectations and better design alternatives.

Diabetes is a widespread non-contagious disease, and a significant fraction of human population in the world is affected by it. Lifestyle changes including physical activities and a healthy diet can prevent or delay the onset of diabetes and its complications. In this paper, nonlinear mathematical models are proposed and analyzed to study the role of awareness in the prevention of diabetes. In model formulation, first it is assumed that the unaware people become aware through word-of-mouth communication only and adopt a preventive lifestyle to reduce the peril of diabetes. Subsequently, the proposed model is extended by incorporating the effect of social media and TV advertisements on diabetes awareness. An awareness generation number is obtained for the first model and it is found that the system exhibits transcritical bifurcation when this number crosses unity. Both models are analyzed qualitatively and a comparison of outcomes reveals that social media and TV ads are more effective in raising the level of awareness among individuals and helps to inhibit the risk of diabetes mellitus. The analytical results are verified through numerical simulation.

The rationale of this study was to gain meaningful insights into SME awareness, practices and the assumed impacts associated with environmental issues. Supported by the theoretic interpretation of stakeholder theory, the study employed a mailed survey to gain data from SMEs operating nationally across Australia. The findings flag a diversity of results across industry groups and also firm size, particularly in relation to their awareness of environmental and social issues. The results also identified the areas of business activity where firms focus their efforts to be environmentally responsible, together with the types of environmental costs they incorporate into their internal information system. The results also revealed their view on the impact flowing from adopting environmental responsibility.

It is common that, in a long-term asynchronous collaborative activity, groups of users engage in occasional synchronous sessions. In this paper, we analyze the data management requirements for supporting this common work practice in typical collaborative activities and applications. We call the applications that support such work practice multi-synchronous applications. This analysis shows that, as users interact in different ways in each setting, some applications have different requirements and need to rely on different data sharing techniques in synchronous and asynchronous settings. We present a data management system that allows to integrate a synchronous session in the context of a long-term asynchronous interaction, using the suitable data sharing techniques in each setting and an automatic mechanism to convert the long sequence of small updates produced in a synchronous session into a large asynchronous contribution. We exemplify the use of our approach with two multi-synchronous applications.

Web-based collaborative systems support a variety of complex scenarios. Not only the interaction among one user and a computer has to be modeled but also the interaction among the collaborating users as well. As a result, the user interfaces of many web-based collaborative systems are quite complex, but hardly use approved user interface concepts for the design of interactive systems. Thereby, web-based collaborative systems aggravate the interaction of the users with the system and also with each other. In this article, we describe how the adaptability and usability of such systems can particularly be improved by supporting direct manipulation techniques for navigation as well as tailoring. The new functionality for tailoring and navigation is complemented by new forms of visualizing synchronous awareness information and supporting communication in web-based systems. We show this exemplarily by retrofitting the web-based collaborative system CURE while highlighting the concepts that can be easily transferred to other web-based collaborative systems.

Purpose: Our study aimed to find the location and pattern of musculoskeletal injuries in participants enrolled in Zumba-based training and to analyze the contributing risk factors for injuries through a self-administered questionnaire. Methods: A total of 50 participants were recruited in an offline and online-based study using a self-administered questionnaire based on seven demographic-based questions, eight injury-related questions and five questions based on the risk factors related to Zumba-based training. Binomial logistic regression analysis was used to predict the odds-ratio and factors contributing to the risk of injuries. Results: Twenty-nine out of 50 participants (58%) had single or multiple musculoskeletal injuries with the most common sites of injury being in the order of: leg (23%), knee (18%) and ankle, foot and the lower back (15%). Amongst the injured subjects, 10 (34.4%) had sought medical help and 11 (37.9%) had resorted to self-management. The binomial regression analysis showed the presence of recurrent injuries and the flooring of the class to be significantly associated with the risk of injuries. Conclusion: There was a 58% prevalence of musculoskeletal injuries in the subjects enrolled in Zumba-based training. The factors which are found to be an increased risk for musculoskeletal injuries were recurrent injuries and flooring of the class.

Geriatric Oncology - Featuring Dr. Ravindran Kanesvaran, President of the Singapore Society of Oncology (SSO).

ASLAN – Transforming the Treatment for Rare Tumour Types in Asia.

Conversation with Dr. Rebecca Dent at 5th Asia Pacific Breast Cancer Summit (APBCS).

P&G Children's Safe Drinking Water Program Celebrates 10 Billion Litre Milestone in Singapore.

New In-Vitro Studies Reinforce Efficacy of BETADINE® Skin Cleanser against Viruses that Cause Hand Foot & Mouth Disease.

Singapore Ranked Fifth in its Readiness to Achieve a Fully Integrated Health System Reveals First Future Health Index.

SCIEX Announces High Throughput, Industrialised Omics Solutions.

Novartis Expands Partnership with Medicines for Malaria Venture to Develop Next-Generation Antimalarial Treatment.

ADVA Launches Dengue Mission Buzz Barometer Tool to Boost Critical Dengue Prevention Awareness and Preparedness Amongst ASEAN Community.

Innovative Diagnostics Awarded Unprecedented Westgard Sigma Certification in Singapore.

Cervical Cancer is Highly Preventable. Don’t Succumb to It.

Do Your Part to Stop Infectious Disease from Spreading: Insights from Infectious Diseases Expert — Dr. Leong Hoe Nam.

Infectious Diseases in Asia Pacific: Top Five Targets for Prophylaxis Vaccines.

Kantar Health in Healthcare.

Saphetor: Leader of the Revolution in Clinical Diagnostics.

Healthcare Advancement: “Healthcare is a National Right, Not a Privilege”.

Data Showed Treatment Makes mCRPC Patients Live Longer.

Agnosias demonstrate the broadest spectrum of pathology of consciousness in neurology and psychiatry. Agnosias wipe off the definite functions from the brain's activity precisely and completely, allowing the consciousness to be investigated in itself. Thorough investigations of confabulatory manifestations disclose the rationale for the development of pathological functions and point out that there is a remedial (reconstructive) sense behind the senselessness of a mental state. Pathology seems to be accompanied by involuntary reparation on the part of the brain. Investigations of the conscious activity in agnosias show a separate, passive and real brain system of consciousness without pathology and genetic regulations. Neurological symbolic agnosias represent a cerebral and notional character and therefore constitute a link between neurological and psychiatric agnosias, which proves the existence of the same mechanism of development underlying agnosic syndromes, both in psychiatry and neurology. The work proves dual form of human self (somatic and notional) that constitute oneness, when they are dissociated, agnosia is caused.

Unconscious monitoring of multimodal stimulus changes enables humans to effectively sense the external environment. Such automatic change detection is thought to be reflected in auditory and visual mismatch negativity (MMN) and mismatch negativity fields (MMFs). These are event-related potentials and magnetic fields, respectively, evoked by deviant stimuli within a sequence of standard stimuli, and both are typically studied during irrelevant visual tasks that cause the stimuli to be ignored. Due to the sensitivity of MMN/MMF to potential effects of explicit attention to vision, however, it is unclear whether multisensory co-occurring changes can purely facilitate early sensory change detection reciprocally across modalities. We adopted a tactile task involving the reading of Braille patterns as a neutral ignore condition, while measuring magnetoencephalographic responses to concurrent audiovisual stimuli that were infrequently deviated either in auditory, visual, or audiovisual dimensions; 1000-Hz standard tones were switched to 1050-Hz deviant tones and/or two-by-two standard check patterns displayed on both sides of visual fields were switched to deviant reversed patterns. The check patterns were set to be faint enough so that the reversals could be easily ignored even during Braille reading. While visual MMFs were virtually undetectable even for visual and audiovisual deviants, significant auditory MMFs were observed for auditory and audiovisual deviants, originating from bilateral supratemporal auditory areas. Notably, auditory MMFs were significantly enhanced for audiovisual deviants from about 100 ms post-stimulus, as compared with the summation responses for auditory and visual deviants or for each of the unisensory deviants recorded in separate sessions. Evidenced by high tactile task performance with unawareness of visual changes, we conclude that Braille reading can successfully suppress explicit attention and that simultaneous multisensory changes can implicitly strengthen automatic change detection from an early stage in a cross-sensory manner, at least in the vision to audition direction.

Managing knowledge in the field of tourism and the hospitality industry will carry significant importance as most people are not aware of knowledge management (KM) implications. As the importance of knowledge management is not well captured in the tourism sector of Nepal, this study aims to identify the awareness level of knowledge management among the tourism entrepreneurs in Nepal and suggest managerial implications for the same. The primary data were collected through 276questionnaire surveys. Tourism entrepreneurs saw the benefits of KM for tourism development despite the costs and challenges it poses. Awareness of knowledge management of entrepreneurs differs according to the people, process, technology, organization structure, and the organization culture dimension. It was further influenced by the demographic characteristics of the tourism entrepreneurs. Enterprises are in more need of knowledge management awareness and several amendments in tourism development policies and programs. Therefore, this study recommends increasing entrepreneurs’ awareness of knowledge management by the joint effort of tourism enterprises and the Nepal Tourism Board. Various knowledge management seminars (integrating tourism experts with tourism entrepreneurs) and training programs should be conducted to manage knowledge effectively.

This paper aims at increasing awareness of knowledge management (KM), its challenges as well as benefits in Higher Education (HE) system of Vietnam. An exploratory qualitative research design was deployed using semi-structured interviews. Nine senior institutional leaders from nine Vietnamese universities participated in the study. Thematic analysis, informed by the literature, was undertaken on English translated transcripts of the interviews. The findings shared senior HE leaders’ perspectives on how KM in higher education institutions (HEI) of Vietnam was being conceptualised and operationalised, as well as insights into how KM associates with six dimensions of HEIs’ performance so as to gear up KM’s benefits and anticipate challenges when a HEI embarking on the KM journey. Further research of different methods on the topic to enlighten the role of KM in HE system of Vietnam, and beyond, is recommended. The role and importance of KM is wildly recognised in business communities. However, studies exploring KM application in HE system remain scarce especially HE of developing countries. In Vietnam, no qualitative studies of KM in HEIs have been located. Vietnam is a nation on its way to transform from a state-based to market-driven economy; and a comprehensive education reform is deemed to shoulder the key task. KM deployment in the whole HE system is essential to comprehensive education reform and then to the global integration of its HE system. Besides, the study helps enrich the literature of KM in HE sector and provide insights of KM to campus chiefs, KM officers, administrator in HEIs.

There are many interests in developing life-like robots, or robots which are both intelligent and autonomous. And, one obvious characteristics of life-like creatures is that they can autonomously develop and learn during their life span. Such abilities obviously depend on the ways of designing human-like minds. Then, a fundamental question is how to devise the innate, or built-in, principles behind the blueprint of a human-like mind, and to apply these findings to guide the design of the mind of life-like robots. In the literature, there are two schools of thoughts. One advocates the study of the nervous systems of biological brains (e.g. human brain) until the discovery of the blueprint of a mind. The second approach is to follow the path of invention and validation until the full understanding of physical principles which enable the design of an artificial mind that is as good as a biological mind. This paper embraces the second approach, and aims at formulating a new ground which could guide the design of the minds of life-like robots at various stages. In particular, the discussion is focused on answering the question of what life is from an engineering point of view. And, we approach the answer by examining the key steps of evolution from non-life to life. In this paper, five key steps of evolution from non-life to life will be discussed in detail. They are embodiment of energy flow, embodiment of signal flow, embodiment of knowledge flow, embodiment of decision flow, and embodiment of awareness flow. These findings are grounded on our engineering works toward the development of low-cost humanoid (LOCH) robot, and offer a unique perspective and an engineering basis. Whenever possible, the discussions in this paper are supported by real results of experiments on real robots.