BACKGROUND Non-attendance for hospital outpatient appointments is a significant problem in many countries. It causes suboptimal use of clinical and administrative staff and financial losses, as well as longer waiting times. The use of Short Message Service (SMS) appointment reminders potentially offers a cost-effective and time-efficient strategy to decrease non-attendance and so improve the ef...

Long-term memory is dependent on protein synthesis and inhibiting such synthesis following training results in amnesia for the task. Proteins synthesized during training must be transported to the synapse and disrupting microtubules with Colchicines, and hence, blocking transport, results in transient amnesia. Reactivating memory for a previously learned avoidance triggers a biochemical cascade...

Nudges at the Dentist We implement a randomized field experiment to study the impact of reminders on dental health prevention. Patients who are due for a check-up receive no reminder, a neutral reminder postcard, or reminders including additional information on the benefits of prevention. Our results document a strong impact of reminders. Within one month after receiving a reminder, the fractio...

This paper presents an early version of the Reminder, a prototype ECA developed in the European project MonAMI. The Reminder helps users to plan activities and to remember what to do. The prototype merges mobile ECA technology with other, existing technologies: Google Calendar and a digital pen and paper. The solution allows users to continue using a paper calendar in the manner they are used t...

BACKGROUND Non-attendance results in administrative problems and disruption in patient care. Several interventions have been used to reduce non-attendance, with varying degree of success. A relatively new intervention, text messaging, has been shown to be as effective as telephone reminders in reducing non-attendance. However, no study has looked specifically at using text messaging reminders t...

BACKGROUND More than 1 in 7 patients with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection in the United States are unaware of their serostatus despite recommendations of US agencies that all adults through age 65 be screened for HIV at least once. To facilitate universal screening, an electronic medical record (EMR) reminder was created for our primary care practice. Screening rates before and aft...

In this paper, we study the problem of mining for frequent trajectories, which is crucial in many application scenarios, such as vehicle traffic management, hand-off in cellular networks, supply chain management. We approach this problem as that of mining for frequent sequential patterns. Our approach consists of a partitioning strategy for incoming streams of trajectories in order to reduce th...

BACKGROUND Patient-reported outcomes are vital in informing randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and health-care interventions and policies from the patient's perspective. However, participant non-response may introduce bias and can affect the generalisability of the trial. This study evaluates two interventions aimed at increasing response rates to postal questionnaires within a large, UK-wide ...

In this paper we propose a mechanism to develop a lightweight encryption technique. We encrypt hierarchical single key-lock access control mechanism key by encoding key (key number). Key number is derived using Chinese reminder theorem and tribes of Gaussian or rational Farey fractions are used to encode the key number. The advantages of the proposed mechanism are i) no decoding overhead as acc...

READINGS: These notes are intended as a supplement to the textbook, not a replacement for it. This homework has two sections. The first section covers material from Math 300; I am not requiring you to do the first section, but I am including it for those students who need a reminder about partitions and equivalence classes. **** ONLY HAND IN SECTION 2 **** But feel free to solve the problems in...