Occupational therapists working with Mexican and Mexican American populations may encounter traditional healing practices associated with curanderismo within a variety of practice settings. Curanderismo is a term referring to the practice of traditional healing in Latin American (Hispanic) cultures. This article reviews from the literature the different types of traditional healers (curanderos/...

BACKGROUND To compare the outcomes of Comprehensive Geriatric Assessments by family physicians and geriatricians. METHODS An explorative observational study was conducted in six family practices (12 ambulatory family practitioners) and 1 geriatric department (4 hospital-based geriatricians) from a university medical center in Nijmegen (the Netherlands). As participants, we included 587 patien...

BACKGROUND There is limited insight into the attributable effect of anemia and comorbidity on functional status and mortality in old age. METHODS The Leiden 85-plus Study is a population-based prospective follow-up study of 562 people aged 85 years. Anemia was defined according to World Health Organization criteria. We measured 3 parameters of functional status at baseline and annually therea...

In this paper, we investigate the problem of monitoring human activities using a network of sensors, including video cameras, in a smart home environment. We introduce an unsupervised method for mining a new kind of qualitative temporally structured activity models from sensor data. We present an application of our method to the recognition of activities of daily living in an elderly care context.

PURPOSE  To describe leisure participation for school-aged children with Down syndrome and to investigate how factors, classified by the World Health Organisation's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, influence their leisure participation. METHOD  Families in Western Australia with a child aged 5-18 years with Down syndrome were surveyed in a population-based s...

The authors investigated the general activity and nest occupation patterns of fox squirrels in a natural setting using temperature-sensitive data loggers that measure activity as changes in the microenvironment of the animal. Data were obtained from 25 distinct preparations, upon 14 unique squirrels, totaling 1385 recording days. The animals were clearly diurnal, with a predominantly unimodal a...

The loss of biodiversity caused by human activity is assumed to alter ecosystem functioning. However our understanding of the magnitude of the effect of these changes on functional diversity and their impact on the dynamics of ecological processes is still limited. We analyzed the functional diversity of copro-necrophagous beetles under different conditions of land use in three Mexican biospher...

BACKGROUND Previous studies have examined the relationships between physical health and leisure activities and between leisure activities and well-being, but, to our knowledge, none has examined these relationships simultaneously. OBJECTIVE This study investigated the relationships between leisure activities, health and well-being considering the role of age, and whether leisure activities me...

This study investigated the effects of leisure and social activities on the ability of middle-aged adults to maintain activities of daily living (ADL), and whether performing these activities alone or with others contributed to the ability to perform ADL. The study used nationally representative longitudinal data of 22,770 adults in Japan, aged 50-59 years, who did not have limitations in perfo...