OBJECTIVE To evaluate the inter-rater reliability of the modified Oxford Grading Scale and the Peritron manometer. DESIGN All participants were evaluated twice, first by one examiner and 30 days later by a second examiner. Measurements of vaginal squeeze pressure were compared with the results from the palpation test. PARTICIPANTS Nineteen women with a mean age of 23.7 years (range 21 to 28...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study is to develop and test reliability, validity, and utility of the Goal-Setting Evaluation Tool for Diabetes (GET-D). The effectiveness of diabetes self-management is predicated on goal-setting and action planning strategies. Evaluation of self-management interventions is hampered by the absence of tools to assess quality of goals and action plans. To address ...

Background In the Danish Emergency Process Triage (DEPT) pain is used as an independent contributor for triaging patients and is validated by the Numerical Pain Rating scale, NRS11. Prior studies have assessed the congruence between nurse’s assessment of their patients’ pain intensity and the patients’ own pain perception with mixed results. The aim of this study was to examine the correlation ...

AIM To validate and evaluate the psychometric properties of the ALPS-Neo, a new pain assessment scale created for the continuous evaluation of pain and stress in preterm and sick term infants. METHODS A unidimensional scale for continuous pain, Astrid Lindgren Children's Hospital Pain Scale (ALPS 1), was developed further to assess continuous pain and stress in infants treated in the neonatal...

Synchronous parallel links are widely used in modern VLSI designs for on-chip inter-module communication. Long range parallel links occupy large area and incur high capacitive load, high leakage power and cross-coupling noise. The problems exacerbate for applications having low utilization of the links or suffer from congestion of the interconnect. While standard synchronous serial links are un...

The evolution of mobile networks and systems to 3 generation and beyond is expected to create a telecommunication service provision model that differs considerably from existing paradigms. A new environment is envisioned, where a plethora of advanced, customisable applications, developed by multiple co-operating entities, will be ubiquitously accessible via diverse terminals and networks. In th...

PURPOSE The study tested the inter-rater reliability and accuracy of triage nurses' assignment of urgency ratings for mental health patient scenarios based on the 2008 Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale (CTAS) guidelines, using a standardized triage tool. The influence of triage experience, educational preparation, and comfort level with mental health presentations on the accuracy of urgency rati...

We address the problem of abandoned object classification in video surveillance. Our aim is to determine (i) which feature extraction technique proves more useful for accurate object classification in a video surveillance context (scale invariant image transform (SIFT) keypoints vs. geometric primitive features), and (ii) how the resulting features affect classification accuracy and false posit...

Assessing behavioral responses to nociception is difficult in severely brain-injured patients recovering from coma. We here propose a new scale developed for assessing nociception in vegetative (VS) and minimally conscious (MCS) coma survivors, the Nociception Coma Scale (NCS), and explore its concurrent validity, inter-rater agreement and sensitivity. Concurrent validity was assessed by analyz...