Smart Homes (SH) offer a promising approach to assisted living for the ageing population. Yet the main obstacle to the rapid development and deployment of Smart Home (SH) solutions essentially arises from the nature of the SH field, which is multidisciplinary and involves diverse applications and various stakeholders. Accordingly, an alternative to a one-size-fits-all approach is needed in order to advance the state of the art towards an open SH infrastructure. This book makes a valuable and critical contribution to smart assisted living research through the development of new effective, integrated, and interoperable SH solutions. It focuses on four underlying aspects: (1) Sensing and Monitoring Technologies; (2) Context Interference and Behaviour Analysis; (3) Personalisation and Adaptive Interaction, and (4) Open Smart Home and Service Infrastructures, demonstrating how fundamental theories, models and algorithms can be exploited to solve real-world problems. This comprehensive and timely book offers a unique and essential reference guide for policymakers, funding bodies, researchers, technology developers and managers, end users, carers, clinicians, healthcare service providers, educators and students, helping them adopt and implement smart assisted living systems.

Before the integration of expert systems in biomedical science, complex problems required human expertise to solve them through conventional procedural methods. Advancements in expert systems allow for knowledge to be extracted when no human expertise is available and increases productivity through quick diagnosis. Expert System Techniques in Biomedical Science Practice is an essential scholarly resource that contains innovative research on the methods by which an expert system is designed to solve complex problems through the automation of decision making through the use of if-then-else rules rather than conventional procedural methods. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics such as image processing, bio-signals, and cognitive AI, this book is a vital reference source for computer engineers, information technologists, biomedical engineers, data-processing specialists, medical professionals, and industrialists within the fields of biomedical engineering, pervasive computing, and natural language processing.

This book explores Ireland's Marriage Bar, examining its impact on women's lives and the predominantly feminised nursing profession. Information on the history of nursing and the evolution of the nursing profession tends to focus on critical events or key persons who shaped the profession. What is less known and explored is the women nurses' work experiences or how the world outside the ward affected the nurse and the nursing profession at moments in time. This book takes one of these moments in time, the period of the Marriage Bar, and examines the women nurses' lives and the nursing profession during this period of Ireland's history. It does so by adopting a historical perspective and a lived experience perspective of women who had to negotiate this practice. Fifty years on from the Bar removal, as remnants of this time in Ireland's history remain, legislative and constitutional change are required to right the wrongs of the past.

This handbook provides a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of a wide range of developmental and clinical issues in pragmatics. Principally, the contributions to this volume deal with pragmatic competence in a native language, in a second or foreign language, and in a selection of language disorders. The topics which are covered explore questions of production and comprehension on the utterance and discourse level. Topics addressed concern the acquisition and learning, teaching and testing, assessment and treatment of various aspects of pragmatic ability, knowledge and use. These include, for example, the acquisition and development of speech acts, implicatures, irony, story-telling and interactional competence. Phenomena such as pragmatic awareness and pragmatic transfer are also addressed. The disorders considered include clinical conditions pertaining to children and to adults. Specifically, these are, among others, autism spectrum disorders, Down syndrome, and Alzheimer's disease.

This volume of the series Cardiac and Vascular Biology presents the most relevant aspects of vascular mechanobiology along with many more facets of this fascinating, timely and clinically highly relevant field. Mechanotransduction, mechanosensing, fluid shear stress, hameodynamics and cell fate, are just a few topics to name. All important aspects of vascular mechanobiology in health and disease are reviewed by some of the top experts in the field. This volume, together with a second title on cardiac mechanobiology featured in this series, will be of high relevance to scientists and clinical researchers in the area of vascular biology, cardiology and biomedical engineering.

If one tries to imagine the amounts of money that have been spent by federal and state governments, coupled with what has been spent by private citizens in battling substance abuse over the last thirty years, it would amount to an almost unimaginable figure.

There have been many books written that offer criticism regarding the traditional twelve-step treatment approaches to addiction. The problem has been that most of these efforts have failed to offer a viable alternative to traditional treatment. Those that have attempted to do so have merely suggested that singular treatment strategies, such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Psychodynamic Therapy, Gestalt Therapy, etc., should be implemented in conjunction with traditional treatment. "Misunderstanding Addiction" outlines a more holistic treatment method that can be implemented in a variety of environmental contexts that do not require patients to be institutionalized for them to be effective.

"Misunderstanding Addiction" has the potential to radically alter the way that addictions are treated in this country. At a time when healthcare is foremost in the thoughts of our nation's citizens, "Misunderstanding Addiction" offers a timely and important look at how addiction treatment should be undertaken now and in the future to ensure an effective outcome for the patient.

This book covers the latest research development in heart valve biomechanics and bioengineering, with an emphasis on novel experimentation, computational simulation, and applications in heart valve bioengineering. The most current research accomplishments are covered in detail, including novel concepts in valvular viscoelasticity, fibril/molecular mechanisms of tissue behavior, fibril kinematics-based constitutive models, mechano-interaction of valvular interstitial and endothelial cells, biomechanical behavior of acellular valves and tissue engineered valves, novel bioreactor designs, biomechanics of transcatheter valves, and 3D heart valve printing. This is an ideal book for biomedical engineers, biomechanics, surgeons, clinicians, business managers in the biomedical industry, graduate and undergraduate students studying biomedical engineering, and medical students.

This volume provides a complete update of all the materials in prior volumes on the subject (including current directories to testing labs and other support establishments worldwide), while adding substantial new material on the following topics: * The history of CROs, including snapshots of CROs and a genealogy chart making clear where they came from and where they went. * Study directors and principal investigators. * The nuts and bolts of study performance. * Electronic reporting requirements - SEND and eCTD (required for NDA, BLA, ANDA, and IND submissions). * Consultants and their roles. * An expanded examination of common problems and their solutions. This book boasts complete directories to the global universe of operating labs - where they are, how to contact them, and what they do (including special capabilities). Additionally, checklists for qualifying labs and manufacturing facilities - and for auditing studies and projects at such facilities - are included. It is directed at those in industry (specifically directed at those working for companies using CRO services) but will also be of interest to scientists or administrators working in research organizations themselves. In this case, the contents of this new work are essential to the target reader because the work, regulations, and actors (CROs) have evolved and changed at a rapid pace in the 10 years since the earlier volume that the author published. Likewise, the companies using these services have come to all be almost completely dependent on outsourcing. The earlier texts remain the only source of their kind (paper or electronic) on the field and the only noncommercial guide to the global industry and this volume provides a complete update.

This edited volume presents fundamentals as well as applications of oculomotor methods in industrial and clinical settings. The topical spectrum covers 1.) basics and background material, 2.) methods such as recording techniques, markov models, Levy flights, pupillometry and many more, as well as 3.) a broad range of applications in clinical and industrial settings. The target audience primarily comprises research experts and practitioners, but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

This book gathers selected studies on the industrial applications of glycoside hydrolases (GHs), presenting an updated classification of these enzymes, and discussing their structure, mechanisms, and various approaches to improve their catalytic efficiency. Further, it explains the various industrial applications of glycoside hydrolases in food, effluent treatment, biofuel production, and the paper and pulp industries. Lastly, the book provides a comparative analysis of glycoside hydrolases and discusses the role of metagenomics in the discovery of industrially important enzymes. As such it is a thought-provoking, instructive and informative resource for biochemists, enzymologists, molecular biologists and bioprocess technologists.