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Objectives This study aimed to describe the process of utilizing a mobile application for ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to collect data on stress and mood in daily life setting. Methods A mobile application for the Android operating system was developed and installed with a set of questions regarding momentary mood and stress into a smartphone of a participant. The application sets alarms at semi-random intervals in 60-minute blocks, four times a day for 7 days. After obtaining all momentary affect and stress, the questions to assess the usability of the mobile EMA application were also administered. Results The data were collected from 97 police officers working in Gyeonggi Province of South Korea. The mean completion rate was 60.0% ranging from 3.5% to 100%. The means of positive and negative affect were 18.34 of 28 and 19.09 of 63. The mean stress was 17.92 of 40. Participants responded that the mobile application correctly measured their affect (4.34 ± 0.83) and stress (4.48 ± 0.62) of 5-point Likert scale. Conclusions Our study investigated the process of utilizing a mobile application to assess momentary affect and stress at repeated times. We found challenges regarding adherence to the research protocol, such as completion and delay of answering after alarm notification. Despite this inherent issue of adherence to the research protocol, the EMA still has advantages of reducing recall bias and assessing the actual moment of interest at multiple time points that improves ecological validity.

Computation of the trace of a matrix function plays an important role in many scientific computing applications, including applications in machine learning, computational physics (e.g., lattice qua...

There have been multiple chemical incidents which involved runaway reaction in the exothermic batch reactors (e.g. synthetic polymer reaction). Runaway reaction commonly refers to the abnormal exothermic reaction when cooling water fails to operate and the temperature inside the reactor increases rapidly. Most commonly, synthetic polymer reactors are operated and controlled by the Basic Process Control System (BPCS) and the safety valve or/and rupture disks are installed for the protection and safety. These measures, however, are limiting in terms of detecting abrupt changes in temperature (and pressure) in advance when a runaway reaction takes place. This research suggests the use of batch reactor along with Safety Instrumented System (SIS) in addition to the current practice of BPCS. As for the Safety Instrumented Functions (SIF) of the SIS, a 2003 voting is installed as a sensor, 2 channels as a logic solver, and a 1002 voting is utilized as final elements.