Search

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is a type of acquired brain injury (ABI) that happens when a sudden, external, physical assault damages the brain. TBI can cause long-term cognitive impairments and other lifestyle changes that may affect psychological wellbeing. Among the psychological challenges people recovering from TBI often face is the subjective loss of their pre-injury identity. Quantitative and qualitative research suggests that spirituality can play a positive role in recovery from TBI, increasing the quality of life and overall mental health. However, thus far, the research into this topic has not directly addressed the relationship between identity and spirituality after TBI. The present study sought to do this by thematically analyzing 22 public podcasts featuring interviews of people recovering from TBI telling their stories. The authors review the spiritual themes discussed in the podcasts and then propose a hypothesis about how, through a sense of connection to something self-transcendent, spirituality may enable people to test new meanings and identities, relatively free from the consequences of discrepancy in meaning and identity after TBI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Road transport is an important infrastructure system that has a vital role in economic progress, sustainable development, and urban prosperity of societies. Thus, geospatial fundamentals of transport systems need to be adequately considered by the organizations that manage such infrastructures. Furthermore, the adoption of methodologies for monitoring, control and optimisation of transportation networks, from a geographical perspective is crucial to deploy or utilize resources efficiently and cost-effectively. This paper aims to describe the implementation of a complete Geographical Information (GI) based system as developed for the needs of the Cyprus road transport infrastructure. The paper focuses on the system architecture and the presentation of the desktop and mobile application interfaces and utilities. The GI-based system provides a good example of how different tools and open-source components can be integrated to provide a complete solution for collecting, storing, managing, analysing and disseminating geographical information data related to road network infrastructure. The use of the platform within the organization has resulted in a noticeable increase in productivity and accountability. The errors in data collection, analysis and storage were minimized and thus the quality of available data been significantly improved. This is a step towards the achievement of the goals of the European Digital Strategy by using Geographical Information System technologies to take reliable and accurate decisions related to road network monitoring, maintenance and management.