Search

Introduction: Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) represent a substantial global public health challenge with multifaceted impacts on individuals, families, and healthcare systems. Brief cognitive screening tools such as the Mini-Cog© can help improve recognition of ADRD in clinical practice, but widespread adoption continues to lag. We compared the Digital Clock and Recall (DCR), a next-generation process-driven adaptation of the Mini-Cog, with the original paper-and-pencil version in a well-characterized clinical trial sample. Methods: DCR was administered to 828 participants in the Bio-Hermes-001 clinical trial (age median ± SD = 72 ± 6.7, IQR = 11; 58% female) independently classified as cognitively unimpaired (n = 364) or as having mild cognitive impairment (MCI, n = 274) or dementia likely due to AD (DLAD, n = 190). MCI and DLAD cohorts were combined into a single impaired group for analysis. Two experienced neuropsychologists rated verbal recall accuracy and digitally drawn clocks using the original Mini-Cog scoring rules. Inter-rater reliability of Mini- Cog scores was computed for a subset of the data (n = 508) and concordance between Mini-Cog rule-based and DCR scoring was calculated. Results: Inter-rater reliability of Mini-Cog scoring was good to excellent, but Rater 2's scores were significantly higher than Rater 1's due to variation in clock scores (p < 0.0001). Mini-Cog and DCR scores were significantly correlated (τB = 0.71, p < 0.0001). However, using a Mini-Cog cut score of 4, the DCR identified more cases of cognitive impairment (n = 47; χ² = 13.26, p < 0.0005) and Mini-Cog missed significantly more cases of cognitive impairment (n = 87). In addition, the DCR correctly classified significantly more cognitively impaired cases missed by the Mini-Cog (n = 44) than vice versa (n = 4; χ² = 21.69, p < 0.0001). Discussion: Our findings demonstrate higher sensitivity of the DCR, an automated, process-driven, and process-based digital adaptation of the Mini- Cog. Digital metrics capture clock drawing dynamics and increase detection of diagnosed cognitive impairment in a clinical trial cohort of older individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

IntroductionAlzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) represent a substantial global public health challenge with multifaceted impacts on individuals, families, and healthcare systems. Brief cognitive screening tools such as the Mini-Cog© can help improve recognition of ADRD in clinical practice, but widespread adoption continues to lag. We compared the Digital Clock and Recall (DCR), a next-generation process-driven adaptation of the Mini-Cog, with the original paper-and-pencil version in a well-characterized clinical trial sample.MethodsDCR was administered to 828 participants in the Bio-Hermes-001 clinical trial (age median ± SD = 72 ± 6.7, IQR = 11; 58% female) independently classified as cognitively unimpaired (n = 364) or as having mild cognitive impairment (MCI, n = 274) or dementia likely due to AD (DLAD, n = 190). MCI and DLAD cohorts were combined into a single impaired group for analysis. Two experienced neuropsychologists rated verbal recall accuracy and digitally drawn clocks using the original Mini-Cog scoring rules. Inter-rater reliability of Mini-Cog scores was computed for a subset of the data (n = 508) and concordance between Mini-Cog rule-based and DCR scoring was calculated.ResultsInter-rater reliability of Mini-Cog scoring was good to excellent, but Rater 2’s scores were significantly higher than Rater 1’s due to variation in clock scores (p

Across many scientific disciplines, the development of computational models and algorithms for generating artificial or synthetic data is gaining momentum. In biology, there is a great opportunity to explore this further as more and more big data at multi-omics level are generated recently. In this opinion, we discuss the latest trends in biological applications based on process-driven and data-driven aspects. Moving ahead, we believe these methodologies can help shape novel multi-omics-scale cellular inferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract What do football passes and financial transactions have in common? Both are networked walk processes that we can observe, where records take the form of timestamped events that move something tangible from one node to another. Here we propose an approach to analyze this type of data that extracts the actual trajectories taken by the tangible items involved. The main advantage of analyzing the resulting trajectories compared to using, e.g., existing temporal network analysis techniques, is that sequential, temporal, and domain-specific aspects of the process are respected and retained. As a result, the approach lets us produce contextually-relevant insights. Demonstrating the usefulness of this technique, we consider passing play within association football matches (an unweighted process) and e-money transacted within a mobile money system (a weighted process). Proponents and providers of mobile money care to know how these systems are used—using trajectory extraction we find that 73% of e-money was used for stand-alone tasks and only 21.7% of account holders built up substantial savings at some point during a 6-month period. Coaches of football teams and sports analysts are interested in strategies of play that are advantageous. Trajectory extraction allows us to replicate classic results from sports science on data from the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Moreover, we are able to distinguish teams that consistently exhibited complex, multi-player dynamics of play during the 2017–2018 club season using ball passing trajectories, coincidentally identifying the winners of the five most competitive first-tier domestic leagues in Europe.

Since becoming a democracy, South African legislation has changed. The South African Constitution and legislation governing the structures and mandate of the different spheres of government aim towards municipalities needing to become more developmental in the way it serves the community with a specific focus on the poor and vulnerable. It sets ideals to overcome the inheritance of the past. However, how to do this is sometimes still unclear. This paper is a case study illustrating how Stellenbosch Municipality overcame obstacles of perceived legislative restrictions, silo operations and antiquated thinking, working towards social inclusion for all its citizens. In moving away from disability accessibility and embracing universal access as a way in which to deliver basic services, Stellenbosch discovered the beginning of the process of overcoming the negative legacy of the past. Understanding the Universal Design principles and approach illustrated how South African municipalities can promote the concept of our rainbow nation as envisioned in the Constitution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organizations today are required to adhere to a number of compliance concerns from laws, regulations and policies. Compliance is achieved through defining and implementing so-called controls in the organizations' business processes. Organizations that build their systems based on the process-driven SOA paradigm realize business processes through orchestration of services to handle the process' business activities. These business activities or groups of business activities in some cases realize the compliance controls. We propose an approach for implementing event-based compliance monitoring infrastructure that observes such business processes to verify that compliance is indeed adhered to. Our approach is essentially a model-driven technique for realizing this infrastructure. We implement a domain-specific language for specification of compliance directives, and we include code generation templates to generate compliance monitoring code, which is leveraged by complex event processing components to monitor for compliance. We evaluate the impact of our approach on the effort and productivity of a developer who is specifying compliance directives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In process-driven, service-oriented architectures (SOAs), process activities can perform service operations, data transformations, or human tasks. Unfortunately, the process activities are usually tightly coupled. Thus, when the number of activities in the process grows, focusing on particular activities of the flow such as the service operations reading or writing persistent data is a time-consuming task. In particular, in order to solve structural problems concerning persistent data access such as deadlocks in data-intensive business processes, stakeholders need to understand the underlying persistent data access details of the activities i.e. physical storage schemes, and database connections. With our view-based model-driven approach, we provide a solution to generate flows of persistent data access activities (which we refer to as persistent data access flows). To the best of our knowledge these persistent data access flows are not used to solve structural problems in process-driven SOAs, yet. Moreover, our persistent data access flows can be flattened by diverse filer criteria e.g. by filtering all activities reading or writing from a specific database or table. Using our approach, we can enhance traceability and documentation of persistent data access in business processes. In a series of motivating scenarios from an industrial case study we present how our persistent data access flow concept can contribute to enhance productivity in service-oriented, process-driven environments. We qualitatively evaluate our concepts and prototypes, and finally, discuss the correctness and the complexity of the underlying algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: A process-driven model is presented to build an instinctive and efficient higher educational administrative management system to overcome problems most universities facing. With this model, processes are identified explicitly and the routine of educational administration is broken into small tasks. Each task has designated role of executors. A process describes the activities and relationships among them. A prototype of higher educational administrative system is built with Bonita open solution. The demo shows that the process-driven higher educational administrative system helps end users understand processes they are involved and focus on what to do. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article presents a system of computer aided costs of weld operations by welding for mechanical assemblages. We propose a system based on the combination of two cost estimation methods: on one hand we use the analytic method to formulate the time for weld and for gas and filling metal consumption according to the different parameters of preparing and welding features. The estimating is based upon an evaluation of the filling metal mass used in the welding process. On the other hand, we use the parametric method for the structuring of costs generated by the different features costs which compose the welding process: preparing, pointing and welding. In this case, the estimating is based on the structure of inductors suitable for the scale of each feature. The system we have developed has been implemented with Microsoft Access which permits us to rapidly and efficiently define important and strong data base. The latter constitutes in majority a library of expertise for the enterprise such as the used processes, the preparations, the metals, etc. At last, and to show the developed methods interest and the efficiency of the model, we have treated an industrial project proposed by a collaborating enterprise. The results obtained compared to real time made by welding staff prove the rapidity and the accuracy of the model we have developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research into the effectiveness and performance of the mobile agent (MA) technology as a means of managing a domain of manufacturing devices has been conducted. However, it has been shown that MAs are not without their scalability issues. A strategic agent travelling algorithm will bring performance improvement as it allows agents to identify the best migration path in order to minimise the total expected time of searching for the desired information. The applications of process-driven dependency management along with MA techology are examined as methods for optimising the efficiency of retrieving critical information in the manufacturing environment. An integrated framework is developed to investigate the alignment of network management paradigm to the strategic management decision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]