The home asthma telemonitoring (HAT) system provides assistance to asthma patients in following self-care plans prescribed by their physicians, and notifies heath care personnel if any negative trends are detected. This allows early recognition of potentially dangerous situations and timely intervention. The design of the HAT system is discussed.

Recent studies demonstrated that successful chronic disease management requires a coordinated effort that includes health care providers who follow recent clinical guidelines in their every day practice, educated patients who are adherent to their prescribed treatment plans and comprehensive patient-provider communication. Studies employing telecommunication technologies have been successful in affecting the major components of chronic disease care including physician practice patterns, patient adherence to therapy, and patient-provider communication. These studies were focused mainly on an improvement of a single component of clinical care process. To date there have been no studies targeting a comprehensive coordinated approach that concurrently employs all of these components in an integrated framework linked to primary care. In this study we propose a multi-component telemanagement system providing an integrated support both to clinicians and patients in implementing hypertension treatment guidelines promulgated by the Seventh Report of the Joint National Committee on Prevention detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Pressure

For a wide range of phenomena, current computational ability does not always allow for atomistic simulations of high-dimensional molecular systems to reach time scales of interest. Coarse-graining (CG) is an established approach to alleviate the impact of computational limits while retaining the same algorithms used in atomistic simulations. It is important to understand how algorithms such as Langevin integrators perform on non-trivial CG molecular systems, and in particular how large of an integration time step can be used without introducing unacceptable amounts of error into averaged quantities of interest. To investigate this, we examined three different Langevin integrators on a CG polymer melt: the recently developed BAOAB method by Leimkuhler and Matthews [J. Chem. Phys. 138 (17), 05B601_1 (2013)], the Gronbech-Jensen and Farago method [Mol. Phys. 111 (8), 983-991 (2013)], or G-JF, and the frequently used Brunger-Brooks-Karplus integrator [Chem. Phys. Lett. 105 (5), 495-500 (1984)], known as BBK. We compute and analyse key statistical properties for each. Our results indicate that the integrators perform similarly for a small friction parameter; however outside this regime, the use of large integration steps produces significant deviations from the predicted diffusivity and steady-state distributions for all methods examined with the exception of G-JF.

The aim of this project was construction of a universal platform for rapid development of interactive computer-based health education programs. Pocket PC was used to pilot test the platform and to implement two educational curricula: for asthma and anticoagulant therapy. Qualitative analysis of the system acceptance in 46 patients showed that computer-assisted education can be successfully implemented on the basis of a handheld computer.

The home asthma telemonitoring (HAT) system provides assistance to asthma patients in following self-care plans prescribed by their physicians, and notifies heath care personnel if any negative trends are detected. This allows early recognition of potentially dangerous situations and timely intervention. The design of the HAT system is discussed

The aim of this project was construction of a universal platform for rapid development of interactive computer-based health education programs. Pocket PC was used to pilot test the platform and to implement two educational curricula: for asthma and anticoagulant therapy. Qualitative analysis of the system acceptance in 46 patients showed that computer-assisted education can be successfully implemented on the basis of a handheld computer

We developed a Web based system for ambulatory monitoring of pulmonary function and tested it in a home setting in 14 asthma patients. The system uses a portable spirometer for patient self testing and a palmtop computer that transmits the results from patients' homes to a hospital information system via phone or wireless network. The results are immediately available to physicians on a Web site, accessible via an Internet Web browser from any location. The system provides daily monitoring of 29 indices of Forced Vital Capacity test (FVC), the flow-volume loop and symptom scores. It generates alerts based on changes in data trends and exchanges messages between patients and physicians. All patients successfully uploaded their FVC data including the flow-volume loop and symptom scores from their homes to our central repository. The flow-volume loop and FVC parameters provided a more accurate assessment of the patients' asthma, and uncovered previously unrecognized nocturnal asthma and small airway obstruction. We believe our approach will be useful for asthma management on a day-to-day basis and in clinical research