Notes

Invisible reservoirs involving bad bacteria within dental settings.
Background Although mobile health (mHealth) has the potential to transform health care by delivering better outcomes at a much lower cost than traditional health care services, little is known about mHealth adoption by hospitals. Objective This study aimed to explore the determinants of mHealth adoption by hospitals using the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework. Methods We conducted an interviewer-administered survey with 87 managers in Chinese public hospitals and analyzed the data using logistic regression. Results The results of our survey indicate that perceived ease of use (β=.692; P less then .002), system security (β=.473; P less then .05), top management support (β=1.466; P less then .002), hospital size (β=1.069; P less then .004), and external pressure (β=.703; P less then .005) are significantly related to hospitals' adoption of mHealth. However, information technology infrastructure (β=.574; P less then .02), system reliability (β=-1.291; P less then .01), and government policy (β=2.010; P less then .04) are significant but negatively related to hospitals' adoption of mHealth. Conclusions We found that TOE works in the context of mHealth adoption by hospitals. In addition to technological predictors, organizational and environmental predictors are critical for explaining mHealth adoption by Chinese hospitals.Background The prevalence of social media (SM) use among youth and young adults suggests SM as an appropriate platform for study recruitment from this population. Previous studies have examined the use of SM for recruitment, but few have compared different SM platforms, and none to our knowledge have attempted to recruit cigarillo users. Objective The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of different SM platforms and advertisement images for recruiting 14-28-year-old cigarillo users to complete a cigarillo use survey. Methods We obtained objective data for advertisement impressions for a 39-week SM recruitment campaign. Advertisements were targeted by age, geography, and interests. Advertising effectiveness was defined as the percentage of approved surveys per advertising impression. Chi-square tests were performed comparing the effectiveness of different advertisement images and platforms. Results Valid survey completers (n=1,089) were predominately older (25-28 years old, n=839, 77%). Five hundred and sixty-eight (52%) identified as male, n=335 (31%) as African American, and n=196 (18%) as Hispanic. Advertisements delivered via Facebook/Instagram were more effective than Twitter; n=311 (0.03%) vs. n=661 (0.02%), Χ2(1, N=4,026,453) = 21.45, P less then .001. Across platforms, ads featuring exclusively an image of cigarillos were more effective (n=397, 0.06%) than ads with images of individuals smoking (n=254, 0.02%), individuals not smoking (n=239, .02%), and groups not smoking (n=82, 0.01%), Χ2(3, N = 4,026,453) = 133.73, P less then .001. Conclusions The campaign was effective in recruiting a diverse sample representative of important racial/ethnic categories. Advertisements on Facebook were more effective than Twitter. Including a cigarillo image was consistently the most effective advertisement design and should be considered by others recruiting cigarillo users via SM.Background Using cell phones to support healthcare (mHealth) has been shown to improve health outcomes across a multitude of health specialties and across the world. Exploring mHealth user experiences can aid in understanding the 'how and why' an intervention was impactful. The Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA) was a free maternal mHealth text messaging (SMS) service offered to pregnant women in Johannesburg, South Africa with a goal of improving maternal, fetal, and infant health outcomes. We conducted focus group discussions with MAMA users to learn about their experiences with the program. Objective To gather opinions of participants of the MAMA maternal mHealth service regarding current healthcare atmosphere, intervention use, and intervention feedback. Methods Fifteen prenatal and postnatal women attending public antenatal and postnatal care sites in central Johannesburg who were receiving free maternal health text messages (MAMA) participated in three focus group discussions. Predefined discussion topics included personal background, health care system experiences, text message program recruitment, acceptability, participant experiences and feedback. Results Feedback regarding experiences with the health system was mixed with a few reports of positive experiences, and many more reports of negative experiences such as long waiting times, understaffed facilities and poor service. Overall acceptability for the maternal text message intervention was high. Participants reflected that messages were timely, written clearly and felt supportive. Participants reported sharing messages with friends and family. Conclusions These findings suggest maternal mHealth interventions, delivered through text messages can provide timely, relevant, useful and supportive information to pregnant women and new mothers especially in cases of mistrust of the healthcare system.Background Social media has recently provided a remarkable means of delivering health information broadly and in a cost-effective way. Despite its benefits, some difficulties are encountered in attempting to influence the public to change their behavior in response to social media health messages. Objective This study aimed to explore the factors that affect individuals' acceptance of using social media as a tool for receiving health awareness messages and adapting such content accordingly by developing a smart health awareness message framework. Methods A quantitative method was adapted to validate the hypotheses and proposed framework through the development of a survey based on the technology acceptance model with the extension of other constructs. The survey was distributed on the web to 701 participants from different countries via Qualtrics software, it generated 391 completed questionnaires, and the response rate was 55.8% (391/701). Results Of the 391 respondents, 121 used social media platforms ofteness of social media and the design of health messages. Future research might seek to explore other factors that relate to people's behavior. This point of view will assist health organizations in developing their health messages more effectively and to be patient friendly.Background Inadequate fruit and vegetable consumption causes a considerable disease burden and premature mortality. Despite considerable public health promotion of a healthy diet the average consumption is still below recommended levels. Fruit and vegetable consumption influences human skin colour, increasing red/yellow/orange pigment in the skin. Given that this colour is deemed attractive and healthy-looking, the appearance benefit may provide motivation to eat more fruit and vegetables. Such appearance motivation could be particularly effective in young individuals who currently eat the least fruit and vegetables. Objective To assess how widely the impact of diet on skin colour is known within the UK. To compare the strength of motivation to eat fruit and vegetables based on health and appearance benefits and to compare the effect of different UK demographics on motivation. Methods Four groups of UK residents (N = 200 each group) were recruited through the Prolific online platform. Groups comprised youngerAsian N = 87, P = .22). Health benefits from a diet high in fruit and vegetables were regarded as more motivating than skin colour appearance benefits. The appearance benefits of a high fruit and vegetable diet (compared to the health benefits) were relatively more important for the younger participants (Mann-Whitney U = 96,263, P less then .001) and for women (N = 489) than for men (N = 310, U = 83,763, P = .01). Conclusions These findings indicate that promotion of the skin colour effects of diets high in fruit and vegetables could provide additional motivation for a healthier diet. Our study indicates the wide appeal of appearance benefits from dietary fruit and vegetable (across ethnicity and socioeconomic status) and particularly amongst young adults where inadequate diet is most prevalent.Background Replacing occupational sitting time with active tasks has several proposed health benefits for office employees. find more Smartphones and motion sensors can provide objective information in real time on occupational sitting behaviour. However, the validity and feasibility of using mHealth devices to quantify and modify occupational sedentary time is unclear. Objective To validate the new Walk@Work-Application (W@WApp) - including an external motion sensor (MetaWearC) attached to the thigh - for measuring occupational sitting, standing and stepping in free-living conditions against the activPAL3M. Methods Twenty office-workers, 16 females (80%, 39.5±8.1 years old) downloaded the W@WApp to their smartphones, wore a MetaWearC attached to their thigh in a tailored band and wore the activPAL3M for three to eight consecutive working hours. Differences between both measures were examined using paired samples t-tests and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests. Agreement between measures were examined using concordance correlat were considered equivalent for all variables excluding stepping time. Conclusions The W@WApp+MetaWearC is a low-cost tool with acceptable levels of accuracy that can objectively quantify occupational sitting, standing, stationary time and upright time in real-time. Due to the feedback available to users, this tool could positively influence occupational sitting behaviours in future interventions. Clinicaltrial Registration Clinical Trials NCT04092738.In this article, the consensus problem of linear systems is revisited from a novel geometric perspective. The interaction network of these systems is assumed to be piecewise fixed. Moreover, it is allowed to be disconnected at any time but holds a quite mild joint connectivity property. The system matrix is marginally stable and the input matrix is not of full-row rank. By directly examining the subspace determined by the network, we first establish convergence by resorting to an observability condition. Then, according to joint connectivity, we are able to extend this convergence uniformly to the entire orthogonal complement of the consensus manifold. In this way, we work out the necessary and sufficient condition for exponential consensus. It turns out that, with a suitably designed feedback matrix, exponential consensus can be realized globally and uniformly if and only if a jointly (δ,T)-connected condition and an observability condition relying only on the system and input matrices are satisfied. We also characterize the lower bound of the convergence rate. Simple yet effective examples are presented to illustrate the findings.Filtering and propagation are two basic operations in image analysis and rendering, and they are also widely used in computer graphics and machine learning. However, the models of filtering and propagation were based on diverse mathematical formulations, which have not been fully understood. This article aims to explore the properties of both filtering and propagation models from a partial differential equation (PDE) learning perspective. We propose a unified PDE learning framework based on nonlinear reaction-diffusion with a guided map, graph Laplacian, and reaction weight. It reveals that 1) the guided map and reaction weight determines whether the PDE produces filtering or propagation diffusion and 2) the kernel of graph Laplacian controls the diffusion pattern. Based on the proposed PDE framework, we derive the mathematical relations between different models, including learning to diffusion (LTD) model, label propagation, edit propagation, and edge-aware filter. In practical verification, we apply the PDE framework to design diffusion operations with the adaptive kernel to tackle the ill-posed problem of facial intrinsic image analysis (FIIA).
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