An Automated Tobacco Cessation Intervention for Emergency Department Discharged Patients

Introduction: Nearly 14% of US adults currently smoke cigarettes. Cigarette smoking causes more than 480,000 deaths each year in the United States. Emergency department (ED) patients are frequently asked for their use of tobacco. Manual selection of pre-formed discharge instructions is the norm for most ED. Providing tobacco cessation discharge instructions to ED patients presents another avenue to combat the tobacco use epidemic we face. The objective of the study is to evaluate the effectiveness of an automated discharge instruction system in increasing the frequency of discharging current tobacco users with instructions for tobacco cessation. Methods: The study was done at an urban academic tertiary care center. A before and after study was used to test the hypothesis that use of an automated discharged instruction system would increase the frequency that patients who use tobacco were discharged with tobacco cessation instructions. Patients that were admitted, left against medical advice, eloped or left without being seen were excluded. The before phase was from 09/21/14-10/21/14 and the after phase was from the same dates one year later, 09/21/15-10/21/15. This was done to account for confounding by time of year, ED volume and other factors. A Fisher’s Exact Test was calculated to compare these two groups. Results: Tobacco cessation DC instructions were received 2/486 (0.4%) of tobacco users in the pre-implementation period compared to 357/371 (96%) in the post-implementation period (p < 0.05). Conclusions: The automated discharge instructions system increases the proportion of tobacco users who receive cessation instructions. Given the public health ramifications of tobacco use, this could prove to be a significant piece in decreasing tobacco use in patients who go to the emergency department.

Development of Control Module Based on a Computing IP-Core

The article presents the result of the implementation of a synthesized microcontroller in integrated circuits of small FPGAs and a variant of building a control system for an onboard control module based on the developed solution. The possibility of creating a full-fledged microcontroller based on a type 5578TC034 FPGA and more capacious microcontrollers is shown. The description of the structure of the microcontroller, processor core and periphery is given. The processor instruction system is presented. Ip-modules of peripheral devices and some interfaces have been developed. A variant of creating a control system using the developed microcontroller is proposed. In the future, it is planned to increase the functionality of the synthesized microcontroller by optimizing ip-modules and adding new ones. When developing the control system, a domestic component base was used.

Effect of Body Representation Level of an Avatar on Quality of AR-Based Remote Instruction

In manufacturing, augmented reality (AR)-based remote instruction systems, which enable workers to receive instructions from an avatar, are widely used. In this study, we developed such a system and investigated the effect of the body representation level of the avatar on the quality of AR-based remote instruction. Drawing on the avatar designs of previous works, three different avatar designs (“Hand only”, “Hand + Arm”, and “Body”), representing three body representation levels, were created. In the experiment with a within-participant design, the avatar pointed at blocks sequentially and participants touched each block as soon as they identified it. The results of the experiment indicate that an AR-based remote instruction system with a “Body” avatar exhibits higher usability and can enable the participants to have a lower workload and higher efficiency.

Research on the realization of intelligent computer in assistant teaching

<p>The combination of artificial intelligence and computer-aided instruction (CAI) makes up for the original shortage and also improves the teaching quality of teachers and the learning efficiency of students. Based on the characteristics of the intelligent computer-aided instruction system, this paper analyzes the realization principle of the system, hoping to be helpful.</p>