ABSTRACT
Introduction: Among factors that underlie high rates of non-participation reported in telehealth interventions are the low older users' acceptance of information technologies and the low levels of non-compliance with therapy of chronic patients. Therefore, inclusion of potential users into design stages of assistive technologies is challenging. In this paper, the design, implementation and evaluation of a multimodal mobile application for telemonitoring chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is presented. The goal of the study was to assess the usability and feasibility of the designed tool. Methods: An iterative user-centered design methodology was applied to implement a prototype that satisfied users' requirements. Feasibility (compliance, COPD knowledge and satisfaction) of the application was assessed in a 6-month field trial with COPD patients. Results: A usable, effective and efficient prototype was released after the development process. A high compliance (86.1%) and an increasing in COPD knowledge were achieved in the field trial. Conclusions: The findings reveal the importance of integrating usability in the design development processes to improve adherence to routine tasks and to reduce the high rates of non-participation reported in recent evaluation studies of telehealth interventions. The presented tool can help to recognize early symptoms of deterioration and to support patients in COPD self-management.
ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Drug-drug interactions are frequently reported in the increasing amount of biomedical literature. Information Extraction (IE) techniques have been devised as a useful instrument to manage this knowledge. Nevertheless, IE at the sentence level has a limited effect because of the frequent references to previous entities in the discourse, a phenomenon known as 'anaphora'. DrugNerAR, a drug anaphora resolution system is presented to address the problem of co-referring expressions in pharmacological literature. This development is part of a larger and innovative study about automatic drug-drug interaction extraction. METHODS: The system uses a set of linguistic rules drawn by Centering Theory over the analysis provided by a biomedical syntactic parser. Semantic information provided by the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) is also integrated in order to improve the recognition and the resolution of nominal drug anaphors. Besides, a corpus has been developed in order to analyze the phenomena and evaluate the current approach. Each possible case of anaphoric expression was looked into to determine the most effective way of resolution. RESULTS: An F-score of 0.76 in anaphora resolution was achieved, outperforming significantly the baseline by almost 73%. This ad-hoc reference line was developed to check the results as there is no previous work on anaphora resolution in pharmacological documents. The obtained results resemble those found in related-semantic domains. CONCLUSIONS: The present approach shows very promising results in the challenge of accounting for anaphoric expressions in pharmacological texts. DrugNerAr obtains similar results to other approaches dealing with anaphora resolution in the biomedical domain, but, unlike these approaches, it focuses on documents reflecting drug interactions. The Centering Theory has proved being effective at the selection of antecedents in anaphora resolution. A key component in the success of this framework is the analysis provided by the MMTx program and the DrugNer system that allows to deal with the complexity of the pharmacological language. It is expected that the positive results of the resolver increases performance of our future drug-drug interaction extraction system.
Subject(s)
Computational Biology/methods , Data Mining/methods , Drug Interactions , Pharmacology/methods , Software , Databases, Factual , Humans , Semantics , Unified Medical Language SystemABSTRACT
El proyecto presenta el diseño de un sistema de alcantarillado sanitario para la ciudad de Yacuiba que contempla lo siguiente: Aumento de la cobertura de las redes de recoleccion mediante el diseño de las mismas con el paquete SEWER el mismo que sera traducido y modificado. Diseño de la planta de tratamiento utilizando modelos del CEPIS aplicables a la ciudad de Yacuiba. Disminucion en la contaminacion del cuerpo receptor Quebrada Internacional como consecuencia de lo anterior. Establecer parametros que proporcionaran informacion basica para el buen funcionamiento del sistema. Estructuracion de la empresa que se encarga de la administracion. Tambien se pretende proporcionar una informacion adecuada para que se pueda aplicar a una infinidad de sistemas de alcantarillado sanitario para ciudades intermedias de nuestro pais.
