"I do not hear you!": hearing-impaired cancer patients report their communication experiences.

PURPOSE: Hearing impairment has a high impact on communication between cancer patients and their oncologists. What is the patient's perspective on this problem and how can physicians draw lessons from it? METHODS: Together with otorhinolaryngologists and hearing-impaired patients, we developed a questionnaire including the sections: WHO (Five) Well-Being Index (5 items), Abbreviated Profile of Hearing Aid Benefit (APHAB) as established self-estimation of hearing function (24 items), use of hearing aid (4 items) as well as patients' experiences (15 items), difficulties (9 items) and wishes (7 items) regarding the communication with physicians. The experiences, difficulties, wishes, and life satisfaction of cancer patients were analyzed between groups based on participants' APHAB scores, well-being and use of hearing aids. A total of 104 cancer survivors (median age 76.5 years, range 32-90 years) were included. RESULTS: Between the groups of subjectively hearing-impaired and normal hearing participants, we registered a significant difference in difficulties in conversation, wishes for physician-patient communication and psychological well-being. Depending on participants' well-being, wishes and difficulties differed. Differences were also found between participants with and without hearing aids in terms of difficulties in conversation, but not in terms of their wishes and well-being. A large proportion of participants classified as subjectively hearing-impaired according to APHAB already had a hearing aid. CONCLUSIONS: Cancer patients with hearing loss are very restricted in their understanding of given information and hearing aid use cannot completely compensate for this. Consequently, communication guidelines should be considered and specific educational tools need to be developed for these groups.

Extractable Work, the Role of Correlations, and Asymptotic Freedom in Quantum Batteries.

We investigate a quantum battery made of N two-level systems, which is charged by an optical mode via an energy-conserving interaction. We quantify the fraction of energy stored in the battery that can be extracted in order to perform thermodynamic work. We first demonstrate that this quantity is highly reduced by the presence of correlations between the charger and the battery or between the subsystems composing the battery. We then show that the correlation-induced suppression of extractable energy, however, can be mitigated by preparing the charger in a coherent optical state. We conclude by proving that the charger-battery system is asymptotically free of such locking correlations in the N→∞ limit.

Probabilistic low-rank factorization accelerates tensor network simulations of critical quantum many-body ground states.

We provide evidence that randomized low-rank factorization is a powerful tool for the determination of the ground-state properties of low-dimensional lattice Hamiltonians through tensor network techniques. In particular, we show that randomized matrix factorization outperforms truncated singular value decomposition based on state-of-the-art deterministic routines in time-evolving block decimation (TEBD)- and density matrix renormalization group (DMRG)-style simulations, even when the system under study gets close to a phase transition: We report linear speedups in the bond or local dimension of up to 24 times in quasi-two-dimensional cylindrical systems.