The effectiveness of group combined intervention using animal-assisted therapy and integrated elderly play therapy.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of group combined intervention that combined animal-assisted therapy and integrated elderly play therapy on the depression, self-esteem, and emotional expression of geriatric patients residing in nursing homes. This was achieved by providing cognitive, physical, and emotional activities and social interaction at the same time. The group combined intervention method was applied to twelve elderly patients (six in the control group, six in the experimental group) aged 65 or older who live in a nursing home for the elderly in C province, from May 3, 2019 to June 21, 2019, for a total of 8 times (once a week, 50 minutes at a time). The quantitative evaluation was analyzed through SPSS 21.0 for comparison before and after the program was implemented, using the Korean version of the depression and the self-esteem scale. The qualitative evaluation compared emotional expression pre-test and post-test. The major results of the study were as follows: First, the group combined intervention was effective in reducing depression levels of the experimental group among the elderly patients. Second, it was effective in improving the self-esteem of the experimental group among the elderly patients. Third, it showed a significant difference in the emotional expression of the experimental group among the elderly patients. Therefore, it was found that group combined intervention reduces depression and improves self-esteem and emotional expression of the elderly. Based on these results, it is hoped that this study will be a cornerstone in the development of concrete programs for the benefit of elderly patients living in facilities.

A bankruptcy problem approach to load-shedding in multiagent-based microgrid operation.

A microgrid is composed of distributed power generation systems (DGs), distributed energy storage devices (DSs), and loads. To maintain a specific frequency in the islanded mode as an important requirement, the control of DGs' output and charge action of DSs are used in supply surplus conditions and load-shedding and discharge action of DSs are used in supply shortage conditions. Recently, multiagent systems for autonomous microgrid operation have been studied. Especially, load-shedding, which is intentional reduction of electricity use, is a critical problem in islanded microgrid operation based on the multiagent system. Therefore, effective schemes for load-shedding are required. Meanwhile, the bankruptcy problem deals with dividing short resources among multiple agents. In order to solve the bankruptcy problem, division rules, such as the constrained equal awards rule (CEA), the constrained equal losses rule (CEL), and the random arrival rule (RA), have been used. In this paper, we approach load-shedding as a bankruptcy problem. We compare load-shedding results by above-mentioned rules in islanded microgrid operation based on wireless sensor network (WSN) as the communication link for an agent's interactions.

A reliable data delivery mechanism for grid power quality using neural networks in wireless sensor networks.

Power grids deal with the business of generation, transmission, and distribution of electric power. Current systems monitor basic electrical quantities such as voltage and current from major pole transformers using their temperature. We improve the current systems in order to gather and deliver the information of power qualities such as harmonics, voltage sags, and voltage swells. In the system, data delivery is not guaranteed for the case that a node is lost or the network is congested, because the system has in-line and multi-hop architecture. In this paper, we propose a reliable data delivery mechanism by modeling an optimal data delivery function by employing the neural network concept.

A design of wireless sensor networks for a power quality monitoring system.

Power grids deal with the business of generation, transmission, and distribution of electric power. Recently, interest in power quality in electrical distribution systems has increased rapidly. In Korea, the communication network to deliver voltage, current, and temperature measurements gathered from pole transformers to remote monitoring centers employs cellular mobile technology. Due to high cost of the cellular mobile technology, power quality monitoring measurements are limited and data gathering intervals are large. This causes difficulties in providing the power quality monitoring service. To alleviate the problems, in this paper we present a communication infrastructure to provide low cost, reliable data delivery. The communication infrastructure consists of wired connections between substations and monitoring centers, and wireless connections between pole transformers and substations. For the wireless connection, we employ a wireless sensor network and design its corresponding data forwarding protocol to improve the quality of data delivery. For the design, we adopt a tree-based data forwarding protocol in order to customize the distribution pattern of the power quality information. We verify the performance of the proposed data forwarding protocol quantitatively using the NS-2 network simulator.