People in public health. Expert hearings: a summary report

People in Public Health is a national study that is looking at how volunteers and lay workers are involved in improving health in their communities. The study’s main aim is to improve understanding of how to support lay people in their many and varied public health roles. In June 2008, three expert hearings were held so that the research team could listen to the views of people with specialist knowledge or practical experience of working in this way. Fifteen experts were invited from around the country to talk about how and why lay people get involved in public health, why the work they do is important and what the main barriers are. Our experts included lay people active in their communities, university researchers, people working in the health service (NHS), local government and the voluntary sector. While some talked about their experience of specific projects, others made more general points about services and support. All the expert hearings were held in public and there were opportunities for discussion

Exploring Light Field camera applications through simulation

Light Field, or Plenoptic, imaging is an exciting new technique where a user can capture 3-D information about a scene in a single acquisition. By placing a microlens array (thousands of tiny lenses) in between a conventional camera's main lens and image sensor, we can split rays which would have met on a single pixel onto different pixels, storing the direction which the ray has come from. By knowing where rays have come from, we can use computational techniques to produce different images from the captured data. This means we can change viewpoint, aperture, and focus after an image has been taken. We can produce an image with everything in focus or a 3-D reconstruction, all from a single acquisition. This technology has many potential benefits in normal photography, and also biomedical imaging techniques such as microscopy. However it is difficult to design, implement, and optimise. Therefore, simulation software has been created so that plenoptic designs and applications can be explored without committing to build and calibrate a system. This will enable advances in biomedical imaging techniques and light field rendering methods to be explored without the need for a physical plenoptic system

Materializing Memory, Mood, and Agency: The Emotional Geographies of the Modern Kitchen

Drawing upon narrative and visual ethnographic data collected from households in the UK, this essay explores the material and emotional geographies of the domestic kitchen. Acknowledging that emotions are dynamically related and co-constitutive of place, rather than presenting the kitchen as a simple backdrop against which domestic life is played out, the paper illustrates how decisions regarding the design and layout of the kitchen and the consumption of material artefacts are central to the negotiation and doing of relationships and accomplishment of domestic life. Based on fieldwork in northern England, the paper examines the affective potential of domestic space and its material culture, exploring how individuals are embodied in the fabric and layout of domestic space, and how memories may be materialized in their absence

Cooking up consumer anxieties about ‘provenance’ and ‘ethics. Why it sometimes matters where foods come from in domestic provisioning

Provenance is fundamentally about foods' point of origin. It is thus, unsurprising that studies of food provenance typically focus on circumstances of production and the routes foods follow to get to situations of exchange and, to a lesser extent, final consumption. However, this dominant framing leads to an asymmetry of attention between production and consumption. By neglecting the situatedness of food purchase and use, much of what makes provenance meaningful and productive for consumers is missed. This paper draws upon qualitative and ethnographic data to explore why and how it sometimes matters where food comes from. What emerges is an expanded and problematized practical understanding of provenance, where concerns for the point of origin is generally inseparable from, and subsumed within, a broader range of ethical concerns about where food comes from

Convenience as care: Culinary antinomies in practice

This paper addresses the social and cultural significance of convenience food, often regarded as among the least healthy and most unsustainable of dietary options, subject to frequent moral disapprobation. The paper focuses, in particular, on the relationship between convenience and care, conventionally seen in oppositional terms as a culinary antinomy. Informed by a ‘theories of practice’ approach, the paper presents empirical evidence from ethnographically-informed research on everyday consumption practices in the UK to demonstrate how convenience foods can be used as an expression of care rather than as its antithesis. The paper uses Fisher and Tronto’s theorisation of caring about, taking care of, caregiving and care-receiving to draw out the dynamics of this morally contested social practice

MyAirCoach: The use of home-monitoring and mHealth systems to predict deterioration in asthma control and the occurrence of asthma exacerbations; Study protocol of an observational study

© Published by the BMJ Publishing Group Limited. Introduction Asthma is a variable lung condition whereby patients experience periods of controlled and uncontrolled asthma symptoms. Patients who experience prolonged periods of uncontrolled asthma have a higher incidence of exacerbations and increased morbidity and mortality rates. The ability to determine and to predict levels of asthma control and the occurrence of exacerbations is crucial in asthma management. Therefore, we aimed to determine to what extent physiological, behavioural and environmental data, obtained by mobile healthcare (mHealth) and home-monitoring sensors, as well as patient characteristics, can be used to predict episodes of uncontrolled asthma and the onset of asthma exacerbations. Methods and analysis In an 1-year observational study, patients will be provided with mHealth and home-monitoring systems to record daily measurements for the first-month (phase I) and weekly measurements during a follow-up period of 11 months (phase II). Our study population consists of 150 patients, aged ≥18 years, with a clinician's diagnosis of asthma, currently on controller medication, with uncontrolled asthma and/or minimally one exacerbation in the past 12 months. They will be enrolled over three participating centres, including Leiden, London and Manchester. Our main outcomes are the association between physiological, behavioural and environmental data and (1) the loss of asthma control and (2) the occurrence of asthma exacerbations. Ethics This study was approved by the Medical Ethics Committee of the Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands and by the NHS ethics service in the UK. Trial registration number NCT02774772

Negotiating the riskscapes of convenience food

Summary: Addressing the spatial dimensions of risk, this paper examines the multiple ways that consumers negotiate the ëriskscapesí associated with the consumption of convenience food. It explores how convenience food poses a range of risks and potential ways of mitigating those risks. Drawing on empirical research from Germany and the UK, the paper demonstrates how food risks should be contextualized within the practices of everyday life and how consumer understandings of risk differ from expert risk assessments. The paper locates a number of different sites within the riskscape associated with convenience food, going beyond the focus on food safety and security that are the main concerns of health authorities and government advisors. Deicit models of food risk are criticised and alternatives are proposed that emphasise the socially embedded nature of risk within the practices of everyday life

Oscillating Positive Expiratory Pressure on Respiratory Resistance in Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease With a Small Amount of Secretion: A Randomized Clinical Trial

Abstract: This study aims to evaluate the acute effects of an oscillating positive expiratory pressure device (flutter) on airways resistance in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Randomized crossover study: 15 COPD outpatients from Asthma Lab–Royal Brompton Hospital underwent spirometry, impulse oscillometry (IOS) for respiratory resistance (R) and reactance (X), and fraction exhaled nitric oxide (FeNO) measures. Thirty minutes of flutter exercises: a “flutter-sham” procedure was used as a control, and airway responses after a short-acting bronchodilator were also assessed. Respiratory system resistance (R): in COPD patients an increase in X5insp (-0.21 to -0.33 kPa/L/s) and Fres (24.95 to 26.16 Hz) occurred immediately after flutter exercises without bronchodilator. Following 20 min of rest, a decrease in the R5, [DELTA]R5, R20, X5, and Ax was observed, with R5, R20, and X5 values lower than baseline, with a moderate effect size; there were no changes in FeNO levels or spirometry. The use of flutter can decrease the respiratory system resistance and reactance and expiratory flow limitation in stable COPD patients with small amounts of secretions

Cross inhibition improves activity selection when switching incurs time costs

We consider a behavioural model of an animal choosing between two activities, based on positive feedback, and examine the effect of introducing cross inhibition between the motivations for the two activities. While cross-inhibition has previously been included in models of decision making, the question of what benefit it may provide to an animal's activity selection behaviour has not previously been studied. In neuroscience and in collective behaviour cross-inhibition, and other equivalent means of coupling evidence-accumulating pathways, have been shown to approximate statistically-optimal decision-making and to adaptively break deadlock, thereby improving decision performance. Switching between activities is an ongoing decision process yet here we also find that cross-inhibition robustly improves its efficiency, by reducing the frequency of costly switches between behaviours