Young-onset dementia and the need for specialist care: a national and international perspective

OBJECTIVES: Receiving a timely and accurate diagnosis and gaining access to age-appropriate support for younger people living with dementia (YPD) remains a challenge both in the UK and internationally because the focus of most dementia services is primarily upon the needs of older people. The political case to improve services for YPD depends upon the establishment of an understanding of the clinical symptoms, an unequivocal evidence base about need and an accurate evaluation of the size of the population affected. This short report assesses the evidence base from international studies regarding service design and delivery. The goal is to raise awareness, advance best practice and galvanise the international community to address the serious underfunding and underprovision of care for this marginalised group. CONCLUSION: The current evidence suggests that there are universal problems, regardless of continent, with delays to diagnosis and poor understanding of optimum models for service provision and long-term care

Frame transformation and geoid undulation transfer to GNSS real time positions through the new RTCM 3.1 transformation messages

Radio Technical Commission for Marine Services (RTCM) standardised messages play an important role in real time Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) applications such as navigation, positioning, civil engineering, surveying, and cartographic or cadastral production. One of the latest agreements on RTCM definitions contains the data fields for real time geodetic reference frame transformation and orthometric heights computation by received geoid undulations via internet protocol. These parameters can be generated dynamically by a GNSS data centre in a network of reference stations, encapsulated in RTCM messages and broadcasted to the rover location so they are centrally administered and the same frame transformations and geoid model are available to every user in the field, obtaining results in a local reference frame in real time. This paper summarises the functionality of the new RTCM 3?1 transformation messages, describes limitations and provides ideas about the possible use for solving specific problems. Test field campaigns are used to describe the real performance and usefulness of these new RTCM 3?1 messagesCapilla Roma, R.; Martín Furones, ÁE.; Anquela Julián, AB.; Berné Valero, JL. (2012). Frame transformation and geoid undulation transfer to GNSS real time positions through the new RTCM 3.1 transformation messages. Survey Review. 44(324):30-36. doi:10.1179/1752270611Y.0000000010S303644324Benciolini, B., Biagi, L., Crespi, M., Manzino, A. M., & Roggero, M. (2008). Reference frames for GNSS positioning services: Some problems and proposed solutions. Journal of Applied Geodesy, 2(1). doi:10.1515/jag.2008.006González-Matesanz, J., Dalda, A., & Malpica, J. A. (2006). A RANGE OF ED50-ETRS89 DATUM TRANSFORMATION MODELS TESTED ON THE SPANISH GEODETIC NETWORK. Survey Review, 38(302), 654-667. doi:10.1179/sre.2006.38.302.654Soler, T., & Marshall, J. (2003). A note on frame transformations with applications to geodetic datums. GPS Solutions, 7(2), 148-149. doi:10.1007/s10291-003-0063-

Global navigation satellite systems performance analysis and augmentation strategies in aviation

In an era of significant air traffic expansion characterized by a rising congestion of the radiofrequency spectrum and a widespread introduction of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) are being exposed to a variety of threats including signal interferences, adverse propagation effects and challenging platform-satellite relative dynamics. Thus, there is a need to characterize GNSS signal degradations and assess the effects of interfering sources on the performance of avionics GNSS receivers and augmentation systems used for an increasing number of mission-essential and safety-critical aviation tasks (e.g., experimental flight testing, flight inspection/certification of ground-based radio navigation aids, wide area navigation and precision approach). GNSS signal deteriorations typically occur due to antenna obscuration caused by natural and man-made obstructions present in the environment (e.g., elevated terrain and tall buildings when flying at low altitude) or by the aircraft itself during manoeuvring (e.g., aircraft wings and empennage masking the on-board GNSS antenna), ionospheric scintillation, Doppler shift, multipath, jamming and spurious satellite transmissions. Anyone of these phenomena can result in partial to total loss of tracking and possible tracking errors, depending on the severity of the effect and the receiver characteristics. After designing GNSS performance threats, the various augmentation strategies adopted in the Communication, Navigation, Surveillance/Air Traffic Management and Avionics (CNS + A) context are addressed in detail. GNSS augmentation can take many forms but all strategies share the same fundamental principle of providing supplementary information whose objective is improving the performance and/or trustworthiness of the system. Hence it is of paramount importance to consider the synergies offered by different augmentation strategies including Space Based Augmentation System (SBAS), Ground Based Augmentation System (GBAS), Aircraft Based Augmentation System (ABAS) and Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring (RAIM). Furthermore, by employing multi-GNSS constellations and multi-sensor data fusion techniques, improvements in availability and continuity can be obtained. SBAS is designed to improve GNSS system integrity and accuracy for aircraft navigation and landing, while an alternative approach to GNSS augmentation is to transmit integrity and differential correction messages from ground-based augmentation systems (GBAS). In addition to existing space and ground based augmentation systems, GNSS augmentation may take the form of additional information being provided by other on-board avionics systems, such as in ABAS. As these on-board systems normally operate via separate principles than GNSS, they are not subject to the same sources of error or interference. Using suitable data link and data processing technologies on the ground, a certified ABAS capability could be a core element of a future GNSS Space-Ground-Aircraft Augmentation Network (SGAAN). Although current augmentation systems can provide significant improvement of GNSS navigation performance, a properly designed and flight-certified SGAAN could play a key role in trusted autonomous system and cyber-physical system applications such as UAS Sense-and-Avoid (SAA)

Analysis of the Skpos® users Initialisation Times

From the establishment of the Slovak real time positioning service (SKPOS®), the reference stations’ observations, network solutions and outputs from the user communications with the service control software were set for archiving. Today we know that all those archived data have the potential to give us valuable information about the service’s character and quality and about the conditions during the performance of Real time Kinematic (RTK) measurements. After conducting some analyses, we are able to easily understand how important factors such as the number of satellites used, the state of the ionosphere, network solutions in the border zone, densification of the network, etc., can affect those measurements. For those purposes the users’ initialisation times derived from the archived National Marine Electronics Association (NMEA) messages are used in advance. As a tool for analysis the new Application for SKPOS® Monitoring and