| 1. |
- Adolfsson, Margareta, 1950-, et al.
(författare)
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Exploring changes over time in habilitation professionals' perceptions and applications of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, version for Children and Youth (ICF-CY).
- 2010
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Ingår i: Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine. - : Medical Journals Sweden AB. - 1650-1977 .- 1651-2081. ; 42:7, s. 670-678
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- OBJECTIVE This study explored how professionals in inter-disciplinary teams perceived the implementation of the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, version for Children and Youth (ICF-CY) in Swedish habilitation services. DESIGN Descriptive longitudinal mixed-methods design. METHODS Following participation in a 2-day in-service training on the ICF-CY, 113 professionals from 14 interdisciplinary teams described their perceptions of the implementation of the ICF-CY at 3 consecutive time-points: during in-service training, after 1 year, and after 2.5 years. RESULTS Implementation of the ICF-CY in daily work focused on assessment and habilitation planning and required adaptations of routines and materials. The ICF-CY was perceived as useful in supporting analyses and in communication about children's needs. Professionals also perceived it as contributing to new perspectives on problems and a sharpened focus on participation. CONCLUSION Professionals indicated that the ICF-CY enhanced their awareness of families' views of child participation, which corresponded to organizational goals for habilitation services. An implementation finding was a lack of tools fitting the comprehensive ICF-CY perspective. The study points to the need for ICF-CY-based assessment and intervention methods focusing on child participation
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| 2. |
- Adolfsson, Margareta, 1950-, et al.
(författare)
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Identifying child functioning from an ICF-CY perspective : everyday life situations explored in measures of participation
- 2011
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Ingår i: Disability and Rehabilitation. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0963-8288 .- 1464-5165. ; 33:13-14, s. 1230-1244
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Purpose. This study was part of a larger work to develop an authentic measure consisting of code sets for self- or proxy-report of child participation. The aim was to identify common everyday life situations of children and youth based on measures of participation. Method. The study was descriptive in nature and involved several stages: systematic search of literature to find articles presenting measures for children and youth with disabilities, identifying measures in selected articles, linking items in included measures to the ICF-CY, analysing content in measures presented as performance and participation and identifying aggregations of ICF-CY codes across these measures. Results. A large number of measures for children and youth with disabilities were identified but only 12 fulfilled the inclusion criteria. A slight distinction in content and age appropriateness appeared. Measures presented as performance covered all the ICF-CY Activities and Participation chapters, whereas measures presented as participation covered five of nine chapters. Three common everyday life situations emerged from the measures: Moving around, Engagement in play and Recreation and leisure. Conclusion. Only a small number of life situations for children and youth emerged from items in selected measures, thus, other sources are needed to identify more everyday life situations.
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| 3. |
- Adolfsson, Margareta, 1950-, et al.
(författare)
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Professionals' views of children's everyday life situations and the relation to participation
- 2012
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Ingår i: Disability and Rehabilitation. - : Informa UK Limited. - 0963-8288 .- 1464-5165. ; 34:7, s. 581-592
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Purpose: The aim was to determine professionals' views of everyday life situations (ELS) of importance for children and to explore how ELS correlate with the construct "Participation". This study was part of a larger work to develop a structured tool with code sets to identify child participation and support children with disabilities to describe what matters most for them in intervention planning. Method: The study had a concurrent mixed methods design. Information from one open-ended question and questionnaires were linked to the ICF-CY component Activities and Participation. Two concurrent data sets were compared. Results: Proposed ELS were distributed across ICF-CY categories from low to high level of complexity and context specificity. The correlation with participation became stronger for the later chapters of the component (d7-d9). Differences between respondents due to working field, country, and children's ages were explored. Acts and tasks seemed most important for the youngest children, whereas ELS shifted towards societal involvement for adolescents. Conclusion: Eleven categories related to ICF-CY chapters d3-d9 emerged as ELS. Two age groups (infants/preschoolers and adolescents) are required to develop code sets for the new tool. The results need triangulation with other concurrent studies to provide corroborating evidence and add a family perspective.
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| 4. |
- Ahlström, Gerd, et al.
(författare)
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Encounters in close care relations from the perspective of personal assistants working with persons with severe disablility.
- 2010
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Ingår i: Health & Social Care in the Community. - : Hindawi Limited. - 0966-0410 .- 1365-2524. ; 18:2, s. 180-188
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In Sweden adults with major and sustainable disabilities can be granted publicly financed support in the form of personal assistance after assessment and decision-making in accordance with government rules. The purpose of the present study was to explore more deeply the encounters in close care relations between personal assistants and disabled persons of working age, as well as the prerequisites for and obstacles to the success of such encounters, this from the perspective of the personal assistants. Thirty-two personal assistants (22- to 55-year old) who worked for 32 persons with serious neurological diseases living at home were interviewed. The transcribed unstructured interviews were qualitatively analysed using latent content analysis. The analyses resulted in five main themes: Perceptive awareness, Entering into the other's role, Mutuality, Handling the relationship and Personal difficulties facing the assistant. These themes illustrated that a prerequisite for the encounter's being meaningful is that the assistant should be able to observe and understand the unique needs of the disabled person. The assistant must furthermore be able to put herself/himself into the other person's position. It is also important that the personal chemistry between the assistant and the disabled person should be good. Being able to share feelings and interests with the functionally impaired person provides the assistant with positive emotional confirmation of a good relationship. A distressing dilemma the assistant faces is that of distinguishing between the working relationship and the personal friendship. In this borderline area are found experiences, feelings and events that the assistant may view as negative or even unacceptable. This study contributes to the understanding of the complexity underlying the daily community care of disabled persons with an extensive need for care and assistance.
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| 5. |
- Alatalo, Juha M., et al.
(författare)
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Climate change and climatic events: community-, functional- and species-level responses of bryophytes and lichens to constant, stepwise, and pulse experimental warming in an alpine tundra
- 2014
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Ingår i: Alpine Botany. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1664-2201 .- 1664-221X. ; 124:2, s. 81-91
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We experimentally imposed three different kinds of warming scenarios over 3 years on an alpine meadow community to identify the differential effects of climate warming and extreme climatic events on the abundance and biomass of bryophytes and lichens. Treatments consisted of (a) a constant level of warming with open top chambers (an average temperature increase of 1.87 A degrees C), (b) a yearly stepwise increase of warming (average temperature increases of 1.0; 1.87 and 3.54 A degrees C, consecutively), and (c) a pulse warming, i.e., a single first year pulse event of warming (average temperature increase of 3.54 A degrees C only during the first year). To our knowledge, this is the first climate change study that attempts to distinguish between the effects of constant, stepwise and pulse warming on bryophyte and lichen communities. We hypothesised that pulse warming would have a significant short-term effect compared to the other warming treatments, and that stepwise warming would have a significant mid-term effect compared to the other warming treatments. Acrocarpous bryophytes as a group increased in abundance and biomass to the short-term effect of pulse warming. We found no significant effects of mid-term (third-year) stepwise warming. However, one pleurocarpous bryophyte species, Tomentypnum nitens, generally increased in abundance during the warm year 1997 but decreased in control plots and in response to the stepwise warming treatment. Three years of experimental warming (all treatments as a group) did have a significant impact at the community level, yet changes in abundance did not translate into significant changes in the dominance hierarchies at the functional level (for acrocarpous bryophytes, pleurocarpous bryophytes, Sphagnum or lichens), or in significant changes in other bryophyte or lichen species. The results suggest that bryophytes and lichens, both at the functional group and species level, to a large extent are resistant to the different climate change warming simulations that were applied.
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| 6. |
- Alatalo, Juha M., et al.
(författare)
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Dominance hierarchies, diversity and species richness of vascular plants in an alpine meadow: Contrasting short and medium termresponses to simulated global change
- 2014
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Ingår i: PeerJ. - : PeerJ Inc.. - 2167-8359. ; 2014:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We studied the impact of simulated global change on a high alpine meadow plant community. Specifically, we examined whether short-term (5 years) responses are good predictors for medium-term (7 years) changes in the system by applying a factorial warming and nutrient manipulation to 20 plots in Latnjajaure, subarctic Sweden. Seven years of experimental warming and nutrient enhancement caused dramatic shifts in dominance hierarchies in response to the nutrient and the combined warming and nutrient enhancement treatments. Dominance hierarchies in the meadow moved from a community being dominated by cushion plants, deciduous, and evergreen shrubs to a community being dominated by grasses, sedges, and forbs. Short-termresponses were shown to be inconsistent in their ability to predict medium-term responses for most functional groups, however, grasses showed a consistent and very substantial increase in response to nutrient addition over the seven years. The non-linear responses over time point out the importance of longer-term studies with repeated measurements to be able to better predict future changes. Forecasted changes to temperature and nutrient availability have implications for trophic interactions, and may ultimately influence the access to and palatability of the forage for grazers. Depending on what anthropogenic change will be most pronounced in the future (increase in nutrient deposits, warming, or a combination of them both), different shifts in community dominance hierarchies may occur. Generally, this study supports the productivity-diversity relationship found across arctic habitats, with community diversity peaking in mid-productivity systems and degrading as nutrient availability increases further. This is likely due the increasing competition in plant-plant interactions and the shifting dominance structure with grasses taking over the experimental plots, suggesting that global change could have high costs to biodiversity in the Arctic. © 2014 Alatalo et al.
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| 7. |
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| 8. |
- Amouzgar, Kaveh, 1980-, et al.
(författare)
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An approach towards generating surrogate models by using RBFN with a priori bias
- 2014
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, 2014, Vol. 2B. - New York, USA : ASME Press. - 9780791846322
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this paper, an approach to generate surrogate modelsconstructed by radial basis function networks (RBFN) with a prioribias is presented. RBFN as a weighted combination of radialbasis functions only, might become singular and no interpolationis found. The standard approach to avoid this is to add a polynomialbias, where the bias is defined by imposing orthogonalityconditions between the weights of the radial basis functionsand the polynomial basis functions. Here, in the proposed a prioriapproach, the regression coefficients of the polynomial biasare simply calculated by using the normal equation without anyneed of the extra orthogonality prerequisite. In addition to thesimplicity of this approach, the method has also proven to predictthe actual functions more accurately compared to the RBFNwith a posteriori bias. Several test functions, including Rosenbrock,Branin-Hoo, Goldstein-Price functions and two mathematicalfunctions (one large scale), are used to evaluate the performanceof the proposed method by conducting a comparisonstudy and error analysis between the RBFN with a priori and aposteriori known biases. Furthermore, the aforementioned approachesare applied to an engineering design problem, that ismodeling of the material properties of a three phase sphericalgraphite iron (SGI) . The corresponding surrogate models arepresented and compared
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| 9. |
- Amouzgar, Kaveh, 1980-, et al.
(författare)
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Multi-objective optimization of a disc brake system by using SPEA2 and RBFN
- 2013
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Ingår i: ASME 2013 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference. - New York : ASME Press. - 9780791855898
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Many engineering design optimization problems involve multiple conflicting objectives, which today often are obtained by computational expensive finite element simulations. Evolutionary multi-objective optimization (EMO) methods based on surrogate modeling is one approach of solving this class of problems. In this paper, multi-objective optimization of a disc brake system to a heavy truck by using EMO and radial basis function networks (RBFN) is presented. Three conflicting objectives are considered. These are: 1) minimizing the maximum temperature of the disc brake, 2) maximizing the brake energy of the system and 3) minimizing the mass of the back plate of the brake pad. An iterative Latin hypercube sampling method is used to construct the design of experiments (DoE) for the design variables. Next, thermo-mechanical finite element analysis of the disc brake, including frictional heating between the pad and the disc, is performed in order to determine the values of the first two objectives for the DoE. Surrogate models for the maximum temperature and the brake energy are created using RBFN with polynomial biases. Different radial basis functions are compared using statistical errors and cross validation errors (PRESS) to evaluate the accuracy of the surrogate models and to select the most accurate radial basis function. The multi-objective optimization problem is then solved by employing EMO using the strength Pareto evolutionary algorithm (SPEA2). Finally, the Pareto fronts generated by the proposed methodology are presented and discussed.
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| 10. |
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