Background: Understanding current patterns of functional decline will inform patient care and has health service and resource implications. Aim: This prospective consecutive cohort study aims to map the shape of functional decline trajectories at the end of life by diagnosis. Design: Changes in functional status were measured using the Australia-modified Karnofsky Performance Status Scale. Segment

The overarching objective of the studies in this thesis is to solve issues associated with the current district heating development in order to improve the efficiency, and thus the environmental performance, of district heating systems. More specifically, the aim is to solve issues related to prosumers and bottlenecks in district heating networks. Prosumers are consumers who also produce district The overarching objective of the studies in this thesis is to solve issues associated with the current district heating development in order to improve the efficiency, and thus the environmental performance, of district heating systems. More specifically, the aim is to solve issues related to prosumers and bottlenecks in district heating networks. Prosumers are consumers who also produce district

Humor is essential to social life, but it is often overlooked in the study of crime and other social problems. We introduce and make use of humor theory, emphasizing the theories of superiority and relief. Based on interviews with incarcerated men, we demonstrate how humor is used to criticize authorities, for self-aggrandizement, and to alleviate the pain of tragic experiences. Funny remarks and

ne of the main limiting factors in improving glucose control for T1DM subjects is the lack of a precise description of meal and insulin intake effects on blood glucose. Knowing magnitude and duration of such effects would be useful not only for patients and physicians but also for the development of a controller targeting glycemia regulation. Therefore, in this paper we focus on estimating low-com

The paper describes the design and verification of a self-adaptive system, composed of multiple smart cameras connected to a monitoring station, that determines the allocation of network bandwidth to the cameras. The design of such a system poses significant challenges, since multiple control strategies are active in the system simultaneously. In fact, the cameras adjust the quality of their strea

This contribution reviews theory, algorithms, and validation results for system identification of continuous-time state-space models from finite input- output sequences. The algorithms developed are autoregressive methods, methods of subspace-based model identification and stochastic realization adapted to the continuous-time context. The resulting model can be decomposed into an input-output mode

Homogeneous Charge Compression Ignition (HCCI) holds promise for reduced emissions and increased efficiency compared to conventional internal combustion engines. As HCCI lacks direct actuation over the combustion phasing, much work has been devoted to designing controllers capable of set-point tracking and disturbance rejection. This paper presents results on model predictive control (MPC) of the

This paper shows an application of continuous-time system identification methods to Type 1 diabetes. First, a general MISO transfer function structure with individual nominator and denominator polynomials for each input is assumed and a parameter estimation procedure via an iterative prediction error method presented. Then, the proposed identification method is evaluated on a simple simulation exa

A drilling task requires a mechanism with five degrees of freedom, in order to achieve the correct position and orientation of the drilling tool. When performed with a standard 6-axes industrial robot, this task leaves an extra degree of freedom that can be exploited in order to achieve any additional criterion. Unfortunately, typical industrial robotic control architectures do not allow the user