The world has seen a pandemic which disrupted the life. Till now there are aftershocks of the COVID-19 such as Omicron instilling fear among individuals. Healthcare staff is on alert specifically the ...nurses has suffered a lot mentally due to this issue by developing fatigue. The study conducted during deadly 3rd COVID-19 wave. The data were collected by developing the questionnaire of the previously validated measures related to the variables under study from nurses working in the intensive care unit, critical care unit and floor wards of COVID-19 at Services Hospital, Lahore. A total of 140 questionnaires were used for data analysis. The study used Statistical Package for Social Sciences for frequency and descriptive statistics. Whereas, the outcomes of fear of COVID-19 were assessed by using the latest Smart Partial Least Squares software which allows to assess the complex research frameworks. The results of the study revealed that the fear of COVID-19 results in poor quality of life among nurses and fatigue. Resilience among nurses can reduce the negative consequences but did not get the statistical support.
Pakistan is a country where the nursing profession still has to get a good working environment as it is directly related to improved patient care. The nursing practice environment is a key factor ...that contributes to retention. Bearing in mind the importance of the issue the present study is designed to know the current state of the nursing practice environment. The data were collected from the nurses working in the medical wards and critical care units in the Pakistan Institute of Neurosciences, Lahore. Convenience sampling was used to select the respondents and collect the data. A total of 150 questionnaires were distributed among the nurses and 110 questionnaires were used for the data analysis in Statistical Package for Social Sciences. Frequency, descriptive statistics, reliability, and validity analyses were performed. As per the results of the study, the questionnaire used in the study was reliable and valid. Additionally, the results of the study established that the nursing practice environment is poor asking for concrete steps to make it better for improved patient care delivery. Nurse leaders can dedicate their efforts to the improvement of the nursing practice environment to improve the nurse job outcomes. Further, they can also arrange the trainings for the professional development of the nurses to ensure the better healthcare services delivery. The perceptions of the good nursing practice environment can be fostered among the nurses by having their active participation in the hospital matters and decision making because they are also the key staff in the hospital environment.
Abstract Objective: To determine the incidence of abnormal renal function tests at presentation in patients from Karachi admitted with severe COVID-19 pneumonia and determine its effect on disease ...severity and clinical outcomes. Study type, settings and duration: This was a cross-sectional study conducted at the COVID Intensive care unit of a large tertiary care government hospital in Karachi from February 2021 to June 2021. Methodology: One hundred ninety patients admitted over five months were included in the study. Patient demographic characteristics, comorbidities, and clinical manifestations of COVID-19 infection were recorded. Laboratory values at the time of presentation, including hemoglobin, neutrophil lymphocyte ratio, platelets, blood urea nitrogen, estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR), inflammatory markers, liver function tests, and electrolytes were recorded. Patient outcome and need for mechanical ventilation were assessed 28 days after admission and compared with the incidence of abnormal renal functions at presentation. Results: Mean eGFR and BUN at presentation were 69.7 and 28.4 respectively. Of the total 109 (57.4%) patients had abnormal renal function tests at the time of presentation. About 76 (40%) patients had low eGFR and 33 (17.4%) had only raised BUN with normal eGFR. Mean eGFR was lower in non-survivors vs survivors (p-value 0.000) and in patients who required mechanical ventilation (p-value 0.008). Patients who had low eGFR showed greater mortality than those with normal eGFR (p-value 0.04) and were more likely to require mechanical ventilation (p-value 0.04). Conclusion: Low eGFR at presentation is common in patients with severe COVID-19 pneumonia and is associated with a higher in-hospital mortality rate and need for mechanical ventilation.
Ocean wave energy conversion is operated in a challenging environment featuring massive and impulsive stresses and is subjected to large amounts of biofouling and marine growth. As most wave energy ...converter technologies are off-shore, operation, maintenance, and repair costs may be significant. Therefore, any cost-effective control and operation of Wave Energy Converters (WECs) must be robust to faults and changes in the operational environment. This paper presents a Bayesian policy gradient-based WEC control approach that is responsive and adaptive to faults in controller feedback, controller actuation, and changes in the plant model. The controller is tested via Hardware in the Loop real-time testbed. The results show that the proposed control is capable of adapting its policy to the loss of information from one or two sensors and recovering nearly full power operation. In the case where sensor loss occurs, after the loss of plate excitation force estimation and displacement sensors, the power decreases to 215.2 kW from 252.7 kW before recovering to 238.4 kW mean power over 20 minutes. Moreover, the Bayesian RL-based control model proves its adaptability by compensating a large portion of power loss due to PTO failures and rapid changes to the dynamic system because of non-destructive damage to the float structure.
This paper presents a comparison of a Reinforcement-Learning (RL) based wave energy conversion controller against standard reactive damping and model predictive control (MPC) approaches, in the ...presence of modeling errors. Wave energy converters (WECs) are under the influence of many non-linear hydrodynamic forces, yet for ease and expediency, it is common to formulate linear WEC models and control laws. Therefore it is expected that significant modeling errors may be present, which may degrade model-based control performance. Model-free RL approaches to control may offer a significant advantage in robustness to modeling errors, in that the model is learned by the controller by experience. It is shown that, for an annual average sea state, RL-based controllers can outperform model-based control - reactive control and MPC - by 19% and 16%, respectively, when significant modeling error is present. Furthermore, compared to similar studies of RL-based control, the proposed model can reduce the training time from 8.4 hr to 1.5 hr.
Everyone has to manage their emotions during their interactions with others; the leaders of organizations are no different. Leaders actively and continually regulate their emotional state. The ...crucial role of emotions in the interactional process, as well in decision-making, triggers leaders to be vigilant about their emotional labor strategies. Thus, emotional labor has become an emerging construct in the leadership domain. This study has collected data from 250 doctors working in private and public hospitals in Gujranwala. The measurement model was employed for confirmation of the validity and internal consistency of the measures. PLS-SEM was used for testing the hypotheses. The findings demonstrated that the leaders' deep acting, as well as their displays of natural emotions, are positively associated with job satisfaction and negatively associated with the leaders' emotional exhaustion. Moreover, surface acting has a significant positive relationship with the leaders' emotional exhaustion and a negative relationship with the leaders' job satisfaction. Psychological capital significantly moderated the relationship between the leaders' emotional labor strategies (surface acting and deep acting), their job satisfaction, and their emotional exhaustion. Whereas it did not moderate the relationship between the leaders' displays of genuine emotions, their job satisfaction, and their emotional exhaustion.
Blind source separation (BSS) is a problem that appears in many research fields. Fast Independent components analysis (FastICA) is one of the techniques to solve the problem. The researchers have ...verified the effectiveness of the technique through the offline analysis of the public datasets. The development of a real-time portable system involving such a computationally complex analysis requires an efficient hardware implementation of FastICA. A Field programmable gate array (FPGA) and an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) are two promising hardware platforms to implement FastICA. This work proposes a new method, called ALgebraic Jacobi Method (ALJM), for performing eigenvalue decomposition (EVD) required for the implementation of FastICA. We use a simplification, a polynomial approximation, and the Newton-Raphson method for calculating the Jacobi rotation. In this way, we ensure hardware reusability between the EVD stage and the weight vector estimation (WVE) stage of FastICA which reduces the computational complexity and the power consumption, without compromising its computation speed. We evaluate the ALJM-based FastICA by performing BSS on the linear mixtures of the deterministic and the random signals and comparing the performance results with the existing methods. After verifying its functionality and numerical stability, we propose a scalable systolic processing array (SPA) for the ALJM-based FastICA and implement it on Spartan-6 FPGA. By comparing the existing implementations of FastICA, in terms of speed, area, and power, we conclude that the ALJM-based FastICA is one of the most efficient methods for prototyping and commercializing a real-time portable system comprising FastICA.
Mooring systems are a critical component of all floating wave energy converter (WEC) systems, yet the impact of amooring system on the WEC dynamics is often neglected during the initial assessment of ...candidate designs. The purpose of this study was to investigate how the inclusion of mooring dynamics in the early stages of the WEC design process influences decisions regarding hydrodynamic features and control strategies. The study was executed within a mechanical circuit framework to represent the WEC response in the frequency domain. Thevenin’s theorem was applied within this framework to transform a multi-body WEC into a single-body canonical form. This work specifically focused on self-reacting point absorbers and examined how four realistic mooring designs impact WEC intrinsic mechanical impedance across a range of common wave frequencies. We show how the mooring can easily be included in this framework, and a simple approach to identifying the mooring model parameters is described. It was observed that if mooring dynamics are considered within the WEC control design process, a 40% reduction in the required range of the controller physical variable can be achieved while yielding up to 16% more useful power. These results suggest that considering the mooring system early can enhance WEC design.
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