Receiving self-care advice rather than referral to a general practitioner influences patient satisfaction negatively. Feeling reassured after consultation is strongly related to satisfaction, which in turn has been found to increase the likelihood of engaging in self-care behaviour.

The needs of nursing care may persist despite the absence of medical needs. The encounter between the nurse and care-seeker is a unique possibility for reassurance and confidence that a minor illness is self-limiting in its nature, and self-care interventions provide relief and comfort.

Background: Understanding and interpreting the complexity of agitation in people with dementia is challenging. Objective: To explore whether a sensor measuring electrodermal activity (EDA) can improve the identification of agitation in individuals with dementia. Methods: Nine individuals with dementia wore a sensor that measured EDA. During the same time, assistant nurses annotated the observed behavior of the person with dementia. A binary logistic regression model was applied to assess the relationship between the sensor and the assistant nurses’ structured observations of agitation. Results: The sensor values correlated with the assistant nurses’ observations both at the time of the observation and 1 and 2 h prior to the observation. Conclusion: A sensor measuring EDA can support early detection of agitation in persons with dementia.

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Aims and objectives. The aim of this study was to describe people's perceptions of needs to feel confident in self-care for minor illnesses as well as their perceptions about supporting and obstructing factors in the practice of self-care. Background. Minor illness constitutes a large part of primary care, and patients' attendance to doctors' appointments for minor illness has been seen to increase future attendance for the same condition. Almost half of the consultations with telenurses result in the provision of self-care advice. Design. A cross-sectional survey. Method. Primary data were collected using a questionnaire, and the study participants (n = 315) were randomly selected from the national Swedish address register. Results. Having knowledge and receiving health care advice and reliable information were perceived to be needs in order for participants to feel confident in self-care. Having family or friends to consult with was perceived to be a positive factor influencing confidence in self-care, especially for persons under the age of 35. Health care services were perceived to support self-care practice by offering easy access to care, giving information about self-care, and offering increased follow-up after consultations. Lack of knowledge, along with difficulties being away from work, were obstructing factors in the practice of self-care. Conclusions. Young age was the factor influencing people's perceptions of needs and supporting factors the most. Young age and low knowledge scores about minor illnesses were the two factors that had the most influence on perceived obstructing factors. Relevance to clinical practice. Nurses play a major role in the promotion of selfcare and in the dissemination of self-care advice. If health care services fail to meet the needs of care-seekers with minor illnesses, patients might turn to out-ofhours clinics and emergency departments for help.Key words: counselling, district nursing, needs, primary care, self-care, support, symptom control, telenursing What does this paper contribute to the wider global clinical community?• Providing persons with proper tools for managing minor illness, and teaching strategies for symptom control, is essential to reduce medical care of minor illness.• The health care services can support the practice of self-care by offering easy access to self-care advice.• Nurses and telenurses play a major role in the promotion of self-care and the dissemination of health care advice. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.

We present a robust Bayesian ordinal regression model that predicts three-quarters of the patients' healthcare utilization after telephone nursing and we found no evidence of model deficiencies. A patient's compliance to the nurse's recommendation varies and depends on the recommended level of care, its agreement with and level of the patient's prior intention, and the availability of different care options at the time. The model reveals a risk reducing behavior among patients and the effect of the telephone nursing recommendation is 7 times higher than the effect of the patient's intended action prior to consultation if the recommendation is the highest level of care. But the effect of the nurse's recommendation is lower, or even non-existing, if the recommendation is self-care. Telephone nursing was found to have a constricting effect on healthcare utilization, however, the compliance to nurse's recommendation is closely tied to perceptions of risk, emphasizing the importance to address caller's needs of reassurance.

In this paper a new synchronization technique is presented for applications using repeated measurements or experiments with periodically excited signals. The objective with repeated or periodic measurements is often to retrieve an estimate of the (noise reduced) signal and its uncertainties. However, these measurements need to be synchronized to obtain accurate estimates. Existing synchronization techniques are limited to specific signal and noise conditions, such as white Gaussian noise or narrowband signals, to achieve good performance. The proposed method, not limited by these conditions, extracts statistical information regarding the underlying signal and the noise contained in the measurements, to obtain good synchronization (asymptotically optimal). The Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB) is derived for the synchronization problem, including bounds for the underlying signal waveform and the covariance of the measurement noise, both considered unknown. The method, which is shown to be the maximum-likelihood estimator (MLE) in both white and colored Gaussian noise, is compared with the CRLB along with standard sub-sample estimation and aligning techniques using Monte Carlo simulations. The results show significant mean square error (MSE) improvements compared to standard synchronization techniques. Synchronization results using the proposed technique are presented for repeated ultrasonic measurements, to validate the method in a real measurement situation, and to experimentally support theoretical results.

Abstract-In ultrasonic measurement situations, when dealing with media of multi-layered structures consisting of 1 or more thin layers, analysis of the measured ultrasonic waveform can be difficult because of overlapping and reverberant echoes. Information from the individual layers is then difficult to extract because the individual echoes cannot be detected. In this study, we use a parametric layer model to analyze the multi-layered material in a system identification approach. The parameters of the model are connected to physical properties of the investigated material, e.g., the reflection coefficients, the time-of-flight, and the attenuation. The main advantage using this model is that the complexity of the model is connected to the number of layers rather than the number of observable echoes in the received ultrasonic waveform. A system of linear equations is presented, giving the opportunity to find the model for both pulse-echo and through-transmission measurements. A thorough effort is made on the parameter estimation and optimization algorithm. The model is validated with practical measurements on a 3-layered structure using both pulse-echo and through-transmission techniques. The 3-layered material consists of a thin embedded middle layer with the time-of-flight in that layer shorter than the emitted signal's time support, giving rise to overlapping echoes. Finally the relation between the model parameters and physical properties of the material is established.