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Accessible Summary: What is known on the subject?: Parenting experiences are a great challenge but also a meaningful achievement for mothers diagnosed with schizophrenia (MDWSs).Most previous studies focused on the parenting experiences of Chinese mothers diagnosed with depression rather than those diagnosed with schizophrenia, who usually experience psychiatric symptoms. What this paper adds to existing knowledge?: Unlike in Western society, Chinese society is characterised by a family‐centred culture. This study insightfully explores MDWSs' parenting and family life experiences addressing their intrapersonal mindsets, interpersonal connections with family members across generations and extrapersonal roles such as traditional social expectations as a mother, wife and daughter‐in‐law.While Western studies have mainly focused on MDWSs' personal resilience, this study insightfully explored MDWSs' resilient dimensions including their personal, familial and cultural issues within the Chinese society. What are the implications for practice?: This study develops a comprehensive and professional understanding of the parenting experiences and family interactions of MDWSs who struggle to achieve their motherly role and re‐establish connections with intimate family members.The findings highlight the following important considerations when offering family‐based nursing cares: (1) assess power relationships, familial dynamics and cultural influences between MDWSs and their family members; (2) extend family members' involvement, such as parents‐in‐law, while offering psychoeducation to MDWSs and their family members. Introduction: In Chinese culture, raising the next generation is recognised as a crucial family matter involving intergenerational participation. Mothers diagnosed with schizophrenia (MDWSs) usually experience high stress due to psychiatric symptoms, different parenting values across generations and traditional expectations associated with motherly roles. MDWSs need urgent professional assistance. Aim: To explore MDWSs' parenting experiences and family life in Chinese cultural contexts. Method: In‐depth interviews were conducted with 20 MDWSs. Data were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analyses. Results: The superordinate theme was identified as 'You are not a qualified mother'. Three major themes were elicited: experiencing crises in parenting, family life and self‐stability; striving to be a good mother and wife under humiliation; and developing wisdom and courage to move forward. Discussion: A dehumanised attitude of family members in a paternalistic culture was found. While Western society focuses on personal resilience and family‐based nursing care for nuclear families, Chinese society intensively focuses on MDWSs' relationship with nuclear family members as well as extended family members such as parents‐in‐law. Implications for Practice: The results highlighted the significance of culturally sensitive nursing care for MDWSs and family‐centred psychoeducation that clarifies familial dynamics and improves effective communication between MDWSs and their family members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Increased medication adherence improves patient outcomes and lowers the overall cost of care by preventing disease relapse and hospital readmission. Several systematic reviews have identified that insight, therapeutic alliance, and attitude towards medication affect medication adherence in patients with schizophrenia; however, no study has examined all the aforementioned variables together nor has discussed the chains of these mediators. Purpose: To examine the insight–medication adherence relationship among community-dwelling schizophrenia patients through a serial multiple mediation model of therapeutic alliance and medication attitude. Patients and Methods: This study with a cross-sectional correlational design included a convenience sample of community-dwelling schizophrenia patients from Taiwan (n = 229). From January 2017 to January 2018, data were collected by trained nurses using questionnaires. The PROCESS tool was used to analyse fine-grained chains. Results: In serial multiple mediation, the indirect effect of insight on medication adherence through therapeutic alliance and, subsequently, alteration of medication attitude was significant. However, the direct effect changed from significant to non-significant, indicating a complete mediating effect. Conclusion: In community-dwelling schizophrenia patients, the effects of therapeutic alliance and medication attitude on medication adherence are greater than that of insight. We recommend revising the strategy of community home visits by different psychiatrists or nurses in alternating shifts. Therapeutic alliance is the first step required to promote medication adherence. Based on this alliance, altering the patients' medication attitude may be more effective in improving medication adherence than merely enhancing insight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accessible summary: What is known on the subject?: Internalized stigma in people diagnosed with mental illness has several negative outcomes; however, it remains unclear in an Indonesian context.The human rights of people diagnosed with mental illness in Indonesia have been routinely violated because of the existing stigma against mental illness and deficiencies in the country's mental healthcare services. What the paper adds to existing knowledge?: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the level of internalized stigma and related factors among Indonesians diagnosed with schizophrenia.Almost one‐third of the subjects had moderate‐to‐severe levels of internalized stigma, among which discrimination was the strongest type.Specifically, younger and unemployed people with more psychotic symptoms had higher levels of internalized stigma. What are the implications for practice?: The provision of adequate pharmacological and psychosocial treatments to help people manage their psychotic symptoms is extremely important to ameliorate stigma.Vocational rehabilitation and employment support for unemployed people may potentially reduce their internalized stigma and promote recovery. Introduction: The human rights of people diagnosed with mental illness in Indonesia have been routinely violated because of societal stigma associated with mental illness and deficiencies in the country's mental healthcare services. Knowledge about internalized stigma among people diagnosed with schizophrenia in lower middle‐income Muslim countries is also scarce. Aim: To identify the level of internalized stigma and related factors among people diagnosed with schizophrenia in Indonesia. Method: A cross‐sectional survey was conducted with a purposive sample of 300 people diagnosed with schizophrenia from an urban Indonesian psychiatric hospital. Results: Almost one‐third of the subjects had moderate‐to‐severe levels of internalized stigma, among which discrimination was the strongest type. Younger age, unemployment status and having psychotic symptoms significantly increased the risk of internalized stigma when analysed in a multivariable ordinal logistic regression. Discussion: The present study firstly identified the high levels of internalized stigma among Indonesian individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia. Implications for practice: Mental health nurses are suggested to provide early anti‐stigma illness management and family psychoeducation interventions to people diagnosed with schizophrenia and their family caregivers, helping them to develop an optimistic understanding about the concept of schizophrenia and mitigating the negative consequences of public and internalized stigma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an uplink scenario, a base station can extract messages from multiple users through received symbols according to individual channel gains. There is a multiple access scheme relying on channel gains for separating users which is referred to as gain division multiple access (GDMA). Our goal is to provide channel estimation for the GDMA system without using pilot signals. We first employ a clustering technique to obtain estimates of the possible linear combinations of channel gains of users through a set of received symbols. We then devise algorithms to estimate the channel gain for each user and recover the message sent from each user. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Nearly half of patients with schizophrenia do not adhere to the long-term medical treatment needed to manage their disease. Programs to promote medication adherence include promotion of motivation as a critical element to influence task performance. Purpose: This study investigated the mediating effect of motivation for medication use on disease management and medication adherence in schizophrenia. Methods: This cross-sectional, descriptive correlational study enrolled a convenience sample of 373 community-dwelling patients with schizophrenia in the northern and central regions of Taiwan. Data were collected with questionnaires and a series of validated assessment tools. Hierarchical regression was used to analyze the mediating effect of motivation for medication use on disease management and medication adherence. Results: The medication adherence rate of the patients was 47.2%. The mediating effect of motivation for medication use on therapeutic alliance and medication adherence was 50%, whereas that on insight and medication adherence was 41% and that on medical social support and medication adherence was 72%. Conclusion: Developing a medication motivation care model may be more effective than promoting therapeutic alliance, insight, or medical social support for promoting medication adherence. It also had greater impact on preventing relapses of community-dwelling patients with schizophrenia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the orthogonal frequency division multiplexing communications, bit flipping can be used for the reduction of peak-to-average-power ratio (PAPR). Error-correction coding can be used to relieve the degradation of bit-error rates (BERs) resultant from the bit-flipping. We propose designs which appropriately integrate deliberate bit flipping and error-correcting codes with unequal error protection. A modified density evolution method is used for obtaining appropriate code degree distributions to our bit-flipping system. Simulation results show that our proposed designs can obtain effective PAPR reduction with very minor BER degradation in many cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is known that the Raptor code can be constructed to achieve a rate close to the capacity of the binary-input AWGN (BIAWGN) channel with a fixed signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In this letter, we propose a constructive approach of designing the Raptor code over the BIAWGN channel such that the achieved rates are close to the associated capacities for wide SNR ranges. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social stigma is inevitable for mentally ill patients, but how patients treat themselves is a priority for rehabilitation and an important buffer mechanism. This study thus aimed to measure the effectiveness of rehabilitation models for improving self-stigma. This quasi-experimental research design applied purposeful sampling. The participants (n = 250) were persons with mental illness who received rehabilitation treatment in central Taiwan. They were divided into community- (n = 170) and institution-based (n = 80) rehabilitation groups. The Internalized Stigma of Mental Illness Scale was evaluated at the time of recruitment, and a follow-up was conducted after 1 and 3 months. A generalized estimation equation was used in data analysis to measure whether self-stigma improved with the rehabilitation model and time, and to test the effect of different rehabilitation models on participants' self-stigma improvement. The study found that the self-stigma of patients receiving CBR improved more than that of those receiving IBR when behavioral problems, education, OT level, sex, and first-time self-stigma were controlled. Returning to the community is the goal of rehabilitation for patients with mental illness, but IBR still dominates the rehabilitation model in Taiwan. Thus, it is necessary to continue promoting CBR plans for future mental health policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this letter, we propose a noncoherent communication system that can be used in the communication environment in which the frequency estimation is only roughly obtained and the phase synchronization is not employed. The transmitter side has the serial turbo coding structure composed of a convolutional encoder followed by an interleaver, an MPSK signal mapper and a differential modulator. At the receiver side an expanded trellis is employed to represent not only the possible paths of the differentially encoded MPSK but also the paths resultant from the possible phase variations due to the frequency offset and the phase noise. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We propose a hybrid ARQ (HARQ) scheme for which a rate-1/2 error-correcting code with code length equal to the packet length is used in the HARQ operation, where each packet comprises two subpackets of equal lengths. For the HARQ system with constant packet lengths, the utilization of subpackets enables the flexibility of carrying new message (or data) in the retransmissions. Hence, such a system can gain additional throughput as compared to the system using all-redundancy retransmissions under the conditions of moderate to high signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). In the proposed HARQ scheme, each of the subpackets can be chosen as a data part, or a redundancy part, or a function of two subpackets, where the data part or the redundancy part may belong to different codewords of the rate-1/2 error-correcting code. With a proper design of the function subpacket, we can adaptively control the error-correcting capability used in the HARQ operation. The key idea is that there is possibility of recovering three data subpackets in one retransmission and hence increasing the throughput. The price is that in each retransmission, up to three bits are needed in the feedback channel to indicate which subpacket is successfully recovered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Forward Link Only (FLO) merit of fountain codes is utilized to avoid excessive retransmission requests for multicast communications. Two important and basic classes of fountain codes, Random Linear (RL) codes and Luby Transform (LT) codes, are considered in this paper as application layer Forward Error Correction (FEC) codes. High Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) is a notorious physical layer problem in OFDM systems. We take the PAPR constraint into account in the encoding of fountain codes for OFDM multicast communications. We propose a selective mapping (SLM) technique that selects the best P candidates among the QP candidates. This SLM technique performs significant better than the conventional SLM technique that selects the best candidate among the Q candidates. Mathematical analysis and computer simulation verify the excellence of our designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Case management is a complex process involving multiple activities. It is vital that nurses are competent in all related tasks for case management. A competence scale is a valuable tool for assessing task-related competency., Purpose: The aims of this study were to examine the reliability and validity of an assessment scale for nurse case management competence and to use this scale to assess the current competency of nurses., Methods: A nurse case management competence scale was developed in three stages: (a) selection of assessment items according to standards of practice for case management and literature review, (b) determination of content validity using the Delphi technique with a panel of experts, and (c) psychometric testing of the developed competence scale using a cross-sectional design. Convenience sampling was used to recruit psychiatric nurses at seven psychiatric centers in Taiwan to complete the scale anonymously. An exploratory factor analysis was performed to analyze construct validity. Discriminant validity, internal consistency, and 2-week test-retest reliability were also examined., Results: Two hundred eighty-five psychiatric nurses completed an assessment scale comprising 18 items (originally 25 items). The content validity index reached 0.96 after the Delphi technique was applied twice in the expert panel. Seventy-eight percent of the total variance was explained by two dimension factors: coordination facilitation competence and direct care competence. Participants who had undertaken case management courses had superior case management ability compared with those who had not, indicating that the scale possesses excellent discriminant validity. Cronbach's α and the test-retest results showed excellent reliability. Of the two competence factors, direct care competence (3.03) was better than coordination facilitation competence (2.81)., Conclusions/implications for Practice: There is a dearth of studies investigating the development and psychometric testing of case management competence scales. The results of this study provide evidence to support the reliability and validity of the developed case management competence scale among Taiwanese psychiatric nurses. It is a reliable and valid assessment instrument that may help identify educational needs and improve the case management competencies of nurses.