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Background Online communities have been gaining popularity as support venues for chronic disease management. User engagement, information exposure, and social influence mechanisms can play a significant role in the utility of these platforms. Objective In this paper, we characterize peer interactions in an online community for chronic disease management. Our objective is to identify key communications and study their prevalence in online social interactions. Methods The American Diabetes Association Online community is an online social network for diabetes self-management. We analyzed 80,481 randomly selected deidentified peer-to-peer messages from 1212 members, posted between June 1, 2012, and May 30, 2019. Our mixed methods approach comprised qualitative coding and automated text analysis to identify, visualize, and analyze content-specific communication patterns underlying diabetes self-management. Results Qualitative analysis revealed that “social support” was the most prevalent theme (84.9%), followed by “readiness to change” (18.8%), “teachable moments” (14.7%), “pharmacotherapy” (13.7%), and “progress” (13.3%). The support vector machine classifier resulted in reasonable accuracy with a recall of 0.76 and precision 0.78 and allowed us to extend our thematic codes to the entire data set. Conclusions Modeling health-related communication through high throughput methods can enable the identification of specific content related to sustainable chronic disease management, which facilitates targeted health promotion.

The sodium–nickel chloride (Na/NiCl2 ) battery has many advantages over the Na–S battery, such as a higher operating voltage, ease of assembly in the discharge state, less corrosive cathode materials, a safer cell failure mode, and better tolerance against overcharging. In this study, to solve the problem of low electrical conductivity, a planar-type Na/NiCl2 cell was designed by optimizing the cathode through the use of both Ni mesh and excess Ni powder. A β″-Al2O3 membrane, which plays a role in the conducting path for Na+ ions, was glass-sealed and attached to a thicker external α″-Al2O3 ring. For carbon coating, the anode side of the membrane was covered with carbon paste. The prototype cell was operated successfully and showed excellent electrochemical characteristics in terms of high Na utilization and stable charge/discharge cycleability.

Background Diabetes and Alzheimer disease and related dementias (ADRD) are the seventh and sixth leading causes of death in the United States, respectively, and they coexist in many older adults. Caring for a loved one with both ADRD and diabetes is challenging and burdensome. Objective This study aims to explore diabetes-related topics in the Alzheimer’s Association ALZConnected caregiver forum by family caregivers of persons living with ADRD. Methods User posts on the Alzheimer’s Association ALZConnected caregiver forum were extracted. A total of 528 posts related to diabetes were included in the analysis. Of the users who generated the 528 posts, approximately 96.1% (275/286) were relatives of the care recipient with ADRD (eg, child, grandchild, spouse, sibling, or unspecified relative). Two researchers analyzed the data independently using thematic analysis. Any divergence was discussed among the research team, and an agreement was reached with a senior researcher’s input as deemed necessary. Results Thematic analysis revealed 7 key themes. The results showed that comorbidities of ADRD were common topics of discussions among family caregivers. Diabetes management in ADRD challenged family caregivers. Family caregivers might neglect their own health care because of the caring burden, and they reported poor health outcomes and reduced quality of life. The online forum provided a platform for family caregivers to seek support in their attempts to learn more about how to manage the ADRD of their care recipients and seek support for managing their own lives as caregivers. Conclusions The ALZConnected forum provided a platform for caregivers to seek informational and emotional support for caring for persons living with ADRD and diabetes. The overwhelming burdens with these two health conditions were apparent for both caregivers and care recipients based on discussions from the online forum. Studies are urgently needed to provide practical guidelines and interventions for diabetes management in individuals with diabetes and ADRD. Future studies to explore delivering diabetes management interventions through online communities in caregivers and their care recipients with ADRD and diabetes are warranted.

Motor imagery (Ml)-based brain-computer interface (BCI) allows users to control external devices using the brain signal patterns induced by the imagination of movements. Since these patterns have high variability between subjects and sessions, the BCI system necessarily requires 20–30 minutes for the calibration process each time the system is used. This time-consuming process requires a high level of the user's concentration; most users experience uncomfortable feelings such as tiredness, exhaustion, and loss of attention, which are symptoms of mental fatigue. In this paper, we introduce a self-paced training that terminates the calibration process within a few minutes. In this training paradigm, users perform MI tasks continuously without an inter-stimulus-interval (ISI). Also, we propose a data selection method to extract the most prominent features from the short calibration data by assuming the data distribution probabilistically and using the prior knowledge of event-related desynchronization (ERD) patterns. The results from 19 subjects indicate that the proposed method gained a comparable classification performance to the conventional method but with a much shorter calibration period (12 min/73.8%, 30 min/76.1%, respectively). In this regard, the proposed method could be of great benefit for real-world BCI applications by providing a quicker calibration process.