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Background: Patients with Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) have high rates of depression and decreased physical function. In addition, the physical function has been reported to decline in patients with depression. However, there is no clear relationship between depression and physical function in patients with CVD. Moreover, the effects of the combination of depression and decreased physical function on prognosis are unclear. This study was performed to clarify the relationship between depression and physical function, in the prognosis of patients with CVD.

A high performance model Stirling engine, in which the heater, regenerator and cooler as a whole is formed by hundreds of porous metal sheets, is identified for theoretical analysis to facilitate the future scale-up design. The reciprocating flow and heat transfer both in the heat exchanger and in the full engine is simulated by a dynamic mesh Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method, and is validated by analytical solutions and experimental data. An optimization method is also developed to incorporate the entropy generation caused by flow friction and irreversible heat transfer. The results show that relatively high indicated power of 33.4 W is obtained, corresponding to a specific power of 1.88 W/cm3 and a thermal efficiency of 43.9%, which are attributable to the extremely small flow friction loss and excellent heat transfer characteristics in the regular shaped microchannels, as well as to the compact heat exchanger design that significantly reduces the dead volume. Given the same operating conditions, the optimized porous-sheets regenerator has a significantly lower total loss of available work while maintaining even higher thermal effectiveness in comparison with the optimized conventional wire mesh regenerator.

[Purpose] This study aimed to determine the effects of increased amount of physical therapy exercise on improvements in the walking ability of patients with stroke. [Subjects and Methods] The subjects were selected from patients with stroke who were hospitalized in the convalescent rehabilitation ward, and included 91 patients who received physical therapy for 2.5-3 exercise sessions per day during 2005-2006 (PT3unit group), and 86 patients who received physical therapy for 4.5-6 exercise sessions per day during 2010-2015 (PT6unit group). The functional independence measure (FIM) score evaluates the walking ability of patients during hospital admission, 2 and 4 weeks after admission, and at discharge. The FIM score was stratified according to the degree of lower limb motor paralysis and subsequently compared between groups. [Results] Among the patients with complete paralysis and severe paralysis, the FIM-Walking scores at 4 weeks after admission and at discharge were significantly higher in the PT6unit group than in the PT3unit group. No significant differences were found between the PT6unit and PT3unit groups for patients with mild and moderate paralysis. [Conclusion] Higher amounts of physical therapy exercise contributed to improvements in the walking ability of patients with complete and severe lower limb paralysis.

An interdisciplinary team (from Design, Community Development, Computer Science, and Rhetoric & Writing) created an interactive, updateable timeline showing the Evolution of Participatory Practices (EPP) in five disciplines over 50 years; the team members also documented and reflected on their own participatory practices. This Experience Report describes how the EPP timeline was created and what the team learned about interdisciplinary work in the process. It offers insights that may help other interdisciplinary groups overcome communication differences ranging from the simple (different vocabularies), to the complex (different definitions of shared terms), to the nearly invisible (the powerful, tacit epistemological assumptions underlying each discipline) by conceptualizing the work process in terms of an interdisciplinary rationality island and seeing the timeline as a boundary object. It also describes how making the process itself an object of study ensured that the reflective work necessary to effective teamwork got done.

Currently, multiband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (MB-OFDM) is considered to be one of the modulation schemes of UWB and is being actively investigated. It is necessary to provide low-cost receivers for consumers to receive wide support for the MB-OFDM system. Such receivers can be achieved by utilizing direct-conversion architecture. Direct-conversion architecture suffers from IQ imbalance. IQ imbalance causes intercarrier interference (ICI) in the demodulated signals. In this paper, a new scheme of IQ imbalance compensation using transmit diversity is proposed. This scheme enables the system to achieve frequency diversity and simultaneously compensates for the influence of IQ imbalance. It is shown that the performance of the proposed scheme is better than that of the conventional IQ imbalance compensation scheme.

Currently, Multi-band OFDM (MB-OFDM) is considered as one of the modulation schemes of UWB and is actively invesgigated. It is necessary to provide low cost receivers for consumers in order to receive wide support for MB-OFDM system. Such receivers can be achieved by utilizing direct conversion architecture. The direct conversion architecture has been investigated for the purpose of cost minimization, miniaturization, and low power consumption of wireless receivers. However, the balance between the in-phase component and the quadrature-phase component of demodulated signals is lost when direct conversion architecture is used. This phenomenon is called IQ imbalance. IQ imbalance is one of the problems for the direct conversion receiver. IQ imbalance causes intercarrier interference (ICI) in the demodulated signals. In this paper, a new scheme of IQ imbalance compensation using transmit diversity is proposed. This scheme enables the system to achieve frequency diversity and compensate the influence of IQ imbalance at the same time. It is shown that the performance of the proposed scheme is better than the conventional IQ imbalance compensation scheme.

Geometric phase modulation is exerted in each arm of nulling interferometer. Experimental results reveal the feasibility of separate phase modulation of an arbitrary amount of radians (less than 2π) in nulling interferometer. The capability of the separate phase modulation will be useful for multi-element nulling interferometer to detect extrasolar planets.