Category / Research communication

FACETS research featured on MS Society blog

FACETS

BU’s FACETS project, which focuses on managing fatigue in people with MS has been featured in a blog post by the MS Society.  Fatigue is one of the most commonly reported and debilitating symptoms of MS and can have a real impact on people’s lives.  It’s the main reason why people with MS eventually give up work.

Research from Professor Peter Thomas and Dr Sarah Thomas from BU’s Clinical Research Unit have developed a group based fatigue management programme called FACETS.  The programme helps to equip people with the tools and strategies they need to effectively manage their energy and cope with fatigue.  Below is an expert from the blog.

Mind the gap – getting care and services research to the clinic

It can sometimes take years for research findings to be rolled out in clinics. The gap between clinical trials and the clinic means that people often miss out on services that were developed with them in mind.

We want to make sure that everyone has access to the therapies, services and support that are right for them. And we’re working hard to make sure that happens.

Managing MS fatigue effectively

‘FACETS’ is a group-based fatigue management programme for people with MS. FACETS stands for Fatigue: Applying Cognitive behavioural and Energy effectiveness Techniques to lifeStyle.

During the programme, people learn strategies to help them manage their energy levels more effectively and explore different ways of thinking about fatigue.

The programme was shown to reduce fatigue and improve quality of life for people with MS in a 2013 trial we funded.

Since then we’ve supported the research team to roll out FACETS, via training days for health care professionals so they can deliver the programme in their practices.

Over 200 health professionals have been trained so far. And a recent survey suggested that more than 1,500 people with MS have already attended a FACETS programme.

Dr Sarah Thomas, who developed the programme, said “One of the most rewarding aspects of carrying out this work has been seeing FACETS rolled out into clinics and, we hope, making a difference to people’s lives.”

The blog can be read in full here.

Research Photography Competition- Your winners announced today!

Find out who you voted to be your winner of 2017’s Research Photography Competition.ResearchPhotographyCompetitionintranet1

Come along today at 2-3pm, in the Atrium Art Gallery, where Vice Chancellor John Vinney will be announcing the three winners.

The Competition is in its third year and saw 26 entries from across all faculties. The images give us just a small glimpse into some of the fantastic work our researchers are doing both here at BU and across the globe. These images will be displayed in the gallery and the researchers  will be on hand to to talk about their research and the inspiration behind their photographs.

If you would like to come along to congratulate the winners please register here. 

Staff and students are welcome to attend. Refreshments will be provided!

Research Photography Competition- Your Winners!

Find out who you voted to be your winner of 2017’s Research Photography Competition.ResearchPhotographyCompetitionintranet1

Join us on Thursday 9 March 2017 at 2-3pm, in the Atrium Art Gallery, where Vice Chancellor John Vinney will be announcing the three winners.

The Competition is in its third year and saw 26 entries from across all faculties. The images give us just a small glimpse into some of the fantastic work our researchers are doing both here at BU and across the globe. These images will be displayed in the gallery and the researchers  will be on hand to to talk about their research and the inspiration behind their photographs.

If you would like to come along to congratulate the winners please register here. 

Staff and students are welcome to attend. Refreshments will be provided!

Research Photography Competition: voting closes Friday!

‘Can you convey the impact of your research in a single image?’ That’s the challenge we set BU academics and students this year. The overwhelming response saw researchers from across the university getting creative and utilising their photography skills. The photos give just a small glimpse into some of the fantastic work our researchers are doing both here at BU and across the globe.

Researchers from across the university, working in areas as diverse as science, marketing, health and forensic investigation submitted images to the competition. Now we want your help to pick the winners!

To vote click on the ‘Vote’ button below your favourite image on this page. Or vote by liking an image via our Facebook album. Perhaps a particular research subject strikes a chord with you, or you find a certain image especially evocative – whatever your reason, the competition winners are for you to decide!

The deadline for voting is 3 March and the winners will be announced in the Atrium Art Gallery on 9 March, by Vice-Chancellor Professor John Vinney at 2pm. If you would like to come along to this free event please order your tickets here.

The full exhibition will then be on display in the Atrium Art Gallery from Thursday 9 March until Wednesday 22 March, so drop by and take a look.

Inaugural lecture: Performing hip replacements in space

Digital screen

Established in 2015, Bournemouth University’s Orthopaedic Research Institute (BUORI) is at the forefront of developing virtual reality training and robots that will allow surgeons to perform hip replacements in this world and beyond.

As part of his inaugural lecture, Professor Robert Middleton, Head of BUORI, will share his research into developing virtual reality training for surgeons, which allows them to practice in the space in front of them – or even in space!

After the lecture, you’ll have the chance to see some of the state-of-the-art training equipment being used by BUORI and even try your hand at virtual surgery.

Professor Middleton joined Bournemouth University in 2015, while continuing to practise as a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon at the Royal Bournemouth Hospital and working as the Director of Trauma at Poole Hospital.  His extensive clinical experience helps to inform his research and the direction of Bournemouth University’s Orthopaedic Research Institute (BUORI).

Bournemouth University’s inaugural lecture series aims to celebrate new professorial appointments and the depth and breadth of research produced by the university.  For further information on the inaugural lecture series, please visit www.bournemouth.ac.uk/public-lecture-series

About the event

To book your free ticket, click here.

Venue: Executive Business Centre, Holdenhurst Road.

Date: Wednesday 12 April.

Time: 6:30pm for a 7pm lecture start.

Refreshments will be provided at the event.

For more information about the event, please contact Rachel Bowen at rbowen@bournemouth.ac.uk.

Patient and Public Involvement Seminar Series

DrBUDSPA James Gavin is running a free series of seminars on  patient and public involvement (PPI).

This series will highlight the importance of PPI throughout the research cycle, from design to dissemination. PPI is gaining importance to identify treatments that meet people’s needs and are more likely to be adopted in practice.

Speakers will share insights on involving the public as partners to improve: relevance, quality, study protocol design and the communication of findings in health research. The speakers are from a variety of roles in occupational therapy, mental health, social work, health demographics, education and national health governance.

To find out more information and to book your place please click here.

Date Location Time Speaker Seminar Title
Monday 6 March 2017 EB708, Lansdowne Campus 3.00-4.30pm Professor Jo Adams Making research meaningful and accessible to patients: Why PPI is crucial to designing effective health research studies
Wednesday 15 March 2017 EB708, Lansdowne Campus 3.00-4.30pm Lisa Gale-Andrews & Dr Zoe Sheppard Importance of public involvement in research design: an orthopaedic case study
Monday 3 April 2017 EB708, Lansdowne Campus 3.00-4.30pm Dr Mel Hughes & Angela Warren Recruiting and supporting participants to engage in meaningful PPI
Monday 24 April 2017 EB708, Lansdowne Campus 11.00am-12.30pm Simon Denegri How can today’s patient help research tackle tomorrow’s health challenges?

Tourist trap: how news of terrorism skews our holiday choices

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

If you’d like to pitch your own article idea to The Conversation, please contact either newsdesk@bournemouth.ac.uk or rbowen@bournemouth.ac.uk.

Grzegorz Kapuscinski, Lecturer in Marketing Management, Bournemouth University

Terrorist attacks are designed to intimidate and change behaviour. It should be no surprise then that we allow fear to be a great motivator when we plan trips abroad. News of an attack is a vivid factor as we decide where to travel with our families, perhaps to places of which we know little else. Efforts by reporters to appeal to our concerns end up feeding us the prompts to avoid certain countries or cities, hammering an often crucial tourism industry in the process.

Ever since real-time news coverage brought the horror of the 2001 World Trade Center attacks into people’s homes, global audiences have become used to watching such events unfold on screen. Recently, we have witnessed shootings at Port El Kantaoui beach, near Sousse in Tunisia in 2015, the Bataclan attack in Paris in the same year, and the New Year’s Eve nightclub shootings in Istanbul less than two months ago.

These are all key holiday destinations. The tactics used and the damage inflicted may differ, but every attack has the potential to stop us in our tracks. This is clearly of huge significance to the tourism and hospitality sectors.

Choices

The first problem is obvious. Uncertainty around safety often translates into avoidance of those places considered dangerous. Holidays are postponed or cancelled. Ultimately, limitations are placed on tourists’ freedom of mobility.

Unsurprisingly, the tolerance of potential physical harm is low in discretionary travel, where other options are readily available and the destination can be incidental. Terrorism has served to highlight the fragility of the tourism industry: the displacement of holidaymakers has caused severe economic losses. In Tunisia, where tourism accounts for 15% of GDP, the effect has been stark, with 2016 revenues cut by half from a year earlier.

In Turkey, which suffered from a wave of attacks during 2016, the Association of Turkish Travel Agencies has predicted a negative impact on tourism revenues of £2-2.5 billion.

In truth, many potential holiday destinations will have a recent or more distant history of safety issues of one kind or another. In an era of uncertainty, under pressure of time, family member concerns, and the risk of financial loss, many tourists turn to the news media for explanation. The question is, how do we arrive at our final decisions?

Judgement call

Years of study on the psychology of risk suggests that the way the public assess danger has much more to do with stuff like emotional responses, their perceived level of control, or their familiarity with a hazard, than official statistics.

News stories of new and emerging hazards often entail multiple storylines, especially in times of conflicting accounts and factual uncertainty. These act as qualitative indicators of risk that allow audiences to simplify complexity and categorise the situation as involving more or less danger. And so terrorism which is framed as religious extremism can appear irrational, beyond compromise and uncontrollable, and can lead to higher levels of perceived risk.

One recent study I carried out with Bournemouth Professor Barry Richards has shown that small variations in news reports can lead to significant changes in leisure tourists’ risk perception. We all have our own unique set of experiences that dictate how we digest news. However, it seems likely that tourists, who instinctively seek to minimise risk will – after years of exposure to coverage – share a deep pool of associations to terrorist attacks: why they are carried out, and who is likely to be targeted. This allows them to create a coherent picture, a mental shortcut which feeds decision making around a fraught and complex task.

It can come down to details. One experiment in the study mentioned above suggests that if articles emphasise the proximity of a bomb explosion to points of tourist interest, or reference other events where tourists were harmed, then there tends to be a greater judgement of risk. It’s the same for an alleged link to religious extremism as opposed to other things, such as a domestic separatist movement.

Moving target

We are also sensitive to accounts from the general public when assessing risk related to terrorism. Reports which quote reactions from local people and which stress the relative newness of the problem, and a lack of confidence in maintaining order and normality, lead to higher estimations of risk. Portrayals of the incident that stress resilience decrease perceived risk.

This doesn’t mean that the media has an agenda in pushing an intimidating interpretation of these events, or that audiences can be easily influenced. The point is that journalists who report on these tragic incidents do so in a style that seeks to resonate with the audience. That means using templates which appear to give information which helps us protect ourselves and our loved ones. It is this transaction which can end up devastating a country’s tourism revenues.

In fact, interviews I carried out with my colleague after the study demonstrated that news consumers have become able to do the job themselves. Even when exposed to reports that aim to soften perceived risk, the audience can use examples of other events when tourists were targeted to interpret destinations as particularly dangerous. For example, a report that stressed a focus on military targets in remote areas of a destination was met with distrust by a tourist who believed the information was intended to downplay the magnitude of risk to Western tourists.

Those “gut feelings” we use to make difficult decisions like this under pressure may actually be wired in from exposure to news coverage. The hard bit is to acknowledge that and manage our responses to emotive and vivid content which can cloud reason and lead us to over- or underestimate risk.

How to stop your lunch break damaging your health

Jeff Bray, Bournemouth University and Heather Hartwell, Bournemouth University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

If you’d like to pitch your own article idea to The Conversation, please contact either newsdesk@bournemouth.ac.uk or rbowen@bournemouth.ac.uk.

Eating out is bad for us. Studies have shown that food provided outside the home contains more calories and more fat, especially saturated fat. The trouble is, many of us are eating this food every day without really realising what’s in it.

In recent years great efforts have been taken to help us understand the composition of packaged food. The clear marking of allergens, ingredients lists and “traffic light” indicators on the front of packs show retail customers how much fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt are contained. However, there is an important gap in this admirable trend.

Those of us who eat our lunch in a workplace canteen find it a lot more difficult to access the kind of information that leads to informed choices. And canteens can play a critical role in terms of healthy eating. They are a captive, sometimes subsidised, setting that is often used to provide the main meal of the day. In effect, many of us are eating out five times a week without really acknowledging it.

Do you go for the healthy option?
Prostock-studio/Shutterstock

Right to know

So how many of us are using these canteens? Well, three quarters of workers in the UK stay at work over lunchtime, with 31% eating at a workplace canteen. That’s more than 7m of us. While nutritional and allergen labelling is now widespread in our supermarkets, workplace canteens rarely provide such information in an easily accessible format. Influencing dietary behaviour here could be instrumental in reducing employees’ risk of developing chronic diet related diseases such as type 2 diabetes or obesity. It should give companies and organisations healthier, happier and more productive employees.

The personal and economic benefits are clear. Health, simply put, can contribute to an organisation’s value. And we have got used to knowing: there is growing consumer interest in information on food eaten out of the home. This includes the nutritional content of dishes, the origin of ingredients and the presence of possible allergens. It could easily be argued that it is a fundamental right to know what we are eating.

New EU regulation requires the clear labelling of the presence of 14 allergens for pre-packaged food and food served. The 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, in the US goes further, requiring nutritional information to be posted in restaurants and large fast food chains. There are similar requirements in Ireland. However, more can be done in workplace canteens to ensure that diners are able to make informed choices. Where dish information is available, it is often not provided in a consumer-friendly way. Possibly as a consequence of this, studies have found that the increased presence of data is not always having a strong influence on consumer choice.

Reviewing the options.
SpeedKingz/Shutterstock

On the menu

So how can we change this? Currently, most information on food offered at work is printed out on a menu card or information board. If you’ve ever eaten in a canteen you will know how cursory the glances are from busy staff to these sources. And if you do take the time to look, the information is normally limited to a description of the dishes with little nutritional or other enhanced information available.

It means that each diner has to work hard to find the information that is relevant to them. After all, the ideal nutritional intake of a manual worker will be quite different than for staff who just push pens or hammer keyboards for a living. What is healthy for one diner might not be so ideal for the next. The need for a personalised approach to providing information is clear, and the solution might lie in our pockets.

Technology, most notably apps on our mobile phones, have been shown to have good potential for providing detailed but clear individualised information. People will happily interact with a well-designed bit of software where they wouldn’t hunt down the printed menu.

That is why a pan-European partnership between industry and academia has developed the FoodSMART project. This project is developing a smart phone app, which uses detailed dish data uploaded by the caterer to provide you with personalised information. You can tailor the information to your particular dietary requirements and preferences and it should allow the lunchtime crowd to assess their food intake precisely and efficiently. It can also make individual recommendations to help diners improve their health and well-being. All you have to do is scan a QR code with your phone to access the menu and all of this enhanced dish information.

Any initiative encouraging us to eat more “attentively” can help to reduce calorie intake. Enhanced information also allows those with food intolerances and specific dietary needs the freedom to eat away from home with ease. The millions of us who eat at a workplace canteen have been left in the dark while other initiatives help to shape our lifestyle choices. So whether you download an app, hunt down the menu cards or interrogate the canteen staff, it is probably time we did something about a five-day-a-week habit that could be damaging our health.

 

Recent publications in disability sport

In the past few weeks, I have been involved in two publications in the field of disability sports medicine that have been accepted for publication. The first is in Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine, and explored the differences in baseline concussion scores between athletes with and without disability (http://journals.lww.com/cjsportsmed/Abstract/publishahead/Do_Neurocognitive_SCAT3_Baseline_Test_Scores.99486.aspx). This study demonstrated that traditional ways of testing for concussion in athletes that already have a disability  are flawed, and is part of a larger PhD study which is evaluating this area.

The second study (which is not yet available online) was accepted by the journal “PM&R”, and is titled “Medication and supplement use in disability football world championships”. This builds on the work of one of the co-authors on this (Phillipe Tscholl), who has conducted extensive research into the overprescription of medications in elite sport (http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/5/9/e007608). Findings from our study were consistent with previous work in the area, and indicated that there were very high rates of prescribing anti-inflammatory medications.

Osman Ahmed, Faculty of Health and Social Sciences

14:Live presents- FoodSMART: Eat out smarter!

14:LIve

Have you ever considered what’s in your food when you’re eating out?

14:Live will be welcoming FoodSMART on 28 February, at 14:00-15:00.

FoodSMART is an innovative technical ICT solution which uses QR coding on your smartphone to provide nutritional information and deliver personalised advice when eating out. This means that consumers can make an informed choice about what they’re eating. The app can even be tailored to your individual dietary requirements or tastes.

It can be quite difficult to eat healthily when in a restaurant or cafe, as menus often give you limited information about the ingredients in a meal. By working with partners across Europe- nutritionists, chefs and other universities- the team have developed an app that can show exactly what is in your meal. The app gives consumers all the data they need and encourages the food service industry to support healthier eating.

Come along to Floor 5, of the Student Centre, on Talbot Campus to hear from Dr Heather Hartwell as she speaks all about the project and even get a chance to test out the prototype.

If you have any questions, then please contact Hannah Jones

Research photography competition: voting now open

RPC image

‘Can you convey the impact of your research in a single image?’  That’s the challenge we set BU academics and students this year. The overwhelming response saw researchers from across the university getting creative and utilising their photography skills.  The photos give just a small glimpse into some of the fantastic work our researchers are doing both here at BU and across the globe.

Researchers from across the university, working in areas as diverse as science, marketing, health and forensic investigation submitted images to the competition. Now we want your help to pick the winners!

To vote click on the ‘Vote’ button below your favourite image on this page. Or vote by liking an image via our Facebook album. Perhaps a particular research subject strikes a chord with you, or you find a certain image especially evocative – whatever your reason, the competition winners are for you to decide!

 The deadline for voting is 3 March and the winners will be announced in the Atrium Art Gallery on 9 March, by Vice-Chancellor Professor John Vinney.

The full exhibition will then be on display in the Atrium Art Gallery from Thursday 9 March until Wednesday 22 March, so drop by and take a look.

Deadline Extended: Machine Learning in Medical Diagnosis and Prognosis

The deadline has been extended to the 14th of April , 2017.

This is a call for papers for the Special Session on Machine Learning in Medical Diagnosis and Prognosis at IEEE CIBCB 2017.

The IEEE International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (IEEE CIBCB 2017) will be held at the INNSIDE Hotel, Manchester from August 23rd to 25th, 2017.

This annual conference has become a major technical event in the field of Computational Intelligence and its application to problems in biology, bioinformatics, computational biology, chemical informatics, bioengineering and related fields. The conference provides a global forum for academic and industrial scientists from a range of fields including computer science, biology, chemistry, medicine, mathematics, statistics, and engineering, to discuss and present their latest research findings from theory to applications.

The topics of interest for the special session include (but are not limited to):

  • Medical image classification
  • Medical image analysis
  • Expert systems for computer aided diagnosis and prognosis
  • Pattern recognition in the analysis of biomarkers for medical diagnosis
  • Deep learning in medical image processing and analysis
  • Ethical and Security issues in machine learning for medical diagnosis and prognosis

Up-to-date information and submission details can be found on the IEEE CIBCB 2017. The submission deadline is the 14th of April, 2017.

Please e-mail srostami@bournemouth.ac.uk with any questions.

What a philosopher and the Thirty Years War tell us about Donald Trump

Donald Nordberg, Bournemouth University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

If you’d like to pitch your own article idea to The Conversation, please contact either newsdesk@bournemouth.ac.uk or rbowen@bournemouth.ac.uk.

Michel Foucault, who died more than 30 years ago, has something to tell us about Donald Trump. The French philosopher once delivered a famous lecture which sought to explain why the people of Europe had done away with the warrior kings of the past and embraced a whole new way of running things. The US now has a president whose advisers announce that he has “a mandate to blow up norms of good governance”.

The extraordinary events of the past few weeks also brought to mind something I heard in private while working as a financial reporter. The CEO of a major multinational happily declared: “No one ever accused this company of being a democracy.”

The corporate sphere and the state have unique characteristics, of course, but Trump is bringing the preoccupations of one into the other. On his first full day in office, the White House CEO invited the CEOs of major US corporations to discuss the future governance of America. They of course come from a world where establishing good corporate governance has sometimes felt like pulling teeth. It will be intriguing to discover what good governance means for Trump.

Immigration rhetoric

We have an early clue. Trump’s executive order closing the border to citizens of seven, mainly Muslim states was quickly set aside by the courts. And like a CEO annoyed by an underling, Trump ranted on Twitter against judges. Was he not the “Leader of the Free World”? Was he not, as president of the first democracy of the modern era, carrying out the will of the people?

This vignette brings to mind Foucault’s view of governance, and that extraordinary dismantling of the concept of divine right for Europe’s monarchies.

The new form of governance that emerged was based on central administration, guided notionally by rational processes. Foucault recalled Machiavelli’s The Prince, where right choices sustain faith in the ruler’s absolute authority. Poor decisions might destroy it. In the Enlightenment, the start of the modern era, such faith transferred to the state.

An illustration of the siege of Nuremberg in 1638.
IgorGolovniov/Shutterstock

What happened between Machiavelli in the 16th century and the Enlightenment in the 18th, of course, was the Thirty-Years’ War of 1618-1648. Protestants and Catholics slaughtered each other over articles of faith that disguised the territorial ambitions of kings and princes. It sapped the legitimacy of monarchies, setting the stage for the unenlightened French Revolution. Democratic at first, it reverted to pre-modern barbarism, which ended only when Napoleon conquered much of Europe and declared himself Emperor.

But before that, modernism – what scholars like Foucault called the turn towards rationalism and scientific method in the Enlightenment era – had ushered in a truly enlightened revolution, the American one. The US Constitution adopted broad enfranchisement, which broadened further over the decades that followed, and created three co-equal branches of government to constrain a president from ruling by divine right.

Hacked off

Reading Foucault’s lecture a few years ago, I reflected on a big news story of that time: The News of the World, a British newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and directed by his son James, had hacked into the mobile phone messages of celebrities. Their protests did little to halt the practice.

But then its journalists hacked the mobile phone of a child who had vanished and was feared dead. Deleting voicemails, they led the family and police to conclude the girl was still alive – a runaway, not a victim.

After a popular outcry, the Murdochs closed the newspaper. They appeared before a parliamentary committee, on what the elder declared, ungrammatically, the “most humble day of my life”.

At that moment, I saw Rupert Murdoch as a Foucault-like version of Machiavelli’s prince, at great risk of forfeiting his “divine right” through the clumsy slaughter of his legitimacy. But Murdoch did not disintegrate. Indeed, he has retained and grown his empire. Now we learn that this corporate emperor was observing events as Trump gave an interview with Michael Gove for one of Murdoch’s titles, The Times.

Trump knows that many successful CEOs are indeed imperious. Murdoch built a small Australian newspaper into a global news and entertainment giant. The lack of external constraint – coupled with ambition, ideas and personal self-control – can create superior outcomes. But the evidence is mixed. Think of accounting scandals at Enron under CEO Jeffrey Skilling, or at Bernie Ebbers’ WorldCom.

And public governance is different from corporate governance. Consider this: markets constrain imperious CEOs when board structures and guidelines cannot – shareholders can sell and walk away. But the market in nationalities is very narrow, as the migrants controversy has underlined.

Trump has so far acted like the CEO of pre-modern corporate governance. He has sought to assert the “unfettered power” which the 1992 UK Cadbury Code sought to constrain at British companies. How it works in the boardroom echoes the checks and balances in the US Constitution.

Trump’s executive orders suggest a wilful, self-absorbed and self-justifying mentality of governance. It has clear echoes of the world of princes and the divine right of kings which the Thirty Years’ War destroyed and to which Foucault drew our attention. But the protests we have seen suggest many are not willing to return to governance that accepts anything like divine right.

There are large parts of US society – Trump’s supporters and doubtful but loyal Republicans – who think differently. Perhaps the “strong man”, with answers to all ills, still has an allure in our unfathomably complex world.

But if Trump pursues this path, he will find that dissatisfaction with both the rationalism of modernism and the intricacies of postmodernism isn’t strong enough to revert to pre-modern governance. Trump’s election may be a big moment in history; just not that big. We can hope so, at least. To put it another way, democracy rules: our ancestors’ rejection of the war-mongerers of 400 years ago is a legacy that will not be easily overturned.

The Conversation

Donald Nordberg, Associate Professor, Corporate Governance and Strategic Leadership, Bournemouth University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.