Tagged / bu briefing

BU Briefing – Mii-vitaliSe: Using Nintendo Wii™ to increase activity levels, vitality and well-being in people with multiple sclerosis.

Our BU briefing papers are designed to make our research outputs accessible and easily digestible so that our research findings can quickly be applied – whether to society, culture, public policy, services, the environment or to improve quality of life. They have been created to highlight research findings and their potential impact within their field. 

The benefits of physical activity for people with multiple sclerosis (MS) have been recognised. Physical activity has been shown to be associated with improvements in mobility, muscle strength and physical fitness. Other secondary benefits might include reduced fatigue, depression and anxiety and improved sense of wellbeing.

This research team have developed a home-based physiotherapist supported Nintendo Wii™ intervention (‘Mii-vitaliSe’) for people with MS that uses commercial software. This is a pilot study to explore the feasibility of conducting a full scale clinical and cost-effectiveness trial of Mii-vitaliSe.

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For more information about the research, contact Sarah Thomas at saraht@bournemouth.ac.uk.
To find out how your research output could be turned into a BU Briefing, contact research@bournemouth.ac.uk.

BU Briefing – Locating the ‘third voice’: participatory film making and the everyday in rural India.

Our BU briefing papers are designed to make our research outputs accessible and easily digestible so that our research findings can quickly be applied – whether to society, culture, public policy, services, the environment or to improve quality of life. They have been created to highlight research findings and their potential impact within their field. 

This research reflects on practice-led research involving a community video project in southern India – Andhra Pradesh. Four of the women involved in this project were asked if they would use their cameras to film their everyday lives.

The aim of this paper was to build on current practice by combining participatory filmmaking with traditional observational documentary techniques and video diary interviews to locate a ‘third voice’ in order to create an engaging narrative and new perspectives on life in rural India.

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For more information about the research, contact Dr Sue Sudbury at smsudbury@bournemouth.ac.uk.
To find out how your research output could be turned into a BU Briefing, contact research@bournemouth.ac.uk.

BU Briefing – An action research approach to informing institutional e-Learning policy

Our BU briefing papers are designed to make our research outputs accessible and easily digestible so that our research findings can quickly be applied – whether to society, culture, public policy, services, the environment or to improve quality of life. They have been created to highlight research findings and their potential impact within their field. 

With the European 2020 digital competence framework designed to address the huge EU digital skills gap, Higher Education Institutions have been challenged to incorporate these digital skills and facilitate institutional change towards enhancing technological learning.

This study describes a two‑spiral action research approach to explore the experience of one university and evaluates their approach to inform institutional e-Learning policy to meet the UK workforce gap in digital skills of workers.

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For more information about the research, contact Dr Gelareh Roushan at groushan@bournemouth.ac.uk, Professor Debbie Holley at dholley@bournemouth.ac.uk or David Biggins at dbiggins@bournemouth.ac.uk.
To find out how your research output could be turned into a BU Briefing, contact research@bournemouth.ac.uk.

BU Briefing – Comparing efficiency in reducing adult cancer in the UK & 20 Western countries

Our BU briefing papers are designed to make our research outputs accessible and easily digestible so that our research findings can quickly be applied – whether to society, culture, public policy, services, the environment or to improve quality of life. They have been created to highlight research findings and their potential impact within their field. 

The response to medical advances, greater expectations, extended longevity and the rising cost of health care, especially for cancer, means health inflation raises almost 3% p.a. and has meant that every Western nation has the need to devote considerably more of its ‘national income’ (gross domestic product) to healthcare.

So, how efficient is the UK in reducing adult (55–74) cancer mortality rates and total mortality rates compared to the other 21 similar socio-economic Western countries?

In this paper, efficiency ratios were calculated by dividing reduced mortality over the period by the average percentage of national income spent on healthcare.

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For more information about the research, contact Professor Colin Pritchard at cpritchard@bournemouth.ac.uk, Tamas Hickish at thickish@bournemouth.ac.uk or Emily Rosenorn-Lanng at elanng@bournemouth.ac.uk.
To find out how your research output could be turned into a BU Briefing, contact research@bournemouth.ac.uk.

BU Briefing – Exploiting temporal stability and low-rank structure for motion capture data refinement

Our BU briefing papers are designed to make our research outputs accessible and easily digestible so that our research findings can quickly be applied – whether to society, culture, public policy, services, the environment or to improve quality of life. They have been created to highlight research findings and their potential impact within their field. 

In recent years, motion capture data (mocap) have been widely used in computer games, film production and sport sciences. The great success of animated and animation enhanced feature films, such as Avatar, provide compelling evidence for the values of mocap techniques. However, even with the most expensive commercial mocap systems, there are still instances where noise and missing data are inevitable.

This paper examines the motion refinement problem and presents an effective framework to solve it, demonstrated by extensive experiments on both synthetic and real data. The experiment shows that the proposed method outperforms all competitors not only in predicting missing values but also in de-noising most of the time.

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For more information about the research, contact Dr Xiaosong Yang at xyang@bournemouth.ac.uk or Professor Jian Jun Zhang at jzhang@bournemouth.ac.uk.
To find out how your research output could be turned into a BU Briefing, contact research@bournemouth.ac.uk.

BU Briefing – Media literacy: The UK’s undead cultural policy

Our BU briefing papers are designed to make our research outputs accessible and easily digestible so that our research findings can quickly be applied – whether to society, culture, public policy, services, the environment or to improve quality of life. They have been created to highlight research findings and their potential impact within their field. 

The Communications Act 2003 requires the UK’s media regulator Ofcom to promote ‘media literacy’, although it left the term undefined. In response to the new legislation, the regulator espoused a deliberately generalised definition, but one that never became a meaningful measure of its own policy work.

This paper investigates how Ofcom managed this regulatory duty from 2003 onwards. It explores how the promotion of media literacy was progressively reduced in scope over time as its funding was incrementally withdrawn. Media literacy in 2016 may be characterised as one of the zombies of cultural policy: an instrument devoid of its original life but continuing in a limited state of animation governed by other policy priorities.

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For more information about the research, contact Dr Richard Wallis at rwallis@bournemouth.ac.uk.
To find out how your research output could be turned into a BU Briefing, contact research@bournemouth.ac.uk.

BU Briefing – Trophic positioning of meiofauna revealed by stable isotopes & food web analyses

Our BU briefing papers are designed to make our research outputs accessible and easily digestible so that our research findings can quickly be applied – whether to society, culture, public policy, services, the environment or to improve quality of life. They have been created to highlight research findings and their potential impact within their field. 

This paper examines seasonal food webs of the invertebrates inhabiting the streambed of the chalk River Lambourn in England. Researchers conducted analyses of gut content (a dietary “snapshot”) of macro and meiofauna, as well as stable isotope analyses (determines the feeding links of an organism as it reflects its assimilated diet) of meiofauna to examine seasonal food webs of the chalk stream.

This study stresses the importance of temporal variations in food and consumer species composition for a comprehensive understanding of food web structure, asserted by similar changes in trophic structure depicted by gut content and stable isotope analyses.

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For more information about the research, contact Professor Genoveva Esteban at gesteban@bournemouth.ac.uk 
To find out how your research output could be turned into a BU Briefing, contact research@bournemouth.ac.uk.

 

BU Briefing – Parametric investigations to enhance thermal performance of paraffin

Our BU briefing papers are designed to make our research outputs accessible and easily digestible so that our research findings can quickly be applied – whether to society, culture, public policy, services, the environment or to improve quality of life. They have been created to highlight research findings and their potential impact within their field. 

Research and development in clean energy technologies is a direct response to the need of generating 50% of energy requirements through renewable sources by 2050 as set by the EU initiative. Renewable energy sources have significant potentials to address key issues in terms of depleting natural energy resources, rocketing energy prices and security.

This paper introduces a two-dimensional finite element computational model which investigates thermal behaviour of a novel geometrical configuration of shell and tube based latent heat storage (LHS) system. It also presents an insight into how to augment the thermal behaviour of paraffin based LHS system which helped inform novel design solutions for wide-ranging practical utilisation in both domestic and commercial heat storage applications.

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For more information about the research, contact Professor Zulfiqar Khan at zkhan@bournemouth.ac.uk or Kamran Tabeshf at KTabeshf@bournemouth.ac.uk.
To find out how your research output could be turned into a BU Briefing, contact research@bournemouth.ac.uk.

BU Briefing – Fatigue management programme for people with multiple sclerosis

Our BU briefing papers are designed to make our research outputs accessible and easily digestible so that our research findings can quickly be applied – whether to society, culture, public policy, services, the environment or to improve quality of life. They have been created to highlight research findings and their potential impact within their field. 

The manualised group-based programme called FACETS (Fatigue: Applying Cognitive behavioural and Energy effectiveness Techniques to lifeStyle) is a conceptual framework integrating elements from cognitive behavioural, social-cognitive, energy effectiveness, self-management and self-efficacy theories. The aim of the intervention is to help people with multiple sclerosis (MS) normalise their fatigue experiences, learn helpful ways of thinking about fatigue and use available energy more effectively.

This paper presents the results from one year follow-up data obtained from a pragmatic three-centre trial of FACETS.

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For more information about the research, contact Professor Peter Thomas at pthomas@bournemouth.ac.uk or Roger Baker at rbaker@bournemouth.ac.uk.
To find out how your research output could be turned into a BU Briefing, contact research@bournemouth.ac.uk.

BU Briefing – Environmental hydro-refugium by vegetation vigour in the Okavango Delta

Our BU briefing papers are designed to make our research outputs accessible and easily digestible so that our research findings can quickly be applied – whether to society, culture, public policy, services, the environment or to improve quality of life. They have been created to highlight research findings and their potential impact within their field. 

Climate shifts at decadal scales can have environmental consequences, and therefore, identifying areas that act as environmental refugia is valuable in understanding future climate variability.

The Okavango Delta is the largest wetland in southern Africa and renowned for its high floral and faunal biodiversity. Due to the Okavango’s distinctive hydrological properties, this paper aims to show how these properties reduce the amplitude of seasonal and decadal variations in vegetation vigour inside the Delta extent, and consequently, enhance its capacity to buffer climate, on at least decadal timescales.

This paper uses satellite remote imagery to show how a rift basin, given suitable hydrogeology, can provide a buffer against the influence of climate on vegetation growth and thus provide a relatively stable living environment for animals amidst an otherwise arid, desert habitat.

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For more information about the research, contact Dr Sally Reynolds at sreynolds@bournemouth.ac.uk or Professor Matthew Bennett at mbennett@bournemouth.ac.uk.
To find out how your research output could be turned into a BU Briefing, contact research@bournemouth.ac.uk.

BU Briefing – Lawfare in Hybrid Wars

Our BU briefing papers are designed to make our research outputs accessible and easily digestible so that our research findings can quickly be applied – whether to society, culture, public policy, services, the environment or to improve quality of life. They have been created to highlight research findings and their potential impact within their field. 

Hybrid Warfare as a method of war is not new. Hybrid Warfare as a method of warfare has its roots in methods of war fighting of past conflicts; while not necessarily new as a category of conflict, it has the potential to change the future conceptualisation of conflict.

This paper introduces the reader to the mutating military concept of Hybrid Warfare and Lawfare, the use of law as a weapon. By examining several present and past examples, the paper tries to foster discussion and thought on how to use Lawfare affirmatively in support of own objectives and to prevent opponents from successfully using law maliciously for their own purposes and objectives.

It also includes some reflection on The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) open source perspective on ‘Hybrid Threats’.

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For more information about the research, contact Dr Sascha-Dominik Bachmann at sbachmann@bournemouth.ac.uk.
To find out how your research output could be turned into a BU Briefing, contact research@bournemouth.ac.uk.

BU Briefing – It was only a mild concussion

Our BU briefing papers are designed to make our research outputs accessible and easily digestible so that our research findings can quickly be applied – whether to society, culture, public policy, services, the environment or to improve quality of life. They have been created to highlight research findings and their potential impact within their field.

Sports concussion has been the subject of much discourse in the scientific literature and mainstream media for many years. Major national and international sporting events are extensively covered by the media, with vast numbers of column inches and webpages dedicated to summarising these events. The frequency of concussion in some of the world’s biggest sports such as soccer, football, and rugby means that many of these concussive events which occur in high-profile competitions are also the focus of this reporting.

This paper analyses the descriptions of online sports concussion news on a global scale, using a search engine to retrieve news stories, and evaluates the media’s role in shaping public perception and misconception regarding concussion in sport. Further analysis sought to identify geographical patterns associated with different descriptions of sports concussion.

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For more information about the research, contact Dr Osman Ahmed at ahmedo@bournemouth.ac.uk.
To find out how your research output could be turned into a BU Briefing, contact research@bournemouth.ac.uk.

BU Briefing – Understanding Afghan healthcare providers

Our BU briefing papers are designed to make our research outputs accessible and easily digestible so that our research findings can quickly be applied – whether to society, culture, public policy, services, the environment or to improve quality of life. They have been created to highlight research findings and their potential impact within their field. 

This paper focuses on the perspectives of Afghan healthcare providers on their roles, experiences, values and motivations, and the impact this has on the quality of care for perinatal women and their newborn babies.  To understand their perspectives , the researchers undertook a six-week observation – including interviews and focus groups – to analyse the culture of a maternity hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan.

This research study offers multiple insights into Afghan healthcare provider behaviour and reveals complex interrelated issues that affect care in this setting.  It is one of few international studies that explore care from the perspective of healthcare providers in their cultural and social environment.  It reveals that understanding the context of healthcare is crucial to understanding behaviour and the underlying problems to quality of care.

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For more information about the research, contact Professor Edwin van Teijlingen at evteijlingen@bournemouth.ac.uk or Immy Holloway at ihollowa@bournemouth.ac.uk. 
To find out how your research output could be turned into a BU Briefing, contact research@bournemouth.ac.uk.