The effectiveness of antibacterial therapeutic clothing based on silver or chitosan as compared with non-antibacterial therapeutic clothing in patients with moderate to severe atopic dermatitis (ABC trial): study protocol for a pragmatic randomized controlled trial

Background: Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a chronic inflammatory skin disease that affects 10 to 20% of children and between 2 and 15% of the adults in Western Europe. Since 2000, therapeutic clothing or functional textiles based on silver or chitosan as antibacterial agents were introduced for AD. These agents aim to reduce skin colonization with...

Endolysin treatment against Staphylococcus aureus in adults with atopic dermatitis: A randomized controlled trial

Letter to the editor. Staphylococcus aureus density is increased in many patients with atopic dermatitis (AD) and is thought to contribute to disease pathogenesis, interacting with an altered skin barrier and immunologic changes.1 S aureus might induce or aggravate inflammation through different mechanisms, for example through excretion of...

Targeted anti-staphylococcal therapy with endolysins in atopic dermatitis and the effect on steroid use, disease severity and the microbiome: Study protocol for a randomized controlled trial (MAAS trial)

Background: Atopic dermatitis (AD) is associated with reduced skin microbial diversity and overgrowth of Staphylococcus (S.) aureus. However, the importance of S. aureus colonisation in the complex pathogenesis remains unclear and studies on the effect of anti-staphylococcal therapy in non-infected AD show contradictory results. Long-term...

The effects of integrating instrumental and affective arguments in rhetorical and testimonial health messages

Recent research highlights the superior influence of affect over cognition in health decision making. The present study examined the independent and combined effects of 2 message characteristics that are thought to tap into the cognition affect distinction: message format (rhetorical vs. testimonial) and argument type (instrumental vs. affective...

The influence of affective and cognitive arguments on message judgement and attitude change: The moderating effects of metabases and structural bases

This study investigated whether the efficacy of affective vs. cognitive persuasive messages was moderated by (1) individuals’ subjective assessments of whether their attitudes were based on affect or cognition (i.e. meta-bases) and (2) the degree individuals’ attitudes were correlated with affect and cognition (i.e. structural bases)....

The role of natural gas in smart grids

PowerMatching City (see ref. (Bliek et al., 2010)) is a living lab smart grid demonstration that shows the feasibility of a market based smart grid optimization methodology. It allows simultaneous optimization of multiple goals of the various stakeholders in a smart grid: in-home optimization, commercial optimization (VPP operation), congestion...

Architectural design and first results evaluation of the PowerMatching City field test

Starting from the beginning of 2010, in the EU FP6 Integral4 project, a large-scale SmartGrid field test with active participation of end-user installation nodes in the electricity network is running. A high-bandwidth dedicated ICTnetwork has been rolled-out to connect electricity supply and demand nodes and to collect data. In the test, the...

Automatic content linking: Speech-based just-in-time retrieval for multimedia archives

The Automatic Content Linking Device monitors a conversation and uses automatically recognized words to retrieve documents that are of potential use to the participants. The document set includes project related reports or emails, transcribed snippets of past meetings, and websites. Retrieval results are displayed at regular intervals. © 2010 ACM.

A cocktail approach to the VideoCLEF'09 linking task

In this paper, we describe the TNO approach to the Finding Related Resources or linking task of VideoCLEF09. Our system consists of a weighted combination of off-the-shelf and proprietary modules, including the Wikipedia Miner toolkit of the University of Waikato. Using this cocktail of largely off-the-shelf technology allows for setting a...

Market optimization of a cluster of DG-RES, micro-CHP, heat pumps and energy storage within network constraints: The Power Matching City field test

The share of renewable energy resources for electricity production, in a distributed setting (DG-RES), increases. The amount of energy transported via the electricity grid by substitution of fossil fuels for mobility applications (electric vehicles) and domestic heating (heat pumps) increases as well. Apart from the volume of electricity also...

PowerMatching city, a living lab smart grid demonstration

PowerMatching City is a living lab Smart Grid demonstration in the Netherlands consisting of 25 interconnected households (phase-I). It focuses on the development of a market model for intelligent network operation under normal market conditions that allows simultaneous in-home optimization (prosumer), technical coordination (distribution system...

A multimedia retrieval system using speech input

The AMIDA Automatic Content Linking Device (ACLD) monitors a conversation using automatic speech recognition (ASR), and uses the detected words to retrieve documents that are of potential use to the participants in the conversation. The document set that is available includes project related documents such as reports, memos or emails, as well as...

Heat buffers improve capacity and exploitation degree of geothermal energy sources

This research focuses on the role of heat buffers to support optimal use of combinations of traditional and renewable heat sources like geothermal heat for greenhouse heating. The objective was to determine the contribution of heat buffers to effective new combinations of resources that satisfy greenhouse heat, carbon dioxide and electricity...

De moderne mens en het binnenklimaat. Bouwen aan een duurzaam (binnen)klimaat (2)

Mensen brengen sinds het begin van de twintigste eeuw steeds meer tijd door in gebouwen en stellen steeds meer eisen aan het binnenklimaat. Vanuit de oorspronkelijke functie om te overleven in de winter zijn gebouwen steeds belangrijker en groter geworden. Daardoor wordt het handhaven van een gezond binnenklimaat steeds complezer. Aandacht voor...

De moderne mens en het binnenklimaat. Bouwen aan een duurzaam (binnen)klimaat

Mensen brengen sinds het begin van de 20e eeuw steeds meer tijd door in gebouwen en stellen steeds meer eisen aan het binnenklimaat. Vanuit de oorspronkelijke functie om te overleven in de winter zijn gebouwen steeds belangrijker en groter geworden. Daardoor wordt het handhaven van een gezond binnenklimaat steeds complexer

Toegankelijkheid van de ouder- en kindzorg voor Marokkaanse en Turkse gezinnen