Kinect-based choice reaching and stepping reaction time tests for clinical and in-home assessment of fall risk in older people: a prospective study

Background

Quick protective reactions such as reaching or stepping are important to avoid a fall or minimize injuries. We developed Kinect-based choice reaching and stepping reaction time tests (Kinect-based CRTs) and evaluated their ability to differentiate between older fallers and non-fallers and the feasibility of administering them at home.

Methods

A total of 94 community-dwelling older people were assessed on the Kinect-based CRTs in the laboratory and were followed-up for falls for 6 months. Additionally, a subgroup (n?=?20) conducted the Kinect-based CRTs at home. Signal processing algorithms were developed to extract features for reaction, movement and the total time from the Kinect skeleton data.

Results

Nineteen participants (20.2 %) reported a fall in the 6 months following the assessment. The reaction time (fallers: 797?±?136 ms, non-fallers: 714?±?89 ms), movement time (fallers: 392?±?50 ms, non-fallers: 358?±?51 ms) and total time (fallers: 1189?±?170 ms, non-fallers: 1072?±?109 ms) of the reaching reaction time test differentiated well between the fallers and non-fallers. The stepping reaction time test did not significantly discriminate between the two groups in the prospective study. The correlations between the laboratory and in-home assessments were 0.689 for the reaching reaction time and 0.860 for stepping reaction time.

Conclusion

The study findings indicate that the Kinect-based CRT tests are feasible to administer in clinical and in-home settings, and thus represents an important step towards the development of sensor-based fall risk self-assessments. With further validation, the assessments may prove useful as a fall risk screen and home-based assessment measures for monitoring changes over time and effects of fall prevention interventions.

     

Die europäische Schuldenkrise als Schub systemischer Vergesellschaftung: Von Partizipationsversprechen zu Partizipationszwang

The article presents a sociological conceptualization of the dealing with the recent sovereign debt crisis in the European Monetary Union (EMU), which is reconstructed as a push of “sociation” (vergesellschaftung in Simmel’s sense) that maneuvered populations of indebted states into de facto contractual obligations vis-à-vis their states’ creditors. Seen from this perspective, the sovereign debt crisis has led to an, if highly ambivalent, deepening of European “integration”. The article suggests a combination of Habermas’s distinction between system and life-world, which enables an interpretation of contract-like relationships as systemic mode of integration potentially harking back on the life-world, with David Graeber’s emphasis on the asymmetrical and hierarchical processes of sociation inherent in contractualized and marketized creditor-debtor relationships. Far from postulating an evolutionary development of processes of debt-related sociation that might be associated with the modernization-theoretical proclivities in Habermas’s theory, the article analyzes the role of financial market publics in creating a structure of legitimation that supported the political interpretation of the financial crisis as a sovereign debt crisis in the EMU, thus bestowing justification on the treatment of populations as “debtors of last resort”.     

THE AGENCY OF POLITICS AND SCIENCE

We study a principal‐agent relationship between a politician and a researcher that captures stylized facts regarding the involvement of politics into scientific research. The politician has some ideal policy that he would like to implement, but needs to contract with a researcher to choose a policy that is supported by scientific advice. We study the implemented contracts under symmetric and under asymmetric information about the researcher's ability and concern for reputation, and discuss with which types of researchers the politician will contract. We identify several conflicts between the interests of voters and those of the politician. (JEL D72, D82, D83)     

Antecedents and effects of individual ambidexterity – A cross-level investigation of exploration and exploitation activities at the employee level

For long-term success, companies need to adapt to technological and environmental change. Organizational ambidexterity, which balances the exploration of new opportunities with the exploitation of existing capabilities, is increasingly viewed as a promising approach to tackle this challenge. However, despite the important role of individuals for firms' ambidexterity and performance, evidence on how exploration of new opportunities and exploitation of existing capabilities are triggered at an individual level and on their subsequent effects on overall performance is still lacking. Accordingly, the present research shifts the focus from organizational ambidexterity to individual ambidexterity. Based on data from 415 employees, the results of structural equation modeling show that both organizational architecture and organizational context can be used to induce individual ambidexterity. Furthermore, positive performance effects of individual ambidexterity across different organizational levels, namely the team and department levels, are confirmed.     

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Existing research on categorical ambiguity has mostly examined how consumers assimilate new products into familiar product categories. Extending these findings, this research investigates whether and under what circumstances consumers either create new mental categories for hybrid products or integrate them into existing categories. Specifically, we propose that this effect is influenced by the degree of product ambiguity and the availability of a new category label. We find that as ambiguity increases, the probability of new category creation augments, but product evaluation deteriorates. However, we also find that a new category label can reduce the effects of ambiguity and can improve product evaluation. Thus, the results fill the existing gap in research on the cognitive integration of hybrid products and shed light on how managers may position these products successfully.     

Stigmatisation of elite actors in corporate scandals: The role of meaning making in the media

Corporate scandals sometimes result in social devaluation and stigma for elite actors. This paper explores the linkage between the meaning-making processes that pertain to corporate scandals in the media and the outcome of stigma in two Swedish cases: the Skandia and ABB scandals. Several discursive strategies are identified that support two meaning-making processes that mediate between corporate acts and the stigmatisation of elite actors: the labelling of the acts as illegitimate and the transformation of the illegitimate act into evidence of some deeply discrediting attributes of elite organisational actors. The paper contributes to the literature on stigmatisation by elaborating on the concept of scandal-induced stigmatisation of elite actors, integrating a more sophisticated understanding of discursive legitimation, and introducing the characteristics of meaning making in the media as a mechanism that links corporate acts to the stigmatisation of elite corporate actors.