The primary aims of this study were (1) to evaluate whole-body mechanical efficiency (ME) in a large group of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients with a wide range of degrees of illness and (2) to examine how ME in COPD is related to absolute work rate and indices of disease severity …

Global awareness on energy consumption and the environmental impacts of fossil fuels boost actions and create more supportive policies towards sustainable energy systems, in the last energy outlook, by the International Energy Agency, it was forecasted totals of 3600 GW from 2016 to 2040 of global deployment …

Objective The evaluation of voice quality is a major component of voice assessment. The aim of the present study was to develop a new multivariate acoustic model for the evaluation of breathiness. Method Concatenated voice samples of continuous speech and the sustained vowel [a:] from 970 subjects …

In this paper, we report on interview data collected from 14 Deaf leaders across seven countries (Australia, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States) regarding their perspectives on signed language interpreters. Using a semi-structured survey questionnaire, …

Out-of-school science educational activities, such as school visits to a science center, aim at stimulating pupils’ science talent. Science talent is a developmental potential that takes the form of talented behaviors such as curiosity and conceptual understanding. This dissertation investigates whether …

Tinto’s integration theory has highly influenced research on student success in Europe and America. However, due to the complexity of the theory and the enormous amount of variables, the theory is not suitable for use in regular evaluations in higher education. By including only the best-proven predictive …

As part of my PhD research, I investigate the influence of the use of social media by first year students in higher education. In this research I have lessened the amount of variables, from Tinto’s theory, by including only the best-proven predictive variables, based on previous studies. Hereby, avoiding …

Rationale: The number of obese older adults with diabetes type 2 is increasing worldwide. Weight loss treatment in this group seems beneficial for cardio-metabolic and other health outcomes, but it might reduce muscle mass and bone mineral density (BMD). The association between obesity and BMD is controversial, …

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: The MyotonPRO is a portable device that measures muscle tone and biomechanical muscle properties objectively. MyotonPRO has already proven to be effective in measuring muscle properties in healthy and diseased populations. However, to the best of our knowledge, it has never been …

Raising the literacy levels of young children is a major concern in many countries for which various programmes have been suggested. One of these is family literacy programmes. In previous meta-analyses wide variability in effects has been found and it has been suggested that this is partly caused by …