Acceptability, engagement and exploratory outcomes and costs of a co-designed intervention to support children of parents with a mental illness: Mixed-methods evaluation and descriptive analysis

Children whose parents have a mental illness are much more likely to experience mental health problems and other adverse long-term impacts. Child-centred psychosocial interventions can be effective, but not much is known about how to design and implement them in different settings. A pre-post, mixed methods, single-arm evaluation of a co-designed social support intervention with parents and children (4-18 years) measured parents' mental health (PHQ-9), perceived social support (ENRICHD), parental self-efficacy (PSAM) and children's mental health (SDQ), quality of life (Kidscreen-27), and child service use (CAMHSRI-EU) at baseline and 6 months. Qualitative data were gathered at 6 months to explore parents' and children's experience with the intervention. Twenty-nine parents and 21 children completed baseline and follow-up questionnaires; 22 parents and 17 children participated in interviews. Parents' depression (MD -1.36, SD 8.08), perceived social support (MD 1, SD 5.91), and children's mental health potentially improved, and children's service use and costs potentially reduced (€224.6 vs. €122.2, MD 112.4). Parental self-efficacy was potentially reduced (MD -0.11, SD 3.33). The sample was too small to perform statistical analysis. Favourable themes emerged describing the high satisfaction with the intervention, parents' improved understanding of the impact of their mental health problems on children, and improvements in parent-child relationships. This study contributes to an emerging evidence base for co-designed child-centred interventions to prevent the transgenerational transmission of poor mental health.

Optical parallel database management system for page oriented holographic memeories

Current data recall rates from page oriented holographic memories far exceed the ability of electronics toeven read or transmit the data. For database management, we must not only read those data but also query them-computationally, a far more complex task. That task is very severe for electronics. We show here the rudiments of an optical system that can do most of the query operations in parallel in optics, leaving the burden for electronics significantly less. Even here, electronics is the ultimate speed limiter. Nevertheless, we can query data far faster in our optical/electronic system than any purely electronic system.

Fractional discrete Fourier transforms

Direct calculation of fractional Fourier transforms from the expressions derived for their optical implementation is laborious. An extension of the discrete Fourier transform would have only O(N(2)) computational complexity. We define such a system, offer a general way to compute the fractional discrete Fourier transform matrix, and numerically validate the algorithm.

Optical syntactic pattern recognition by fuzzy scoring

A novel syntactic approach is introduced to treat particular problems in pattern recognition. The procedure is implemented by the use of optical correlation methods for identifying the various primitives that appear in the input pattern, and their importance is determined by fuzzy relational scoring. Robust pattern recognition with tolerance to normal variations is demonstrated, indicating an efficient new approach for optical pattern recognition.