This paper describes a flexible, cost-effective, wireless in-home activity monitoring system for assisting patients with cognitive impairments due to traumatic brain injury (TBI). The system locates the subject with fixed home sensors and classifies early morning bathroom activities of daily living with a wearable wireless accelerometer. The system extracts time-and frequencydomain features from the accelerometer data and classifies these features with a hybrid classifier that combines Gaussian mixture models and a finite state machine. In particular, the paper establishes that despite similarities between early morning bathroom activities of daily living, it is possible to detect and classify these activities with high accuracy. It also discusses system training and provides data to show that with proper feature selection, accurate detection and classification are possible for any subject with no subject specific training.

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At Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas, we began performing lithotripsy with the Medstone STS lithotripter for gallstones in January 1988 and in the first year treated 81 patients. Fifty-five of these patients were available for 4-month follow-up. We randomized half of the patients to receive ursodeoxycholic acid for 7 days prior to lithotripsy and gave all of the patients ursodeoxycholic acid after lithotripsy. Only 10.4 percent of the patients who contacted us ultimately proved to be candidates for lithotripsy. Gallstone fragmentation occurred in 95 percent of all patients and in 97 percent of those patients with solitary stones under 20 mm in size. The rate of clearance for solitary stones less than 20 mm in size was 50 percent. Unfavorable effects ascribable to lithotripsy were infrequent. All of the patients had pain before treatment, and one-third complained of biliary colic after treatment. Minor skin bruising which resolved in 1 to 5 days was found in 20 percent of the patients. This study lends credence to the findings of previous studies and demonstrates that lithotripsy combined with bile acid therapy is a useful therapy for cholelithiasis.

Laparoscopy has been used in surgical procedures more frequently in the past decade because it reduces postoperative pain, decreases the length of hospitalization, decreases the duration of disability, and provides a better cosmetic result. We retrospectively reviewed our experience with laparoscopic colon surgery at Baylor University Medical Center. Since 1995, we have done 17 procedures, including 10 colon resections and 7 colostomies. The results in these patients have been quite good: only 1 patient was converted to an open procedure, and the remaining 16 patients experienced no mortality, major morbidity, or wound infection.