A double-blind randomized placebo-controlled study of inhaled marijuana smoke on postural responses was performed in 10 adult patients with spastic multiple sclerosis (MS) and 10 normal volunteers matched as closely as possible for age, sex, and weight. A computer-controlled dynamic posturographic platform with a video line scan camera measured shoulder displacement in response to pseudorandom platform movements. Premarijuana smoking patient tracking was inferior to that of the normal volunteers as indicated by the higher noise variance of the former. Smoking one marijuana cigarette containing 1.54% delta 9-tetrahydrocannabinol increased postural tracking error in both the patients and normal control subjects with both eyes open and closed; this untoward effect was greatest for the patients. The tracking error was also accompanied by a decrease in response speed for the patients with their eyes closed. Marijuana smoking further impairs posture and balance in patients with spastic MS.

Neonatal spells are cardiorespiratory events that occur in newborn infants with variable combinations of cessation of breathing, decrease in blood oxygen saturation and decrease in heart rate. A system using real-time temporal analysis of physiological data streams to accurately detect pauses in breathing together with changes in heart rate and blood oxygen saturation is described. The system uses a multidimensional online health analytics environment that supports the acquisition, transmission and real-time processing of high volume, high rate data. A family of algorithms has been developed using IBM Infosphere Streams, a scalable middleware component for analysing multiple streams of data in real-time. Respiratory pauses are identified by accurately detecting breaths and by calculating the time interval since the last breath. Changes in heart rate and blood oxygen saturation are identified by both threshold breaches and the detection of relative change. The algorithms detect relative change by assessing a sliding normal baseline and generating alerts when values fall out of range. The output of these algorithms has been shown to detect clinically significant relative changes in both heart rate and blood oxygen saturation in a single use case study. The specificity of the algorithm is 98.5%; the sensitivity is 100%. Future research will focus on the application of these algorithms for the assessment and classification of neonatal spells.

Neonatal spells are cardiorespiratory events that occur in newborn infants with variable combinations of cessation of breathing, decrease in blood oxygen saturation and decrease in heart rate. A system using real-time temporal analysis of physiological data streams to accurately detect pauses in breathing and changes in heart rate and oxygen saturation for classifying neonatal spells is described. The system uses a multidimensional online health analytics environment that supports the acquisition, transmission and real-time processing of high volume, high rate data. A family of algorithms has been developed using IBM InfoSphere Streams, a scalable middleware component for analysing multiple streams of data in real-time. Respiratory pauses are identified by accurately detecting breaths and calculating time intervals between breaths. Changes in heart rate and blood oxygen saturation are identified by both threshold breaches and the detection of relative change by assessing a sliding baseline and generating alerts when values fall out of range. Events detected in individual signals are synced together based on timestamps and assessed using a classifier based on clinical rules to determine a classification of neonatal spells. The output of these algorithms has been shown, in a single use case study with 24 hours of patient data, to detect clinically significant events in heart rate, blood oxygen saturation and pauses in breathing. The accuracy for detecting these is 97.8%, 98.3% and 98.9% respectively. The accuracy for determining spells classifications is 98.9%. Future research will focus on the clinical validation of these algorithms.