Long-term care residents who have a dementia diagnosis could account for as much 50% of a nursing home's population. Often residents with dementia experience a distressing behavioral symptom that affects the resident experiencing the symptom(s), other nursing home residents, visitors, and staff. The Closing Group intervention was developed as a nonpharmacological alternative that aims to reduce agitation and anxiety, increase socialization, decrease restraint use, and decrease antipsychotic drug use for selected residents with a dementia diagnosis. The program was based on an understanding of the contributing factors to agitation and anxiety, the nursing home environment as it relates to behavior, and the offering of resident-driven recreational activities. The purpose of this 2-year study was, with use of multiple measures, to examine the extent to which the Closing Group intervention has met its goals. A sample of 16 long-term care residents was offered attendance at the group. Findings in the area of reducing agitation and anxiety were encouraging to the extent that further study with larger samples is needed.

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This paper presents the application of principal components analysis for Taguchi orthogonal experiments to develop a robust electron beam welding treatment (EBWT) process with high efficiency multiple performance characteristics (MPCs). In this study, the principal components analysis (PCA) design incorporating the correlation matrix of tested trials is employed. In the first step, the MPCs are reduced to two independent components using PCA. Both components accounted for 98.8% of the total variance. The first principal component (PC), which refers to the integrated hardening capability index of the EBWT process, accounts for 70.7% of the total variation. The remaining 28.1% were contributed by the second PC, which can be interpreted as the penetration capability index. In the second step, we identify the most important PC loading vectors using PCA, and estimate the importance of the PCs. By using PCA, relationships between different MPCs can be investigated and the most important factors for the variance of the EBWT process can be identified.The experimental results show that redundant information could be eliminated by using principal components in conjunction with Taguchi's orthogonal array experiments. This proposed approach is simple, effective, and efficient for developing a robust and high-efficiency EBWT process of high quality. In this study, the MPCs in the EBWT process are successfully optimized.Keywords Electron beam welding treatment (EBWT) 9 Multiple performance characteristic (MPC) 9 Optimization 9 Principal components analysis (PCA)