Disability questionnaires are increasingly used for clinical assessment, outcome measurement of treatment and research methodology of low back pain. Their use in different countries and cultural groups must follow certain guidelines for translation and cross-cultural adaptation. The translation of such an instrument must be tested for its reliability and validity to be applied and to allow comparability of data. The Oswestry Disability Index and the Roland-Morris Disability Questionnaire are two disability questionnaires most commonly used as outcome measures in patients with low back pain. The two questionnaires were translated for use with the Greek population, were back translated and tested, and became available in a final version. The Greek versions of the Oswestry Disability Index and the Roland-Morris Disability Questionnaire were tested in 697 patients with low back pain. Internal consistency reliability for the Greek translation of the Oswestry Disability Index and the Roland-Morris Disability Questionnaire reached a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.833 and 0.885 respectively. Face validity and content validity were ensured. Concurrent validity was assessed using a six-point pain scale as a criterion. The correlation of both scales was significant. The Greek translation of these disability questionnaires provided reliable and valid instruments for the evaluation of Greek-speaking patients with low back pain.

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Contemporary shifts in the nature of Intelligent Networks (IN) have both made the problem of IN load control increasingly important and have pointed towards agent technology as an appropriate solution to that problem. In this paper we present a Multi-agent System (MAS), comprised of intelligent, autonomous and self-interested agents, which makes use of a market-based approach to perform real-time control of IN traffic. The algorithm is assessed against the benchmark Automatic Call Gapping (ACG) algorithm; the agent implementation is assessed in terms of its suitability to market-based IN load control.Simulation results show that the algorithm is capable of better performance in terms of generated network revenue when compared against ACG. We conclude that the engineering abstraction provided by agents, coupled with the distribution of autonomous decision-making, give a better granularity for fine-grained control of network components.

This extended abstract introduces the concept and defines the requirements of time-aware agents, that is, agents capable of reasoning about temporal constraints placed on both agent-agent and human-agent interactions. Using this concept, a real-time architecture for time-aware agents is described and realised through a prototype implementation in the April programming language. This architecture re-engineers classical real-time concepts (such as the scheduler) by elevating them from operating system components to being agents in their own right. This enables time-aware agents to be applied to environments where humans and agents play equally active roles: firstly by making them aware of the different temporal nature of agent-agent and human-agent interactions, and secondly by reasoning about both in a uniform and seamless manner.

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