This paper presents partial findings of a larger research project focusing on what it means to live with a chronic illness. Getting in harmony with oneself is a movement towards, and a form of, acceptance of the chronic suffering and disease. Some patients achieve this level of acceptance, while for others the obstacles of everyday life make this movement towards acceptance difficult. Achieving harmony with oneself is conditioned by the existence of hope and spirit of life/life courage and by the pressure of doubts on this hope. Doubts can shake this hope so that instead of moving towards acceptance, the patient drifts towards hopelessness and despair. The research design is qualitative and uses a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach. A total of 18 patients were interviewed, divided into three groups of six patients diagnosed with 'type I' diabetes, colitis ulcerosa and patients with coronary occlusion in the rehabilitation phase. The goal of the research was to derive patterns/themes common to the three diagnosed groups regarding the patients' view of health and disease in connection with chronic illness and to elucidate the significance of this view for how the patients coped with everyday life. The research method is inspired by Paul Ricoeur.

This study shows that self-responsibility and self-control are meaningful values in the activities and decisions of everyday life. Dignity and being respected as an individual are closely connected to being able to manage on one's own and being independent of others' help. The study also shows that including other people into one's life situation can be an important sign of self-management. However, the critical interpretation shows that it is the view of the human being which determines whether help from others and self-managing on one's own can be combined. With a relational view of the human being, i.e. the basic condition that people always enter into relations of dependence, there is no contradiction between independence and dependence. In contrast, an individualist, liberalist view of the human being promotes an attitude of blaming oneself with the potential for feelings of inadequacy and guilt. The study also shows that seeking out treatment in the alternative medical sector maintain a form of continued self-control and self-responsibility. The study concludes that the nurse must work to qualify her/his sensory-based, situationally determined attentiveness and her/his view of the human being, which will include directing her/his attention towards the patient's view of the human being, values and ways of relating to oneself and to one's choices. The research design is qualitative and takes a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach. The data are based on interviews with 18 chronically ill patients, divided into three groups of six patients diagnosed with 'type I' diabetes, colitis ulcerosa and patients with coronary occlusion in the rehabilitation phase. Regardless of the diagnosis, the objective of the interview study was to highlight themes in the patients' views of health and illness related to their chronic condition and the significance of these views have for their mastery of everyday life. The research method is inspired by Paul Ricoeur.

Abstract. We present a framework for formal verification of a realtime extension of UML statecharts. For clarity, we restrict ourselves to a reasonable subset of the rich UML statechart model and extend this with real-time constructs (clocks, timed guards, and invariants). We equip the obtained formalism, called hierarchical timed automata (HTA), with an operational semantics. We outline a translation of one HTA to a network of flat timed automata, that can serve as input to the real-time model checking tool Uppaal. This translation can be used to faithfully verify deadlock-freedom, safety, and unbounded response properties of the HTA model. We report on an XML-based implementation of this translation, use the well-known pacemaker example to illustrate our technique, and report run-time data for the formal verification part.

In this paper we describe a decision procedure for the core theory of fixed-sized bit-vectors with extraction and composition that can readily be integrated into Shostak's procedure for deciding combinations of theories. Inputs to the solver are unquantified bit-vector equations t-u and the algorithm returns true if t-u is valid in the bit-vector theory, false if t = u is unsatisfiable, and a system of solved equations otherwise. The time complexity of the solver is 0(] t I 9 log n + n2), where t is the length of the bit-vector term t and n denotes the number of bits on either side of the equation. Then, the solver for the core bit-vector theory is extended to handle other bit-vector operations like bitwise logical operations, shifting, and arithmetic interpretations of bit-vectors. We develop a BDD-like data-structure called bit-vector BDDs to represent bit-vectors~ various operations on bit-vectors, and a solver on bit-vector BDDs.

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