988368

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Objectives: The objective of this study is to evaluate the safety climate as an important part of macroergonomics domains and to determine the importance of each safety climate factor in an Iranian company.

Methods: For data gathering, the researchers used Macroergonomic Organizational Questionnaire Survey (MOQS) method. For conducting this method we applied safety climate questionnaire which has been presented by Vinodkumar et al. After distribution of questionnaires through our samples with accuracy of 5% and confidence level of 95% and gathering the questionnaires, data were analyzed using SPSS V.16 software and Entropy.

Results: The number of returned valid questionnaires was 134 out of 151 and response rate was 88.74%. Questionnaire’s reliability which assessed by Cronbach’s Alpha was 0.928. The results indicated that mean of safety climate score was 154.84 and 68.7% of workers had positive safety attitudes. In addition, we found a significant relationship between ages on safety climate (P<0.05). The highest and lowest weights, which are obtained by entropy, belong to safeness of work environment and emergency preparedness in the organization with weights of 0.197 and 0.144 respectively.

Discussion: Considering catastrophic consequences of accidents in petrochemical industry, the results show the importance of attention to safety principles and to develop a positive employee attitudes related to safety.

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Objectives: Automated Auditory Brainstem Responses (ABR) peak detection is a novel technique to facilitate the measurement of neural synchrony along the auditory pathway through the brainstem. Analyzing the location of the peaks in these signals and the time interval between them may be utilized either for analyzing the hearing process or detecting peripheral and central lesions in the human hearing system.
Methods: In this paper, model-based signal processing is proposed to estimate the effective parameters of ABR signals. In this process, the biological parameters of the signal are assessed by utilizing a Finite Impulse Response (FIR) adaptive filter in which its adaptation procedure is performed based on the correntropy concept. The proposed method is applied on a set of ABR signals recorded in response to three stimuli of /da/, /ba/, and /ga/, and then its performances are compared with an existing state-of-the-art technique. 
Results: The results show that the proposed method can significantly increase the accuracy of estimating the parameters in stable stimulations (/da/, /ba/) for major positive and negative peaks. This improvement is more significant (up to 2-3 times) for /ba/ stimulus and especially in major positive peaks. However, in other peaks, the improvements also occurred in smaller amounts. However, for unstable stimuli (/ga/), no significant improvement was achieved.
Discussion: Increasing the accuracy performance of the proposed method for detecting the stable stimuli (while its performance remains unchanged) for detecting unstable stimuli indicates its effectiveness in automated clinical analysis of ABR signals.