Designing, implementing and testing an intervention of affective intelligent agents in nursing virtual reality teaching simulations - a qualitative study

Emotions play an important role in human-computer interaction, but there is limited research on affective and emotional virtual agent design in the area of teaching simulations for healthcare provision. The purpose of this work is twofold: firstly, to describe the process for designing affective intelligent agents that are engaged in automated communications such as person to computer conversations, and secondly to test a bespoke prototype digital intervention which implements such agents. The presented study tests two distinct virtual learning environments, one of which was enhanced with affective virtual patients, with nine 3rd year nursing students specialising in mental health, during their professional practice stage. All (100%) of the participants reported that, when using the enhanced scenario, they experienced a more realistic representation of carer/patient interaction; better recognition of the patients' feelings; recognition and assessment of emotions; a better realisation of how feelings can affect patients' emotional state and how they could better empathise with the patients

Translation, cross‐cultural adaptation, and preliminary validation of a patient‐reported outcome measure for genetic counseling outcomes in Sweden

Genetic counseling is key for understanding the consequences of hereditary and genetic diseases and, therefore, crucial for patients, their families, and healthcare providers. Genetic counseling facilitates individuals' comprehension, decision‐making, and adaptation to hereditary diseases. This study focuses on the Swedish adaptation of the Genetic Counseling Outcome Scale‐24 (GCOS‐24), an internationally validated, patient‐reported outcome measure (PROM) for quantifying patient empowerment in genetic counseling. This study aimed to translate and cross‐culturally adapt the GCOS‐24 to measure patient‐reported outcome from genetic counseling in Sweden. The adaptation process was meticulously conducted, adhering to international guidelines, with cross‐cultural adaptation, translation, and back translation, to ensure semantic, conceptual, and idiomatic equivalence with the original English version. Face validity and understandability was assured using qualitative cognitive interviews conducted with patient representatives, and by a committee of experts in the field. The psychometric properties of the Swedish version of GCOS‐24 (GCOS‐24swe) were evaluated using a robust sample of 374 patients. These individuals received genetic counseling by telephone or video, necessitated by the constraints of the COVID‐19 pandemic. Participants responded to GCOS‐24swe both before and after genetic counseling. The GCOS‐24swe demonstrated face validity, good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.86), significant responsiveness (Cohen's d = 0.65, p < 0.001), and good construct validity. The study's findings underscore the GCOS‐24swe's potential as an effective instrument in both clinical practice and research within Sweden. It offers a valuable means for assessing patient empowerment, a key goal of genetic counseling. Additional psychometric assessment of test–retest reliability and interpretability would further enhance the utility of GCOS‐24swe

Development of a chemical kinetic mechanism for ammonia/macromolecular hydrocarbon combustion

C-free fuel ammonia has a high auto-ignition temperature and low flame speed compared to conventional hydrocarbon fuels, which limits its application in internal combustion engines (ICEs). Blending ammonia (NH3) with a highly reactive fuel can effectively solve this problem, and traditional macromolecular hydrocarbon fuels are a good choice because of their practicality and economy. However, the chemical reaction mechanism for the combustion of NH3/macromolecular hydrocarbons is not yet fully understood. In this study, a detailed kinetic mechanism for NH3 and toluene reference fuel (TRF) is proposed with 250 species and 4272 reactions. The developed NH3/TRF mechanism was validated by a single component (NH3, n-heptane, iso-octane, and toluene) and multiple components (NH3/n-heptane, NH3/iso-octane, NH3/toluene) with ignition delay time, laminar burning velocity, and key intermediate component distribution. The current NH3/TRF mechanism showed good performance compared with previous mechanisms. The co-combustion of NH3/TRF blends was performed with different NH3 energy fractions, and sensitivity and reaction pathway analyses were performed to reveal the effect of TRF addition on NH3 combustion. The results showed that the OH radical is mainly produced through N-containing reactions rather than C-containing reactions under T = 1000 K, P = 40 atm, and ϕ = 1 with more than 30 % NH3 addition. The HO2 radical is the most important radical for NH3 ignition, in addition to OH radicals, and its reactions with N-containing radicals (NH2, H2NO, and NO) contribute to the majority of OH radicals

PnuTac: A vision-based pneumatic tactile sensor for slip detection and object classification

Soft optical tactile sensors allow robots to capture important information, such as contact geometry, estimations of object compliance, and slip detection. However, most optical tactile sensors utilize gel-filled elastic membranes with non-variable stiffness. To overcome this limitation, this paper presents the development of a pneumatic tactile sensor with tunable pressure (PnuTac). The sensor comprises a pneumatic system, an elastic membrane, and a sealed chamber with a camera inside. The inner side of the membrane layer has dot markers on its surface that are used for slip detection. Slippage is prevented by controlling a Robotiq 2-finger gripper that closes according to the slip detection signal. Additionally, objects held by the gripper appear as contours in sensor images. A dataset of 10,000 such images from 10 tools was utilized for training a VGG-19 convolutional neural network for tool classification. Our results show that increasing the pressure of the PnuTac sensor reduces the time it takes for the gripper to stabilize a slipping object. The overall success rate of slip detection was determined to be 87%. The trained neural network, fed from the PnuTac's sensor live data, successfully classified 8 out of the 10 tools

A transactional or a relational contract? The student consumer, social participation and alumni donations in higher education

The relationship between students and higher education is seen to have become increasingly transactional. We approach the study of the student-HE relationship in a novel way, by focusing on students’ behaviour post-university, rather than on student narratives. Conceptually, the article builds on multidimensional views of student engagement and the differentiation between psychological transactional contracts - where students who achieve better academic results are more likely to donate - and relational contracts - where students donate more following engagement in social experiences. Making use of longitudinal data on donation behaviour from over 50,000 alumni from an English university over two decades, we find that while students who get better degree outcomes are more likely to donate, the association between participation in social experiences and donations is much stronger. This questions prevalent transactional models of HE and underlines the limitations of purely consumerist views of the relation between students and higher education institutions, even in the marketized UK context

Introducing law and humanities

An introductory chapter that introduces the chapters that follow as well as the study of law and humanitie

Law and history

A review of how legal history has developed as a field of study in England and Wales, placing it within the wider field of law and humanitie

Operational research: methods and applications

Throughout its history, Operational Research has evolved to include a variety of methods, models and algorithms that have been applied to a diverse and wide range of contexts. This encyclopedic article consists of two main sections: methods and applications. The first aims to summarise the up-to-date knowledge and provide an overview of the state-of-the-art methods and key developments in the various subdomains of the field. The second offers a wide-ranging list of areas where Operational Research has been applied. The article is meant to be read in a nonlinear fashion. It should be used as a point of reference or first-port-of-call for a diverse pool of readers: academics, researchers, students, and practitioners. The entries within the methods and applications sections are presented in alphabetical order. The authors dedicate this paper to the 2023 Turkey/Syria earthquake victims. We sincerely hope that advances in OR will play a role towards minimising the pain and suffering caused by this and future catastrophes

A new letter by Sara Coleridge

This article provides a discussion of a previously unpublished letter in the Keats House Collections written by Sara Coleridge, the poet and editor, and the only daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Presented here is the first transcription of the letter to be printed – addressed to the artist Samuel Laurence (sometimes Lawrence) – and an analysis of its contents in relation to Sara’s creative writing and life. The essay considers what the letter might be able to tell us about the author, her writing, her engagement with the arts, her position as a woman of letters in the late Romantic/early Victorian period in London, and her health, both physical and mental