TamTalk: Building an AAC Application to Close the Gap in Communication for Hard of Hearing Individuals

[ABSTRACT ONLY; NO FULL TEXT] Communication is the act of passing along dialogue and information by mouth, but this includes the process of hearing these words and processing them cognitively. While communication represents "C" in AAC (Augmentative and Alternative Communication), the focus of most AAC devices is built with individuals with speech impairments in mind, leaving hard of hearing individuals behind. People who are hard of hearing use hearing aids, cochlear implants, captioning and even develop the skills for lip-reading. Some of these serve as a fix in distinct situations but are frustrating depending on when one lost their hearing or speaking skills. This thesis discusses an AAC application, TamTalk, created with typical AAC features in mind and the addition of speech-to-text features. This will aid hard of hearing users in their desire for face-to-face communication by picking up the dialogue of a communication partner in the room and transcribing what's said back into the app. In addition to this, the choice to execute this as an application allows for users to bypass hoops they're expected to jump through for insurance and that app will be economically affordable. The app will be available cross-platform with the intention of eye tracking ability in the future. With UI set up containing both TTS and STT, a usability test will be carried out to collect data as well as feedback to create a scope for future iterations of development and design. Inclusion criteria for recruitment will look for individuals 18 years of age or older living with a vision, auditory, motor, and/or cognitive impairment with or without Complex Communication Needs (CCN) who feel they may benefit from AAC. Individuals may experience only one of these impairments or a combination. Any individuals that have suffered from a stroke in the last 6 months will fall under the exclusion criteria. Participants will be asked for their permission in recording the session via camera but have the option to decline. A study survey will be provided at the end to collect feedback to gather the information needed for the future scope.by Natalie Strou

Website Redesign

Redesign is a necessary part of having a news website. The process can be lengthy and costly and there's always some risk involved – will the audience engage with and like the redesigned look? The Center for Media Engagement wanted to test whether online experiments could help news organizations learn more about what their audience wants when going through a redesign.The results show that an online experiment can pick up on many of the same signals as a full deployment of a site redesign. To the extent that these findings continue to replicate, doing an online experiment would provide news organizations with a relatively inexpensive way to test out redesigns before embarking on a full launch

We Should Not Get Rid of Incivility Online

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.Incivility and toxicity have become concepts du jour in research about social media. The clear normative implication in much of this research is that incivility is bad and should be eliminated. Extensive research—including some that we’ve authored—has been dedicated to finding ways to reduce or eliminate incivility from online discussion spaces. In our work as part of the Civic Signals Initiative, we’ve been thinking carefully about what metrics should be adopted by social media platforms eager to create better spaces for their users. When we tell people about this project, removing incivility from the platforms frequently comes up as a suggested metric. In thinking about incivility, however, we’ve become less convinced that it is desirable, or even possible, for social media platforms to remove all uncivil content. In this short essay, we discuss research on incivility, our rationale for a more complicated normative stance regarding incivility, and what other orientations may be more useful. We conclude with a post mortem arguing that we should not abandon research on incivility altogether, but we should recognize the limitations of a concept that is difficult to universalize

Addressing Risks of Lead in Water and Soil: Using Citizen Science and a Unique Partnership with Faith Organizations

One of the most widespread environmental health hazards in the United States remains exposure to the harmful neurotoxin lead. So much lead remains in the urban environment that it is not unusual to find neighborhoods where more than 10% of children exhibit harmful levels of lead, compared to the national average of about 1%. To overcome this challenge, a partnership between IUPUI researchers and faith organizations in Indianapolis is taking aim at the risk of household lead contamination by providing residents the tools they need to protect against it. The community-driven science aspect of this project is intentional—not only will the individuals who participate benefit directly, but the resulting data will also play a role in keeping communities safer more broadly

Addressing Risks of Lead in Water and Soil: Using Citizen Science and a Unique Partnership with Faith Organizations

One of the most widespread environmental health hazards in the United States remains exposure to the harmful neurotoxin lead. So much lead remains in the urban environment that it is not unusual to find neighborhoods where more than 10% of children exhibit harmful levels of lead, compared to the national average of about 1%. To overcome this challenge, a partnership between IUPUI researchers and faith organizations in Indianapolis is taking aim at the risk of household lead contamination by providing residents the tools they need to protect against it. The community-driven science aspect of this project is intentional—not only will the individuals who participate benefit directly, but the resulting data will also play a role in keeping communities safer more broadly

Multicenter Study Evaluating Impact of Patient and Sonographer Demographics on Quality of Focused Cardiac Ultrasounds

Introduction: Demographic inequities in cardiovascular care have been well established, with evidence of effects from sex, age, and body mass index (BMI). For instance, women are less likely to receive guideline-based care for acute myocardial Infarction, bystander cardiopulmonary resuscitation, or recognition of cardiac arrest. We investigated the impact of patient sex, along with other patient demographics such as age and BMI, on the quality of focused cardiac ultrasounds (FOCUS). We hypothesized that females would have lower overall FOCUS quality and more frequently omitted apical four-chamber (A4C) views due to breast tissue. Secondary objectives included evaluating differences in image quality and omission rates by BMI, and by age and sonographer sex and training level. Methods: In this multicenter, retrospective study we investigated 1,200 total adult patients (100 females and 100 males per site) at six participating sites. The FOCUS quality was determined by two blinded experts per site using a 1-5 ordinal scale per view (parasternal long, parasternal short, A4C, and subxiphoid). The primary outcome, overall quality, was the summed score of the four views, with a maximum score of 20. This scale was then collapsed into three categories for the individual FOCUS views: images inadequate to support diagnosis; images meeting the minimum to support diagnosis; and images supporting the diagnosis well. Secondary outcomes were A4C quality and omission rate. We evaluated associations between sex and FOCUS overall quality using unadjusted mixed-effects models followed by multivariable mixed-effects models adjusted for patient age, BMI, operator sex, and operator experience level. Results: The A4C images of female patients were of significantly lower quality (P 60% higher odds of a diagnostic A4C view (95% CI 1.3 - 2.0). Overall FOCUS quality decreased as BMI deviated from normal and as age increased. There was no significant difference in overall FOCUS quality between female and male patients. Conclusion: We did not find sex-based differences in overall FOCUS quality; however, we did find that females received lower quality apical four-chamber views and had this view omitted more frequently. Additionally, overall quality declined as BMI deviated from normal, and as age advanced. Future research should elucidate the clinical implications of these differences in quality and the explanation behind not obtaining high-quality views in older patients, in individuals whose BMI deviated from normal toward either underweight or overweight, or in female patients.No embarg

Multiorgan MRI findings after hospitalisation with COVID-19 in the UK (C-MORE): a prospective, multicentre, observational cohort study

Introduction: The multiorgan impact of moderate to severe coronavirus infections in the post-acute phase is still poorly understood. We aimed to evaluate the excess burden of multiorgan abnormalities after hospitalisation with COVID-19, evaluate their determinants, and explore associations with patient-related outcome measures. Methods: In a prospective, UK-wide, multicentre MRI follow-up study (C-MORE), adults (aged ≥18 years) discharged from hospital following COVID-19 who were included in Tier 2 of the Post-hospitalisation COVID-19 study (PHOSP-COVID) and contemporary controls with no evidence of previous COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid antibody negative) underwent multiorgan MRI (lungs, heart, brain, liver, and kidneys) with quantitative and qualitative assessment of images and clinical adjudication when relevant. Individuals with end-stage renal failure or contraindications to MRI were excluded. Participants also underwent detailed recording of symptoms, and physiological and biochemical tests. The primary outcome was the excess burden of multiorgan abnormalities (two or more organs) relative to controls, with further adjustments for potential confounders. The C-MORE study is ongoing and is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04510025. Findings: Of 2710 participants in Tier 2 of PHOSP-COVID, 531 were recruited across 13 UK-wide C-MORE sites. After exclusions, 259 C-MORE patients (mean age 57 years [SD 12]; 158 [61%] male and 101 [39%] female) who were discharged from hospital with PCR-confirmed or clinically diagnosed COVID-19 between March 1, 2020, and Nov 1, 2021, and 52 non-COVID-19 controls from the community (mean age 49 years [SD 14]; 30 [58%] male and 22 [42%] female) were included in the analysis. Patients were assessed at a median of 5·0 months (IQR 4·2–6·3) after hospital discharge. Compared with non-COVID-19 controls, patients were older, living with more obesity, and had more comorbidities. Multiorgan abnormalities on MRI were more frequent in patients than in controls (157 [61%] of 259 vs 14 [27%] of 52; p<0·0001) and independently associated with COVID-19 status (odds ratio [OR] 2·9 [95% CI 1·5–5·8]; padjusted=0·0023) after adjusting for relevant confounders. Compared with controls, patients were more likely to have MRI evidence of lung abnormalities (p=0·0001; parenchymal abnormalities), brain abnormalities (p<0·0001; more white matter hyperintensities and regional brain volume reduction), and kidney abnormalities (p=0·014; lower medullary T1 and loss of corticomedullary differentiation), whereas cardiac and liver MRI abnormalities were similar between patients and controls. Patients with multiorgan abnormalities were older (difference in mean age 7 years [95% CI 4–10]; mean age of 59·8 years [SD 11·7] with multiorgan abnormalities vs mean age of 52·8 years [11·9] without multiorgan abnormalities; p<0·0001), more likely to have three or more comorbidities (OR 2·47 [1·32–4·82]; padjusted=0·0059), and more likely to have a more severe acute infection (acute CRP >5mg/L, OR 3·55 [1·23–11·88]; padjusted=0·025) than those without multiorgan abnormalities. Presence of lung MRI abnormalities was associated with a two-fold higher risk of chest tightness, and multiorgan MRI abnormalities were associated with severe and very severe persistent physical and mental health impairment (PHOSP-COVID symptom clusters) after hospitalisation. Interpretation: After hospitalisation for COVID-19, people are at risk of multiorgan abnormalities in the medium term. Our findings emphasise the need for proactive multidisciplinary care pathways, with the potential for imaging to guide surveillance frequency and therapeutic stratification