Will Animal Assisted Therapy Result in Shorter Length of Stay for Hospitalized Patients and Improve Basic Needs Status and Physical Outcomes Such as Blood Pressure, Heart Rate, and Pain?

Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT) has been thought to have a therapeutic effect upon humans, especially those individuals who are confined due to age or illness. Human-animal contact encourages socialization for the lonely; it promotes movement in the relatively immobile, and may serve as a memory prompt for the elderly and just plain talking for nearly everyone. The purposes of this research study was to assess if AAT would result in shorter length of stay for hospitalized patients and improve basic need status and physical outcomes such as blood pressure, heart rate, pain. The Basic Need Satisfaction Inventory Tool (BNSI) created by Nancy Klein Leidy, PhD (Leidy, 1994) using Maslow’s Theory provided the theoretical framework for this study. Maslow’s theory contends that as humans meet basic needs, they seek to satisfy successively higher needs that occupy a hierarchy. Dr. Leidy created a twenty- seven item questionnaire using a Likert scale. This tool was divided into five subscales each addressing physical needs, safety, belonging, self-esteem and self-actualization needs (Leidy, 1994). The non-random sample in this study consisted of forty-five patients (n=30 experimental group and n=15 control group), seeking medical care in a community hospital for recently diagnosed cancer. Participants completed two pencil and paper questionnaires, consent for study and release of responsibility waiver to the hospital. Data analyses included descriptive statistics and independent-sample t-tests. Patients in the experimental group showed significantly better results (p<0.5) with blood pressure, pain, and belonging needs being met. Findings from this study suggest that there is a substantial need for further studies to determine benefit not only to patients but staff as well. The findings can be useful for the medical community and nurse practitioners as we learn more about AAT.Master'sSchool of Health Professions and Studies: NursingUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/117970/1/Zaremba.pd

Emotionales Erleben positiv besetzter Stimuli

Emotionsregulation hat einen wesentlichen Einfluss auf das allgemeine Wohlbefinden und die Gesundheit von Menschen. Dabei spielt es vor allem eine Rolle, welche Strategien zur Emotionsregulation angewendet werden. Das Ziel dieser Studie war zu untersuchen, ob sich Personen mit unterschiedlichen emotionalen Reaktionen auf positiv besetzte Stimuli auch hinsichtlich gewohnheitsmäßig eingesetzter Emotionsregulationsstrategien unterscheiden. Zur Messung der emotionalen Reaktion wurden die HRV, die Pulsfrequenz und der Affekt herangezogen. Als positiv besetzter Stimulus wurde die Anwesenheit eines Hundes eingesetzt. Darüber hinaus ob reale und virtuelle Hunde vergleichbare Auswirkungen auf die affektive und physiologische Reaktion des Menschen haben. Es wurden 145 Personen getestet, die zufällig zwei Versuchsgruppen (realer und virtueller Hund) und einer Kontrollgruppe zugeordnet wurden. Es konnten teilweise vergleichbare Effekte von virtuellen und realen Stimuli gefunden werden. Bezüglich der Emotionsregulationsstrategien konnten fast keine Unterschiede festgestellt werden.Emotion regulation is essential within the repertoire of social skills and its use has a significant impact on physiological health and psychological wellbeing. Dogs have been shown to be decrease cardiovascular activation and fear as well as to increase HRV and positive affect. Therefore 145 participants have been randomly assigned to either dog assisted groups (live and virtual) or to a control group (music). HRV, heart rate and affect have been measured during the presence of each stimulus to compare their psychophysiological impact. Comparable results could be found for virtual and live stimuli. However unexpectedly the presence of neither dog could decrease heart rate or increase HRV. Furthermore two commonly used emotion regulation strategies, cognitive reappraisal and suppression, have been examined in the context of affective and physiological reactivity in the presence of the live dog and the virtual dog. The results showed mostly no significant differences in the use of emotion regulation strategies depended on the activation of the autonomic nervous system. Thus the level of using either strategy was not influenced by the nature of the affective or the cardiovascular change

Interactive Poster: Fun CHI changing the world, changing ourselves “I Care About Him as a Pal”: Conceptions of Robotic Pets in Online AIBO Discussion Forums

In this study, we analyzed people&apos;s conceptions of AIBO, a robotic pet, through their spontaneous postings in online AIBO discussion forums. Results showed that AIBO psychologically engaged this group of participants, particularly by drawing forth conceptions of essences (79%), agency (60%), and social standing (59%). However, participants seldom attributed moral standing to AIBO (e.g., that AIBO deserves respect, has rights, or can be held morally accountable for action). Our discussion focuses on the societal implications of these results

Collaborative Artificial Intelligence Development for Social Robots

The main aim of this doctoral thesis was to investigate on how to involve a community for collaborative artificial intelligence (AI) development of a social robot. The work was initiated by the author’s personal interest in developing the Sony AIBO robots that have been unavailable on the retail markets, however, user communities with special interests in these robots remained on the internet. At first, to attract people’s attention, the author developed three specific features for the robot. These consisted of teaching the robot 1) sound event recognition in order to react to environmental audio stimuli, 2) a method to detect the underlying surface under the robot, and 3) of how to recognize its own body states. As this AI development proved to be very challenging, the author decided to start a community project for artificial intelligence development. Community involvement has a long history in open-source software projects and some robotics companies tried to benefit from their userbase in product development. An active online community of Sony AIBO owners was approached to investigate factors to engage its members in the creative processes. For this purpose, 78 Sony AIBO owners were recruited online to fill a questionnaire and their data were analyzed with respect to age, gender, culture, length of ownership, user contribution, and model preference. The results revealed the motives to own these robots for many years and how these heavy users perceived their social robots after a long period in the robot acceptance phase. For example, female participants tended to have more emotional relation to their robots than male who had more technically oriented long-term engagement motivation. The user expectations were also explored by analyzing the answers to this questionnaire to discover the key needs of this user group. The results revealed that the most-wanted skills were the interaction with humans and the autonomous operation. The integration with the AI agents and Internet services was important, but the long-term memory and learning capabilities were not so relevant for the participants. The diverse preferences for robot skills led to creating a prioritized recommendation list to complement the design guidelines for social robots in the literature. In sum, the findings of this thesis showed that developing AI features for an outdated robot is possible but takes a lot of time and shared community efforts. To involve a specific community, one needs first to build up trust by working with and for the community. Also, the trust for the long-term endurance of the development project was found as a precondition for the community commitment. The discoveries of this thesis can be applied to similar types of collaborative AI developments in the future. There are significant contributions in this dissertation to robotics. First, the long-term robot usage was not studied on a years-long scale before and the most extended human-robot interactions analyzed test subjects for only a few months. A questionnaire investigated the robot owners with 1-10+ years-long ownership in this work and their attitude towards robot acceptance. The survey results helped to understand the viable strategies to engage users for a long time. Second, innovative ways were explored to involve online communities in robotics development. The past approaches introduced the community ideas and opinions into product design and innovation iterations. The community in this dissertation tested the developed AI engine, provided inputs for further development directions, created content for the actual AI and gave their feedback about product quality. These contributions advance the social robotics field

Spatial Practices/Digital Traces: Embodiment and Reconfigurations of Urban Spaces Through GPS Mobile Applications

This research explores the relationship between bodies, space and mobile technologies by studying the affective and spatial properties of three GPS-based mobile applications—Grindr, Mappiness and Waze. Discussions of how newly constructed subjectivities experience location, orientation and spatial movements—both physical and digital—emerge throughout the chapters. The study seeks to answer the following research questions: How are GPS-based apps enabling the construction of new digital subjects and embodiments? How do they enable users to perform these identities in space? How does the production of these new subjectivities create alternate forms of inhabiting urban spaces as well as alternate modes of digital mobility? In what ways do GPS apps create new spatiotemporal relations for bodies, and how are these relations made visible by the interfaces’ spatial and urban representations? To answer these questions, the three apps—which were selected from a group of contemporary apps based on their GPS properties, strong link to urban space and relation to embodied performance—are treated as a series of material objects. Though each app’s particular purpose varies, as a set they suggest coupled themes that structure the study’s analysis: physical boundaries/digital peripheries, companionship/wayfinding, embodiments/othering, judgement/ confidence, gamification/interface, intimacy/tactility and trails/digital residue. Guided by Cyberfeminist theories, the method of study is conducted through three phases: personal empirical research, in-depth interviews with participants and the designing of a series of coded avatars of the participants’ identities. The dissertation argues that there exists a mutual shaping between a person’s subjectivity and app-technology, and that these constructions affect the way space is navigated and perceived. To elaborate on this triadic relationship between body/space/technology and to open up new imaginaries to theorise about the body in space through a Cyberfeminist perspective, it proposes a new, performative figuration—the boy—arguing that these newly constructed identities are fluidly assembled and disassembled by their continuous negotiation between physical and digital boundaries. In this way, the study rethinks how Grindr, Mappiness and Waze enable alternate embodiments for performing identities in space, while also seeking to discuss how they create new spatial organisations and socio-spatial manifestations