Stafford Beer in memoriam – ‘an argument of change’ three decades on.

Purpose This paper is written in memory of the late Stafford Beer. The paper engages with only one dimension of the whole man: Stafford Beer as the diagnostician and prognostician of the social conditions that he so keenly observed. Design/methodology/approach The paper revisits a talk that Stafford Beer gave, over three decades ago, to administrators of the UK National Health Service (NHS). It uses the content of the talk, entitled “Health and Quiet Breathing”, to diagnose the problems that have been encountered in the development of NHS information management strategies. The paper concludes with some brief personal recollections of Stafford Beer as a friend and as a teacher. Findings The paper finds Stafford Beer’s managerial cybernetics to be a useful tool in understanding many of the problems that have beset NHS information management strategies: lack of operational research, problems in the commodification of information, financial scandal, and bureaucracy. In its examination of these issues, the paper recognises Stafford Beer’s status as a legatee of not only Norbert Wiener, but also of the great philosophers. Value The paper demonstrates how the problem-orientation of Stafford Beer’s managerial cybernetics continues to be fresh and relevant to today’s society and provides a brief portrait of him both as a friend and as a teacher

Cross-Modal Health State Estimation

Individuals create and consume more diverse data about themselves today than any time in history. Sources of this data include wearable devices, images, social media, geospatial information and more. A tremendous opportunity rests within cross-modal data analysis that leverages existing domain knowledge methods to understand and guide human health. Especially in chronic diseases, current medical practice uses a combination of sparse hospital based biological metrics (blood tests, expensive imaging, etc.) to understand the evolving health status of an individual. Future health systems must integrate data created at the individual level to better understand health status perpetually, especially in a cybernetic framework. In this work we fuse multiple user created and open source data streams along with established biomedical domain knowledge to give two types of quantitative state estimates of cardiovascular health. First, we use wearable devices to calculate cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF), a known quantitative leading predictor of heart disease which is not routinely collected in clinical settings. Second, we estimate inherent genetic traits, living environmental risks, circadian rhythm, and biological metrics from a diverse dataset. Our experimental results on 24 subjects demonstrate how multi-modal data can provide personalized health insight. Understanding the dynamic nature of health status will pave the way for better health based recommendation engines, better clinical decision making and positive lifestyle changes.Comment: Accepted to ACM Multimedia 2018 Conference - Brave New Ideas, Seoul, Korea, ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5665-7/18/1

Using System Analysis and Personas for e-Health Interaction Design

Today, designers obtain more central roles in product and service development (Perks, Cooper, & Jones, 2005). They have to deal with increasingly complicated problems, like integrating the needs of various stakeholders while taking care about social, ethical and ecological consequences of their designs. To deal with this demanding design situation, they need to apply new methods to organize the available information and to negotiate the stakeholder’s perspectives. This paper describes how systems analysis supports the design process in a complex environment. In a case study, we demonstrate how this method enables designers to describe user requirements for complex design environments while considering the perspectives of various stakeholders. We present a design research project applying cybernetic systems analysis using the software ''System-Tools'' (Vester, 2002). Results from the analysis were taken to inform the design of an electronic patient record (EPR), considering the particularities of the German health care system. Based on the analysis, we developed a set of requirements for every stakeholder group, detailing the patients' perspective with persona descriptions. We then picked a main persona as reference for the EPR design. We describe the resulting design sketch and discuss the value of cybernetic systems analysis as a tool to deal with complex social environments. The result shows how the method helps designers to structure and organize information about the context and identify fruitful intervention opportunities for design. Keywords: E-Health; System Analysis, Cybernetics; Personas.</p

Intelligence-based medicine

Despite seven hundred thousand new medical references last year, the relationship between a given set of medical features and specific pathophysiology, treatment, and criteria of improvement is often weak. Moreover, the generalization of evidences obtained in specific settings may lead to under-treat or to over-treat a significant proportion of patients. We expose an application of the cybernetic loop, based on traditional medical steps: nosology, semeiology, pathophysiology, therapy and on the four transitions between these steps. This approach leads to formulate eight basic questions evaluating the steps in terms of reproducibility and the transitions in terms of predictivity. We detail two practical applications: 1) the evaluation of a medical decision (implantation of an internal cardioverter-defibrillator) and 2) the evaluation of a specific study (EPHESUS). Using this loop allows to determine clearly when evidence is lacking and/or to which extend an evidence really increases the medical knowledge or just creates a market

Practopoiesis: Or how life fosters a mind

The mind is a biological phenomenon. Thus, biological principles of organization should also be the principles underlying mental operations. Practopoiesis states that the key for achieving intelligence through adaptation is an arrangement in which mechanisms laying a lower level of organization, by their operations and interaction with the environment, enable creation of mechanisms lying at a higher level of organization. When such an organizational advance of a system occurs, it is called a traverse. A case of traverse is when plasticity mechanisms (at a lower level of organization), by their operations, create a neural network anatomy (at a higher level of organization). Another case is the actual production of behavior by that network, whereby the mechanisms of neuronal activity operate to create motor actions. Practopoietic theory explains why the adaptability of a system increases with each increase in the number of traverses. With a larger number of traverses, a system can be relatively small and yet, produce a higher degree of adaptive/intelligent behavior than a system with a lower number of traverses. The present analyses indicate that the two well-known traverses-neural plasticity and neural activity-are not sufficient to explain human mental capabilities. At least one additional traverse is needed, which is named anapoiesis for its contribution in reconstructing knowledge e.g., from long-term memory into working memory. The conclusions bear implications for brain theory, the mind-body explanatory gap, and developments of artificial intelligence technologies.Comment: Revised version in response to reviewer comment

Cybernetic Theory as a New Approach to Studying Workers’ Well-being

The aim of the present research is to explain why well-being in the workplace is a theme of increasing interest and why many studies have analyzed its functioning and diffusion. From the literature on well-being it is evident that the findings of previous research are sometimes discordant and theoretical models particularly use diverse variables according to different needs and objectives. Despite the influence of a number of different factors, well-being can be studied by looking at three main aspects: physical well-being, mental health, and job satisfaction. The variables influencing it, however, are numerous and often analyzed from different perspectives. Methods of analysis vary across national and disciplinary contexts. The present work is based on a local survey of a small Italian district that investigates two hypotheses about the correlation between locus of control and variables determining work well-being (Spector et al., 2002) and the possibility of using perceptions and desires on the variables influencing well-being as predictors of it. We use the concepts of cybernetic theory and feedback loop (Edwards, 1992). Findings of statistical correlation and hierarchic regression are discussed; limitations and suggestions for further research are presented.work well-being, cybernetic theory, desires and perceptions

Wikileaks and the limits of protocol

In this chapter, I reflect on Wikileaks and its use of technology to achieve freedom in capitalist society. Wikileaks represents an avant-garde form of media (i.e. networked, cryptographic), with traditional democratic values: opposing power and seeking the truth. At times, http://wikileaks.org appears broken and half abandoned and at other times, it is clearly operating beyond the level of government efficiency and military intelligence. It has received both high acclaim and severe criticism from human rights organisations, the mainstream media and governments. It is a really existing threat to traditional forms of power and control yet, I suggest, it is fundamentally restrained by liberal ideology of freedom and democracy and the protocological limits of cybernetic capitalism

A Robot Model of OC-Spectrum Disorders : Design Framework, Implementation and First Experiments

© 2019 Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyComputational psychiatry is increasingly establishing itself as valuable discipline for understanding human mental disorders. However, robot models and their potential for investigating embodied and contextual aspects of mental health have been, to date, largely unexplored. In this paper, we present an initial robot model of obsessive-compulsive (OC) spectrum disorders based on an embodied motivation-based control architecture for decision making in autonomous robots. The OC family of conditions is chiefly characterized by obsessions (recurrent, invasive thoughts) and/or compulsions (an urge to carry out certain repetitive or ritualized behaviors). The design of our robot model follows and illustrates a general design framework that we have proposed to ground research in robot models of mental disorders, and to link it with existing methodologies in psychiatry, and notably in the design of animal models. To test and validate our model, we present and discuss initial experiments, results and quantitative and qualitative analysis regarding the compulsive and obsessive elements of OC-spectrum disorders. While this initial stage of development only models basic elements of such disorders, our results already shed light on aspects of the underlying theoretical model that are not obvious simply from consideration of the model.Peer reviewe