Facilitating American Sign Language learning for hearing parents of deaf children via mobile devices

In the United States, between 90 and 95% of deaf children are born to hearing parents. In most circumstances, the birth of a deaf child is the first experience these parents have with American Sign Language (ASL) and the Deaf community. Parents learn ASL as a second language to provide their children with language models and to be able to communicate with their children more effectively, but they face significant challenges. To address these challenges, I have developed a mobile learning application, SMARTSign, to help parents of deaf children learn ASL vocabulary. I hypothesize that providing a method for parents to learn and practice ASL words associated with popular children's stories on their mobile phones would help improve their ASL vocabulary and abilities more than if words were grouped by theme. I posit that parents who learn vocabulary associated with children's stories will use the application more, which will lead to more exposure to ASL and more learned vocabulary. My dissertation consists of three studies. First I show that novices are able to reproduce signs presented on mobile devices with high accuracy regardless of source video resolution. Next, I interview hearing parents with deaf children to discover the difficulties they have with current methods for learning ASL. When asked which methods of presenting signs they preferred, participants were most interested in learning vocabulary associated with children's stories. Finally, I deploy SMARTSign to parents for four weeks. Participants learning story vocabulary used the application more often and had higher sign recognition scores than participants who learned vocabulary based on word types. The condition did not affect participants' ability to produce the signed vocabulary.PhDCommittee Chair: Starner, Thad; Committee Member: Abowd, Gregory; Committee Member: Bruckman, Amy; Committee Member: Guzdial, Mark; Committee Member: Quinto-Pozos, David; Committee Member: Singleton, Jenn

Quantifying Quality of Life

Describes technological methods and tools for objective and quantitative assessment of QoL Appraises technology-enabled methods for incorporating QoL measurements in medicine Highlights the success factors for adoption and scaling of technology-enabled methods This open access book presents the rise of technology-enabled methods and tools for objective, quantitative assessment of Quality of Life (QoL), while following the WHOQOL model. It is an in-depth resource describing and examining state-of-the-art, minimally obtrusive, ubiquitous technologies. Highlighting the required factors for adoption and scaling of technology-enabled methods and tools for QoL assessment, it also describes how these technologies can be leveraged for behavior change, disease prevention, health management and long-term QoL enhancement in populations at large. Quantifying Quality of Life: Incorporating Daily Life into Medicine fills a gap in the field of QoL by providing assessment methods, techniques and tools. These assessments differ from the current methods that are now mostly infrequent, subjective, qualitative, memory-based, context-poor and sparse. Therefore, it is an ideal resource for physicians, physicians in training, software and hardware developers, computer scientists, data scientists, behavioural scientists, entrepreneurs, healthcare leaders and administrators who are seeking an up-to-date resource on this subject

Quantifying Quality of Life

Describes technological methods and tools for objective and quantitative assessment of QoL Appraises technology-enabled methods for incorporating QoL measurements in medicine Highlights the success factors for adoption and scaling of technology-enabled methods This open access book presents the rise of technology-enabled methods and tools for objective, quantitative assessment of Quality of Life (QoL), while following the WHOQOL model. It is an in-depth resource describing and examining state-of-the-art, minimally obtrusive, ubiquitous technologies. Highlighting the required factors for adoption and scaling of technology-enabled methods and tools for QoL assessment, it also describes how these technologies can be leveraged for behavior change, disease prevention, health management and long-term QoL enhancement in populations at large. Quantifying Quality of Life: Incorporating Daily Life into Medicine fills a gap in the field of QoL by providing assessment methods, techniques and tools. These assessments differ from the current methods that are now mostly infrequent, subjective, qualitative, memory-based, context-poor and sparse. Therefore, it is an ideal resource for physicians, physicians in training, software and hardware developers, computer scientists, data scientists, behavioural scientists, entrepreneurs, healthcare leaders and administrators who are seeking an up-to-date resource on this subject

Hooligans, vandals and the community: a study of social reaction to juvenile delinquency

The thesis consists of three studies on various ways in which society reacts to juvenile delinquency. It is introduced with an account of recent developments in the sociology of deviance which have drawn attention to the nature and effect of the societal reaction to deviance. These developments, termed the "transactional perspective", are put in the context of a "sceptical" reaction against more conventional ways of conceptualizing deviance. The implications of this new perspective for theory and research are indicated. The first study is on vandalism, and starts by attempting to unravel the different definitions of this behaviour as a form of rule-breaking and deviance. It goes on to consider the processes through which vandalism becomes defined as a social problem and then discusses the main images and stereotypes through which society tries to conceptualize this form of delinquency. It finally considers the organized approaches to the prevention and control of vandalism. The second study is a survey of the views about delinquency - its nature, causes and control - and allied topics, held by a selected sample of official and unofficial control agents in a London Borough "Northview". The relevance of these views to understanding the social control of delinquency is considered. The final study is of various types of response to the Mods and Rockers phenomenon. Using mass media and observational sources, an analysis is made of how this form of deviance was reported and conceptualized. The emergent images of the behaviour are related to the ways in which society attempted to control it. The effects of these reactions on the form and development of the phenomenon are suggested

The UK code of practice for consumer IoT cybersecurity: where we are and what next

This report has been produced by the Geopolitics of Industrial Internet of Things Standards (GISt) research project led by Professors Madeline Carr and Stephen Hailes, and the Building Evidence for CoP Legislation (BECL) research project led by Dr Saheli Datta Burton and commisioned by the Secure-by-Design team of the United Kingdom Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Both GISt and BECL projects are held at the Department of Science, Technology, Engineering and Public Policy (STEaPP), University College London and funded by The PETRAS National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity, a consortium of leading UK universities dedicated to understanding critical issues in the privacy, ethics, trust, reliability, acceptability, and security of the Internet of Things. Funding for PETRAS is provided by the UKRI’s Strategic Priorities Fund as part of the Security of Digital Technologies at the Periphery (SDTaP) programme

Usability analysis of contending electronic health record systems

In this paper, we report measured usability of two leading EHR systems during procurement. A total of 18 users participated in paired-usability testing of three scenarios: ordering and managing medications by an outpatient physician, medicine administration by an inpatient nurse and scheduling of appointments by nursing staff. Data for audio, screen capture, satisfaction rating, task success and errors made was collected during testing. We found a clear difference between the systems for percentage of successfully completed tasks, two different satisfaction measures and perceived learnability when looking at the results over all scenarios. We conclude that usability should be evaluated during procurement and the difference in usability between systems could be revealed even with fewer measures than were used in our study. © 2019 American Psychological Association Inc. All rights reserved.Peer reviewe

43rd Annual Judge Robert H. Staton Indiana Law Update

Meeting proceedings of a seminar by the same name, held September 21-22, 2021

A review of the effectiveness of lower limb orthoses used in cerebral palsy

To produce this review, a systematic literature search was conducted for relevant articles published in the period between the date of the previous ISPO consensus conference report on cerebral palsy (1994) and April 2008. The search terms were 'cerebral and pals* (palsy, palsies), 'hemiplegia', 'diplegia', 'orthos*' (orthoses, orthosis) orthot* (orthotic, orthotics), brace or AFO