Interprofessional simulation to improve patient participation in transitional care

This is an accepted version of the article. The original is available at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/scs.12341/abstract;jsessionid=1AF42118605EDBD498F7DFCF4900C430.f03t01.Background: Educating and training healthcare professionals is known to improve the quality of transitional care for older adults. Arranging interprofessional meetings for healthcare professionals might be useful to improve patient participation skills in transitional care. Aim: To describe the learning activities used in The Meeting Point programme, focusing on patient participation in transitional care, and assess whether they increase healthcare professionals’ awareness of and competencies relating to patient participation in the transitional care of older patients. Design: Data were collected as part of an educational intervention programme, The Meeting Point, including three seminars on ‘Patient participation in the transitional care of older patients’ and four follow-up meetings. Participants were nurses, care assistants, doctors, physiotherapists, patient coordinators and administrative personnel from hospital, nursing homes and home-based care services. Method: The Meeting Point was organised around four pillars: introduction, teaching session, group work activity and plenary discussion. Qualitative data included log reports, summaries of meetings, notes from group work activities, and reports from participants and from follow-up meetings. Results: Feedback from participants shows that they were satisfied with meeting healthcare professionals from other units of care. A film scenario was perceived relevant for group work activity and useful in focusing participants’ attention to patient participation. Follow-up meetings show that some nursing home wards, the emergency department and one medical ward at the hospital continued with ongoing work to improve quality of care. Efforts included implementation of an observational waiting room with comfortable chairs, planning for discharge in hospital admission, a daily patient flow registration system and motivational interviewing during admission to nursing home. Conclusions: The description of the learning activities used at The Meeting Point seminars shows that they were useful to increase awareness of and competencies on patient participation in transitional care.acceptedVersio

Virtual Meeting Rooms: From Observation to Simulation

Virtual meeting rooms are used for simulation of real meeting behavior and can show how people behave, how they gesture, move their heads, bodies, their gaze behavior during conversations. They are used for visualising models of meeting behavior, and they can be used for the evaluation of these models. They are also used to show the effects of controlling certain parameters on the behavior and in experiments to see what the effect is on communication when various channels of information - speech, gaze, gesture, posture - are switched off or manipulated in other ways. The paper presents the various stages in the development of a virtual meeting room as well and illustrates its uses by presenting some results of experiments to see whether human judges can induce conversational roles in a virtual meeting situation when they only see the head movements of participants in the meeting

The VITI program: Final Report

In this report we present our findings and results from the VITI program in 2000. The focus of the research work undertaken by VITI has been to provide electronic meeting environments that are easy to use and afford as natural a collaboration experience as possible. This final report is structured into three parts. Part one concerns the VITI infrastructure and consists of two sections. The first section describes the process of establishing the infrastructure, concentrating on how the work was done. The second section presents the actual infrastructure that is in place today, concentrating on what has been put in place. Part two examines the use the VITI infrastructure has been put to, giving examples of activities it has supported and discussing strengths and weaknesses that have emerged through this use. Finally part three considers the future of distributed electronic meeting environments. It is recommended that the report be read in the order in which it is presented. However, each section has been written as a standalone document and can be read independently of the others

The Sensitivity of Hearing-Impaired Adults to Acoustic Attributes in Simulated Rooms

In previous studies we have shown that older hearing-impaired individuals are relatively insensitive to changes in the apparent width of broadband noises when those width changes were based on differences in interaural coherence [W. Whitmer, B. Seeber and M. Akeroyd, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 132, 369-379 (2012)]. This insensitivity has been linked to senescent difficulties in resolving binaural fine-structure differences. It is therefore possible that interaural coherence, despite its widespread use, may not be the best acoustic surrogate of spatial perception for the aged and impaired. To test this, we simulated the room impulse responses for various acoustic scenarios with differing coherence and lateral (energy) fraction attributes using room modelling software (ODEON). Bilaterally impaired adult participants were asked to sketch the perceived size of speech tokens and musical excerpts that were convolved with these impulse responses and presented to them in a sound-dampened enclosure through a 24-loudspeaker array. Participants' binaural acuity was also measured using an interaural phase discrimination task. Corroborating our previous findings, the results showed less sensitivity to interaural coherence in the auditory source width judgments of older hearing-impaired individuals, indicating that alternate acoustic measurements in the design of spaces for the elderly may be necessary

The 2005 AMI system for the transcription of speech in meetings

In this paper we describe the 2005 AMI system for the transcription\ud of speech in meetings used for participation in the 2005 NIST\ud RT evaluations. The system was designed for participation in the speech\ud to text part of the evaluations, in particular for transcription of speech\ud recorded with multiple distant microphones and independent headset\ud microphones. System performance was tested on both conference room\ud and lecture style meetings. Although input sources are processed using\ud different front-ends, the recognition process is based on a unified system\ud architecture. The system operates in multiple passes and makes use\ud of state of the art technologies such as discriminative training, vocal\ud tract length normalisation, heteroscedastic linear discriminant analysis,\ud speaker adaptation with maximum likelihood linear regression and minimum\ud word error rate decoding. In this paper we describe the system performance\ud on the official development and test sets for the NIST RT05s\ud evaluations. The system was jointly developed in less than 10 months\ud by a multi-site team and was shown to achieve very competitive performance

Pro-active Meeting Assistants : Attention Please!

This paper gives an overview of pro-active meeting assistants, what they are and when they can be useful. We explain how to develop such assistants with respect to requirement definitions and elaborate on a set of Wizard of Oz experiments, aiming to find out in which form a meeting assistant should operate to be accepted by participants and whether the meeting effectiveness and efficiency can be improved by an assistant at all

Multi-party Interaction in a Virtual Meeting Room

This paper presents an overview of the work carried out at the HMI group of the University of Twente in the domain of multi-party interaction. The process from automatic observations of behavioral aspects through interpretations resulting in recognized behavior is discussed for various modalities and levels. We show how a virtual meeting room can be used for visualization and evaluation of behavioral models as well as a research tool for studying the effect of modified stimuli on the perception of behavior