TechNews digests: Jan - Mar 2010

TechNews is a technology, news and analysis service aimed at anyone in the education sector keen to stay informed about technology developments, trends and issues. TechNews focuses on emerging technologies and other technology news. TechNews service : digests september 2004 till May 2010 Analysis pieces and News combined publish every 2 to 3 month

Intervention for a visual attention span processing deficit in a Greek-speaking child with slow reading speed:Developmental dyslexia and visual attention span processing training

We present the case of TN, aged 9;11, a monolingual Greek-speaking girl with accurate but slow word and non-word reading. Neuropsychological assessment revealed a selective deficit in visual attention (VA) span tasks.  TN had previously taken part in a spelling intervention targeting whole word processing and, although her spelling improved, at the end of the programme her reading remained slow. In the present study, we assessed TN in a lexical decision task with semantic primes, and she showed reduced semantic priming in relation to typically developing readers. TN took part in an intervention aimed at mitigating the VA span processing deficit and similar to a programme previously conducted with a twelve-year-old Greek-speaking boy, RF ([author(s)], 2013). Post-test results for TN revealed a significant improvement in letter report ability as well a reduction in word reading latencies; semantic facilitation was also observed in the priming task following the intervention, although differences were not significant. The results indicate, in line with previous research, an association between visual attention span and reading speed

RFID Localisation For Internet Of Things Smart Homes: A Survey

The Internet of Things (IoT) enables numerous business opportunities in fields as diverse as e-health, smart cities, smart homes, among many others. The IoT incorporates multiple long-range, short-range, and personal area wireless networks and technologies into the designs of IoT applications. Localisation in indoor positioning systems plays an important role in the IoT. Location Based IoT applications range from tracking objects and people in real-time, assets management, agriculture, assisted monitoring technologies for healthcare, and smart homes, to name a few. Radio Frequency based systems for indoor positioning such as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a key enabler technology for the IoT due to its costeffective, high readability rates, automatic identification and, importantly, its energy efficiency characteristic. This paper reviews the state-of-the-art RFID technologies in IoT Smart Homes applications. It presents several comparable studies of RFID based projects in smart homes and discusses the applications, techniques, algorithms, and challenges of adopting RFID technologies in IoT smart home systems.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures, 3 table

Visual illusions: An interesting tool to investigate developmental dyslexia and autism spectrum disorder

A visual illusion refers to a percept that is different in some aspect from the physical stimulus. Illusions are a powerful non-invasive tool for understanding the neurobiology of vision, telling us, indirectly, how the brain processes visual stimuli. There are some neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by visual deficits. Surprisingly, just a few studies investigated illusory perception in clinical populations. Our aim is to review the literature supporting a possible role for visual illusions in helping us understand the visual deficits in developmental dyslexia and autism spectrum disorder. Future studies could develop new tools – based on visual illusions – to identify an early risk for neurodevelopmental disorders

Parental Reflective Functioning and Children’s Emergent Reading Skills: ERP and longitudinal behavioral measures

The current study examined the correlations between parental reflective functioning and children’s phonological awareness and reading-related neural development (measured via a phoneme-processing experiment using EEG), and its utility as a predictor of children’s reading skills one year later when they have begun literacy education. Fourteen pre-readers’ (mean age 4.51 years) phonological awareness and their parents’ reflective functioning skills were assessed, along with their EEG responses in a phoneme- processing task. Children’s phonological awareness and emergent reading skills were assessed again 12-15 months later, at the start of First Grade. Left-lateralized neural indices were observed to be correlated with parental reflective functioning (PRF) and children’s later reading-related skills. Specifically, scores on measures of PRF: Interest & Curiosity were positively correlated with the N2 amplitude in the left temporal cortex (p = 0.049), and the P2 amplitude in the left temporal cortex was also correlated with children’s Phonological Awareness scores (p = 0.004) and with their Basic Reading scores (p = 0.002) one year later. Multiple linear regression analyses also revealed that scores on measures of PRF: Interest and Curiosity significantly predicted children’s future phonological awareness (p = 0.014) and basic reading skills (p = 0.002). This study is the first of its kind to identify correlations between parental engagement and neural indices of children’s pre-reading skills, and to reveal parental reflective functioning as a strong predictor of children’s later reading abilities