Why Can\u27t We Sleep? Impact of Race and Social Status on Sleep in College

This study assessed the impacts of discrimination, microaggressions, and socioeconomic status (SES) on sleep in college students. The study also assessed moderators of racial identity and sleep hygiene as potential buffers of the impact from discrimination. Method: The impacts of lifetime discrimination and microaggressions over the past six months on sleep over the past month was assessed using an online survey (Study 1), and daily impacts of microaggressions on sleep was assessed from a daily diary study (Study 2). Results: The results showed modest correlations for the impact of discrimination, microaggressions, and SES on sleep, with the overall patterns suggesting a detrimental impact on sleep for students of color. The moderators of racial identity and sleep hygiene did not indicate significant effects. Conclusion: The impact of discrimination and microaggressions on sleep for students of color is promoting poorer sleep outcomes in comparison to White students. Additionally, higher SES contributed to better sleep outcomes; however, for students of color, higher SES was not shown to buffer the impact of discrimination on sleep outcomes

A smart home anomaly detection framework

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial ful lment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophySmart Homes (SHs), as subsets of the Internet of Things (IoT), make use of Machine Learning and Arti cial Intelligence tools to provide technology-enabled solutions which assist their occupants and users with their Activities of Daily Living (ADL). Some SH provide always-present, health management support and care services. Having these services provided at home enables SH occupants such as the elderly and disabled to continue to live in their own homes and localities thus aiding Ageing In Place goals and eliminating the need for them to be relocated in order to be able to continue receiving the same support and services. Introducing and interconnecting smart, autonomous systems in homes to enable these service provisions and Assistance Technologies (AT) requires that certain interfaces in, and connections to, SH are exposed to the Internet, among other public-facing networks. This introduces the potential for cyber-physical attacks to be perpetrated through, from and against SH. Apart from the actual threats posed by these attacks to SH occupants and their homes, the potential that these attacks might occur can adversely a ect the adoption or uptake of SH solutions.This thesis identi es key attributes of the di erent elements (things or nodes and rooms or zones) in SHs and the relationships that exist between these elements. These relationships can be used to build SH security baselines for SHs such that any deviations from this baseline is described as anomalous. The thesis demonstrates the application of these relationships to Anomaly Detection (AD) through the analysis of several hypothetical scenarios and the decisions reached about whether they are normal or anomalous. This thesis also proposes an Internet of Things Digital Forensics Framework (IDFF), a Forensics Edge Management System (FEMS), a FEMS Decision-Making Algorithm (FDMA) and an IoT Incident Response plan. These tools can be combined to provide proactive (autonomous and human-led) Digital Forensics services within cyber-physical environments like the Smart Home

A Social Practice Theory Perspective to Exploring the Lived Experiences of Physical Activity in People with Type-2 Diabetes in Urban Nigeria

This thesis aims to gain a greater understanding of the social, material and historical processes underlying physical activity participation in the lived experiences of people with type-2 diabetes in Urban Nigeria. Using social practice theory and life-course perspective as guiding theoretical frameworks, a qualitative narrative inquiry was conducted with thirty-five people with type-2 diabetes receiving outpatient care at the University College Hospital Ibadan, Oyo state, Nigeria. Through a multi-modal research design, data were collected in three phases: Firstly, a narrative interview study was conducted to obtain biographical accounts of how people’s relationship with physical activity has evolved over their life course. Secondly, participants took part in a one-week activity tracking and diary study to capture their daily life patterns of activity. Thirdly, the diary study was followed up with a visual elicitation interview co-explore their captured data to gain deeper access to the context of their daily lives and how physical activity fits within this context. Additionally, an informal contextual inquiry involving observations and discussions with healthcare professionals was conducted to help build a bigger picture of the context in which people lived. Four separate analyses of the research data were performed. The first involved a case-based narrative analysis of six of the thirty-five participants’ data to understand the nuances and peculiarities of their individual lived experiences. This was followed by a cluster analysis of participants’ daily activities to identify groups of participants with similar patterns of activities. The third included a thematic analysis of participants’ experiences of physical activity over the life course. Lastly, a separate thematic analysis was conducted to understand participants’ knowledge about physical activity as part of their type-2 diabetes management. The cluster analysis of people with type-2 diabetes’ daily activities identified six participant sub-groups, with members of each group having similar patterns of activities. Physical activity patterns also varied across the life course and were strongly implicated in processes including changing social roles within the family life trajectory, transitions to retirement, ageing, type-2 diabetes diagnosis, gender norms, absence of an exercise culture, and negative age stereotypes. The research makes three contributions. Firstly, it makes an empirical contribution by providing an in-depth multi-layered account of the socio-historical dynamics of physical activity in the lived experiences of people with type-2 diabetes in an urban Nigerian context. Secondly, the research offers a methodological contribution by demonstrating how combining SPT with concepts from life-course perspectives can facilitate a relational and temporal approach to exploring the lived experiences of physical activity in people with Type-2 diabetes in Urban Nigeria. Thirdly, the research findings contribute to the growing theoretical debates that physical activity engagement is not a static or linear behaviour but a dynamic, ongoing process of change that encompasses an interplay of transitions, turning points, and social interactions in people’s lives

Investigating Human Perceptions of Trust and Social Cues in Robots for Safe Human-Robot Interaction in Human-oriented Environments

As robots increasingly take part in daily living activities, humans will have to interact with them in domestic and other human-oriented environments. This thesis envisages a future where autonomous robots could be used as home companions to assist and collaborate with their human partners in unstructured environments without the support of any roboticist or expert. To realise such a vision, it is important to identify which factors (e.g. trust, participants’ personalities and background etc.) that influence people to accept robots’ as companions and trust the robots to look after their well-being. I am particularly interested in the possibility of robots using social behaviours and natural communications as a repair mechanism to positively influence humans’ sense of trust and companionship towards the robots. The main reason being that trust can change over time due to different factors (e.g. perceived erroneous robot behaviours). In this thesis, I provide guidelines for a robot to regain human trust by adopting certain human-like behaviours. I can expect that domestic robots will exhibit occasional mechanical, programming or functional errors, as occurs with any other electrical consumer devices. For example, these might include software errors, dropping objects due to gripper malfunctions, picking up the wrong object or showing faulty navigational skills due to unclear camera images or noisy laser scanner data respectively. It is therefore important for a domestic robot to have acceptable interactive behaviour when exhibiting and recovering from an error situation. In this context, several open questions need to be addressed regarding both individuals’ perceptions of the errors and robots, and the effects of these on people’s trust in robots. As a first step, I investigated how the severity of the consequences and the timing of a robot’s different types of erroneous behaviours during an interaction may have different impact on users’ attitudes towards a domestic robot. I concluded that there is a correlation between the magnitude of an error performed by the robot and the corresponding loss of trust of the human in the robot. In particular, people’s trust was strongly affected by robot errors that had severe consequences. This led us to investigate whether people’s awareness of robots’ functionalities may affect their trust in a robot. I found that people’s acceptance and trust in the robot may be affected by their knowledge of the robot’s capabilities and its limitations differently according the participants’ age and the robot’s embodiment. In order to deploy robots in the wild, strategies for mitigating and re-gaining people’s trust in robots in case of errors needs to be implemented. In the following three studies, I assessed if a robot with awareness of human social conventions would increase people’s trust in the robot. My findings showed that people almost blindly trusted a social and a non-social robot in scenarios with non-severe error consequences. In contrast, people that interacted with a social robot did not trust its suggestions in a scenario with a higher risk outcome. Finally, I investigated the effects of robots’ errors on people’s trust of a robot over time. The findings showed that participants’ judgement of a robot is formed during the first stage of their interaction. Therefore, people are more inclined to lose trust in a robot if it makes big errors at the beginning of the interaction. The findings from the Human-Robot Interaction experiments presented in this thesis will contribute to an advanced understanding of the trust dynamics between humans and robots for a long-lasting and successful collaboration

A Comprehensive Approach to WSN-Based ITS Applications: A Survey

In order to perform sensing tasks, most current Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) rely on expensive sensors, which offer only limited functionality. A more recent trend consists of using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) for such purpose, which reduces the required investment and enables the development of new collaborative and intelligent applications that further contribute to improve both driving safety and traffic efficiency. This paper surveys the application of WSNs to such ITS scenarios, tackling the main issues that may arise when developing these systems. The paper is divided into sections which address different matters including vehicle detection and classification as well as the selection of appropriate communication protocols, network architecture, topology and some important design parameters. In addition, in line with the multiplicity of different technologies that take part in ITS, it does not consider WSNs just as stand-alone systems, but also as key components of heterogeneous systems cooperating along with other technologies employed in vehicular scenarios

Sleep-Related Arousal and Spontaneous Movement Properties in Methadone-Exposed Neonates: A Videographic Assessment On the First or Second Postnatal Night

Prenatal substance exposure such as alcohol, nicotine, and opiates is known to modulate autonomic regulatory function during sleep, and to decrease arousability and spontaneous movements (SM). SM during sleep may reflect a protective mechanism for immature patterns of arousals. Neurodevelopmental compromise in sleep and arousal systems may underlie sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) risk in which infants expire during sleep. Previous studies from our laboratory found abnormal patterns of neonatal arousal, sleep fragmentation, and deficits in sleep-related SM in infants with prenatal alcohol exposure. In this study, prenatal exposure to methadone was hypothesized to disrupt the development of sleep and arousal neural circuitry, which have been found for other high-risk samples. Neonatal Abstinence Syndrome (NAS) is a common consequence of prenatal methadone exposure that may appear within 24 - 72 hours postbirth, and is known to disrupt sleep due to hyperarousability. As a secondary hypothesis, the neonatal age (day 1 or 2 of life) was expected to affect infant sleep and arousal outcomes in methadone-exposed neonates particularly on day 2 when NAS symptoms increase. Additionally, single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in the catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) gene was found to associate with the severity of NAS in our previous study. NAS severity has been associated with sleep disorders. Therefore, the second hypothesis of this thesis study is that the minor allelic variants (AG/GG) of the COMT gene previously identified as protective of NAS severity may also associate with better sleep organization and more robust SM than the carriers of the AA genotype. Rural, disadvantaged Caucasian mothers and infants (N=58 dyads: methadone=37, comparison=21) were recruited from multiple narcotic treatment sites and prenatal clinic at Eastern Maine Medical Center (EMMC). Mothers were interviewed to determine demographics, psychiatric status, and substance abuse history during the 3rd trimester. Biweekly maternal urinalysis screens and neonatal meconium were applied to verify comorbid alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use. Finnegan scores determined symptoms of withdrawal in opioid exposed newborns. Videosomnographic recordings of behavioral states were collected in the newborn nursery of EMMC overnight, and recordings between 2400-0500h were analyzed for frequency and duration of sleep, wake, arousal, and SM. Saliva samples for genetic study was collected using OrageneTM kits. Results from behavioral state analysis (n=50) showed that methadone-exposed neonates were significantly hyper-aroused and crying more on both day 1 and 2 of life (p\u3c.05); and both the frequency and duration of these parameters increased significantly in the methadoneexposed neonates on day 2 of life, as expected. In the genetic study (n=20), neonates with NAS protective AG/GG genotypes showed better behavioral sleep, fewer arousals, and robust SM than infants with NAS risk AA genotype (p\u3c.05). These findings support evidence of sleep fragmentation in the exposed neonates that is exacerbated by the passage of time since birth when withdrawal symptoms compound the intensity of sleep disturbance and infant distress. Consistent with other findings from other SIDS-risk samples, these findings indicate that arousal and SM regulation may be disrupted in methadone-exposed neonates, suggesting that prenatal methadone may increase risk for SIDS

FinBook: literary content as digital commodity

This short essay explains the significance of the FinBook intervention, and invites the reader to participate. We have associated each chapter within this book with a financial robot (FinBot), and created a market whereby book content will be traded with financial securities. As human labour increasingly consists of unstable and uncertain work practices and as algorithms replace people on the virtual trading floors of the worlds markets, we see members of society taking advantage of FinBots to invest and make extra funds. Bots of all kinds are making financial decisions for us, searching online on our behalf to help us invest, to consume products and services. Our contribution to this compilation is to turn the collection of chapters in this book into a dynamic investment portfolio, and thereby play out what might happen to the process of buying and consuming literature in the not-so-distant future. By attaching identities (through QR codes) to each chapter, we create a market in which the chapter can ‘perform’. Our FinBots will trade based on features extracted from the authors’ words in this book: the political, ethical and cultural values embedded in the work, and the extent to which the FinBots share authors’ concerns; and the performance of chapters amongst those human and non-human actors that make up the market, and readership. In short, the FinBook model turns our work and the work of our co-authors into an investment portfolio, mediated by the market and the attention of readers. By creating a digital economy specifically around the content of online texts, our chapter and the FinBook platform aims to challenge the reader to consider how their personal values align them with individual articles, and how these become contested as they perform different value judgements about the financial performance of each chapter and the book as a whole. At the same time, by introducing ‘autonomous’ trading bots, we also explore the different ‘network’ affordances that differ between paper based books that’s scarcity is developed through analogue form, and digital forms of books whose uniqueness is reached through encryption. We thereby speak to wider questions about the conditions of an aggressive market in which algorithms subject cultural and intellectual items – books – to economic parameters, and the increasing ubiquity of data bots as actors in our social, political, economic and cultural lives. We understand that our marketization of literature may be an uncomfortable juxtaposition against the conventionally-imagined way a book is created, enjoyed and shared: it is intended to be

An aesthetics of touch: investigating the language of design relating to form

How well can designers communicate qualities of touch? This paper presents evidence that they have some capability to do so, much of which appears to have been learned, but at present make limited use of such language. Interviews with graduate designer-makers suggest that they are aware of and value the importance of touch and materiality in their work, but lack a vocabulary to fully relate to their detailed explanations of other aspects such as their intent or selection of materials. We believe that more attention should be paid to the verbal dialogue that happens in the design process, particularly as other researchers show that even making-based learning also has a strong verbal element to it. However, verbal language alone does not appear to be adequate for a comprehensive language of touch. Graduate designers-makers’ descriptive practices combined non-verbal manipulation within verbal accounts. We thus argue that haptic vocabularies do not simply describe material qualities, but rather are situated competences that physically demonstrate the presence of haptic qualities. Such competencies are more important than groups of verbal vocabularies in isolation. Design support for developing and extending haptic competences must take this wide range of considerations into account to comprehensively improve designers’ capabilities