Audiovisual cues to uncertainty

This paper presents research on the use of audiovisual prosody to signal a speaker’s level of uncertainty. The first study con-sists of an experiment, in which subjects are asked factual ques-tions in a conversational setting, while they are being filmed. Statistical analyses bring to light that the speakers ’ Feeling-of-Knowing (FOK) correlate significantly with a number of vi-sual and verbal properties. Interestingly, it appears that an-swers tend to have a higher number of marked feature settings (i.e., divergences of the neutral audiovisual expression) when the FOK score is low, while the reverse is true for non-answers. The second study is a perception experiment, in which a selec-tion of the utterances from the first study is presented to sub-jects in one of three conditions: vision only, sound only or vi-sion+sound. Results reveal that human observers can reliably distinguish HighFOK responses from LowFOK responses in all three conditions, be it that answers are easier than non-answers, and that a bimodal presentation of the stimuli is easier than their unimodal counterparts. Results of these two experiments are potentially relevant for improving the communication style in human-machine interaction. 1

Acute upper airway failure and mediastinal emphysema following a wire-guided percutaneous cricothyrotomy in a patient with severe maxillofacial trauma

Contains fulltext : 69538.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)BACKGROUND: In the presence of severe maxillofacial trauma, management of the airway is important because this condition poses a significant threat to airway patency. That securing the airway is not always straightforward is described and illustrated in this paper. CASE: We present the case of a 23-year-old patient who sustained severe maxillofacial injury for which airway control was necessary. A wire-guided percutaneous dilation cricothyrotomy was performed, which was most probably the cause of an acute loss of airway patency. The literature regarding the role of percutaneous techniques in an elective and emergency setting is reviewed