318 research outputs found
@Science: a network about science accessibility for university students
At present, visually impaired students are strongly discouraged to attend university scientific studies, especially because of the lack of scientific resources fully accessible through assistive technologies, the difficulty to attend scientific university lectures based on explanations employing transparencies with mathematical expressions as well as graphical representations and the tools to work on mathematical expressions, which are often partially usable or incomplete for advanced subjects. Furthermore, the variety all over Europe of national braille codes to represent mathematical expressions and the language dependence of audio books recorded by human readers make difficult a cross country exchange of knowledge and resources. Some universities have been working on the improvement of assistive technologies in science learning for many years and they have collected best experiences, tools, accessible scientific resources and effective and efficient methods. Unfortunately, up to now many of these best practices and educational resources haven't got widespread all over Europe. In order to share knowledge among universities about science accessibility by visually impaired people and to produce guidelines and to document best practices, the @Science thematic network was established. It is supported for two years by the European Union eContent- Plus Programme. It involves six founding members from five European countries: Italy, Austria, Slovakia, Belgium and France. In the project lifetime, collaboration actions will be undertaken so as to involve in the thematic network other universities, software and hardware manufacturers, publishers, associations for visually impaired persons and students themselves. In so doing, each group will contribute with its experience and will gain knowledge from other experiences. Moreover, the guidelines and best practices will be the result of a two years exchange of knowledge among experts and end users. At first, this paper will introduce the main barriers which affect blind students in going through scientific studies. Then, it will present the objectives and the methodology of the @Science network
Sonification of guidance data during road crossing for people with visual impairments or blindness
In the last years several solutions were proposed to support people with
visual impairments or blindness during road crossing. These solutions focus on
computer vision techniques for recognizing pedestrian crosswalks and computing
their relative position from the user. Instead, this contribution addresses a
different problem; the design of an auditory interface that can effectively
guide the user during road crossing. Two original auditory guiding modes based
on data sonification are presented and compared with a guiding mode based on
speech messages.
Experimental evaluation shows that there is no guiding mode that is best
suited for all test subjects. The average time to align and cross is not
significantly different among the three guiding modes, and test subjects
distribute their preferences for the best guiding mode almost uniformly among
the three solutions. From the experiments it also emerges that higher effort is
necessary for decoding the sonified instructions if compared to the speech
instructions, and that test subjects require frequent `hints' (in the form of
speech messages). Despite this, more than 2/3 of test subjects prefer one of
the two guiding modes based on sonification. There are two main reasons for
this: firstly, with speech messages it is harder to hear the sound of the
environment, and secondly sonified messages convey information about the
"quantity" of the expected movement
Improving the regeneration of skeletal muscle
Several pathological conditions of the skeletal muscle (myopathies, dystrophies and age-related
atrophy) represent a burden for health care system. Satellite cells are postnatal resident myogenic precursors
present in the skeletal muscles throughout the entire lifespan. The identification of novel therapeutic strategies
able to enhance their regenerative capacity is one of the most promising tools to compensate muscle
degeneration and to restore functional muscle performance in patients and elderly. Our research activity is
aiming to contribute to this crucial topic
The microtransplantation technique: a simple ad useful approach to study receptors transplanted into xenopus oocytes
Neuroreceptors are involved in many neurological diseases and represent the preferential target
for the pharmacological treatments. Thus functional studies of their activity, by the use of electrophysiological
techniques, are a fundament approach to understand not only the pathological mechanism of many
neurological diseases but also the mechanism of action of potential drugs. Unfortunately, this cannot be
applied for studying the receptor activity in all the human tissues. The option is the use of animal models,
however they often resemble only some of the neurological diseases in human. In addition, adult or old
animals are not always suitable for electrophysiological studies of age-related diseases. Here, we propose the
microtransplantation technique as a novel and useful method to study receptors in humans and, more in
general, in adult animals
μGraph: Haptic Exploration and Editing of 3D Chemical Diagrams
People with visual impairments or blindness (VIB) encounter diffculties in exploring graphical representations that are widely used for the study of STEM subjects. In particular, graphs are used to represent many different scientifc notations: fowcharts, automata, cognitive maps, and more. Among these, structural chemical formulae are characterized by a complex, often 3-dimensional structure, which makes them hard to access and author with traditional assistive tools. We propose \ub5Graph, a multimodal system that combines haptic and speech feedback to enable people with VIB to explore and edit structural chemical formulae. Two main contributions are presented: (i) a novel, non-visual interaction paradigm for exploring graphs and its implementation in the \ub5Graph system, and (ii) an extensive evaluation of the proposed system with 10 participants with VIB showing that \ub5Graph is thoroughly accessible and that the haptic feedback enhances understanding of the geometric properties of a graph
WordMelodies: supporting children with visual impairment in learning literacy
We present WordMelodies, an inclusive, cross platform, mobile app that supports children with visual impairments in the acquisition of basic literacy skills through 8 different exercises. WordMelodies has been designed and evaluated by three domain experts in assistive technologies and education for children with visual impairments. After three design and evaluation iterations the app is fully accessible, except for one limitation of the cross platform development toolkit used
AudioFunctions.web: Multimodal Exploration of Mathematical Function Graphs
We present AudioFunctions.web, a web app that uses sonifcation, earcons and speech synthesis to enable blind people to explore mathematical function graphs. The system is designed for personalized access through different interfaces (touchscreen, keyboard, touchpad and mouse) on both mobile and traditional devices, in order to better adapt to different user abilities and preferences. It is also publicly available as a web service and can be directly accessed from the teaching material through a hypertext link. An experimental evaluation with 13 visually impaired participants highlights that, while the usability of all the presented interaction modalities is high, users with different abilities prefer different interfaces to interact with the system. It is also shown that users with higher level of mathematical education are capable of better adapting to interaction modalities considered more diffcult by others
A preliminary study on the role of Piezo1 channels in myokine release from cultured mouse myotubes
It has long been known that regular physical exercise induces short and long term benefits reducing the
risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, cancer and improves sleep quality, cognitive level,
mobility, autonomy in enderly. More recent is the evidence on the endocrine role of the contracting
skeletal muscle. Exercise triggers the release of miokines, which act in autocrine, paracrine and endocrine
ways controlling the activity of muscles but also of other tissues and organs such as adipose tissue,
liver, pancreas, bones, and brain. The mechanism of release is still unclear.
Neuromuscular electrical stimulation reproduces the beneficial effects of physical activity producing
physiological metabolic, cardiovascular, aerobic responses consistent with those induced by exercise.
In vitro, Electrical Pulse Stimulations (EPS) of muscle cells elicit cell contraction and mimic miokine
release in the external medium.
Here we show that, in cultured mouse myotubes, EPS induce contractile activity and the release of the
myokine IL-6. Gadolinium highly reduces EPS-induced IL-6 release, suggesting the involvement of mechanical
activated ion channels. The chemical activation of mechanosensitive Piezo1 channels with the
specific agonist Yoda1 stimulates IL-6 release similarly to EPS, suggesting the involvement of Piezo1
channels in the control of the myokine release. The expression of Piezo1 protein in myotubes was
confirmed by the Western blot analysis.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first evidence of a Piezo1-mediated effect in myokine release
and suggests a potential translational use of specific Piezo1 agonists for innovative therapeutic treatments
reproducing/enhancing the benefits of exercise mediated by myokines
- …