My Lockdown Escape: Sparking Self-Empathy in the Context of the Covid-19 Pandemic

During the Covid-19 pandemic, research communities focused on collecting and understanding people's behaviours and feelings to study and tackle the pandemic indirect effects. Despite its consequences are slowly starting to fade away, such an interest is still alive. In this article, we propose a hybrid, gamified, story-driven data collection approach to spark self-empathy, hence resurfacing people's past feelings. The game is designed to include a physical board, decks of cards, and a digital application. As the player plays through the game, they customize and escape from their lockdown room by completing statements and answering a series of questions that define their story. The decoration of the lockdown room and the storytelling-driven approach are targeted at sparking people's emotions and self-empathy towards their past selves. Ultimately, the proposed approach was proven effective in sparking and collecting feelings, while a few improvements are still necessary

Scaling collaborative policymaking: how to leverage on digital co-creation to engage citizens

n recent years, new methods to engage citizens in deliberative processes of governments and institutions have been studied. Such methodologies have become a necessity to assure the efficacy and sustainability of policies. Several tools and solutions have been proposed while trying to achieve such a goal. The dual problem to citizen engagement is how to provide policymakers with useful and actionable insights and data stemming from those processes. The following paper has the aim to share with the audience of the Data for Policy Conference 2021 an innovative tool based on the concept of participatory policymaking with the scope of collecting feedback and comments to enhance the consistency and the usefulness of the tool. We propose research featuring a method and implementation of a crowdsourcing and co-creation technique that can provide value to both citizens and policymakers engaged in the policy-making process. Thanks to our methodology, policymakers can design challenges for citizens to take part, cooperate and provide their input to policymakers. We also propose a web-based tool that allows citizens to participate and produce content to support the policymaking processes through a gamified interface that focuses on emotional and vision-oriented content

Temperament and Character Effects on Late Adolescents' Well-Being and Emotional-Behavioural Difficulties

Background. Research on adults points to personality as a crucial determinant of well- being. The present study investigates the question of personality's relation to well-being and psychosocial adjustment in adolescence. Methods. We assessed the role of temperament and character (Temperament and Character Inventory, TCI-125), on psychological well-being (PWB; Psychological Well- Being scales), subjective well-being (SWB; Positive and Negative Affect, PA and NA, respectively), and psychosocial adjustment (emotional-behavioural problems measured by the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire for Adolescents, SDQ-A), in 72 Italian late adolescents (aged 17.5 0.75). Multiple regressions were conducted to predict PWB, SWB, and SDQ-A scores using TCI-125 scales as predictors. Results. Character maturity, and in particular Self-Directedness, had a widespread protective effect on well-being and psychosocial adjustment, while different strengths and emotional-behavioural difficulties were associated to specific temperamental and character traits. For example, Harm-Avoidance and Novelty-Seeking positively predicted internalized and externalized problems, respectively. Discussion. The present results suggest the usefulness of continuing to evaluate temperament and, in particular, character dimensions in investigations focused on adolescents' well-being and psychosocial functioning, especially in the contexts of potential interventions aimed at enhancing development of adolescents' character dimensions at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, and transpersonal levels

Healthy and Sustainable Hospital Evaluation—A Review of POE Tools for Hospital Assessment in an Evidence-Based Design Framework

Hospitals are complex, high-performance systems that demand continuous quality improvement. Several instruments evaluate the organizational or clinical qualities but very few focus on the built environment. The purpose of this paper is to compare and review the recent tools able to assess the hospital built environment and test how they measure health, sustainability, or both through Post Occupancy Evaluation (POE). A literature review has been conducted in the field of hospital quality assessment and 13 POE instruments have been included and analyzed through Ulrich’s Evidence-Based Design (EBD) framework. The percentage and the content of health or sustainability-related criteria have been compared and further discussed. Health related criteria the most recent tools are used three times more than in the tools developed in the nineties. The most used EBD criteria are safety enhancement (n = 131; 14%) and visual environment (n = 119; 13%). Although sustainability remains a relevant issue, today, growing attention is dedicated to the impact of built environment on occupant’s health. Further investigation is needed to understand the effectiveness of those instruments in practice

RF-Assisted Free-Space Optics for 5G Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications

Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications are being proposed, tested and deployed to improve road safety and traffic efficiency. However, the automotive industry poses strict requirements for safety-critical applications, that call for reliable, low latency and high data rate communications. In this context, it is widely agreed that both Radio-Frequency (RF) technologies at mmWaves and Free-Space Optics (FSO) represent promising solutions, although their performances are severely degraded by transmitter-receiver misalignment due to the challenging high-mobility conditions. By combining RF and FSO technologies, this paper proposes a FSO-based V2V communication system where the pointing coordinates of laser sources are based on vehicle's information exchanged over a reliable low-rate RF link. Numerical simulations demonstrate that such compensation mechanism is mandatory to counteract the unavoidable misalignments induced by vehicle dynamics, and thus to enable FSO technology for V2V communications even in high mobility scenarios.Comment: Accepted in IEEE ICC 201

Phosphate overload accelerates vascular aging in uremic patients

Vascular calcification is a very common event in atients affected by diabetes and chronic kidney disease (CKD). Recently, it has been well documented that abnormalities in mineral and bone metabolism in CKD patients are associated with increased morbidity and mortality. Elevated serum phosphate and calcium-phosphate product levels play an important role in the pathogenesis of vascular mineralization in uremic patients and also appear to be associated with increased cardiovascular mortality. Together with classical passive precipitation of calcium-phosphate in soft tissues, during the last decade it has been demonstrated that inorganic phosphate may cause extraskeletal calcification directly through a real “ossification” of the tunica media in the vasculature of CKD patients. Therefore, control of phosphate retention is now an even more crucial target of treatment in patients affected by chronic kidney disease

Facile and sustainable functionalization of graphene layers with pyrrole compounds

A facile and sustainable functionalization of graphene layers was performed with pyrrole compounds (PyC) prepared through the Paal–Knorr reaction of a primary amine with 2,5-hexanedione. A good number of primary amines were used: hexanamine, dodecanamine, octadecanamine, 2-aminoacetic acid, 2-amino-1,3-propanediol, 3-(triethoxysilyl)propan-1-amine. The reactions were characterized by good yield, up to 96 %, and indeed satisfactory atom efficiency, up to 80 %. The functionalization of graphene layers was obtained by mixing PyC with a high surface area graphite and heating at a temperature range from 130 °C to 150 °C for 3 h. The yield of functionalization reaction was larger than 60 % and also up to about 90 % for the pyrrole compounds from dodecanamine and 2-amino-1,3-propanediol, respectively. The cycloaddition reaction between the graphene layers and the pyrrole compound, oxidized in two position, is proposed as working hypothesis to account for such efficient functionalization. Raman spectroscopy revealed that the structure of the graphitic substrate remained substantially unaltered, after the reaction. Stable dispersions of HSAG adducts with different PyC were prepared in solvents with different solubility parameters and HRTEM analysis showed the presence of aggregates of only few layers of graphene. Qualitative results of dispersion tests were used to calculate the Hansen sphere for the HSAG adduct with the pyrrole compound based on dodecanamine so to provide a first estimate of its Hansen solubility parameters. This work paves the way for the facile and sustainable modification of the solubility parameters of graphene layers and for the predictive assessment of their compatibility with different environments

Bioengineering the Pancreas: Cell-on-Scaffold Technology

Nowadays, type I diabetes mellitus is a pathology afflicting millions of people globally with a dramatic assessment in the next future. Current treatments including exogenous insulin, pancreas transplantation and islets transplantation, are not free from important lifelong side effects. In the last decade, tissue engineering and regenerative medicine have shown encouraging results about the possibility to produce a functional bioengineered pancreas. Among many technologies, decellularization offers the opportunity to produce an organ-specific acellular matrix that could subsequently repopulate with endocrine cellular population. Herein, we aim to review the state-of-art and this technology highlighting the diabetes burden for the healthcare system and the major achievements toward the manufacturing of a bioengineered pancreas obtained by cell-on-scaffold technology