XRSpotlight: Example-based Programming of XR Interactions using a Rule-based Approach

Research on enabling novice AR/VR developers has emphasized the need to lower the technical barriers to entry. This is often achieved by providing new authoring tools that provide simpler means to implement XR interactions through abstraction. However, novices are then bound by the ceiling of each tool and may not form the correct mental model of how interactions are implemented. We present XRSpotlight, a system that supports novices by curating a list of the XR interactions defined in a Unity scene and presenting them as rules in natural language. Our approach is based on a model abstraction that unifies existing XR toolkit implementations. Using our model, XRSpotlight can find incomplete specifications of interactions, suggest similar interactions, and copy-paste interactions from examples using different toolkits. We assess the validity of our model with professional VR developers and demonstrate that XRSpotlight helps novices understand how XR interactions are implemented in examples and apply this knowledge in their projects

Collaborative lifelong learning and professional transfer. Case study: ECO European Project

This research reviews the formative model of the sMOOCs (social MOOC) characterized by the interaction and the implication of the participants who, relying on collective intelligence, look for the co-creation of knowledge in every educational action. The fieldwork focuses on the analysis of the “Step by Step” sMOOC of ECO Project (the second and third editions), that aims at the training of e-teachers and the transfer of learning to the professional field. The research methodology is mixed, with quantitative and qualitative techniques: it uses a semi-structured questionnaire, in order to compare possible bivariate correlations between the different variables; it conducts a content analysis of the fragments of messages written by the participants in the forums of the course. One of the most significant conclusions is the high degree of satisfaction of the participants with regard to the value of the course for their professional life. This form of transfer of the learning process leads to the proposal of a new modality for MOOCs, the tMOOC as “transferMOOC”

Branes with Background Fields in Boundary State Formalism

Interaction of branes in presence of internal gauge fields is considered by using the boundary state formalism. This approach enables us to consider the problems that are not easily accessible to the canonical approach via open strings. The effects of compactification of some of the dimensions on tori are also discussed. Also we study the massless state contribution on this interaction.Comment: 12 pp. No figure

Development of a novel scheme for long-term body temperature monitoring: a review of benefits and applications

Body temperature is a health or disease marker that has been in clinical use for centuries. The threshold currently applied to define fever, with small variations, is 38 °C. However, current approaches do not provide a full picture of the thermoregulation process and its correlation with disease. This paper describes a new non-invasive body temperature device that improves the understanding of the pathophysiology of diseases by integrating a variety of temperature data from different body locations. This device enables to gain a deeper insight into fever, endogenous rhythms, subject activity and ambient temperature to provide anticipatory and more efficient treatments. Its clinical use would be a big step in the overcoming of the anachronistic febrile/afebrile dichotomy and walking towards a system medicine approach to certain diseases. This device has already been used in some clinical applications successfully. Other possible applications based on the device features and clinical requirements are also described in this paper.Cuesta Frau, D.; Varela Entrecanales, M.; Valor Pérez, R.; Vargas, B. (2015). Development of a novel scheme for long-term body temperature monitoring: a review of benefits and applications. Journal of Medical Systems. 39(4):1-7. doi:10.1007/s10916-015-0209-3S17394Gai, M., Merlo, I., Dellepiane, S., Cantaluppi, V., Leonardi, G., Fop, F., Guarena, C., Grassi, G., and Biancore, L., Glycemic pattern in diabetic patients on hemodialysis: Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) analysis. Blood Purif. 38(1):68–73 , 2014.Kondziella, D., Friberg, C.K., Wellwood, I., Reiffurth, C., Fabricius, M., and Dreier, J.P.: Continuous EEG monitoring in aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage: A systematic review. Neurocrit. Care (2014)Ciccone, A., Celani, M.G., Chiaramonte, R., Rossi, C., and Righetti, E., Continuous versus intermittent physiological monitoring for acute stroke. Cochrane Database Syst. Rev. 31, 2013.Kushimoto, S., Yamanouchi, S., Endo, T., Sato, T., Nomura, R., Fujita, M., Kudo, D., Omura, T., Miyagawa, N., and Sato, T., Body temperature abnormalities in non-neurological critically ill patients: A review of the literature. J. Intensive Care 2, 2014.Mc Callum, L., and Higgings, D., Measuring body temperature. Nursing Times 108:20–22, 2012.Varela, M., Ruiz-Esteban, R., Martinez-Nicolas, A., Cuervo-Arango, A., Barros, C., and Delgado, E.G., Catching the spike and tracking the flow: Holter-temperature monitoring in patients admitted in a general internal medicine ward. Int. J. Clin. Pract. 65(12):1283–1288, 2011.Lopes, F., Peres, D., Bross, A., Melot, C., and Vincent, J.L., Serial evaluation of the SOFA score to predict outcome in critically ill patients. J. Am. Med. Assoc. 286:1754–1758, 2001.Vincent, J.L., and Moreno, R., Clinical review: Scoring systems in the critically ill. Crit. Care, 14, 2010.Sund-Levander, M., and Grodzinsky, E., Time for a change to assess and evaluate body temperature in clinical practice. Int. J. Nurs. Pract. 15:241–249, 2009.Cuesta-Frau, D., Varela, M., Aboy, M., and Miro, P., Description of a portable wireless device for body temperature acquisition and analysis. Sensors 9(10):7648–7663, 2009.Varela, M., Cuesta-Frau, D., Madrid, J.A., Churruca, J., Miro-Matinez, P., Ruiz, R., and Marinez, C., Holter monitoring of central peripheral temperature: Possible uses and feasibility study in outpatient settings. J. Clin. Monit. Comput. 4(23):209–216, 2009.Jordan, J., Miro, P., Cuesta-Frau, D., Varela, M., and Vargas B.: Aplicacion de analisis multivariante para la deteccion de estados prefebriles en pacientes ingresados (in Spanish), XXXIV Congreso Nacional de Estadistica e Investigacion Operativa, Castellon (Spain) (2013)Richman, J., and Moorman, J.R., Physiological time-series analysis using approximate entropy and sample entropy. Am. J. Physiol. Heart Circ. Physiol. 278(6):H2039–2049, 2000.Young, P., Saxena, M., Eastwood, G.M., Bellomo, R., and Beasley, R., Fever and fever management among intensive care patients with known or suspected infection: A multicentre prospective cohort study. Crit. Care Resusc. 13:97–102 , 2011.Drewry, A.M., Fuller, B.M., Bailey, T.C., and Hotchkiss, R.S., Body temperature patterns as a predictor of hospital-acquired sepsis in afebrile adult intensive care unit patients: A case-control study. Crit. Care,17, 2013.Musher, D., Fainstein, V., Young, E., and Pruett, T., Fever patterns. Their lack of significance. Arch. Intern. Med. 139(11):1225–8, 1979.Varela, M., Calvo, M., Chana, M., Gomez-Mestre, I., Asensio, R., and Galdos, P., Clinical implications of temperature curve complexity in critically ill patients. Crit. Care Med. 33(12):2764–2771, 2005.Varela, M., Churruca, J., Gonzalez, A., Martin, A., Ode, J., and Galdos, P., Temperature curve complexity predicts survival in critically ill patients. Am. J. Respir. Crit. Care Med. 174(3):290–298, 2006.Cuesta-Frau, D., Varela, M., Miro, P., Galdos, P., Abasolo, D., Hornero, R., and Aboy, M., Predicting survival in critical patients by use of body temperature regularity measurement based on Approximate Entropy. Med. Biol. Eng. Computing 45:671–678, 2007.Mackiowak, P. Temperature regulation and the pathogenesis of fever, Principles and Practice of Infectious Diseases, pp. 765–778. New York: Churchill Livingston Elsevier, 2010.Cherbuin N., and Brinkman C., Cognition is cool: Can hemispheric activation be assessed by tympanic membrane thermometry? Brain Cogn. 54:228–231, 2004

Can Narrative Skills Improve in Autism Spectrum Disorder? A Preliminary Study with Verbally Fluent Adolescents Receiving the Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition affecting social and communicative skills, including narrative ability, namely the description of real-life or fictive accounts of temporally and causally related events. With this study, we aimed to determine whether a communicative-pragmatic training, i.e., the version for adolescents of the Cognitive-Pragmatic Treatment, is effective in improving the narrative skills of 16 verbally fluent adolescents with ASD. We used a multilevel approach to assess pre- and post-training narrative production skills. Discourse analysis focused on micro- (i.e., mean length of utterance, complete sentences, omissions of morphosyntactic information) and macrolinguistic measures (i.e., cohesion, coherence errors, lexical informativeness). Results revealed a significant improvement in mean length of utterance and complete sentences and a decrease in cohesion errors. No significant change was found in the other narrative measures investigated. Our findings suggest that a pragmatically oriented training may be useful in improving grammatical efficiency in narrative production

AR TutorialKit: an Augmented Reality Toolkit to Create Tutorials

Augmented Reality (AR) is a widely used technology in fields such as medicine, engineering, and architecture, and is also prevalent in social media platforms like Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok. In recent years, the availability of AR applications and improvements in hardware have made it affordable for educational training in various disciplines. However, limited options are available for the general construction of AR tutorials in the literature. Most solutions are specific for particular contexts, such as medical procedures or industry-specific tasks. This paper proposes an AR toolkit that enables novice programmers to create tutorials without topic restrictions. Our aim is to keep improving TutorialKit in such a way that it can be used flexibly and effectively in a variety of different contexts, enabling it to meet the diverse needs and requirements of users

Mixed Branes Interaction in Compact Spacetime

We present a general description of two mixed branes interactions. For this we consider two mixed branes with dimensions p_1 and p_2, in external field B_{\mu\nu} and arbitrary gauge fields A^1_{\alpha_1} and A^2_{\alpha_2} on the world volume of them, in spacetime in which some of its directions are compactified on circles with different radii. Some examples are considered to clear these general interactions. Finally contribution of the massless states on the interactions is extracted. Closed string with mixed boundary conditions and boundary state formalism, provide useful tools for calculation of these interactions.Comment: 22 pages, to appear in Nucl. Phys.