Workforce Housing Design Charrette in Berwick, Maine

The Workforce Housing Coalition of the Greater Seacoast organized a workforce housing design charrette in the community of Berwick, Maine. The event was held over the two-day period of October 14 and 16, 2015. The process included a site walk, community dialogue session, and design workshop, culminating in a design reveal on October 16. This, the Coalition’s sixth annual design charrette. This produced conceptual designs for a mixed-use development that includes workforce housing for the charrette focus areas at the Prime Tanning and Estabrook School sites in Berwick, Maine

NaviCane [navigation assisting cane]

We at Envision Today aim to enhance the quality of life of the visually impaired with the NaviCane: Navigation-Assisting White Cane. The NaviCane is essentially an integration between an ordinary white cane and pre-existing Global Positioning System (GPS) devices. Along with navigational capabilities, the NaviCane also features obstacle detections in front of and above the user. This will ensure that any user (regardless of their degree of vision impairment) may be able to comfortably and confidently travel. By utilizing our software application in conjunction with the NaviCane, the user is able to input any desired destination into the device. In the real world, the NaviCane operates similarly to an ordinary white cane so the learning curve is rather low; this provides the user with an easier transition period from their ordinary white cane to our device. We foresee the NaviCane being able to guide the user to venture out of their comfort zone and into unfamiliar territories. Since our product provides functionalities of a GPS navigational device within a regular white cane, it becomes more costeffective, lighter in weight, and more user-friendly when compared to existing solutions on the market

A recommender for the management of chronic pain in patients undergoing spinal cord stimulation

Spinal cord stimulation (SCS) is a therapeutic approach used for the management of chronic pain. It involves the delivery of electrical impulses to the spinal cord via an implanted device, which when given suitable stimulus parameters can mask or block pain signals. Selection of optimal stimulation parameters usually happens in the clinic under the care of a provider whereas at-home SCS optimization is managed by the patient. In this paper, we propose a recommender system for the management of pain in chronic pain patients undergoing SCS. In particular, we use a contextual multi-armed bandit (CMAB) approach to develop a system that recommends SCS settings to patients with the aim of improving their condition. These recommendations, sent directly to patients though a digital health ecosystem, combined with a patient monitoring system closes the therapeutic loop around a chronic pain patient over their entire patient journey. We evaluated the system in a cohort of SCS-implanted ENVISION study subjects (Clinicaltrials.gov ID: NCT03240588) using a combination of quality of life metrics and Patient States (PS), a novel measure of holistic outcomes. SCS recommendations provided statistically significant improvement in clinical outcomes (pain and/or QoL) in 85\% of all subjects (N=21). Among subjects in moderate PS (N=7) prior to receiving recommendations, 100\% showed statistically significant improvements and 5/7 had improved PS dwell time. This analysis suggests SCS patients may benefit from SCS recommendations, resulting in additional clinical improvement on top of benefits already received from SCS therapy

Mapping local solutions to entrenched transport problems: key lessons regarding the use of geographical information technologies in community mapping with disadvantaged communities

There is an increasing interest in the use of information technology as a participatory planning tool, particularly the use of geographical information technologies to support collaborative activities such as community mapping. However, despite their promise, the introduction of such technologies does not necessarily promote better participation nor improve collaboration. In part this can be attributed to a tendency for planners to focus on the technical considerations associated with these technologies at the expense of broader participation considerations. In this paper we draw on the experiences of a community mapping project with disadvantaged communities in suburban Australia to highlight the importance of selecting tools and techniques which support and enhance participatory planning. This community mapping project, designed to identify and document community-generated transport issues and solutions, had originally intended to use cadastral maps extracted from the government's digital cadastral database as the foundation for its community mapping approach. It was quickly discovered that the local residents found the cadastral maps confusing as the maps lacked sufficient detail to orient them to their suburb (the study area). In response to these concerns and consistent with the project's participatory framework, a conceptual base map based on resident's views of landmarks of local importance was developed to support the community mapping process. Based on this community mapping experience we outline four key lessons learned regarding the process of community mapping and the place of geographical information technologies within this process