Positive Versus Negative Agents: The Effects of Emotions on Learning

The current study investigates the impact of affect, mood contagion, and linguistic alignment on learning during tutorial conversations between a human student and two artificial pedagogical agents. The study uses an Intelligent Tutoring System known as OperationARIES! to engage students in tutorial conversations with animated agents. In this investigation, 48 college students (N = 48) conversed with pedagogical agents as they displayed 3 different moods (i.e., positive, negative, and neutral) along with a control condition in a within-subjects design. Results indicate that the mood of the agent did not significantly impact student learning even though mood contagion did occur between the artificial agent and the human student. Learning was influenced by the student\u27s self-reported arousal level and the alignment scores that reflected a shared mental representation between the human student and the artificial agents. The results suggest that arousal and linguistic alignment during the tutorial conversations may play a role in learning

A Method to Visualize Patient Flow Using Virtual Reality and Serious Gaming Techniques

This paper proposes a method to visualize Emergency Department patient flow data in a Virtual Reality (VR) Serious Game (SG) environment. Visualizing the patient flow data will allow patterns and trends that hospitals can use to reduce alternative level of care (ALC) days and increase the acute capacity of the hospital. The method proposes to use Unity to develop two VR visualisations of patient flow to a hospital ED such that hospital staff can determine which of the two visualizations will be the most usable, immersive, and playable. This paper also presents future work that will look at the whole system of a hospital using one years’ worth of patient flow data to develop a usable, immersive and playable Virtual Environment (VE)

Differential activation of CD57-defined natural killer cell subsets during recall responses to vaccine antigens

Natural killer (NK) cells contribute to the effector phase of vaccine-induced adaptive immune responses, secreting cytokines and releasing cytotoxic granules. The proportion of responding NK cells varies between individuals and by vaccine, suggesting that functionally discrete subsets of NK cells with different activation requirements may be involved. Here, we have used responses to individual components of the DTP vaccine [tetanus toxoid (TT), diphtheria toxoid (DT), whole cell inactivated pertussis] to characterize the NK cell subsets involved in interleukin-2-dependent recall responses. Culture with TT, DT or pertussis induced NK cell CD25 expression and interferon-γ production in previously vaccinated individuals. Responses were the most robust against whole cell pertussis, with responses to TT being particularly low. Functional analysis of discrete NK cell subsets revealed that transition from CD56bright to CD56dim correlated with increased responsiveness to CD16 cross-linking, whereas increasing CD57 expression correlated with a loss of responsiveness to cytokines. A higher frequency of CD56dim CD57− NK cells expressed CD25 and interferon-γ following stimulation with vaccine antigen compared with CD56dim CD57+ NK cells and made the largest overall contribution to this response. CD56dim CD57int NK cells represent an intermediate functional phenotype in response to vaccine-induced and receptor-mediated stimuli. These findings have implications for the ability of NK cells to contribute to the effector response after vaccination and for vaccine-induced immunity in older individuals

Impact of malaria during pregnancy on pregnancy outcomes in a Ugandan prospective cohort with intensive malaria screening and prompt treatment

Malaria in pregnancy (MiP) is a major public health problem in endemic areas of sub-Saharan Africa and has important consequences on birth outcome. Because MiP is a complex phenomenon and malaria epidemiology is rapidly changing, additional evidence is still required to understand how best to control malaria. This study followed a prospective cohort of pregnant women who had access to intensive malaria screening and prompt treatment to identify factors associated with increased risk of MiP and to analyse how various characteristics of MiP affect delivery outcomes

A Framework for Analyzing and Measuring Business Performance with Web Services

The web services paradigm provides organizations with an environment to enhance B2B communications. The aim is to create modularized services supporting the business processes within their organization and also those external entities participating in these same business processes. Current web service frameworks do not include the functionality required for web service execution performance measurement from an organization perspective. As such, a shift to this paradigm is at the expense of the organization’s performance knowledge, as this knowledge will become buried within the internal processing of the web service platform. This research introduces an approach to reclaim and improve this knowledge for the organization establishing a framework that enables the definition of web services from a performance measurement perspective, together with the logging and analysis of the enactment of web services. This framework utilizes web service concepts, DSS principles, and agent technologies, to enable feedback on the organization’s performance measures through the analysis of the web services. A key benefit of this work is that the data is stored once but provides information both to the customer and the supplier of a web service, removing the need for development of internal web service performance monitoring. 2

Mobility in healthcare for remote intensive care unit clinical management

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Guest Editors’ Introduction

Healthcare is often perceived to lag behind other industry sectors in its uptake and adoption of new technology[...