A Wearable System for Multisensory Stimulation Therapy for Children

Multisensory stimulation therapy involves the simultaneous stimulation of several senses in a relaxing environment to achieve a variety of therapeutic outcomes for client with conditions affecting sensory and cognitive processes. We present, StimuHat, a wearable system for therapists to visually stimulate patients. We conducted a pilot study in which a therapist used StimuHat in sessions with three children with profound brain damage. The results showed that StimuHat appears to have stimulated the children and created positive relaxation and engagement in them

A Video of Myself Helps Me Learn : A Scoping Review of the Evidence of Video-Making for Situated Learning

Nursing, dance and studio-based arts, engineering, and athletic therapy are viewed as practice-oriented professions in which the teaching and situated learning of practical skills are central. In order to succeed, students must perform a series of performance-based assessments, which seemingly require an “able” body to enact complex tasks in situated and/or simulation-based contexts (for example, “safe nursing practice”). Our interdisciplinary research seeks to intervene within the culture of professional learning by investigating what we know about the use of smartphone video recording for situated, practice-based learning, and for supporting interactive video-based assessment as a means of accommodation and extending access for students, including students with performance anxiety, mature students, ESL learners, students with disabilities, and students in remote communities. In this paper we employ a scoping review methodology to present our findings related to students’ and instructors’ perspectives on the use of smartphone video to demonstrate and document practical knowledge and practice-oriented competencies across fields in the arts and sciences. We also examine broader research, as well as the ethical and design implications for the development of our technology-based toolbox project – an online resource created to advance pedagogies deploying smartphones as tools for practical skills acquisition - and for accommodation - within multidisciplinary practical learning environments

The Benefits of Co-creation for Assistive Technology

Knowledge mobilization tools let researchers engage stakeholders earlier in a project. Making stakeholder concerns become the basis for a research question. Thus, research goals can change from being theoretical to practical, which develops assistive technology that is better suited to the needs of project stakeholders.York’s Knowledge Mobilization Unit provides services and funding for faculty, graduate students, and community organizations seeking to maximize the impact of academic research and expertise on public policy, social programming, and professional practice. It is supported by SSHRC and CIHR grants, and by the Office of the Vice-President Research & Innovation. [email protected] www.researchimpact.c

The Evaluation of Microplanning and Surface Realization in the Generation of . . .

In this paper, we describe an application domain which requires the computational simulation of human-human communication in which one of the interlocutors has an expressive communication disorder. The importance and evaluation of a process, called here microplanning and surface realization, for such communicative agents is discussed and a related exploratory study is described

Ensuring stylistic congruity in collaboratively written text, requirements analysis and design issues

grantor: University of TorontoOften, texts that have been written collaboratively do not "speak with a single voice." Eliminating stylistic incongruity, a difficult undertaking for both collaborative and singular writers, is the desired function of a software tool. This thesis describes the first cycle of an iterative software development process towards meeting this goal. The user requirements are analyzed with respect to a model that synthesizes established research, and then the requirements are taxonomized. Then, a framework for performing computational stylistic assessments is developed for later tool design. An experiment designed to measure the subjectivity in stylistic assessment--a relevant issue for making deterministic, computational stylistic assessments--was performed; the results indicate that future stylistic assessment tools must account for different patterns of assessment. Several design directions motivated by these results are suggested.M.Sc