Examine the Perceived Risk of Falls Among Patients Receiving Acute Care

Purpose: In an effort to lower the number of falls that occur among hospitalized patients, several facilities have begun introducing various fall prevention programs. However, the efficacy of fall prevention programs is diminished if patients do not consider themselves to be at risk for falls and do not follow recommended procedures. The goal of this study was to characterize how patients in four different acute care specialist services felt about their risk of falling while in the hospital. Methods: One hundred patients admitted to the study hospital with a Morse Fall Scale score of 45 or higher were given the Patient Perception Questionnaire, a tool designed to assess a patient's perception of their own fall risk, fear of falling, and motivation to take part in fall prevention efforts. Scores on the Morse Fall Scale were gathered through a historical assessment of medical records. Descriptive statistics, Pearson's correlation coefficients, and independent sample t tests were used to examine the data. Results: The average age was 65, and around half (52%) were men and half (48%) were women. Based on their ratings on the Morse Fall Scale, all 100 participants were classified as being at high risk for falls. However, only 55.5% of the individuals agreed with this assessment. The likelihood that a patient would seek assistance and the degree to which they feared falling both declined as their faith in their mobility improved. Patients hospitalized after a fall exhibited considerably lower confidence scores and greater fear scores than patients who had not been injured in a fall. Conclusions: Patients who have a high fall risk assessment score may not believe they are at risk for falls and may not take any steps to reduce their risk. The prevalence of falls in hospitals might be mitigated by the creation of a fall risk assessment technique that takes into account both objective and subjective factors

Altered energy partitioning across terrestrial ecosystems in the European drought year 2018

Drought and heat events, such as the 2018 European drought, interact with the exchange of energy between the land surface and the atmosphere, potentially affecting albedo, sensible and latent heat fluxes, as well as CO(2)exchange. Each of these quantities may aggravate or mitigate the drought, heat, their side effects on productivity, water scarcity and global warming. We used measurements of 56 eddy covariance sites across Europe to examine the response of fluxes to extreme drought prevailing most of the year 2018 and how the response differed across various ecosystem types (forests, grasslands, croplands and peatlands). Each component of the surface radiation and energy balance observed in 2018 was compared to available data per site during a reference period 2004-2017. Based on anomalies in precipitation and reference evapotranspiration, we classified 46 sites as drought affected. These received on average 9% more solar radiation and released 32% more sensible heat to the atmosphere compared to the mean of the reference period. In general, drought decreased net CO(2)uptake by 17.8%, but did not significantly change net evapotranspiration. The response of these fluxes differed characteristically between ecosystems; in particular, the general increase in the evaporative index was strongest in peatlands and weakest in croplands. This article is part of the theme issue 'Impacts of the 2018 severe drought and heatwave in Europe: from site to continental scale'

HMM-based synthesis of emotional facial expressions during speech in synthetic talking heads

One of the research goals in the human-computer interaction community is to build believable Embodied Conversational Agents, that is, agents able to communicate complex information with human-like expressiveness and naturalness. Since emotions play a crucial role in human communication and most of them are expressed through the face, having more believable ECAs implies to give them the ability of displaying emotional facial expressions. This paper presents a system based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) for the synthesis of emotional facial expressions during speech. The HMMs were trained on a set of emotion examples in which a professional actor uttered Italian non-sense words, acting various emotional facial expressions with different intensities. The evaluation of the experimental results, performed comparing the “synthetic examples” (generated by the system) with a reference “natural example” (one of the actor’s examples) in three different ways, shows that HMMs for emotional facial expressions synthesis have some limitations but are suitable to make a synthetic Talking Head more expressive and realistic

How ICT and non-ICT solutions can facilitate the interactions in migration-related work?

In this poster, we present a preliminary study carried out within the Horizon 2020 PERCEPTIONS project (2019-2023), in which we investigated through quantitative and qualitative methods how ICT and non-ICT solutions can facilitate the interactions among users (practitioners, stakeholders, migrants) in migration-related work

imagery.

One of the research goals in the human-computer interaction community is to build believable Embodied Conversational Agents, that is, agents able to communicate complex information with human-like expressiveness and naturalness. Since emotions play a crucial role in human communication and most of them are expressed through the face, having more believable ECAs implies to give them the ability of displaying emotional facial expressions. This paper presents a system based on Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) for the synthesis of emotional facial expressions during speech. The HMMs were trained on a set of emotion examples in which a professional actor uttered Italian non-sense words, acting various emotional facial expressions with different intensities. The evaluation of the experimental results, performed comparing the “synthetic examples ” (generated by the system) with a reference “natural example ” (one of the actor’s examples) in three different ways, shows that HMMs for emotional facial expressions synthesis have some limitations but are suitable to make a synthetic Talking Head more expressive and realistic

The lexico-semantic annotation of an Italian Treebank

In this paper we present the lexico-semantic annotation of an Italian treebank, focusing on the annotation strategy followed, the results achieved, and possible further work and application

Can multimodal interaction support older adults in using mobile devices? The ECOMODE study.

Several studies investigated the potentialities of multimodal interfaces for improving accessibility for older people. This paper presents a study that evaluated the user experience of sixty people who worked with a tablet PC running the ECOMODE technology. This technology consists of an event-driven compressive vision algorithm, that allows the realization of a new generation of low-power cameras, able to elaborate real-time vocal- and video-inputs. The users interact with the applications on the tablet PC using mid-air hand gestures and vocal commands. Even if the ECOMODE technology suffers from some technical limitations, older people appreciated the proposed multimodal interaction mode. The results pointed out that the ECOMODE technology was considered to be particularly promising for daily tasks involving communication, such as placing calls, sending and listening to audio and messages, and taking and sharing pictures. It also seems effective in navigating archives, such as pictures, audio, or music databases