Dancing With Parkinson's Disease: The SI-ROBOTICS Study Protocol

Introduction: Parkinson's disease (PD) is one of the most frequent causes of disability among older people, characterized by motor disorders, rigidity, and balance problems. Recently, dance has started to be considered an effective exercise for people with PD. In particular, Irish dancing, along with tango and different forms of modern dance, may be a valid strategy to motivate people with PD to perform physical activity. The present protocol aims to implement and evaluate a rehabilitation program based on a new system called “SI-ROBOTICS,” composed of multiple technological components, such as a social robotic platform embedded with an artificial vision setting, a dance-based game, environmental and wearable sensors, and an advanced AI reasoner module. Methods and Analysis: For this study, 20 patients with PD will be recruited. Sixteen therapy sessions of 50 min will be conducted (two training sessions per week, for 8 weeks), involving two patients at a time. Evaluation will be primarily focused on the acceptability of the SI-ROBOTICS system. Moreover, the analysis of the impact on the patients' functional status, gait, balance, fear of falling, cardio-respiratory performance, motor symptoms related to PD, and quality of life, will be considered as secondary outcomes. The trial will start in November 2021 and is expected to end by April 2022. Discussions: The study aims to propose and evaluate a new approach in PD rehabilitation, focused on the use of Irish dancing, together with a new technological system focused on helping the patient perform the dance steps and on collecting kinematic and performance parameters used both by the physiotherapist (for the evaluation and planning of the subsequent sessions) and by the system (to outline the levels of difficulty of the exercise). Ethics and Dissemination: The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of the IRCCS INRCA. It was recorded in ClinicalTrials.gov on the number NCT05005208. The study findings will be used for publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals and presentations in scientific meetings

Dynamic tailoring of SCORM sequencing and navigation rules

The widespread use of the new information technologies in the teaching sector has driven an ever faster evolution of both technological and methodological tools. The proliferation of standards and specifics for defining pedagogical models, describing resources and drawing the student profile bears clear witness to this phenomenon. However, these specifics are rarely used synergically in virtual learning environments. Aim of the present work is to use the IMS Learner Information Package specifics, together with the Sequencing and Navigation specifics of the SCORM standard, as a means of personalizing the use of LO on an e-learning platform. We present the architecture of an intelligent agent that, when integrated in LMS, can tailor navigation of the learning content to the specific student characteristics

Architettura Multiagente per Learning Object Repository

Fino a questo momento il lavoro incessante della comunità di e-learning é stato rivolto più alla definizione di standard che garantiscano l’interoperabilità e la riusabilità (informatica) del materiale, piuttosto che alla riusabilità (pedagogica) e alla personalizzazione dei percorsi di apprendimento. Una delle mancanze nel campo della strutturazione dei contenuti é la quantità, ma soprattutto la qualità, delle informazioni pedagogiche che accompagnano il contenuto. Ma come é possibile prescindere dal contesto educativo in cui una determinata risorsa didattica é stata utilizzata? Tutto questo va a discapito sia della qualità del riuso che della personalizzazione dei percorsi di apprendimento. Solitamente quando si pensa ad un processo di e-learning istintivamente si é portati a pensare che questo differisca da un processo di formazione tradizionale da diversi punti di vista. Il lavoro propone, partendo da una proposta di specifiche per la descrizione degli scenari di apprendimento/insegnamento, un modello architetturale di repository al fine di creare una comunità di buone pratiche in cui i docenti non solo ritrovano del materiale didattico da utilizzare, ma anche la collezione di tutte le esperienze di tutti i colleghi che ne hanno già fatto uso

A recommendation technique for cultural heritage hypermedial objects

The ever more widespread use of the Web for knowledge sharing has led to the creation of a wide spectrum of opportunities for employing shared information resources and, at the same time, a gradual increase in the technologies for making these resources available. In this scenario, it is important to define new methods and techniques that can support users’ search activities and selection of the resources corresponding most closely to their needs. The work is situated in the context of research into recommendation methods for defining systems that can suggest to users what hypermedial resource best fits their specific requirements. The paper proposes a recommendation technique that can elicit relations existing within complex domains so as to be able to suggest semantically correlated hypermedial objects to users according to their requests

CSA: Un’evoluzione del modello studente cooperativo COSMO

La costruzione di sistemi didattici adattativi richiede il modellamento delle capacità cognitive e metacognitive del discente. Le tecniche impiegate per modellare l’utente propongono modelli invisibili all’utente e pongono il problema della raccolta di dati significativi. Per superare tale problema si ricorre a tecniche di modellizzazione aperta o cooperativa che coinvolgono lo studente nel processo di creazione del suo modello. A tale proposito, si è proposto un modello capace di stimare la capacità di autovalutazione dello studente, COSMO, che coinvolgeva lo studente nella valutazione delle sue prestazioni. L’impiego del modello in sistemi d’e-learning ne ha evidenziato problemi di funzionamento. Sono stati condotti test approfonditi per verificare la natura del problema e poi, una volta modificato il modello, per verificare che il suo comportamento fosse quello atteso. Nell’articolo è descritto il processo di cambiamento che ha condotto, attraverso test ripetuti ed approfonditi, al nuovo modello CSA

Evaluating The Effects Of CSA - Cooperative Student Assessment on Learning

Training through the Internet poses a series of technical problems and pedagogical issues. Traditional training is not indiscriminate but takes on different forms according to the needs of the subject being trained and the context where such training occurs. In order to make the systems adaptable in this way, a model of the student’s characteristics - the student model - has to be set up, maintained and updated. However, there are many difficulties involved in obtaining sufficient information to create an accurate student model. One way to solve this problem is to involve students in the student modeling process, stimulating them to provide the necessary information by means of a dialog in which the student and system build the student model according to a collaborative process. The present work describes a cooperative student modeling method (Cooperative Student Assessment - CSA) which builds a joint system-student assessment of student’s activities on the basis of the student’s self-assessment ability estimation and a prototype system for children, addressing the learning of fractions, in which CSA is implemented. The article also reports the result of an experimentation carried out with learners attending primary school aiming at evaluating the effectiveness of involving students in the assessment process by comparing two versions of the same system: one using cooperative student modeling and the other the traditional overlay model