Memory Card

“I have always had a phenomenal memory,” a sentiment that I just recently remembered. Growing up I could recite every number in a thirteen string, remember a poem after one read, quote every menial conversation I had ever had. I considered myself cursed and blessed with an elephant’s memory: it made me extremely sensitive to others, often confused and upset when I heard people repeat the same things to me and make the same gestures. Had our interaction not meant anything? Do they not remember me? Now I don’t remember. I lose things. I feel irresponsible with objects and conversations and parts of my life. The funny part about remembering your memory is that it means you’ve forgotten it. What kind of a memory is that? After tackling mountains of old home videos, revisiting birthday cards, story books, terrible essays from high school, my project was conceived: an attempt to reevaluate and reconstruct older memories in my life. At the start of the process I only looked at the past, until I realized – why stop there? In the frame of a found memory card the viewer scrolls through small moments of my childhood, things I can remember, until reaching a point in which it glitches – in which the viewer cannot tell the difference between reality and fantasies of events, as well as the environment they exist in. Past this point, old memories are recreated and explored, lead by a fictionalized older version of myself. However, there is a catch: none of my memories that take place in the future have happened yet. Through the body of a memory card and the small story of a woman who breaks the screen to talk to you, I am curating parts of my past and parts of my future. I don’t intend the piece to seem explicitly about myself, instead, a character that exists within the memory card. She jumps between multiple ages throughout the piece, and wanders aimlessly through her own environments, describing events that happened while leading the viewer through worlds that only become more visually distressed; the piece is intended to age and become confused in narrative as memory does over time. She encounters many visual glitches, pauses, and errors in her world, as she is also grappling with her own relationship to the digital media and film that has captured her, as well as memory’s relationship to error as it accumulates and is stored in the mind. In her world things do not make sense, though the environments exist as fully as any would. With time and exploration colors prevail over specifics, and we find ourselves riding a boisterous wave of sound and place. Where to? Where does it all lead? Well, I promise I’ll let you know when I remember

Vorbeugende Pflege- und Sorgepolitik: Herausforderungen und (kommunale) Gestaltungspotenziale in NRW

Es wird ein Konzept vorbeugender Pflege- und Sorgepolitik vorgestellt, das sowohl pflegebedürftige Personen als auch ihre pflegenden Angehörigen adressiert. Für pflegebedürftige Menschen steht dabei der Verbleib in der gewohnten, häuslichen Umgebung im Fokus. Pflegende Angehörige sollen vor gesundheitlichen Schäden sowie vor Erwerbs- und Armutsrisiken geschützt werden. Der Beitrag zeigt Handlungsansätze auf, wie dies mit einem Mix aus familiären, professionellen und zivilgesellschaftlichen Hilfeleistungen gelingen könnte. Dabei geht es auch um Gestaltungspotenziale und -grenzen auf kommunaler Ebene

A Wearable Ultra-Low-Power sEMG-Triggered Ultrasound System for Long-Term Muscle Activity Monitoring

Surface electromyography (sEMG) is a well-established approach to monitor muscular activity on wearable and resource-constrained devices. However, when measuring deeper muscles, its low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), high signal attenuation, and crosstalk degrade sensing performance. Ultrasound (US) complements sEMG effectively with its higher SNR at high penetration depths. In fact, combining US and sEMG improves the accuracy of muscle dynamic assessment, compared to using only one modality. However, the power envelope of US hardware is considerably higher than that of sEMG, thus inflating energy consumption and reducing the battery life. This work proposes a wearable solution that integrates both modalities and utilizes an EMG-driven wake-up approach to achieve ultra-low power consumption as needed for wearable long-term monitoring. We integrate two wearable state-of-the-art (SoA) US and ExG biosignal acquisition devices to acquire time-synchronized measurements of the short head of the biceps. To minimize power consumption, the US probe is kept in a sleep state when there is no muscle activity. sEMG data are processed on the probe (filtering, envelope extraction and thresholding) to identify muscle activity and generate a trigger to wake-up the US counterpart. The US acquisition starts before muscle fascicles displacement thanks to a triggering time faster than the electromechanical delay (30-100 ms) between the neuromuscular junction stimulation and the muscle contraction. Assuming a muscle contraction of 200 ms at a contraction rate of 1 Hz, the proposed approach enables more than 59% energy saving (with a full-system average power consumption of 12.2 mW) as compared to operating both sEMG and US continuously.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, 2023 IEEE International Ultrasonics Symposiu

Sorgende Angehörige als Adressat_innen einer vorbeugenden Pflegepolitik: eine intersektionale Analyse (PflegeIntersek)

Kernergebnis der Studie PflegeIntersek ist eine Typologie sorgender Angehöriger mit fünf Pflegebewältigungstypen. Eine mehr oder weniger stark ausgeprägte Selbstsorgeorientierung von sorgenden Angehörigen trägt zum ‚(Nicht-)Gelingen‘ der Bewältigung von häuslicher Pflege maßgeblich bei. Das Konzept Care for Carers arbeitet typenspezifische sowie übergreifende Ansatzpunkte heraus, wie eine vorbeugende Pflegepolitik diese Selbstsorgeorientierung und insgesamt eine ‚gelingende Pflegebewältigung‘ fördern kann

Sorgende Angehörige als Adressat_innen einer vorbeugenden Pflegepolitik: eine intersektionale Analyse (PflegeIntersek)

Im Mittelpunkt dieser Studie stehen sorgende Angehörige, die sich um Pflegebedürftige mit hohem Hilfebedarf kümmern. Die Pflegenden werden im Hinblick auf Wechselwirkungen zwischen den Differenzkategorien sozioökonomischer Status (SÖS), Geschlecht, Ethnizität sowie Erwerbsstatus untersucht, und es wird nach Unterschieden in der Pflegebewältigung gefragt. Dabei konnten fünf Pflegebewältigungstypen entwickelt werden, wobei drei zu einer ‚eher gelingenden Pflegebewältigung führen, zwei dagegen in einer ‚eher prekären Pflegebewältigung münden. Die Typen differieren in der Art des Zusammenwirkens der genannten Differenzkategorien sowie der Selbstsorgeorientierung der sorgenden Angehörigen. Blickt man auf die Bedarfe, so geht es darum, die Selbstsorgeorientierung und das Selbstsorgehandeln der Sorgenden zu fördern. Dazu ist typenübergreifend im Rahmen einer vorbeugenden Sozialpolitik insbesondere eine frühzeitige zugehende professionelle Pflegebegleitung aus einer Hand im Sinne eines Case-Managements zu empfehlen.The study focuses on caring relatives caring for people in need of long-term care. The caring relatives are analysed with regard to interdependencies between the structural categories socio-economic status, gender, ethnicity, and employment status. We also ask for differences in their coping capacity with regard to elderly care. Five types of coping capacities in longterm-care have been developed, three of these types leading to a rather successful coping strategy, and two types tending to a rather precarious coping situation. The types differ in the way the structural categories interact, and the self-caring orientation of the carers varies, too. Regarding needs and support of caring relatives, their self-caring orientation and self-caring capacity should be strengthened. Across all types, one element of a preventive social policy is highly recommendable: an outreach and professional care assistance from one provider at an early stage in the sense of case-management

Arabic and contact-induced change

This volume offers a synthesis of current expertise on contact-induced change in Arabic and its neighbours, with thirty chapters written by many of the leading experts on this topic. Its purpose is to showcase the current state of knowledge regarding the diverse outcomes of contacts between Arabic and other languages, in a format that is both accessible and useful to Arabists, historical linguists, and students of language contact

Arabic and contact-induced change

This volume offers a synthesis of current expertise on contact-induced change in Arabic and its neighbours, with thirty chapters written by many of the leading experts on this topic. Its purpose is to showcase the current state of knowledge regarding the diverse outcomes of contacts between Arabic and other languages, in a format that is both accessible and useful to Arabists, historical linguists, and students of language contact

Arabic and contact-induced change

This volume offers a synthesis of current expertise on contact-induced change in Arabic and its neighbours, with thirty chapters written by many of the leading experts on this topic. Its purpose is to showcase the current state of knowledge regarding the diverse outcomes of contacts between Arabic and other languages, in a format that is both accessible and useful to Arabists, historical linguists, and students of language contact

Arabic and contact-induced change

This volume offers a synthesis of current expertise on contact-induced change in Arabic and its neighbours, with thirty chapters written by many of the leading experts on this topic. Its purpose is to showcase the current state of knowledge regarding the diverse outcomes of contacts between Arabic and other languages, in a format that is both accessible and useful to Arabists, historical linguists, and students of language contact

Arabic and contact-induced change

This volume offers a synthesis of current expertise on contact-induced change in Arabic and its neighbours, with thirty chapters written by many of the leading experts on this topic. Its purpose is to showcase the current state of knowledge regarding the diverse outcomes of contacts between Arabic and other languages, in a format that is both accessible and useful to Arabists, historical linguists, and students of language contact