Voice symptoms in teachers during distance teaching : a survey during the COVID-19 pandemic in Finland

Purpose Due to the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19), teachers during the pandemic have had to adapt to online teaching at short notice. This study aims to investigate the voice symptoms and their environmental risk factors as well as the work ability associated with distance teaching and to compare these with symptoms in previous contact teaching. Methods We conducted a survey of 121 primary and secondary school teachers across Finland. The survey was advertised online through social media and the replies collected from voluntarily participating teachers. Results During distance teaching vocal symptoms appeared less often than in school with 71% teachers experiencing them in regular teaching and 44% in distance teaching, VHI result decreased from 7.88 in school teaching to 4.58 in distance teaching. Acoustic conditions were reported to be more suitable in distance teaching with 73% of teachers finding them adequate during distance teaching in comparison to 46% for those in regular teaching. Background noise was the most disturbing factor for a teacher's voice in the classroom and in distance teaching and this was even more conspicuous in the classroom. Also, subjectively experienced poor indoor air quality at school influenced the voice negatively. Further, voice problems were associated with increased subjective stress levels and reduced ability to work. Conclusion Distance teaching has affected teachers' voices in a positive way compared with regular teaching. This difference is likely to be due to better acoustics and indoor air quality in distance teaching conditions.Peer reviewe

Velocitap: Investigating fast mobile text entry using sentence-based decoding of touchscreen keyboard input

We present VelociTap: a state-of-the-art touchscreen keyboard decoder that supports a sentence-based text entry approach. VelociTap enables users to seamlessly choose from three word-delimiter actions: pushing a space key, swiping to the right, or simply omitting the space key and letting the decoder infer spaces automatically. We demonstrate that VelociTap has a significantly lower error rate than Google’s keyboard while retaining the same entry rate. We show that intermediate visual feedback does not significantly affect entry or error rates and we find that using the space key results in the most accurate results. We also demonstrate that enabling flexible word-delimiter options does not incur an error rate penalty. Finally, we investigate how small we can make the keyboard when using VelociTap. We show that novice users can reach a mean entry rate of 41 wpm on a 40mm wide smartwatch-sized keyboard at a 3% character error rate.This is the accepted manuscript. The final version is available from ACM at http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2702135

Data for: Voice Disorders are Associated with Stress among Teachers: A Cross-Sectional Study

Addressed the concerns of the reviewers, we have included the questionnaire that was used for the study

The feasibility of eyes-free touchscreen keyboard typing

Typing on a touchscreen keyboard is very difficult without being able to see the keyboard. We propose a new approach in which users imagine a Qwerty keyboard somewhere on the device and tap out an entire sentence without any visual reference to the keyboard and without intermediate feedback about the letters or words typed. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, we developed an algorithm that decodes blind touchscreen typing with a character error rate of 18.5%. Our decoder currently uses three components: a model of the keyboard topology and tap variability, a point transformation algorithm, and a long-span statistical language model. Our initial results demonstrate that our proposed method provides fast entry rates and promising error rates. On one-third of the sentences, novices' highly noisy input was successfully decoded with no errors

Data for: Voice Disorders in Teachers Are Associated with School Indoor Air Problems: A Cross-sectional Study in Finland

The dataset include the questionnaire data from the teachers and exposure data from the school buildings. Confirming the hypotheses, the data show that indoor air problems are associated with voice disorders in teachers and that there is an agreement between objective and subjective assessment of indoor air quality. In general, value 0 means not occurred and value 1 means occurred. Exceptions: 1. Sex: 1 = male, 2 = female 2. Age: the number of years 3. Profession: 1 = class teacher, 2 = subject teacher, 3 = special education teacher 4. Years in building: the number of years a teacher has been working in the present building 5. Building status: 0 = no indoor air problems, 1 = indoor air problems occurring, 2 = repaired because of indoor air problem

Data for: Voice Disorders are Associated with Stress among Teachers: A Cross-Sectional Study

Addressed the concerns of the reviewers, we have included the questionnaire that was used for the study.THIS DATASET IS ARCHIVED AT DANS/EASY, BUT NOT ACCESSIBLE HERE. TO VIEW A LIST OF FILES AND ACCESS THE FILES IN THIS DATASET CLICK ON THE DOI-LINK ABOV

Dataset of the school buildings

The dataset includes the technical information and assessments from the school buildings (n = 67). The values are as follows; Pupils per building: 500 = more than 500 pupils per building Experts A and B: The school building assessments of the technical experts combined in three categories: No deficiencies – Deficiencies – Renovated Additional information: Additional information from the school buildings provided by the experts The inspection report: The indoor air quality assessments from the inspection reports of the Environment Center of the city: No comments – Renovation work recommended – Health impacts The targeted benchmarking data: The indoor air quality assessments in the targeted benchmarking data on the schools from the National Institute for Health and Welfare: No deficiencies – Deficiencies – Renovated Technical assessment: Satisfactory (indoor air environment) – IA (indoor air) problems – IA problems renovated Reasons for the decision: Agreement of the experts – Disagreement of the experts; the final decision made by following the order of precedence; (1) the assessments of the technical experts, (2) the additional information provided by the technical experts, (3) the assessments in the inspection report of the Environment Center of the city, (4) the assessments in the targeted benchmarking data on the schools from the National Institute for Health and Welfare

Text Blaster: A multi-player touchscreen typing game

Text Blaster is a multi-player shoot 'em up game based on players typing sentences on a mobile device's touchscreen keyboard. Players attempt to be the last player standing by using the speed, precision, and timing of their typing to annihilate competing players. Our game utilizes a sentence-based decoding approach in which users type an entire sentence before our auto-correction algorithm infers the most likely text. Text Blaster provides an engaging and competitive game for use in investigating performance and design aspects of touchscreen text entry interfaces

An automatic incision device for obtaining blood samples from the heels of preterm infants causes less damage than a conventional manual lancet

OBJECTIVES—To evaluate in a randomised blind study the effect on puncture site lesions of two different incision devices used to obtain blood samples from preterm infants by repeated heel sticks. 
SETTING—The neonatal intensive care unit at the Hospital for Children and Adolescents and Laboratory, Helsinki University Central Hospital. 
PATIENTS—A total of 100 preterm infants (birth weight below 2500 g) not previously subjected to heel stick sampling. 
INTERVENTIONS—The infants were randomly allocated to blood sampling from the heel with either a conventional manual lancet or an automatic incision device. The same type of lancet was used for any given baby throughout the study (2-21 days).
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES—The damage caused by sampling was evaluated using four criteria: bruising of the heel, inflammation of the heel, bruising of either the ankle or the leg, and skin healing at the puncture site. The evaluation was based on photographs presenting typical categories of each outcome. 
RESULTS—To obtain a sufficient volume of blood, on average 2.6 times more punctures were needed when the conventional manual lancet was used than when the automatic incision device was used. Heels punctured with the lancet had more bruising (100% v 84%) and more signs of inflammation (79% v 53%), and there was more bruising of the ankle or leg (92% v 53%) than when the automatic incision device was used. Skin healed equally rapidly in the two groups.
CONCLUSION—The use of an automatic incision device for collecting repeated skin puncture samples from preterm infants is less traumatic than the use of a conventional manual lancet.


Applying prediction techniques to phoneme-based AAC systems

It is well documented that people with severe speech and physical impairments (SSPI) often experience literacy difficulties, which hinder them from effectively using orthographicbased AAC systems for communication. To address this problem, phoneme-based AAC systems have been proposed, which enable users to access a set of spoken phonemes and combine phonemes into speech output. In this paper we investigate how prediction techniques can be applied to improve user performance of such systems. We have developed a phoneme-based prediction system, which supports single phoneme prediction and phoneme-based word prediction using statistical language models generated using a crowdsourced AAC-like corpus. We incorporated our prediction system into a hypothetical 12-key reduced phoneme keyboard. A computational experiment showed that our prediction system led to 56.3 % average keystroke savings.