Low-fi skin vision: A case study in rapid prototyping a sensory substitution system

We describe the design process we have used to develop a minimal, twenty vibration motor Tactile Vision Sensory Substitution (TVSS) system which enables blind-folded subjects to successfully track and bat a rolling ball and thereby experience 'skin vision'. We have employed a low-fi rapid prototyping approach to build this system and argue that this methodology is particularly effective for building embedded interactive systems. We support this argument in two ways. First, by drawing on theoretical insights from robotics, a discipline that also has to deal with the challenge of building complex embedded systems that interact with their environments; second, by using the development of our TVSS as a case study: describing the series of prototypes that led to our successful design and highlighting what we learnt at each stage

Towards a real-time system for teaching novices good violin bowing technique

We describe the ongoing development of a system to support the teaching of good posture and bowing technique to novice violin players. Using an inertial motion capture system we can track in real-time: i) a player’s bowing action (and measure how it deviates from a target trajectory); ii) whether the player is holding their violin correctly. We detail some initial experiments that show that vibrotactile feedback can guide arm movements in one and two dimensions. We then present some preliminary findings from integrating the motion capture and feedback components into a prototype real-time training system. The advantages of vibrotactile feedback are that: i) it does not use the students’ visual and auditory systems which are already involved in the activity of music making; ii) it is an intuitive way to guide body movements

Good vibrations: Guiding body movements with vibrotactile feedback

We describe the ongoing development of a system to support the teaching of good posture and bowing technique to novice violin players. Using an inertial motion capture system we can track in real-time a player’s bowing action and how it deviates from a target trajectory set by their music teacher. The system provides real-time vibrotactile feedback on the correctness of the student’s posture and bowing action. We present the findings of an initial study that shows that vibrotactile feedback can guide arm movements in one and two dimension pointing tasks. The advantages of vibrotactile feedback for teaching basic bowing technique to novice violin players are that it does not place demands on the students’ visual and auditory systems which are already heavily involved in the activity of music making, and is understood with little training

Under erasure: Jenny Holzer's war paintings

This article examines Jenny Holzer’s painterly reworkings of redacted American military documents, comparing her practice with some of Nancy Spero’s extended visual narratives of torture and victimization. As two artists immersed in a feminist visual politics (and poetics) of representation where language is both a vehicle and a form of expression, they adopt contrasting strategies of transformation: for Spero via allegory and the mythic, for Holzer through an aesthetic of negation. I read their work partly through Jacques Rancière’s notion of the necessity for bringing traumatic events into visibility, and I argue that in their respective scripto-visual artworks and sensitivity to the materiality of language and its performative dimension, they ‘make the inhuman perceptible’. I also consider their practice as evidence of an ongoing project of foregrounding arts responsibility as witness to history and the historical subject, seeing in their respective modes of figuration and emphasis upon surface (presence/absence, colour, writing) a means of inscribing the body in the text

Modulation of Medical Condition Likelihood by Patient History Similarity

Introduction: We describe an analysis that modulates the simple population prevalence derived likelihood of a particular condition occurring in an individual by matching the individual with other individuals with similar clinical histories and determining the prevalence of the condition within the matched group. Methods: We have taken clinical event codes and dates from anonymised longitudinal primary care records for 25,979 patients with 749,053 recorded clinical events. Using a nearest neighbour approach, for each patient, the likelihood of a condition occurring was adjusted from the population prevalence to the prevalence of the condition within those patients with the closest matching clinical history. Results: For conditions investigated, the nearest method performed well in comparison with standard logistic regression. Conclusions: Results indicate that it may be possible to use histories to identify \u27similar\u27 patients and thus to modulate future likelihoods of a condition occurring

Nurse-led Design and Development of an Expert System for Pressure Ulcer Management

The use of Clinical Practice Guidelines (CPGs) is known to enable better care outcomes by promoting a consistent way of treating patients. This paper describes a user-centered design approach involving nurses, to develop a prototype expert system for modelling CPGs for Pressure Ulcer management. The system was developed using Visirule, a software tool that uses a graphical approach to modeling knowledge. The system was evaluated by 5 staff nurses and compared nurses’ time and accuracy to assess a wound using CPGs accessed via the Intranet of an NHS Trust and the expert system. A post task qualitative evaluation revealed that nurses found the system useable with a systematic design, that it increased access to CPGs by reducing time and effort required by other usual methods of access, that it provided opportunities for learning due to its interactive nature, and that its recommendations were more actionable that those provided by usual static CPG documents