Levels of State and Trait Anxiety in Patients Referred to Ophthalmology by Primary Care Clinicians: A Cross Sectional Study

Purpose There is a high level of over-referral from primary eye care leading to significant numbers of people without ocular pathology (false positives) being referred to secondary eye care. The present study used a psychometric instrument to determine whether there is a psychological burden on patients due to referral to secondary eye care, and used Rasch analysis to convert the data from an ordinal to an interval scale. Design Cross sectional study. Participants and Controls 322 participants and 80 control participants. Methods State (i.e. current) and trait (i.e. propensity to) anxiety were measured in a group of patients referred to a hospital eye department in the UK and in a control group who have had a sight test but were not referred. Response category analysis plus infit and outfit Rasch statistics and person separation indices were used to determine the usefulness of individual items and the response categories. Principal components analysis was used to determine dimensionality. Main Outcome Measure Levels of state and trait anxiety measured using the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory. Results State anxiety scores were significantly higher in the patients referred to secondary eye care than the controls (p0.1). Rasch analysis highlighted that the questionnaire results needed to be split into “anxiety-absent” and “anxiety-present” items for both state and trait anxiety, but both subscales showed the same profile of results between patients and controls. Conclusions State anxiety was shown to be higher in patients referred to secondary eye care than the controls, and at similar levels to people with moderate to high perceived susceptibility to breast cancer. This suggests that referral from primary to secondary eye care can result in a significant psychological burden on some patients

Understanding Challenges in Designing Interactions for the Age of Ambient Media

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Language Evolution On The Go

Knowing about the evolution of a term can significantly decrease time needed for searching for information. It can also aid in quickly getting a broader overview, which is essential when one is on the move. In this paper we present a solution for providing language evolution knowledge “on the goâ€. We present a mobile interface for easy access and visualization as well as an overview of how this evolution was found

Unobtrusive Personalized Services in Ambient Media Environments

In the age of ambient media, people are surrounded by lots of physical objects (media objects) for rendering the digital world in the natural environment. These media objects should interact with users in a way that is not disturbing for them. To address this issue, this work presents a design strategy for augmenting the world around us with personalized services capable of adjusting its obtrusiveness level (i.e., the extent to which each service intrudes the user's mind) by using the appropriate media objects for each situation

Research as a Service: The Role of Competence Centers in Bridging Industry and Academia

Turning research results into commercial success has been one of the key economic challenges since the beginning of the industrial revolution. In this context, most recently an increasing impact of Public Private Partnership (PPP) approaches can be observed. In this chapter, we focus on a specific form of PPP which aims at establishing so-called “Competence Centers”, i.e. research institutions explicitly joining the forces of academic and industrial research. Based on two examples in the Austrian funding program COMET, we describe the basic setup of such centers, and discuss the specific roles and challenges for various types of research staff, including their roles and career paths. Finally, we sketch the most important lessons learned, before we conclude with a brief summary and outlook

AI, You're Fired! Artwork

The paper is text-based artwork, which is representing the initial conceptualization or contemplative phase of the media art and contemporary art performance and installation.The objective of the long term art project is to further examine the potential of engagement of the advanced technology within the context of artistic research and contemporary art practice, with the specific postulate that the potential product of the artwork is expected to be imperceptible. The artistic research is referring to the philosophical and metaphysics idea that the alleged real reality cannot be perceived or defined via some concept. The question is, if it is so, than, is the art or the artist capable to successfully illustrate the undetectable real reality, even with the most advanced technological instruments employed. The text-based contemporary artwork is partly referring to another segment, which can be also observed within the context of the contemporary art – text based computer adventure games. More specifically, the method implemented for establishing the artwork’s concept uses some aspects similar to those used in early text-based computer games.There are several stages in which the long-term artwork will progress. The initial form is designed in such a manner which would confirm that this segment of artwork not only does serve as a fundament for the other parts to unfold, but is also autonomous and is already completed in terms of contemporary art. This stand is applicable to all the consecutive stages – each segment is both independent and contextual.The following stages would include the interactivity between the author, art audience, but also with the devices applied for the producing the artwork, like advanced technology instruments e.g. augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), mixed reality (MR) devices, then interactive 3D technology, artificial intelligence (AI), plus the interactivity with the no-reality (reality in spiritual and philosophical contexts)

Chalktalk VR/AR

When people want to brainstorm ideas, currently they often draw their ideas on paper or on a whiteboard.  But the result of those drawings is a static visual representation.  Alternately, people often use various tools to prepare animations and simulations to express their ideas.  But those animations and simulations must be created beforehand, and therefore cannot be easily modified dynamically in the course of the brainstorming process. Chalktalk VR/AR is a paradigm for creating drawings in the context of a face to face brainstorming session that is happening with the support of VR or AR.  Participants draw their ideas in the form of simple sketched simulation elements, which can appear to be floating in the air between participants.  Those elements are then recognized by a simple AI recognition system, and can be interactively incorporated by participants into an emerging simulation that builds more complex simulations by linking together these simulation elements in the course of the discussion

Visualisation Methods of Hierarchical Biological Data: A Survey and Review

The sheer amount of high dimensional biomedical data requires machine learning, and advanced data visualization techniques to make the data understandable for human experts. Most biomedical data today is in arbitrary high dimensional spaces, and is not directly accessible to the human expert for a visual and interactive analysis process. To cope with this challenge, the application of machine learning and knowledge extraction methods is indispensable throughout the entire data analysis workflow. Nevertheless, human experts need to understand and interpret the data and experimental results. Appropriate understanding is typically supported by visualizing the results adequately, which is not a simple task. Consequently, data visualization is one of the most crucial steps in conveying biomedical results. It can and should be considered as a critical part of the analysis pipeline. Still as of today, 2D representations dominate, and human perception is limited to this lower dimension to understand the data. This makes the visualization of the results in an understandable and comprehensive manner a grand challenge. This paper reviews the current state of visualization methods in a biomedical context. It focuses on hierarchical biological data as a source for visualization, and gives a comprehensiv

Virtual Reality Techniques for Eliciting Empathy and Cultural Awareness: Affective Human-Virtual World Interaction

On the average human beings have about 50,000 thoughts every day. If we consider that thoughts influence how we feel there is little doubt that the way we perceive reality will strongly correlate with how we act upon that reality. Let’s contextualize this thinking process within the realm of global business where interacting with individuals from other cultural backgrounds is the norm. Our own perceptions and stereotypes towards those cultural groups will strongly influence how we interact with them in business situations. The problem is that stereotypes, being cognitive shortcuts, not necessarily accurately represent intentions. Stereotypes provide us with a false sense of security enabling us to believe that we “understand” the reasons behind certain actions and reactions. This false sense of security often results in conflict in global business situations. That is one of the reasons why becoming globally competent without falling into stereotyping will provide us with the tools to increase success in cross-cultural business interactions. This paper describes an approach to design a virtual reality (VR) scenarios aimed at developing abilities to work across cultures using the principles of empathy and perspective taking. The approach we are taking in this design innovation paper  moves away from only using the understanding of cultural dimensions in cultural competence skills development as research shows that focusing on “preconceived” differences in cultures can enhance stereotyping.  Instead our approach provides users with the opportunity of exploring the thought process as a character in first person whose cultural background is different from that of the user. This scenarios provide opportunities for perspective taking which is conducive to empathy across cultures