Communication Support System Research Articles

The experience of surrogate decision-making and deciphering critically ill patient values: A qualitative study.

Surrogate decision-makers (SDMs) who make decisions for critically ill patients often face great challenges. Although shared decision-making has been advocated, its implementation has been less than satisfactory. To explore the experience of the surrogate decision-making process and determine how SDMs understand the values and preferences of critically ill patients. A constructivist qualitative study was used. The data were collected using semistructured interviews with four questions conducted between January and February 2023. The audio recordings were transcribed verbatim and analysed via thematic analysis. Fourteen SDMs (all family members) of 10 critically ill patients were recruited according to the inclusion criteria. We identified eight sub-themes that were classified into three themes: (a) the unbalanced act: no respite for the surrogates, conflict between rationality and emotion, and sacrifice in surrogate decision-making; (b) unclear values and preferences: ignored values, intentional silence and substituted values; and (c) unsatisfying surrogate decisions: decision regret and decreased surrogate decision-making self-efficacy. These findings underscore the urgent need for enhanced communication strategies and support systems to better assist SDMs in navigating their roles. Effective interventions could help clarify patients' values and preferences, thereby improving the decision-making process and outcomes for both SDMs and patients. Misalignment between patient values and those of SDMs can potentially degrade the quality of decision-making. Clinicians should be skilled in stimulating SDMs to think about patient values and preferences.

Choosing strategies for deployment and ensuring the reliability of a UAV swarm to support communications in destruction conditions

The subject matter of the article is the system of communication networks of UAVs (flying networks, FNs), which use LiFi technology for data transmission from the source to the receiver in conditions of physical obstacles and cyber threats, as well as deployment and reliability assurance strategies (DRAS) of FNs. The goal of the work is to develop criteria and algorithms for choosing DRAS of FNs that provide the necessary level of reliability and efficiency under given constraints. The following tasks were solved in the article: systematization of deployment strategies and ensuring the reliability of the flying network; formulation of principles and development of an algorithm for choosing the optimal deployment strategy and ensuring the reliability of FNs; providing recommendations on choosing the optimal deployment strategies and ensuring the reliability of the flying network. The following methods are used: system analysis for choosing the optimal DRAS; theory of reliability and system efficiency. The following results were obtained: the classifier of FNs deployment strategies was expanded due to additional features of repair and maintenance, as well as the presence of cyber attacks; the criteria for choosing deployment strategies and ensuring the reliability of FNs are formulated; an algorithm for choosing the optimal deployment strategy and ensuring the reliability of FNs was developed; the analysis is carried out and an example of the application of the developed algorithms is given to illustrate the step-by-step procedure for choosing a strategy, which is accompanied by calculations of reliability indicators. Conclusions: the proposed sets, criteria, and algorithm for choosing deployment and reliability assurance strategies of FNs enable the substantiation of a set of parameters and planning of the implementation of the optimal (according to the defined criterion) policy for the introduction of an automatic communication support system at critical infrastructure objects under conditions of destruction and cyber influence, as well as increase efficiency (minimize cost) of the use of flying networks.

2E4-5 Development of a Communication Support System by Visual Evoked Potential

2E4-5 Development of a Communication Support System by Visual Evoked Potential

What is current care for people with Long COVID in England? A qualitative interview study

ObjectiveTo investigate current care for people with Long COVID in England.DesignIn-depth, semistructured interviews with people living with Long COVID and Long COVID healthcare professionals; data analysed using thematic analysis.SettingNational Health...

UNDERSTANDING FAMILY DYNAMICS AND COPING STRATEGIES IN RESPONSE TO SEXUAL ASSAULT FREQUENCY AND DURATION

This study investigates the interplay between family dynamics, coping strategies, and the duration and frequency of sexual assault experienced by individuals. Utilizing qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys, the research explores how family characteristics such as communication patterns, support systems, and socio-economic backgrounds influence coping mechanisms in response to sexual assault. Findings reveal nuanced relationships between family dynamics and coping strategies, highlighting the significance of familial support, interpersonal relationships, and cultural influences in shaping individuals' responses to sexual assault experiences. The study contributes to a deeper understanding of the complex interactions between family environments and coping behaviors in the aftermath of sexual violence.

Design and implementation of a decision support system for flood management

This work deals with the design and implementation of a decision support system for flood management. In the society today emergency issues arises due to terrorist attack, flood disaster, epidemics, widespread massive riot etc. In other to handle this situation government has established a number of agents supported by Non-governmental organization (NGO). Due to non-existence of integrated database and communication support system for managing flood emergency has resulted to poor handling, huge losses and reoccurrences. This work involves managing the inter operations/ interlinks of flood incidents sources by the handling agents, design of database report format and communication media for the system automation. In other to solve this problem waterfall methodology was adopted in this study. The programming tool adopted was adobe dreamer. Its host has front end and back end. The front end is the user interface and serves as a channel through which users communicates to the system. Adobe dreamer being the tools used for building such web-based application supports many mark-up languages like HTML, CSS and Java script. The most common available tools for the development of this system is the Adobe Dream waver which is IDE (integrated Development Environment. It is a creation management tool and requires no programming language and good enough for experienced website developers.

Justification of radiological procedures: Radiographers’ experiences at two public hospitals

BackgroundJustification is a process conducted by the radiographer in consultation with the radiologist to evaluate radiological procedures ordered by doctors. The main purpose for justifying all radiologic procedures is to assess the benefits and risks of a requested radiographic procedure and determine whether exposure will continue. Furthermore, justification helps to prevent unnecessary radiation exposure and reduce the chances of harmful effects of ionizing radiation. ObjectivesThe study aimed to explore the experiences of radiographers regarding the justification of radiological procedures at two public hospitals in Namibia MethodsThis study made use of a qualitative, exploratory design. A total number of 13 purposefully selected radiographers from radiology departments in two tertiary public - hospitals in Namibia were interviewed using a semi-structured interview guide and audio recorder. All interviews were conducted face-to-face until data saturation was achieved. Data were analysed using Atlas.ti Windows (version 9.0 using Tesch's 8-step method of qualitative data analysis to generate themes and subthemes. FindingsThe participants experienced an enhancement of patient care through enhanced radiation protection and optimised patient care. They also experienced defunct communication systems through deficient communication between radiographers and referrers, professional role conflict and incomplete referrals. ConclusionThe study revealed that the justification of radiological procedures was linked to both negative and positive experiences. Enhanced patient-centred care was a positive experience related to the radiographers' job responsibilities. The defunct communication support system was a negative experience as it related to the limited availability and utilisation of communication systems that are meant to enhance and support justification by radiographers. The study recommends an in-depth study to quantify unjustified procedures in these two hospital departments. Continuous professional development focusing on justification and referral protocols must be conducted jointly between radiographers and referrers to create awareness and a platform for shared decision-making models.

A Hybrid Semantic Networks Construction Framework for Engineering Design

Abstract This paper proposes a novel framework for building semantic networks from a seed design statement using Recursive Object Modeling (ROM), Word2Vec language modeling, and vector semantic-based method. Semantic Scholar API was used to retrieve abstracts of scientific papers to build ROM-based Semantic Networks to address the design problem implied in the seed design statement, following Environment Analysis from Environment-Based Design (EBD) methodology. The proposed framework was applied to construct the semantic network for a project to design aircraft braking systems, which demonstrates the framework's efficiency. The presented research makes two major contributions: a ROM-based phrase extractor and a domain-specific language model, which is trained on the automatically collected literature abstracts. Using a manually created and assessed truth set containing 100 pairs of abstract-key phrases, the phrase extractor was evaluated by benchmarking it with two existing off-the-shelf key phrase extraction algorithms: TextRank and Rake. The ROM-based phrase extractor extracted most key phrases from target domains and showed higher precision, recall, and F-1 scores than other methods. Meanwhile, the trained project-specific language model was evaluated using the NASA thesaurus. We randomly sampled 457 pairs of connected domain-specific terms related to aircraft braking and landing knowledge. Our Skip-gram model was compared with Google's pre-trained word2vec model and a baseline word2vec model. The results demonstrated that our language model could detect the most pairs of concepts from the NASA thesaurus. The generated semantic network can be applied to design information retrieval, computer-aided design idea generation, cross-domain communication support system, and designer training tool.

Process and components of disaster risk communication in health systems: A thematic analysis.

This study has clarified and explained all the main components and measures of risk communication that can be used for planning scientifically.

The Vaccine Communication Demands on Community-Based Workforces.

Community-based organizations (CBOs) are experiencing some of the highest demand in years for a wide spectrum of health and social services. Their client-facing employees have taken on a new, challenging role as a sought-after source of COVID-19 vaccine information and guidance. These workforces operating on the frontlines, do their best to meet the increased need for services and information, often without additional resources or training to do so. The most effective immediate response to this challenge is a comprehensive communication support system working in tandem with CBOs. Our three organizations, the New York Vaccine Literacy Campaign at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, Hunger Free NYC, and Health Leads, have collaborated in key short-term approaches to meet these needs. We outline these processes and anticipated outcomes and offer lessons learned to advocate for long-term structural changes needed to increase community-level communication support.

Emotion Recognition Using Electroencephalography Signals of Older People for Reminiscence Therapy.

Objective: Numerous communication support systems based on reminiscence therapy have been developed. However, when using communication support systems, the emotional assessment of older people is generally conducted using verbal feedback or questionnaires. The purpose of this study is to investigate the feasibility of using Electroencephalography (EEG) signals for automatic emotion recognition during RT for older people.Participants: Eleven older people (mean 71.25, SD 4.66) and seven young people (mean 22.4, SD 1.51) participated in the experiment.Methods: Old public photographs were used as material for reminiscence therapy. The EEG signals of the older people were collected while the older people and young people were talking about the contents of the photos. Since emotions change slowly and responses are characterized by delayed effects in EEG, the depth models LSTM and Bi-LSTM were selected to extract complex emotional features from EEG signals for automatic recognition of emotions.Results: The EEG data of 8 channels were inputted into the LSTM and Bi-LSTM models to classify positive and negative emotions. The recognition highest accuracy rate of the two models were 90.8% and 95.8% respectively. The four-channel EEG data based Bi-LSTM also reached 94.4%.Conclusion: Since the Bi-LSTM model could tap into the influence of “past” and “future” emotional states on the current emotional state in the EEG signal, we found that it can help improve the ability to recognize positive and negative emotions in older people. In particular, it is feasible to use EEG signals without the necessity of multimodal physiological signals for emotion recognition in the communication support systems for reminiscence therapy when using this model.

Communication and Decision Support Systems

In emergencies, assessment and communication activities are particularly important for the support of the top decision-making bodies, to evaluate “just in time” the best actions to be taken. The multiple problems to be solved require specific skills in different areas. Upon the occurrence of a calamity, the authorities must answer questions such as “is a given place safe from the threat (e.g., an oncoming flood)?”, that’s why today knowledge of tools that can support decision-making is increasingly necessary: the so-called Decision Support Systems (DSS), software that allow users to improve situation assessment, helping all those who must make strategic decisions. Hand in hand with the growing interest in DSS there is an increasing use of communication systems based on IT. First responders know that to face an emergency everything must be prepared and planned, also communication. In fact, DSS and voice/data transmission systems are often integrated into a single system, as proposed by the European projects FIRE IN and IN PREP, because managing information is crucial for carrying out rescue activities in the best possible way. This work describes the impact of new technologies on rescue and emergency management in Italy and Europe, highlighting the challenges associated with their use.

Enhancing the Adoption of Evidence-Based Health Marketing and Promotion Strategies in Local Communities: Building a Communication Dissemination and Support System for the National Diabetes Prevention Program.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) created a health communication marketing and promotion support system (support system) to help 10 CDC-funded national organizations (recipients) grow enrollment of underserved populations in the National Diabetes Prevention Program. This article describes the creation of a successful support system to increase the use of effective marketing approaches and key messaging. The support system was developed using a systematic approach. It included a needs assessment, audience research, marketing strategy identification, expert panel review, materials development, and dissemination guidance. Hands-on, individualized, and group end-user training and technical assistance was also included. Recipients received culturally and linguistically tailored marketing materials to support their specific priority audiences, as well as corresponding training on recommended dissemination methods. In in-depth key-informant interviews, staff from six recipients reported increased knowledge of local communities and audiences, efficacy and skills to conduct media interviews, capacity to identify and train champions and influencers, and greater community partner investments. With marketing support, 90% of recipients reported increased enrollment, of which 40% exceeded self-set targets and another 40% doubled or tripled their enrollment numbers. These findings indicate that a customized strategic health communication marketing and promotion support system presents a significant opportunity to help recipients increase enrollment in evidence-based interventions. Practitioners disseminating evidence-based interventions may consider a support system to increase program uptake.

Development of a Drawing Application for Communication Support during Endoscopic Surgery and Its Evaluation Using Steering Law

The purpose of this study is to construct a hands-free endoscopic surgical communication support system that can draw lines in space corresponding to head movements using AR technology and evaluate the applicability of the drawing motion by the head movement to the steering law, one of the HCI models, for the potential use during endoscopic surgery. In the experiment, the participants manipulated the cursor by using head movements through the pathway and movement time (MT); the number of errors and subjective evaluation of the difficulty of the task was obtained. The results showed that the head-movement-based line drawing manipulation was significantly affected by the tracking direction and by the task difficulty, shown as the Index of Difficulty (ID). There was high linearity between ID and MT, with a coefficient of determination R2 of 0.9991. The Index of Performance was higher in the horizontal and vertical directions compared to diagonal directions. Although the weight and biocompatibility of the AR glasses must be overcome to make the current prototype a viable tool for supporting communication in the operating room environment, the prototype has the potential to promote the development of a computer-supported collaborative work environment for endoscopic surgery purposes.

Improve health care access is possible. A case report

IntroductionWithin the hub and spoke organizational model provided by the Emilia Romagna Region for assistance to people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), Cesena ward of psychiatry represents the hospital Hub. Here, a dedicated team (doctors, psychologist, case manager) creates individualized pathways to ensure second-level specialist diagnostics and the management of comorbidities affecting subjects diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Intellectual Disability (ID).ObjectivesWe report the case of a 23-year-old man, who from the age of 6 was opposed to any instrumental diagnostic investigation.MethodsIn order to guarantee the patient’s full collaboration in carrying out essential diagnostic activities, short behavioural paths were created including video modelling. The Vi.Co app was used and a new app was created to target behaviors that could not be included in Vi.CoResultsIt was thus possible to make the patient compliant with the execution of blood samples, ECG, MRI of the brain in sedation and CT dental scan.ConclusionsIn our case, communication support systems and behavioral strategies have proved to be excellent allies in significantly improving the quality of care for our young patient. Considering the worst prognosis of pathologies and the reduced life expectancy of subjects suffering from ASD and ID, known in the literature, in our opinion, the first essential step becomes facilitating access to care for these patients.DisclosureNo significant relationships.

Information-Seeking and Use of Primary Care Mental Health Services Among Gulf Coast Survivors of Natural Disasters.

This study sought to understand factors related to weather-related disaster survivors' health information and mental health-care-seeking behaviors. In November 2017, we conducted a quantitative survey of 170 Gulf Coast residents who experienced weather-related disasters. The survey assessed how individual and psychosocial factors affect health-care-seeking behavior. Nearly 66% of participants reported a high frequency of depression and/or anxiety symptoms, yet only 39% saw a medical professional. Of participants who visited a medical professional, 76% sought information from nonmedical sources. Seeking medical care was strongly correlated with seeking information from nonmedical sources and previous healthcare experiences, but not with fear and stigma. Positive communication and strong support systems have the potential to mitigate the reluctance people have in seeking help for mental health problems. Although it is discouraging that few people seek professional care, it is promising that participants were not avoiding care due to fear of being stigmatized. Less opposition to mental health care by survivors offers opportunity for mental health professionals to treat the psychological problems survivors experience. Providing necessary information may make headway to mental health care where it is greatly needed.

Tech Startups Led by Women - A Journey Ahead

The present paper demonstrates that the concept of gender equality still remains mostly in theory in the whole world, particularly in the context of economic participation and opportunity available to Indian women. It aims to depict the contribution of women-led tech startups in diverse fields like medical and health care, materials and product innovations and logistics, automobile sector, communication support system, security system, and human resource management. The contribution of Indian women in the forefront of tech startups in spite of all the barriers of cultural, social, economic, and political has been reflected here. It points out the brilliance and hard work of women entrepreneurs and suggests an urgent need for the change in the perception on the role of women of all relevant agencies in Indian society.

Digital Cardiology

The increase in life expectancy and Healthy Life Years in Europe is largely attributable to the success of cardiovascular medicine. Technical developments enable ever more detailed insights into disease processes and enable a precise, multimodal diagnosis of even complex diseases using digital imaging, cardiac biomarkers and genomic information. The rapid availability of this data, often in real time, allows optimized planning and performing of tailored interventional, surgical, or pharmacotherapies. But there are also completely new challenges due to the growing flood of data, the integration of which can no longer be achieved by the individual doctor. The active involvement and participation of the patient also requires new digital concepts and should include decision-making, treatment planning, (long-term) history, and feedback on success and adverse drug reactions. By using artificial intelligence, digital communication and decision support systems, economic benefits, quality improvements and acceleration of outpatient and inpatient treatment become possible.The DGK supports these developments in its own activities, both in project planning, communication with specialist groups, and in training and education. In this article you will find excerpts from current developments of digital cardiology.

Comparison of Information Display Method in Communication Support System for Knowing Handicapped Person

Comparison of Information Display Method in Communication Support System for Knowing Handicapped Person

高度プレゼンス情報を活用したコミュニケーション支援システム(論文部門,「中小企業のためのテレワーク」及び「震災とテレワーク」)

高度プレゼンス情報を活用したコミュニケーション支援システム(論文部門,「中小企業のためのテレワーク」及び「震災とテレワーク」)