Virtual Home Research Articles

Long-Term Psychotherapy Jeopardized in Ontario

Back to table of contents Previous article Government NewsFull AccessLong-Term Psychotherapy Jeopardized in OntarioRenata M. VillelaM.D. , F.R.C.P.C. President, Ontario District BranchRenata M. VillelaSearch for more papers by this authorM.D. , F.R.C.P.C. President, Ontario District BranchPublished Online:17 Apr 2019https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2019.4b50Psychotherapy in Ontario is facing an extinction-level crisis. The first wave took the stage at the national level, with provinces across the country reworking their residency curricula to be competency-based instead of time-based. Under that guise, those opposing psychotherapy as an integral part of psychiatric residency programs began to claim that psychotherapy was too difficult to evaluate under the new system and argued for it to be sidelined. For those already in practice, a second, more localized hit was in place as part of the ongoing contract negotiations between the Ontario government and the province's physicians. Currently, Ontario patients can see psychiatrists or family physicians for psychotherapy via our universal health care system without any restrictions on the length of the treatment course. The government is proposing that psychotherapy be limited to about 24 hours per patient per year for a given psychiatrist, alleging a lack of evidence for long-term psychotherapy. While the health care system in the U. S. operates under a very different model, the conflict around protecting long-term psychotherapy as a valuable form of treatment crosses borders.There is solid evidence for long-term psychotherapy in the literature. We need only look to the works of Susan Lazar, M.D., Meiram Bendat, J.D., Glen Gabbard, M.D., and colleagues (for example, Clinical Necessity Guidelines for Psychotherapy, Insurance Medical Necessity and Utilization Review Protocols, and Mental Health Parity). Long-term psychotherapy is not a luxury; it can be a life-saving treatment. Patients deserve better than fast-food medicine models that focus on a one-size-fits all mentality. There is room at the table for all of the tools at our disposal, and physicians may choose to focus their practice on one set more so than another. The psychotherapy debate appears to be an extension of the stigma of mental illness; it is hard to believe that a proposal to stop covering evidence-based treatments is even on the table. I am unaware of any other medical specialty that would consider doing something similar. Yet psychiatry can be seen as low-hanging fruit, an easy target.A recent opinion article by Dr. Norman Doidge in The Globe and Mail highlights the current conflict within our profession in Ontario. He speaks to the impact that the proposed session cap would have on long-term psychotherapy in a variety of forms, with psychoanalysis being one example. Some argue that this drastic change is necessary to cut out the supposed cancer of the mythical elite, worried-well who are engaging in self-indulgent navel-gazing at taxpayers' expense. Yet the remuneration changes are being suggested without a complete dataset/understanding of whether this feared misuse of the system is taking place on a massive scale. Furthermore, it could easily become standard practice for documentation to include a clear indication of the need for ongoing intensive treatment. We can be part of the solution around these misconceptions. The movement against long-term psychotherapy in Ontario has also been suggesting that having more access to psychiatrists in the form of consults should ideally replace the role of treatment. Essentially, patients would be advised about possible pharmacotherapy/structured, short-term psychotherapy options and then be on their own to implement extended treatment privately. The longitudinal therapeutic relationship (whether via pharmacotherapy, psychotherapy, or both) that psychiatrists can offer is, to me, a fulfilling aspect of our work. Patients would get understandably angry by repeated consults telling them the same general impression/plan when there is no improvement in their symptoms because they are no longer covered for longer-term, intensive psychotherapy as needed. With advances in technology that have become available via the Ontario Telemedicine Network (OTN), an encrypted form of telepsychiatry, patient access to treatment, including psychotherapy, has increased. OTN allows physicians to do virtual home visits and to connect with health teams to offer shared care. The argument that psychiatrists offering psychotherapy in Ontario are disproportionately in urban centers and are ignoring those in more remote areas falls flat. Our patients look to us to advocate for their needs when they are at their most vulnerable. When our patients ask whether these changes will come to pass, I hope that we can collectively as a profession say "Not on my watch" and have it be true. ■ ISSUES NewArchived

R.O.G.E.R Help software for the diagnosis and rehabilitation of cognitive disorders

Event Abstract Back to Event R.O.G.E.R Help software for the diagnosis and rehabilitation of cognitive disorders Sébastien Serlet1* 1 CO3 / Consciousness, Cognition & Computation Group, Belgium R.O.G.E.R (Realistic Observation in Game and Experiences in Rehabilitation) is a virtual reality software. It is developed by a video game company (Fishing Cactus), by neuropsychological researchers (University of Brussels) and clinicians (ERASME Hospital) that allows the creation of cognitive assessment scale and observation and the creation of game scenarios for cognitive rehabilitation purposes. This tool can be found in laboratories or rehabilitation services and can be used by different therapists (neuropsychology, physiotherapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy ...). It also allows adding physiological measurements which can record and analyze data during sessions of reeducation (eye-tracker, electrodermal activity, cardiac ...) We now find a virtual home (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IwtA-YOL2E) on a computer accessible to all, the graphic quality allowing a complete immersion. Virtual reality is accepted as a therapeutic tool and allows a better transfer of rehabilitation in everyday life. The software integrates a scenario editor (simple creation without knowledge of codings beforehand, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pGH_WqyvkY). Subsequently, a platform of buying and selling scenarios will enrich the catalog of this serious game. The possibility of standardization of the data in real time for each scenario with an evaluation aim as well as scales of evaluations for the rehabilitation scenarios will also be found. R.O.G.E.R promises a graphic quality, a grip accessible to all, a constant updating and in real time. It also makes it possible to work on all the cognitive functions and to bring new data for the clinic and the research. References Traité de neuropsychologie clinique de l'adulte: Tome 2-Rééducation. De Boeck Superieur, 2016. Camara Lopez, M. (2018). DÉVELOPPEMENT D’UN OUTIL D’ÉVALUATION NEUROPSYCHOLOGIQUE EN RÉALITÉ VIRTUELLE: CAS SPÉCIFIQUE DE L’ÉVALUATION DE LA MÉMOIRE PROSPECTIVE. Keywords: virtual reality, Rehabilitation, Neuropsychologie, Neurological disorders & brain damage, medical device Conference: 13th National Congress of the Belgian Society for Neuroscience , Brussels, Belgium, 24 May - 24 May, 2019. Presentation Type: Poster presentation Topic: Behavioral/Systems Neuroscience Citation: Serlet S (2019). R.O.G.E.R Help software for the diagnosis and rehabilitation of cognitive disorders. Front. Neurosci. Conference Abstract: 13th National Congress of the Belgian Society for Neuroscience . doi: 10.3389/conf.fnins.2019.96.00033 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 25 Apr 2019; Published Online: 27 Sep 2019. * Correspondence: Mr. Sébastien Serlet, CO3 / Consciousness, Cognition & Computation Group, Brussels, B-1050, Belgium, sebastien.serlet@yahoo.fr Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract Supplemental Data The Authors in Frontiers Sébastien Serlet Google Sébastien Serlet Google Scholar Sébastien Serlet PubMed Sébastien Serlet Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.

Formative research to underpin a text messaging home safety intervention for young mothers

Objective:Unintentional injury is the leading cause of death for infants and young children in the USA, and the children of young mothers are at an even higher risk. Mobile health (mHealth) interventions have been successful in promoting behaviour change for many health conditions. This study assessed interest in mSafety, a text and video messaging mHealth intervention targeting injury prevention knowledge, behaviour and self-efficacy in young mothers.Design:Interviews with young mothers were conducted using a semi-structured interview guide.Setting:Interviews took place at a health clinic for teenage mothers and their children and at a local public charter high school which serves pregnant teenagers and young mothers.Method:A trained research assistant conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 young mothers (ages 15–20). Participants were asked both closed and open-ended questions to elicit opinions about their willingness to utilise mSafety.Results:The results of the interviews were positive. Participants were most interested in learning about the prevention of falls and poisonings, as well as safe sleep. Many emphasised that the language of the messages should be simple and that videos could be included to demonstrate methods of injury prevention. Most interviewees were willing to participate in a ‘virtual home safety visit’ in which participants text home photos to an expert to evaluate home safety practices.Conclusion:The concept of an mHealth intervention that would provide young mothers with the tools to prevent injuries among their children received positive feedback.

Virtual home assistant for voice based controlling and scheduling with short speech speaker identification

With the advancement of interface technologies in smart devices, voice-controlled assistants have quickly gained popularity. These assistants are designed to use voice commands to achieve a more human-friendly interaction. On these lines, we propose a cloud-connected voice based home assistant in this paper. It accepts voice commands to control or monitor devices in a home. It can understand and schedule device operations based on time or sensor data through a simple voice based approach. To enhance its capability, it is designed to identify the speakers. Mel-Frequency Cepstrum Coefficients (MFCC) in combination with other speech features are used as feature vector. We use Vector Quantization (VQ) and Principal Component Analysis (PCA) for dimensionality reduction of the feature vector, followed by Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) for classification. The validation of the short speech speaker identification is carried out on a set of Indian speakers in an uncontrolled indoor environment. An accuracy greater than 92% is achieved for speech samples as small as 1 second. A database of more than 50 different commands per speaker is also created for validation of the proposed virtual assistant. IBM’s Bluemix and Google’s cloud service is used for speech to text conversion.

A sensor-service collaboration approach for target tracking in wireless camera networks

Mobile target tracking is a necessary function of some emerging application domains, such as virtual reality, smart home and intelligent healthcare. However, existing portable devices for target tracking are resource intensive and high-cost. Camera tracking is an effective location tracking way for those emerging applications which can reuse the existing ubiquitous video monitoring system. This paper proposes a dynamic community-based camera collaboration (D3C) framework for target location and tracking. The contributions of D3C mainly include that (1) nonlinear perspective projection model is selected as the camera sensing model and sequential Monte Carlo is employed to predict the target location; (2) a dynamic collaboration scheme is proposed, it is based on the local community-detection theory deriving from social network analysis. The performance of proposed approach is validated by both synthetic datasets and real-world application. The experiment results show that D3C meets the versatility, real-time and fault tolerance requirements of target tracking applications.

Perceptions of telecare training needs in home healthcare services: a focus group study

BackgroundThe implementation and use of telecare requires significant changes to healthcare service organisation and delivery, including new ways of working for staff. Competency development and training for healthcare professionals is therefore required to enable necessary adaptation of clinical practice and ensure competent provision of telecare services. It is however unclear what skills healthcare staff need when providing care at a distance and there is little empirical evidence on effective training strategies for telecare practice. Training should however emphasise the experiences and preferences of prospective trainees to ensure its relevance to their educational needs. The aim of this study was to explore healthcare professionals’ perceptions of training related to the general use of telecare, and to identify specific training needs associated with the use of virtual visits in the home healthcare services.MethodsSix focus group interviews were held with a total of 26 participants working in the home healthcare services in Norway, including registered nurses, enrolled nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, social workers, health workers, and healthcare assistants. The data material was analysed by way of systematic text condensation.ResultsThe analysis resulted in five categories relevant to telecare training for healthcare professionals: Purposeful training creates confidence and changes attitudes; Training needs depend on ability to cope with telecare; The timing of training; Training must facilitate practical insight into the patients’ perspective; and Training content must focus on the telecare process. Findings are discussed in light of implications for the form and content of a training program for healthcare professionals on how to undertake virtual home healthcare visits.ConclusionAppropriate preparation and training for telecare use is important for healthcare professionals and must be taken seriously by healthcare organisations. To facilitate the knowledge, skills and attitudes required for new ways of working and enable quality and safety in telecare practice, staff should be provided with training as part of telecare implementation processes. Telecare training should be hands-on and encourage an overall patient-centred approach to care to ensure good patient-professional relationships at a distance.

Modeling Data Transport Capacity of Mobile Networks for Mobile Social Services

In this paper, we mainly study the data transport capacity of mobile networks for mobile social services. Specifically, mobile ad hoc social networks (MAHSNs) with infrastructure support are considered the carrier networks. In MAHSNs with infrastructure support, the underlying physical networks and the upper social relationship networks interact with each other and influence the capacity of this hybrid mobile social communication carrier network together. For the physical networks, we introduce a more practical clustered model to depict the social behavior of users. We consider a virtual home point for each mobile user. For the upper social relationship networks, we propose an improved population-based model, in which we map the home points of the mobile users into the social relationship formation, to solve the social formation problem in the mobile environment. This process comprehensively considers the clustering levels of the degree of friendship and friendship distribution. Finally, from a layered networking perspective, the geographical distribution of the social traffic sessions is analyzed to derive the capacity for social-broadcast sessions of MAHSNs with infrastructure support. The results provide deep insights into the impacts of a user’ mobility pattern and social relationship formation on the capacity of MAHSNs with infrastructure support.

Evaluating a simulation-based telecare training program for home healthcare professionals: A trainee perspective

Background: The provision and use of telecare services implies new ways of working for home healthcare staff. To gain the knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary for sound telecare practice, staff are in need of thorough training opportunities. Simulation has been suggested as a useful approach to prepare healthcare professionals for providing telecare services. The aim of this study was to test and evaluate a simulation-based telecare training program for qualified healthcare professionals and explore whether it met intended training objectives from the perspective of the trainees.Methods: A total of 14 healthcare professionals working in home healthcare services participated in up to two training sessions, each across two separate days. Data were collected by way of four tape-recorded focus group interviews and field notes from non-participant observations of eight simulation sessions, and were analysed by way of systematic text condensation.Results: The analysis resulted in seven categories addressing trainees’ experiences of partaking in simulated virtual visits; their perceptions of simulation-based telecare training; and their views on the main learning outcomes from the simulation-based training program in question.Conclusions: Simulation-based training provides trainees with realistic insight into the knowledge and skills required for new ways of working through telecare and can thus be a useful way of preparing healthcare professionals for the delivery of telecare services such as virtual home healthcare visits.

Architecture of intellectual sociality: Tea and coffeehouses in post-colonial Delhi

Abstract The essay presents a historical narrative about the way tea and coffeehouses in post-partition, post-colonial Delhi were inhabited, embraced, used, celebrated and fought for by a couple of generations of migrant Hindi intellectuals in the middle decades of the last century. Adda-like, but more public and open, the space helped them connect with the city, otherwise an alien and distant entity mired in power and busy with the agenda of nation-building. It is here that they set up networks with their like-minded others to find a virtual home away from home. It is long past its glory, but its affective appeal as a socially convivial, creatively stimulating, and politically vibrant, albeit gendered, public place is nostalgically testified in the abundant testimonials offered by its more articulate regular visitors. The space, what happens there, and to it, thus emerges as a metaphor for changing times the city has witnessed through the decades.

Virtually home: Exploring the potential of virtual reality to support patient discharge after stroke

Introduction The level of assessment and intervention received by patients prior to discharge varies widely across stroke services in the United Kingdom. This study aimed to explore the potential value of virtual reality in preparing patients for discharge following stroke. Method Semi-structured interviews were carried out with 13 occupational therapists, eight patients with a stroke and four community stroke survivors. Views were sought of the perceived acceptability, potential utility and limitations of a ‘virtual home’ environment for use in pre-discharge education and assessment. Data were analysed thematically. Findings Interviewees found the virtual home to be an acceptable and visual means of facilitating discussions about discharge. It was perceived as valuable in assessing patient insight into safety risks and exploring the implications of installing assistive equipment at home. Limitations were identified relating to specific software issues and the use of virtual reality with patients with cognitive or perceptual impairments. Conclusion The results demonstrate the potential utility of the virtual home within stroke rehabilitation. Patients and therapists engaged with the virtual home and, moreover, made practical suggestions for future development. Feasibility and pilot testing in a clinical setting is required to compare the use of the virtual home with traditional approaches of pre-discharge assessment.

I1.3: Invited Paper: Immersive Applications based on Depth‐Imaging and 3D‐Sensing Technology

The recent developments in depth‐imaging and 3D computer vision techniques allow efficient and real‐time acquisition, reconstruction, and understanding of the 3D environment, which enable an array of life‐like and immersive applications. We show here an excerpt of some of the key technologies spanning sensors, algorithms, and system integration based on depth imaging and 3D sensing technology. The small form factor, the low power and the real‐time depth image capture are the key enablers. We talk here about emerging trends in this burgeoning field and new enabled applications that include immersive and interactive gaming, virtual home and office decoration, virtual cloth fitting, video conferencing with custom background and synthetic environment, education and training, and numerous other new entertainment and productivity usages with natural and intuitive interactions.

‘Rosie 2’ A Child Protection Simulation: Perspectives on Neglect and the ‘Unconscious At Work’

Neglect is the most common category for abuse of children under one. It is prevalent in large families; where there is a mother with low self‐esteem and frequent changes of partner. Because neglect is difficult to work with, the Centre for Child Protection at the University of Kent has developed a child protection simulation – ‘Rosie 2’ – which is designed to train child protection professionals. It follows a social worker and health visitor on a virtual home visit to a family where neglect is a significant concern, and offers a safe opportunity to explore practice options. A small‐scale research project has been conducted whereby highly sensitive eye tracker technology and facial recognition software were used to examine the emotional responses exhibited by social workers and health visitors during this ‘virtual visit’. The results indicate that the prevailing emotion exhibited by the professional group showed a ‘neutral’ response. There were significant differences between the groups, with health visitors displaying more sadness, and social workers demonstrating greater surprise and disgust. The article discusses these findings in the context of debates on compassion fatigue and emotional response within child protection. We conclude by discussing how the findings can enhance professionals' supervision. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.‘There were significant differences between the groups’Key Practitioner Messages Neglect is a chronic problem in some families and can have long‐term effects on practitioners including burnout, compassion fatigue and secondary trauma. Simulations can provide immersive, realistic environments for child protection training and ‘Rosie 2’ has been developed for this purpose. Eye tracker technology coupled with simulations can provide insight into the unconscious emotional impact on practitioners of child protection work. This can potentially support and inform supervision.‘Simulations can provide immersive, realistic environments for child protection training’

FOCUS for Early Childhood: A Virtual Home Visiting Program for Military Families with Young Children

The risk for mental health problems and relational difficulties in military service members, spouses, and children is well-established. Yet, few services are available for families, particularly during the formative preschool years, when healthy parent–child relationships are crucial to the attainment of major socio-emotional milestones that form the foundation for later development. This paper describes the adaptation of a previously established military and trauma-informed preventive intervention, Families OverComing Under Stress (FOCUS) for use with families with a preschool-aged child (FOCUS for Early Childhood; FOCUS-EC). Grounded in theory and research on family resilience, FOCUS-EC aims to support parents as leaders of the family by providing developmental guidance and psychoeducation on deployment and reintegration, facilitate the construction of a family narrative, and enhance parenting strategies and the parent–child relationship. Furthermore, FOCUS-EC was adapted for use in a telehealth platform, enabling clinicians to reach military and veteran families in their homes, which is particularly useful for high-risk civilian-dwelling military families (including Reserve and National Guard). Pilot work and ongoing data collection as part of a randomized control trial suggest that FOCUS-EC is acceptable and feasible for military and veteran families with preschoolers.

Virtual home energy auditing at scale: Predicting residential energy efficiency using publicly available data

In this study we model and examine the energy efficiency profile of individual single-family houses from Gainesville, Florida, in our sample (n=7091). For this we use Princeton Scorekeeping Method (PRISM) which processes historical weather data and monthly utility usage data as inputs using an iterative regression approach to compute three energy efficiency parameters: (1) baseload consumption for end-uses which do not change with weather, e.g., lighting, refrigerator, water heater; (2) heating/cooling slope which is a function of the building shell insulation and the efficiency of the heating/cooling unit; (3) reference temperature, i.e., the outside temperature at which the house turns on heating/cooling. These parameters make up the normalized annual consumption (NAC). We then proceed to regress these parameters against the publicly available data to study the extent we can extract statistical insight for residential energy efficiency profiling using publicly available information (n=5243). These regression models are to pave a path to creating energy efficiency “reservoir maps” across individual homes and reducing the information barrier to energy efficiency adoption.

Virtual goods recommendations in virtual worlds.

Virtual worlds (VWs) are computer-simulated environments which allow users to create their own virtual character as an avatar. With the rapidly growing user volume in VWs, platform providers launch virtual goods in haste and stampede users to increase sales revenue. However, the rapidity of development incurs virtual unrelated items which will be difficult to remarket. It not only wastes virtual global companies' intelligence resources, but also makes it difficult for users to find suitable virtual goods fit for their virtual home in daily virtual life. In the VWs, users decorate their houses, visit others' homes, create families, host parties, and so forth. Users establish their social life circles through these activities. This research proposes a novel virtual goods recommendation method based on these social interactions. The contact strength and contact influence result from interactions with social neighbors and influence users' buying intention. Our research highlights the importance of social interactions in virtual goods recommendation. The experiment's data were retrieved from an online VW platform, and the results show that the proposed method, considering social interactions and social life circle, has better performance than existing recommendation methods.

Web Alert

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Leveling Up to Immersive Dispute Resolution (IDR) in 3-D Virtual Worlds: Learning and Employing Key IDR Skills to Resolve In-World Developer-Participant Conflicts

As technology improves, bandwidth expands and devices proliferate, hundreds of millions of people are engaging with ever-more realistic and complex three-dimensional (3-D) immersive environments for up to thirty hours per week. The growing variety of online 3-D spaces allows individuals to try on new identities as avatars and to interact, explore and shape either reality- or fantasy-based online worlds. In some of these virtual worlds, the emphasis is on developing personal relationships through social networking while others revolve primarily around achieving competitive game objectives. Participants may engage in a laundry list of mundane or whimsical activities from decorating your virtual home and chatting with fellow avatars to slaying mythical monsters or accomplishing quests in a hero’s journey. In a review of forty-five 3-D environments, one activity typically missing within the contours of the virtual world is an effective, in-world conflict resolution process to handle developer (or owner)-participant (or player) conflicts within the contours of the virtual world. Most of these virtual environments require adversarial conflict resolution either traditional courts or arbitration to process disputes between game developers and members. A few sites’ terms of use refer vaguely to “non-appearance based” conflict resolution options without further explanation of the nature of these processes. In other instances, developers can unilaterally take action against players through a variety of self-help remedies which have led to further court challenges. Incongruously, these virtual realities often teach some of the key skills necessary for collaborative conflict resolution methods outside of traditional litigation, including strategic analysis of one’s own and third party interests, understanding other’s perspectives through shifting online identities, balancing collaborative and competitive interactions with other parties, and exploring creative solutions to achieve objectives. Yet these virtual spaces seldom offer any meaningful opportunity for these skills learned in-world to be applied using the existing 3-D infrastructure to resolve these disagreements. This article calls for a new conflict resolution approach; the utilization of “immersive dispute resolution (IDR)” to leverage both the communication and graphical technological advancements in 3-D virtual worlds and the collaborative and strategic thinking skills virtual participants readily acquire in these digital experiences. In this paper, Part I will discuss research on learning in virtual worlds with a special emphasis on the key collaborative conflict resolution skills garnered through exploration, engagement and play in virtual environments. Part II examines current dispute resolution processes in forty-five 3-D worlds which emphasize adversarial methods and illustrate a failure to leverage the 3-D immersive technologies or the collaborative skills learned in these immersive environments. Part III will call for established dispute resolution professional and organizational providers to spearhead greater integration of 3-D technologies with facilitative IDR processes to help leverage player-acquired collaborative skills in resolving owner-participant disputes.

Multi-robot behavior adaptation to local and global communication atmosphere in humans-robots interaction

Multi-robot behavior adaptation mechanism based on cooperative–neutral–competitive fuzzy-Q learning is proposed for coordinating local communication atmospheres in humans-robots interaction, in which the communication atmosphere is represented by a two-layer fuzzy fusion model and is visualized by shape–color–fill–wave graphics. It aims to realize smooth communication between humans and robots in the local and global communication atmosphere coexistent interaction by decreasing the response time of robots and social distance between humans and robots, as well as visualizing the communication atmosphere. Experiments on multi-robot behavior adaptation are performed in a virtual home party environment. Results show that the proposal saves 47 and 103 learning steps (i.e., the learning rate is increased by 72 % and 85 %) compared to fuzzy production rule based friend-Q learning (FPRFQ) and friend-Q learning (FQ), respectively; the distance between human-generated atmosphere and robot-generated atmosphere is 3 times and 7 times shorter than the FPRFQ and the FQ, respectively. Additionally, subjective estimation of graphic visualization of the atmosphere through questionnaire obtains 85.5 % accuracy for shape, 77.2 % for color, 65.3 % for fill, and 91.7 % for wave. The proposed mechanism is being extended to the robot behavior adaptation to international communication atmosphere, where the atmosphere is generated by people from different countries with different cultural backgrounds.

Understanding Social Learning Behaviors via a Virtual Field Trip

This is a multidisciplinary study investigating how a virtual rather than face-to-face field trip can be conducted in a real-world setting and how students respond to such a social learning opportunity. Our participants followed a story of a stroke patient at her virtual home and in a virtual hospital via a teaching vignette. They were then given a new case and got on a virtual trip via a multiuser virtual environment. They played the roles of patients, relatives, doctors, or nurses, experiencing the emotional, physical, or social impacts those stakeholders may go through. Our study finds the overall participation of the Virtual Group is 50% more than the Text Group. Although the Virtual Group generates much more nodes in total, they focused much less on knowledge sharing and comparing than the Text Group (46 vs. 67), but more on other higher-level aspects of social interactions, such as knowledge discovery (57 vs. 42), co-construction (66 vs. 39), testing and modification (58 vs. 24) and application of newly constructed meaning (60 vs. 16). Analysis of students’ virtual field activities and in-depth discussions of important issues implied are included to help understand social learning behaviors during a virtual field trip. Sustainability of such systems is discussed.

仮想家電による状況認識型家電制御システムについて

仮想家電による状況認識型家電制御システムについて