scholarly journals Chatbot as a Telehealth Intervention Strategy in the COVID-19 Pandemic

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruno Azevedo Chagas ◽  
Kícila Ferreguetti ◽  
Thiago C. Ferreira ◽  
Milena S. Marcolino ◽  
Leonardo B. Ribeiro ◽  
...  

The COVID-19 pandemic and the need for social distancing have created a demand for new and innovative solutions in healthcare systems worldwide. One of the strategies that have been implemented are chatbots, which can be helpful in providing reliable health information and preventing people from seeking assistance in healthcare centers and being unnecessarily exposed to the virus. In this context, although a high number of chatbots have been implemented worldwide, little has been discussed about the process and challenges in developing and implementing this technology. This paper reports on an action research, which designed a novel chatbot as a prompt response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The chatbot is intended to be a first layer of interaction with the public, performing triage of patients and providing information about COVID-19 on a large scale and without human contact. Our contribution is twofold: (i) we reflected on the development process and discuss lessons learned and recommendations to support a multidisciplinary development and evolution process of the chatbot; and (ii) we identified some interactive and technological features that can be used as a reference framework for this kind of technology. These contributions can be useful to other researchers and multidisciplinary teams facing similar challenges.

Author(s):  
Marco Bastos ◽  
Dan Mercea

In this article, we review our study of 13 493 bot-like Twitter accounts that tweeted during the UK European Union membership referendum debate and disappeared from the platform after the ballot. We discuss the methodological challenges and lessons learned from a study that emerged in a period of increasing weaponization of social media and mounting concerns about information warfare. We address the challenges and shortcomings involved in bot detection, the extent to which disinformation campaigns on social media are effective, valid metrics for user exposure, activation and engagement in the context of disinformation campaigns, unsupervised and supervised posting protocols, along with infrastructure and ethical issues associated with social sciences research based on large-scale social media data. We argue for improving researchers' access to data associated with contentious issues and suggest that social media platforms should offer public application programming interfaces to allow researchers access to content generated on their networks. We conclude with reflections on the relevance of this research agenda to public policy. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘The growing ubiquity of algorithms in society: implications, impacts and innovations'.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon C. Day

The Representative Areas Program (RAP) was, at the time, the most comprehensive process of community involvement and participatory planning for any environmental issue in Australia. The RAP was a key component of the widely acclaimed rezoning of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, and although completed in 2003, many lessons learned are still relevant today. This paper provides an analysis of the comprehensive public participation program that significantly influenced the final planning outcome. It provides insights into a fundamental component of effective marine planning, assessing what worked well and what did not in terms of public engagement. Some aspects of the public participation program were innovative, and some were more effective than others. The outcome was one-third of the Marine Park was declared as highly protected no-take zones in 2004, with the remainder of the park also zoned to provide lower levels of protection. The methods used to engage the public and the 25 lessons discussed in this paper should be of interest for practitioners, policy makers and academics elsewhere aiming for ‘good practice’ approaches to achieve environmental conservation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (3S) ◽  
pp. 638-647 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janine F. J. Meijerink ◽  
Marieke Pronk ◽  
Sophia E. Kramer

Purpose The SUpport PRogram (SUPR) study was carried out in the context of a private academic partnership and is the first study to evaluate the long-term effects of a communication program (SUPR) for older hearing aid users and their communication partners on a large scale in a hearing aid dispensing setting. The purpose of this research note is to reflect on the lessons that we learned during the different development, implementation, and evaluation phases of the SUPR project. Procedure This research note describes the procedures that were followed during the different phases of the SUPR project and provides a critical discussion to describe the strengths and weaknesses of the approach taken. Conclusion This research note might provide researchers and intervention developers with useful insights as to how aural rehabilitation interventions, such as the SUPR, can be developed by incorporating the needs of the different stakeholders, evaluated by using a robust research design (including a large sample size and a longer term follow-up assessment), and implemented widely by collaborating with a private partner (hearing aid dispensing practice chain).


2019 ◽  
pp. 91-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rostislav I. Kapeliushnikov

Using published estimates of inequality for two countries (Russia and USA) the paper demonstrates that inequality measuring still remains in the state of “statistical cacophony”. Under this condition, it seems at least untimely to pass categorical normative judgments and offer radical political advice for governments. Moreover, the mere practice to draw normative conclusions from quantitative data is ethically invalid since ordinary people (non-intellectuals) tend to evaluate wealth and incomes as admissible or inadmissible not on the basis of their size but basing on whether they were obtained under observance or violations of the rules of “fair play”. The paper concludes that a current large-scale ideological campaign of “struggle against inequality” has been unleashed by left-wing intellectuals in order to strengthen even more their discursive power over the public.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fernando Gonçalves ◽  
Daniel G. Streicker ◽  
Mauro Galetti

Nowadays, restoration project might lead to increased public engagement and enthusiasm for biodiversity and is receiving increased media attention in major newspapers, TED talks and the scientific literature. However, empirical research on restoration project is rare, fragmented, and geographically biased and long-term studies that monitor indirect and unexpected effects are needed to support future management decisions especially in the Neotropical area. Changes in animal population dynamics and community composition following species (re)introduction may have unanticipated consequences for a variety of downstream ecosystem processes, including food web structure, predator-prey systems and infectious disease transmission. Recently, an unprecedented study in Brazil showed changes in vampire bat feeding following a rewilding project and further transformed the land-bridge island into a high-risk area for rabies transmission. Due the lessons learned from ongoing project, we present a novel approach on how to anticipate, monitor, and mitigate the vampire bats and rabies in rewilding projects. We pinpoint a series of precautions and the need for long-term monitoring of vampire bats and rabies responses to rewilding projects and highlighted the importance of multidisciplinary teams of scientist and managers focusing on prevention educational program of rabies risk transmitted by bats. In addition, monitoring the relative abundance of vampire bats, considering reproductive control by sterilization and oral vaccines that autonomously transfer among bats would reduce the probability, size and duration of rabies outbreaks. The rewilding assessment framework presented here responds to calls to better integrate the science and practice of rewilding and also could be used for long-term studying of bat-transmitted pathogen in the Neotropical area as the region is considered a geographic hotspots of “missing bat zoonoses”.


2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Marlina Marlina

Reading short stories “Suku Pompong” (Pompong Tribe) and “Rumah di Ujung Kampung” (House at the End of the Village) is like reading a historical reality that is happening on the ground of Riau Malay. The exploitation of forest resources on a large scale in recent decades in Riau Province has changed the land use of the area of intact forest into plantation area. The exploitation process causes friction in the community. The friction is eventually lead to conflict between communities and plantation companies. Their struggle to resolve conflicts and maintain their ancestral land, the strength of the company that has the license to the land and sadness when the public finally has always been on the losing side. This study objected to describe the objective reality of the Malay community in terms of land conversion, the communal land into plantations and reality of imaginative literature contained in the short stories “Suku Pompong” dan “Rumah di Ujung Kampung”. This study applied the sociology of literature approach, while the sociological approach to literature is a literary approach that specializes in reviewing literature by considering the social aspects. Based on these approaches, it can be concluded that short stories Suku Pompong and Rumah di Ujung Jalan are short stories that raised the reality of the Malay community.AbstrakMembaca cerpen “Suku Pompong” dan cerpen “Rumah di Ujung Kampung” seperti membaca sebuah realita sejarah yang terjadi di tanah Melayu Riau. Ekploitasi sumber daya hutan secara besar-besaran pada beberapa dekade terakhir di Provinsi Riau telah mengubah tata guna lahan dari kawasan hutan yang utuh menjadi kawasan perkebunan. Proses eksploitasi tersebut menimbulkan gesekan-gesekan dalam masyarakat. Gesekan-gesekan inilah yang akhirnya menimbulkan konflik antara masyarakat dengan pihak perusahaan perkebunan. Perjuangan masyarakat dalam menyelesaikan konflik dan mempertahankan tanah leluhur mereka, kekuatan pihak perusahaan yang memiliki surat izin atas tanah tersebut, dan kesedihan ketika masyarakat akhirnya selalu berada di pihak yang kalah. Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mendeskripsikan realitas objektif masyarakat Melayu Riau dalam hal alih fungsi lahan, dari lahan tanah ulayat menjadi lahan perkebunan, dan realititas imajinatif sastra yang terdapat dalam cerpen “Suku Pompong” dan cerpen “Rumah di Ujung Kampung”. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan sosiologi sastra, yaitu suatu pendekatan sastra yang mengkhususkan diri dalam menelaah karya sastra dengan mempertimbangkan segi-segi sosial kemasyarakatan. Dari pendekatan tersebut dapat diambil kesimpulan bahwa cerpen “Suku Pompong” dan cerpen “Rumah di Ujung Kampung” memang merupakan cerpen yang mengangkat realitas masyarakat Melayu Riau.


Author(s):  
Liesel Mack Filgueiras ◽  
Andreia Rabetim ◽  
Isabel Aché Pillar

Reflection about the role of community engagement and corporate social investment in Brazil, associated with the presence of a large economic enterprise, is the major stimulus of this chapter. It seeks to present how cross-sector governance can contribute to the social development of a city and how this process can be led by a partnership comprising a corporate foundation, government, and civil society. The concept of the public–private social partnership (PPSP) is explored: a strategy for building a series of inter-sectoral alliances aimed at promoting the sustainable development of territories where the company has large-scale enterprises, through joint efforts towards integrated long-term strategic planning, around a common agenda. To this end, the case of Canaã dos Carajás is introduced, a municipality in the State of Pará, in the Amazon region, where large-scale mining investment is being carried out by the mining company Vale SA.


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