scholarly journals Development and Testing of Motion-Detection Techniques for People with Cerebral Palsy

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 4
Author(s):  
Clara Lebrato-Vázquez ◽  
Alberto J. Molina-Cantero ◽  
Juan A. Castro-García ◽  
Manuel Merino-Monge ◽  
Isabel M. Gómez-González

This paper describes several computer access methods tested by Eva, a woman with choreoathetosic cerebral palsy. This disease prevents her from controlling the peripherals and configurations that normally give access to information and communication technologies, further limiting her independence. To make Eva access a computer, we focused our efforts on the methodologies that Eva could control by just moving her neck and head. These sensors were: Kinect, inertial measurement units (IMU), and video. Kinect, composed of a system of cameras and sensors, gives the option to interact and control the devices contactlessly. The IMU is a device consisting of an accelerometer and a gyroscope that measure velocity, orientation, and gravitational forces. For live image processing, a common webcam was used. During the development of the experiment, Eva must follow a sequence shown on the computer screen that alternates movement of the head with rest. These movements involved moving the head up, down, right, or left. Our results showed that the Kinect system could not be used effectively, while the image-processing algorithm obtained the best performance.

Author(s):  
Paraskevi Theodorou ◽  
Athanasios Drigas

The purpose of this paper is to review the most representative studies of the last decade (2006-2015) which deal with the combination of technology and music and concern individuals with Generic learning disabilities. Particularly, the areas of needs in this paper are divided to the following categories: Depression/ disruptive behavior, Down syndrome, Intellectual disa¬bilities, Cerebral palsy and Severe/Profound disa-bilities. It is also underlined the important role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and digital music tools in promoting musical participation and as-sisting students with the pre-referred disa-bilities.


2017 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 802-806 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teodor Savov ◽  
Valentina Terzieva ◽  
Katia Todorova ◽  
Petia Kademova-Katzarova

The information and communication technologies (ICT) have penetrated into almost all areas of human life. They have a dual impact on education – increase learning efficiency and train students actively to use innovations. We assess this impact by examining teachers’ experience with innovative tools in Bulgarian schools. In an anonymous online survey, we investigate their opinions on the issues related to technology integration in contemporary classrooms. The research shows that educators appreciate the benefits of technology implementation in the teaching-learning process, but they need a single structured system encompassing all technological resources and tools. This work proposes a conception for a smart classroom – an innovative learning environment that can establish and control suitable conditions for education as well as to impact the instructional process directly.


2014 ◽  
pp. 57-70
Author(s):  
Ana-Cristina Ionescu

The realities of our world are imperatively legitimated by the complex relationship between media, technology, and society. Whether we deal with old or new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), the content of the message delivered by the media assumes a fundamental role. The adherence of a large number of individuals to a common idea facilitates the formation of media-enabled personalities and communities within the virtual space. The emergence of Web 2.0 solves the tension from the ‘90s, when the public opinion decomposed into an amalgam of informal opinions of private individuals not entirely convinced by the formal ones, issued by publicistically effective but one-way communication media. While today the Internet provides the most inclusive forum of public deliberation, where communication is negotiated between cyber-women and cyber-men with equal rights, healed of the social diseases of the outer world, an important gap in our knowledge is whether Web 2.0 reflects our existing reality or whether it constructs a new environment, one that is devoid of the old biases. I would like to fill this gap in information, by exploring whether virtual communities represent a continuation, by technical means, of the pre-existing, face-to-face, geographic, stereotyped interactions, or whether they enabled the establishment of substantially different structures with their own intrinsic features and dynamics, where women have access to and control information.


Author(s):  
Md. Abdullah Al Harun Khan Chowdhury

In Bangladesh, transport sectors are developing rapidly to meet the increasing demand for transporting passengers and freight inside and outside the country. But there is not such development in railway transport system. The Bangladesh Railway transport system is still using an old technology to monitor and control signalling, scheduling, operations etc. This paper describes various problems in the existing systems and also solutions have been provided considering the existing railway transport systems of Bangladesh. A new system has been developed to control and monitor the total railway transport system from remote locations. While designing the system, various sensors and actuators have been introduced and also Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have been applied in the field of railway transport. So a Machatronics aspect of system has been designed to ensure a collision free, safe and efficient operation and management of railway transport system. This system is not only for monitoring and controlling of railway transport but also ensures efficient asset management. As a result face-to-face accidents, cross-road accidents and accidents due to railway line displacements or breakage can be avoided and there will be no loss of assets and valuable human lives.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (13) ◽  
pp. 2901 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hossain ◽  
Georges ◽  
Rondeau ◽  
Divoux

There are all sort of indications that Internet usage will go only upwards, resulting in an increase in energy consumption and CO2 emissions. At the same time, a significant amount of this carbon footprint corresponds to the information and communication technologies (ICT) sector, with around one third being due to networking. In this paper we have approached the problem of green networking from the point of view of sustainability. Here, alongside energy-aware routing, we have also introduced pollution-aware routing with environmental metrics like carbon emission factor and non-renewable energy usage percentage. We have proposed an algorithm based on these three candidate-metrics. Our algorithm provides optimum data and control planes for three different metrics which regulate the usage of different routers and adapt the bandwidth of the links while giving the traffic demand requirements utmost priority. We have made a comparison between these three metrics in order to show their impact on greening routing. The results show that for a particular scenario, our pollution-aware routing algorithm can reduce 36% and 20% of CO2 emissions compared to shortest path first and energy-based solutions, respectively.


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 591-606
Author(s):  
Mohammad Ali Fazeli, PhD ◽  
Azamossadat Hosseini, PhD ◽  
Farkhondeh Asadi, PhD ◽  
Hassan Haghighi, PhD

Introduction: Effective crisis management can reduce the costs and consequences of a crisis and has a significant impact on saving human lives in critical situations. Proper use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) can improve all crisis management phases and crisis communication cycles according to the needs of stakeholders. The purpose of this review article is to identify which ICTs have been used in effective crisis management and what managerial tasks they support.Method: A systematic review was conducted based on PRISMA protocol. The investigated articles that have been published in English were all indexed in PubMed, Science Direct, IEEE, Web of Science, and Google Scholar databases from 2005 to 2019. The keywords searched were “Crisis Management,” “Emergency Management,” “Information and Communication Technology,” and their synonyms.Results: A total of 1,703 articles were retrieved, and 81 articles that met the inclusion criteria were retained. In terms of content, there were 54 case studies/review articles, 38 proposals, and seven prototypes among which 18 case studies and proposals were the same. According to surveys, 18 ICT tools and technologies have been used in effective crisis management with the purpose of supporting managerial tasks such as situation assessment, decision-making, coordination/command and control, communication with the public, and supply of basic services in order to enable crisis management and logistics.Conclusion: This study showed that proper use of ICT can help crisis managers optimize their performance that will consequently result in effective crisis management and the reduction of casualties. In the crisis management cycle, several tools and technologies have been used for various purposes, however; some crisis managers’ tasks were still not taken into consideration sufficiently, and thus, some recommendations for further research in this field were provided.


2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 287-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pieter Lemmens

Abstract ‘The art of living with ICTs (information and communication technologies)’ today not only means finding new ways to cope, interact and create new lifestyles on the basis of the new digital (network) technologies individually, as ‘consumer-citizens’. It also means inventing new modes of living, producing and, not in the least place, struggling collectively, as workers and producers. As the so-called digital revolution unfolds in the context of a neoliberal cognitive and consumerist capitalism, its ‘innovations’ are predominantly employed to modulate and control both production processes and consumer behavior in view of the overall goal of extracting surplus value. Today, the digital networks overwhelmingly destroy social autonomy, instead engendering increasing social heteronomy and proletarianization. Yet it is these very networks themselves, as technical pharmaka in the sense of French ‘technophilosopher’ Bernard Stiegler, that can be employed as no other to struggle against this tendency. This paper briefly explores this possibility by reflecting upon current diagnoses of our ‘technological situation’ by some exemplary post-operaist Marxists from a Stieglerian, pharmacological perspective.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chantal Faucher ◽  
Margaret Jackson ◽  
Wanda Cassidy

Cyberbullying is an emerging issue in the context of higher education as information and communication technologies (ICT) increasingly become part of daily life in university. This paper presents findings from 1925 student surveys from four Canadian universities. The overall findings are broken down to determine gender similarities and differences that exist between male and female respondents’ backgrounds, ICT usage, experiences with cyberbullying, opinions about the issue, and solutions to the problem. We also examine the continuities between these findings and those of earlier studies on cyberbullying among younger students. Our findings also suggest that gender differences, which do emerge, provide some support for each of the three theoretical frameworks considered for understanding this issue, that is, relational aggression, cognitive-affective deficits, and power and control. However, none of these three models offers a full explanation on its own. The study thus provides information about cyberbullying behaviour at the university level, which has the potential to inform the development of more appropriate policies and intervention programs/solutions to address the gendered nature of this behaviour.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 206-212
Author(s):  
Patrícia Mesquita Vilas Boas ◽  
Adriana Geórgia Davim Bastos ◽  
Walter Kischinhevsky

The Electronic Patient Record (EPR) is already a reality in the practice of many offices, diagnostic centers and hospitals. The Federal Council of Medicine (FCM) regulated its use, through FCM Resolution n° 1,821/2007 In the Health Boards (HB) of the COMAER, agencies responsible for doing the medical-expert examinations of the military force, the paper record is still the rule. There is no automatic sharing of information between HB. In this context, it is perceived the need for the implementation of the unified EPR for the COMAER HB, because it speeds up the sharing of medical-expert information of the military and allows the military to carry out their health inspections in different locations, not interfering in the planning of missions so peculiar to the force, saving time and costs, speeding up the release of the results and control of inspections. The research thus consists of the qualitative approach, with exploratory objective and bibliographic procedure, carried out in the Scielo and Google Scholar databases, based on the discussion in ten articles, in addition to the FCM Resolutions. It was noted that the perspective that EPR has direct advantages for the Institution, however, requires an abrupt cultural change to the model that is made today, to provide a greater speed among the HB, even if in the transition phase, it is chosen to use in parallel in paper and Information and Communication Technologies. Therefore, the implementation of EPR in HB can provide both multidisciplinary teams and users of COMAER HB, a more efficient medical-expert assistance by promoting information sharing and agility in the performance of Health Inspections.


Author(s):  
Marcus Henrique Linhares Ponte Filho

This article is a product of the author's PhD Thesis, which investigated what teachers in the early years of elementary school think (and do) about the use of Information and Communication Technologies - ICT in the educational context. The research was conducted in a public school in the city of Fortaleza, Ceara State, and the data collected consists of discussions held in focus groups, with teachers and managers of the institution. The analyses were made from theoretical references of Educommunication, a field of research in expansion in Brazil, which defends the idea that educating must necessarily be a democratic and participatory act. The prevalence among educators of a discourse of fear and control over the use of ICT in school was verified through the promotion of a centralizing and authoritarian use of ICT during classes.


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