Advanced eNose-Driven Pedestrian Tracking Pipeline for Intelligent Car Driver Assisting System: Preliminary Results

From a biological point of view, alcohol human attentional impairment occurs before reaching a Blood Alcohol Content (BAC index) of 0.08% (0.05% under the Italian legislation), thus generating a significant impact on driving safety if the drinker subject is driving a car. Car drivers must keep a safe driving dynamic, having an unaltered physiological status while processing the surrounding information coming from the driving scenario (e.g., traffic signs, other vehicles and pedestrians). Specifically, the identification and tracking of pedestrians in the driving scene is a widely investigated problem in the scientific community. The authors propose a full, deep pipeline for the identification, monitoring and tracking of the salient pedestrians, combined with an intelligent electronic alcohol sensing system to properly assess the physiological status of the driver. More in detail, the authors propose an intelligent sensing system that makes a common air quality sensor selective to alcohol. A downstream Deep 1D Temporal Residual Convolutional Neural Network architecture will be able to learn specific embedded alcohol-dynamic features in the collected sensing data coming from the GHT25S air-quality sensor of STMicroelectronics. A parallel deep attention-augmented architecture identifies and tracks the salient pedestrians in the driving scenario. A risk assessment system evaluates the sobriety of the driver in case of the presence of salient pedestrians in the driving scene. The collected preliminary results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Narrative Medicine: A Digital Diary in the Management of Bone and Soft Tissue Sarcoma Patients. Preliminary Results of a Multidisciplinary Pilot Study

Background. Guidelines for the implementation of narrative medicine in clinical practice exist; however, in Italy, no standard methodology is currently available for the management of oncological patients. Since 2017, at the “Regina Elena” National Cancer Institute, studies using “digital narrative diaries” (DNMLAB platform) have been carried out; this article focuses on a pilot, uncontrolled, real-life study aiming to evaluate the utility of DNM integrated with the care pathway of patients with bone and limb soft tissue sarcomas. Methods. Adult patients completed the diary during treatment or follow-up by writing their narrative guided by a set of narrative prompts. The endpoints were: (a) patients’ opinions about therapeutic alliance, awareness, and coping ability; (b) healthcare professionals’ (HCPs’) opinions about communication, therapeutic alliance, and information collection. Open- and closed-ended questions (Likert score: 1–5) were used to assess the items. Results. At the interim analysis of data from seven patients and five HCPs, DNM was shown to improve: (a) the expression of patients’ point of view, the perception of effective taking charge, disease awareness, and self-empowerment (score: 4.8/5); (b) patients’ communication, relationships, and illness knowledge (score: 4.6–4.8/5). Conclusions. The preliminary results supported the need to integrate patients’ narratives with clinical data and encourage further research.

The Mediating Effect of Dispositional Gratitude on the Relationship between Religious Struggles and Self-Esteem: Preliminary Results

In comforting or distressing circumstances, individuals tend to have various perceptions of themselves. It seems that religious comfort and religious distress correlate differently with people’s self-esteem. Since the relationship between religiosity and self-esteem is not only direct but can be mediated by other factors that are recognized as buffers against adverse situations, our main goal was to verify whether dispositional gratitude may have an indirect effect on the association between both variables. The research involved data from 254 participants aged 18 to 25 (M = 21.24; SD = 2.09) and included 192 women (76%) and 62 men (24%). To measure the title variables, we used: the Religious Comfort and Strain Scale (RCSS), the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES), and the Gratitude Questionnaire (GQ-6). The results showed that people who consider religion as a source of comfort express positive attitudes toward the self and recognize others’ kindness, as well. In contrast, people who consider religiosity as a cause of fear, stress, and internal strain tend to display a lower subjective sense of personal worth and lower appreciation of the positivity around them. Moreover, gratitude had a mediatory effect on the relationships between religious comfort/negative emotions toward God and self-esteem.