Emerging Advancement for Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) in Dentistry

The skill of visual reality has matured, and VR and AR are increasingly being used in educational and surgical settings. The development of virtual reality technologies allows users to mix medical knowledge, medical data, and graphical data. It can provide more precise information, allowing users to increase their safety and reduce their risk. Virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) simulators that provide direct feedback and objective evaluation could be a useful tool in dental education in the future. Not only has it been applied to education, but it has also been created in therapeutic therapy. The authors believe that in the future VR and AR training and teaching will be extended and used in every aspect of dentistry, enabling students to develop their abilities on their own. In comparison to augmented reality, virtual reality offers a far more immersive experience. It would establish a trusting relationship between patients and doctors based on the experience of the dentists and the use of different hardware and software.

Improving Students’ Oral Communication Skills in Public Speaking through Individual Presentation Task

This current study attempts to seek the answers of a question: how effective is the individual presentation method in improving students' oral communication skills, especially in public speaking? Designed as a qualitative research, this research was conducted at the Faculty of Tarbiyah and Teacher Training of IAIN Pekalongan in the academic year of 2019/2020. The research involved 100 of the second year students of the English Education Department of IAIN Pekalongan who took Public Speaking course. The data were collected through an open-ended questionnaire as the instruments of this study to get their perception after taking the course with performing an individual presentation as its main task. The research findings reveal despite the obstacles they encountered, the presentation task was effective to enhance students’ confidence as well as to give them experience to speak in front of a crowd. The task also gave them more awareness and self-evaluation on how to perform a good public speaking as they received direct feedback from the audience while performing the individual presentation.

Comparison of Digital Self-Assessment Systems and Faculty Feedback for Tooth Preparation in a Preclinical Simulation

Background: Regarding the new dental licensing regulations in Germany (AOZ), this study evaluated the effectiveness of two different digital tooth preparation validation systems in comparison to traditional faculty feedback. Methods: Participants were randomly divided into groups: Faculty Feedback (FF: n = 33), PrepCheck® (PC: n = 32) and Dental Teacher™ (n = 32). Students had the task to prepare tooth 16 for a retentive full-cast crown. Preparations could be repeated as often as desired. Feedback was provided either by faculty staff or by digital validation systems only. Exams were conducted and graded by two independent and experienced examiners. A survey was performed to evaluate the assessment concepts. Results: No statistical difference in examination performance between groups could be observed. Nevertheless, the survey showed participants preferred consulting the faculty staff rather than the digital validation systems. Students preferred practising with DT rather than with PC. Conclusions: Although both classical and digital methods showed comparable results regarding the preparation examination performance, direct feedback by the faculty staff is still appreciated by the students. A combination of both methods is mandatory since demonstration and advice by the teacher is needed. However, digital tooth preparation validation systems are predestined for free practice sessions, providing self-assessment.

Impact of Covid-19 on the Mental Health of Healthcare Workers: Predisposing factors, prevalence and supportive strategies

The massive upsurge of hospitalizations and deaths in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic has placed an unprecedented strain on the psychological well-being of the healthcare workers (HCW) worldwide. The concern about being viewed as unfit for duty by employers or “mentally weak” was the primary reason given. In addition, a majority of HCWs insisted that improvements on the administrative front would have a better impact. An extensive literature review for this paper has been done through databases like Pubmed (Medline) and Google scholar to compile information from various sources. A study of the causative and exacerbating factors, corrective and preventative measures applied, and direct feedback from HCW reveals that much work is yet to be done to develop a satisfactory approach towards ensuring the mental wellbeing of one of the greatest assets in the fight against the pandemic. (*The paper was presented at the 2nd Conference on Business Data Analytics: Innovation in emerging trends in management data analytics. Apeejay School of Management, Dwarka, Delhi, India. November 2021)

Efficacy of Virtual Reality and Exergaming in Improving Balance in Patients With Multiple Sclerosis: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is one of the most common causes of neurological progressive disease and can lead to loss of mobility, walk impairment, and balance disturbance. Among several rehabilitative approaches proposed, exergaming and virtual reality (VR) have been studied in the recent years. Active video game therapy could reduce the boredom of the rehabilitation process, increasing patient motivation, providing direct feedback, and enabling dual-task training. Aim of this systematic review was to assess the efficacy of exergaming and VR for balance recovery in patients with MS. PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science were systematically searched from the inception until May 14, 2021 to identify randomized controlled trials (RCTs) presenting: patients with MS as participants, exergaming and VR as intervention, conventional rehabilitation as comparator, and balance assessment [Berg Balance Scale (BBS)] as outcome measure. We also performed a meta-analysis of the mean difference in the BBS via the random-effects method. Out of 93 records, this systematic review included and analyzed 7 RCTs, involving a total of 209 patients affected by MS, of which 97 patients performed exergaming or VR and 112 patients underwent conventional rehabilitation. The meta-analysis reported a significant overall ES of 4.25 (p < 0.0001), showing in the subgroup analysis a non-significant ES of 1.85 (p = 0.39) for the VR and a significant ES of 4.49 (p < 0.0001) for the exergames in terms of the BBS improvement. Taken together, these findings suggested that balance rehabilitation using exergames appears to be more effective than conventional rehabilitation in patients affected by MS.

HiNative: A Global Q&A Platform to Learn Language and Culture

Advances in technology have had arevolutionary effect on education, making online education more accessible toeveryone. These advances have also provided opportunities for development ofapplications or websites that could prove helpful to the process of languagelearning and teaching, by offering tools that could be used both inside andoutside of language classroom. Among a myriad of language applications,HiNative is an app that has recently been developed. The application provideslanguage learners with opportunity to improve their vocabulary, sentencemaking, and even pronunciation. one-on-one direct feedback from speakers ofdifferent languages has made HiNative a popular option for those who try totake control of their own language learning. This app could also be used tofamiliarize learners of a language with its culture too. This review provides adescription of the attributes of this application and tries to point out theadvantages and disadvantages of using this application as a supplementary languagelearning tool.

Align, then memorise: the dynamics of learning with feedback alignment

Direct Feedback Alignment (DFA) is emerging as an eficient and biologically plausible alternative to backpropagation for training deep neural networks. Despite relying on random feedback weights for the backward pass, DFA successfully trains state-of-the-art models such as Transformers. On the other hand, it notoriously fails to train convolutional networks. An understanding of the inner workings of DFA to explain these diverging results remains elusive. Here, we propose a theory of feedback alignment algorithms. We ffrst show that learning in shallow networks proceeds in two steps: an alignment phase, where the model adapts its weights to align the approximate gradient with the true gradient of the loss function, is followed by a memorisation phase, where the model focuses on fftting the data. This two-step process has a degeneracy breaking eflect: out of all the low-loss solutions in the landscape, a network trained with DFA naturally converges to the solution which maximises gradient alignment. We also identify a key quantity underlying alignment in deep linear networks: the conditioning of the alignment matrices. The latter enables a detailed understanding of the impact of data structure on alignment, and suggests a simple explanation for the well-known failure of DFA to train convolutional neural networks. Numerical experiments on MNIST and CIFAR10 clearly demonstrate degeneracy breaking in deep non-linear networks and show that the align-then-memorize process occurs sequentially from the bottom layers of the network to the top.

Talking about Complimentary and Alternative Medicine: A Conversation Analysis Study

Multiple Myeloma (MM) is a clonal plasma cell malignancy characterized by low blood counts and increased risk of infection, and primarily afflicts older adults. Although MM is incurable, advances in treatment, including autologous stem cell transplant (ASCT) has improved the lifespan of patients. MM patients commonly use over-the-counter complementary and alternative medicines (CAM) alongside conventional cancer therapies which, often without recognition by health care practitioners, may impact their treatment. Using data from an 18-month ethnographic study, we applied conversation analysis to examine 1180 minutes of audio-recordings to describe how patients and nurses interacted about CAM during ASCT education visits. Patients (n=12) had a median age of 62 years (IQR= 54-73), were mostly white (n=12, 75%), male (n=9, 56%), and had a moderate score on the FACT-G7 of 15 (IQR= 10-20). All patients had a caregiver present during their visit. Nurses (n=3) were aged 39 (IQR= 29-49) all with at least five years providing care to patients with blood cancers. Results suggested that nurses rarely provided direct feedback about CAM modalities, instead providing brief responses, and moving on to other topics. Excerpts were categorized into three groups, (1) demonstration of implicit epistemic authority, (2) demonstration of deferred epistemic authority in patient-initiated conversations, and (3) demonstration of deferred epistemic authority in nurse-initiated conversations. Understanding how conversations surrounding CAM are navigated can provide insights into patient-communication in general, and methods for improving ASCT education.

The Impact of Teacher Feedback Via Google Doc in L2 Learners’ Writing

Academic writing of assignments is challenging for many undergraduate students of English, and therefore, instructors' written evaluative comments are needed to help students obtain information about their performance in such academic written tasks. As a qualitative case study, this study was carried out on one undergraduate course, specifically on the instructor's written comments on 10 learners' peer academic writing of article reports, how students revise their texts in responding to written comments and how they view such comments and academic writing via Google Docs. The data was collected from the written comments, students’ text revisions and a focus group interview. The findings show that the instructor commented on issues and errors at the global and local levels of academic texts directly and indirectly. Quantification of the data illustrated that the instructor provided the five pairs of learners with an overall number of 1440 which targeted 373 (25%) global issues and 1067 (75%) local issues in the writing of the five pairs. In terms of direction, 977 (68%) accounted for direct feedback, while 463 (32%) accounted for indirect feedback. Distribution of the feedback received by the learners varied across the five pairs of students. The findings indicate that most of the learners’ text revisions were made based on teacher feedback (1187/93%), while only 95 (7%) revisions were self-made revisions. The thematic analysis of the follow-up interview underlies students’ perceived value of teacher feedback in improving their writing, their preference for direct feedback on their writing, their perceived role of Google doc in editing their written assignments. Yet, a few students reported a few restrictions of Google Dos-peer writing and editing. The current study implied that teachers should act as mediators, be aware of the role of feedback in facilitating their students’ development of writing and misinterpretation and confusion their feedback can cause to our students in the process of writing revision, and decide what issues their feedback needs to target, focus on what issues actually challenge their learners in writing. Finally, feedback practices should be made innovative through integration of technological tools.