bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Impact of immediate and continuous heart rate feedback by dry electrode ECG on time to initiation of ventilation after birth: protocol for a randomised controlled trial
Authors: Rettedal Siren , Kibsgaard Amalie , Eilevstjønn Joar , Kvaløy Jan Terje , Bjorland Peder Aleksander , Markhus Pike Hanne , Haynes Joanna , Tysland Thomas Bailey , Størdal Ketil , Holte Kari , Davis Peter G , Ersdal Hege Langli
Published: September 2022

Introduction

3%–8% of newborns need positive pressure ventilation (PPV) after birth. Heart rate (HR) is considered the most sensitive indicator of the newborns’ condition and response to resuscitative interventions. According to guidelines, HR should be assessed and PPV initiated within 60 s after birth in non-breathing newborns. Dry electrode ECG can provide accurate feedback on HR immediately after birth and continuously during resuscitation. The impact of early and continuous HR feedback is unknown.

Method and analysis

This single-centre randomised controlled trial seeks to determine if HR feedback by dry electrode ECG immediately after birth and continuously during newborn resuscitation results in more timely initiation of PPV, improved ventilation and short-term outcomes compared with standard HR assessment.

In all newborns≥34 gestational weeks, the dry electrode ECG sensor is placed on the upper abdomen immediately after birth as an additional modality of HR assessment. The device records and stores HR signals. In intervention subjects, the HR display is visible to guide decision-making and further management, in control subjects the display is masked. Standard HR assessment is by stethoscope, gel-electrode ECG and/or pulse oximetry (PO).

Time of birth is registered in the Liveborn app. Time of initiation and duration of PPV is calculated from video recordings. Ventilation parameters are retrieved from the ventilation monitor, oxygen saturation and HR from the PO and gel-electrode ECG monitors.

The primary endpoint is proportion of resuscitated newborns who receive PPV within 60 s after birth. To detect a 50% increase with power of 90% using an overall significance level of 0.05 and 1 interim analysis, 169 newborns are needed in each group.

Ethics and dissemination

Approval by the Norwegian National Research Ethics Committee West (2018/338). Parental consent is sought at routine screening early in pregnancy. The results will be published in peer-reviewed journal and presented at conferences.

Trial registration number

NCT03849781.
Corticosteroids to safely reduce neonatal respiratory morbidity after late preterm and term planned caesarean section birth? A randomised placebo-controlled feasibility study
Authors: CHAN Johanna , Mackay Laura , Bloomfield Frank , Crowther Caroline , Lee Arier , Morris Jonathan M , Hay Rebecca , Oakes-ter Bals Mariska , Thurnell Christopher , De Jong Phoebe , Carlsen Victoria , Williams Tracey , Groom KM
Published: September 2022

Objectives

To assess the feasibility of conducting a randomised placebo-controlled trial of corticosteroids prior to planned caesarean section from 35+0 to 39+6 weeks.

Design

A triple-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel, trial randomised at the participant level (1:1 ratio). Additional feasibility data obtained by questionnaires from trial participants and women who declined trial participation, and focus groups with local site researchers and clinicians.

Setting

Three obstetric units in New Zealand including tertiary and secondary care; public and private care, and research active and non-active units.

Participants

Women undergoing a planned caesarean section from 35+0 to 39+6 weeks; local site researchers and clinicians.

Interventions

Two doses of 11.4 mg betamethasone or saline placebo. Questionnaires and focus group meetings.

Primary and secondary outcome measures

Primary outcome: trial recruitment rate of eligible women. Secondary outcomes: trial recruitment by gestational age, site and delivery indication; proportion of babies who completed measurements of blood glucose concentrations as per protocol; overall incidence neonatal respiratory distress requiring >60 min of respiratory support; overall incidence of neonatal hypoglycaemia, and barriers and enablers to trial participation by participants, researchers and clinicians.

Results

The recruitment rate was 8.9% (88/987) overall and 11.2% (88/789) for those approached about the trial. Neonatal blood glucose concentrations were measured as per protocol in 87/92 (94.6%) babies. For potential participants, key enablers to participation were contributing to research, a feeling of relevance and a good understanding; key barriers were a lack of understanding and concerns over safety. For researchers and clinicians, themes representing enablers and barriers included relevance, communication and awareness, influences on women’s decision-making, resource challenges and trial process practicalities.

Conclusions

Some women are willing to participate in a randomised placebo-controlled trial of corticosteroids prior to a planned caesarean section birth at late preterm and term gestations. Participation in such a trial can be enhanced.
Protocol for an integrative review: patient and families’ perspectives on telehealth in palliative care
Authors: Bauer Eithne Hayes , Schultz Anders Nikolai Ørsted , Brandt Frans , Smith Anthony C , Bollig Georg , Dieperink Karin Brochstedt
Published: September 2022

Introduction

Increases in the use of telehealth in palliative care (telepalliative care) prior to, and during, the COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in a proliferation of studies on the topic. While knowledge is building on how providers and recipients adapt to telepalliative care, no reviews have, as of yet, examined telepalliative care from a patient and family perspective. Therefore, the aim of this integrative review is to explore patients and families’ perspectives on telepalliative.

Methods and analysis

An integrative review will be performed inspired by the methodology of Remmington and Toronto from March 2022 to December 2022. Medline, Embase, PsycINFO and CINAHL will be searched for primary peer-reviewed studies that describe telepalliative care from patient and families’ perspectives. Limiters will be used for age; 18 years+, time; 10 years, and language; English and Danish. Hand searches of authors of included articles and reference lists of included articles will be performed. Two reviewers will independently screen and appraise selected articles using the Mixed Method Appraisal Tool. Conflicts will be resolved through discussions with a third reviewer. Data will be extracted independently by two reviewers into a data matrix with predefined headings and analysed using thematic analysis. Findings will be reported thematically, summarised into a thematic synthesis and discussed in relation to relevant literature.

Ethics and dissemination

Ethical approval is not required for this review. Results will be published in an international peer-reviewed journal and presented at a relevant international conference. Reporting of this protocol was guided by the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses Protocol checklist and prospectively reported to PROSPERO (CRD42022301206).
Physical health of care-experienced young children in high-income countries: a scoping review protocol
Authors: Bradford Daniel R R , Allik Mirjam , McMahon Alex D , Brown Denise
Published: September 2022

Introduction

Care-experienced children have poorer health, developmental, and quality of life outcomes across the lifespan compared to children who are not in care. These inequities begin to manifest in the early years. The purpose of the proposed scoping review is to collate and synthesise studies of the physical health of young care-experienced children. The results of the review will help map the distribution of health outcomes, identify potential targets for intervention, and assess gaps in the literature relating to this group.

Methods and analysis

We will carry out a scoping review of the literature to identify studies of physical health outcomes in care-experienced children. Systematic literature searches will be carried out on the MEDLINE, CINAHL and Web of Science Core Collection databases for items indexed on or before 31 August 2022. Studies will be included where the participants are aged 3 months or greater and less than 6 years. Data elements extracted from included studies will include study objectives, health outcomes, participant demographics, care setting characteristics and bibliographic information. The results of the review will be synthesised and reported using a critical narrative approach. Comparisons between care and non-care populations will be reported if sufficient studies are identified.

Ethics and dissemination

Data will be extracted from publicly available sources, so no additional ethical approval is required. Results will be published in a peer-reviewed journal article. Furthermore, they will be shared in summary reports and presented to local authorities, care organisations and other relevant stakeholders that can influence healthcare policy and procedure relating to young children in care.
Content Curation for Spatial Experience of Architectural Heritage
Authors: Jang Sun-Young , Kim Sung-Ah
Published: September 2022

Augmented space can be usefully applied to cultural heritage experience, because it is possible to experience physical space and acquire information at the same time. Experiencers can expand their experiences through virtual content while feeling the presence of relics or historic sites. The cultural heritage experiences currently implemented show simple forms in terms of their content and delivery method. Many cases repeatedly provide the same content regardless of the experience in a specific location. The present research, titled “the spatial-experience model of architectural heritage,” derived a methodology for construction of spatial experiences augmented by digital technology. Specifically, it deals with the problem of content curation and the limitations of the information system, which can be seen in the spatial-experience composition methods in the current digital heritage field. The information structure of the model was improved to enable spatial-oriented explanation of the expression of architectural heritage, which was insufficient in the existing metadata and ontology structures. The model has inference rules for creating an experience sequence and composes various combinations of experience content based on historical knowledge relationships. The model and reasoning rules were tested by applying them to real architectural heritage cases. Based on the test results, the role of the information structure in the spatial expression of its combination with content, as well as the possibility of diversification of sequence derivation, were considered. This research presents a syntax for construction of a semantic-rich environment while extending historical knowledge and spatial expression to the existing cultural heritage information system. In addition, by means of the content generator, which is a model for producing content using the extended descriptive language system, it is possible to create experience content in response to the increasing amount and demands of data. By applying the proposed model, it will be possible to quickly and easily derive various experience contents from the cultural heritage space, thereby reducing cost and time for content producers and providing an evolved spatial experience for consumers.
In Search of the Plastic Image
Authors: Holzer Derek
Published: September 2022

Scan processing is an analog electronic image manipulation technology which emerged in the late 1960's, reached its apex during the 1970's, and was made obsolete by digital computing in the 1980's. During this period, scan processing instruments such as the Scanimate (1969) and the Rutt/Etra Video Synthesizer (1973) revolutionized commercial animation and inspired a generation of experimental video artists. This paper presents a media archaeological examination of scan processing which analyzes the history and functioning of the instruments used, what sorts of possibilities they afforded their users, and how those affordances were realized with technology of the era. The author proposes the reenactment of historical media technologies as an investigative methodology which helps us understand the relation of past and present, and details a reenactment of scan processing involving the display of digitally synthesized audio signals on an analog Cathode Ray Tube vector monitor.
MuteIt
Authors: Srivastava Tanmay , Khanna Prerna , Pan Shijia , Nguyen Phuc , Jain Shubham
Published: September 2022

In this paper, we present MuteIt, an ear-worn system for recognizing unvoiced human commands. MuteIt presents an intuitive alternative to voice-based interactions that can be unreliable in noisy environments, disruptive to those around us, and compromise our privacy. We propose a twin-IMU set up to track the user's jaw motion and cancel motion artifacts caused by head and body movements. MuteIt processes jaw motion during word articulation to break each word signal into its constituent syllables, and further each syllable into phonemes (vowels, visemes, and plosives). Recognizing unvoiced commands by only tracking jaw motion is challenging. As a secondary articulator, jaw motion is not distinctive enough for unvoiced speech recognition. MuteIt combines IMU data with the anatomy of jaw movement as well as principles from linguistics, to model the task of word recognition as an estimation problem. Rather than employing machine learning to train a word classifier, we reconstruct each word as a sequence of phonemes using a bi-directional particle filter, enabling the system to be easily scaled to a large set of words. We validate MuteIt for 20 subjects with diverse speech accents to recognize 100 common command words. MuteIt achieves a mean word recognition accuracy of 94.8% in noise-free conditions. When compared with common voice assistants, MuteIt outperforms them in noisy acoustic environments, achieving higher than 90% recognition accuracy. Even in the presence of motion artifacts, such as head movement, walking, and riding in a moving vehicle, MuteIt achieves mean word recognition accuracy of 91% over all scenarios.
Towards Automating Retinoscopy for Refractive Error Diagnosis
Authors: Aggarwal Aditya , Gairola Siddhartha , Upadhyay Uddeshya , Vasishta Akshay P. , Rao Diwakar , Goyal Aditya , Murali Kaushik , Kwatra Nipun , Jain Mohit
Published: September 2022

Refractive error is the most common eye disorder and is the key cause behind correctable visual impairment, responsible for nearly 80% of the visual impairment in the US. Refractive error can be diagnosed using multiple methods, including subjective refraction, retinoscopy, and autorefractors. Although subjective refraction is the gold standard, it requires cooperation from the patient and hence is not suitable for infants, young children, and developmentally delayed adults. Retinoscopy is an objective refraction method that does not require any input from the patient. However, retinoscopy requires a lens kit and a trained examiner, which limits its use for mass screening. In this work, we automate retinoscopy by attaching a smartphone to a retinoscope and recording retinoscopic videos with the patient wearing a custom pair of paper frames. We develop a video processing pipeline that takes retinoscopic videos as input and estimates the net refractive error based on our proposed extension of the retinoscopy mathematical model. Our system alleviates the need for a lens kit and can be performed by an untrained examiner. In a clinical trial with 185 eyes, we achieved a sensitivity of 91.0% and specificity of 74.0% on refractive error diagnosis. Moreover, the mean absolute error of our approach was 0.75±0.67D on net refractive error estimation compared to subjective refraction measurements. Our results indicate that our approach has the potential to be used as a retinoscopy-based refractive error screening tool in real-world medical settings.
SAMoSA
Authors: Mollyn Vimal , Ahuja Karan , Verma Dhruv , Harrison Chris , Goel Mayank
Published: September 2022

Despite advances in audio- and motion-based human activity recognition (HAR) systems, a practical, power-efficient, and privacy-sensitive activity recognition system has remained elusive. State-of-the-art activity recognition systems often require power-hungry and privacy-invasive audio data. This is especially challenging for resource-constrained wearables, such as smartwatches. To counter the need for an always-on audio-based activity classification system, we first make use of power and compute-optimized IMUs sampled at 50 Hz to act as a trigger for detecting activity events. Once detected, we use a multimodal deep learning model that augments the motion data with audio data captured on a smartwatch. We subsample this audio to rates ≤ 1 kHz, rendering spoken content unintelligible, while also reducing power consumption on mobile devices. Our multimodal deep learning model achieves a recognition accuracy of 92.2% across 26 daily activities in four indoor environments. Our findings show that subsampling audio from 16 kHz down to 1 kHz, in concert with motion data, does not result in a significant drop in inference accuracy. We also analyze the speech content intelligibility and power requirements of audio sampled at less than 1 kHz and demonstrate that our proposed approach can improve the practicality of human activity recognition systems.
MiniKers
Authors: Yang Xiaoying , Sayono Jacob , Xu Jess , Li Jiahao Nick , Hester Josiah , Zhang Yang
Published: September 2022

Automating operations of objects has made life easier and more convenient for billions of people, especially those with limited motor capabilities. On the other hand, even able-bodied users might not always be able to perform manual operations (e.g., both hands are occupied), and manual operations might be undesirable for hygiene purposes (e.g., contactless devices). As a result, automation systems like motion-triggered doors, remote-control window shades, contactless toilet lids have become increasingly popular in private and public environments. Yet, these systems are hampered by complex building wiring or short battery lifetimes, negating their positive benefits for accessibility, energy saving, healthcare, and other domains. In this paper we explore how these types of objects can be powered in perpetuity by the energy generated from a unique energy source - user interactions, specifically, the manual manipulations of objects by users who can afford them when they can afford them. Our assumption is that users' capabilities for object operations are heterogeneous, there are desires for both manual and automatic operations in most environments, and that automatic operations are often not needed as frequently - for example, an automatic door in a public space is often manually opened many times before a need for automatic operation shows up. The energy harvested by those manual operations would be sufficient to power that one automatic operation. We instantiate this idea by upcycling common everyday objects with devices which have various mechanical designs powered by a general-purpose backbone embedded system. We call these devices, MiniKers. We built a custom driver circuit that can enable motor mechanisms to toggle between generating powers (i.e., manual operation) and actuating objects (i.e., automatic operation). We designed a wide variety of mechanical mechanisms to retrofit existing objects and evaluated our system with a 48-hour deployment study, which proves the efficacy of MiniKers as well as shedding light into this people-as-power approach as a feasible solution to address energy needed for smart environment automation.
MicroFluID
Authors: Sun Wei , Chen Yuwen , Chen Yanjun , Zhang Xiaopeng , Zhan Simon , Li Yixin , Wu Jiecheng , Han Teng , Mi Haipeng , Wang Jingxian , Tian Feng , Yang Xing-Dong
Published: September 2022

RFID has been widely used for activity and gesture recognition in emerging interaction paradigms given its low cost, lightweight, and pervasiveness. However, current learning-based approaches on RFID sensing require significant efforts in data collection, feature extraction, and model training. To save data processing effort, we present MicroFluID, a novel RFID artifact based on a multiple-chip structure and microfluidic switches, which informs the input state by directly reading variable ID information instead of retrieving primitive signals. Fabricated on flexible substrates, four types of microfluidic switch circuits are designed to respond to external physical events, including pressure, bend, temperature, and gravity. By default, chips are disconnected into the circuit owing to the reserved gaps in transmission line. While external input or status change occurs, conductive liquid floating in the microfluidics channels will fill the gap(s), creating a connection to certain chip(s). In prototyping the device, we conducted a series of simulations and experiments to explore the feasibility of the multi-chip tag design, key fabrication parameters, interaction performance, and users' perceptions.
MiShape
Authors: Adhikari Aakriti , Regmi Hem , Sur Sanjib , Nelakuditi Srihari
Published: September 2022

We propose MiShape, a millimeter-wave (mmWave) wireless signal based imaging system that generates high-resolution human silhouettes and predicts 3D locations of body joints. The system can capture human motions in real-time under low light and low-visibility conditions. Unlike existing vision-based motion capture systems, MiShape is privacy non-invasive and can generalize to a wide range of motion tracking applications at-home. To overcome the challenges with low-resolution, specularity, and aliasing in images from Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) mmWave systems, MiShape designs deep learning models based on conditional Generative Adversarial Networks and incorporates the rules of human biomechanics. We have customized MiShape for gait monitoring, but the model is well adaptive to any tracking applications with limited fine-tuning samples. We experimentally evaluate MiShape with real data collected from a COTS mmWave system for 10 volunteers, with diverse ages, gender, height, and somatotype, performing different poses. Our experimental results demonstrate that MiShape delivers high-resolution silhouettes and accurate body poses on par with an existing vision-based system, and unlocks the potential of mmWave systems, such as 5G home wireless routers, for privacy-noninvasive healthcare applications.
Dwell Selection with ML-based Intent Prediction Using Only Gaze Data
Authors: Isomoto Toshiya , Yamanaka Shota , Shizuki Buntarou
Published: September 2022

We developed a dwell selection system with ML-based prediction of a user's intent to select. Because a user perceives visual information through the eyes, precise prediction of a user's intent will be essential to the establishment of gaze-based interaction. Our system first detects a dwell to roughly screen the user's intent to select and then predicts the intent by using an ML-based prediction model. We created the intent prediction model from the results of an experiment with five different gaze-only tasks representing everyday situations. The intent prediction model resulted in an overall area under the curve (AUC) of the receiver operator characteristic curve of 0.903. Moreover, it could perform independently of the user (AUC=0.898) and the eye-tracker (AUC=0.880). In a performance evaluation experiment with real interactive situations, our dwell selection method had both higher qualitative and quantitative performance than previously proposed dwell selection methods.
PEPPER
Authors: Belal Yacine , Bellet Aurélien , Mokhtar Sonia Ben , Nitu Vlad
Published: September 2022

Recommender systems are proving to be an invaluable tool for extracting user-relevant content helping users in their daily activities (e.g., finding relevant places to visit, content to consume, items to purchase). However, to be effective, these systems need to collect and analyze large volumes of personal data (e.g., location check-ins, movie ratings, click rates .. etc.), which exposes users to numerous privacy threats. In this context, recommender systems based on Federated Learning (FL) appear to be a promising solution for enforcing privacy as they compute accurate recommendations while keeping personal data on the users' devices. However, FL, and therefore FL-based recommender systems, rely on a central server that can experience scalability issues besides being vulnerable to attacks. To remedy this, we propose PEPPER, a decentralized recommender system based on gossip learning principles. In PEPPER, users gossip model updates and aggregate them asynchronously. At the heart of PEPPER reside two key components: a personalized peer-sampling protocol that keeps in the neighborhood of each node, a proportion of nodes that have similar interests to the former and a simple yet effective model aggregation function that builds a model that is better suited to each user. Through experiments on three real datasets implementing two use cases: a location check-in recommendation and a movie recommendation, we demonstrate that our solution converges up to 42% faster than with other decentralized solutions providing up to 9% improvement on average performance metric such as hit ratio and up to 21% improvement on long tail performance compared to decentralized competitors.
AdaMICA
Authors: Akhunov Khakim , Yildirim Kasim Sinan
Published: September 2022

Recent studies on intermittent computing target single-core processors and underestimate the efficient parallel execution of highly-parallelizable machine learning tasks. Even though general-purpose multicore processors provide a high degree of parallelism and programming flexibility, intermittent computing has not exploited them yet. Filling this gap, we introduce AdaMICA (Adaptive Multicore Intermittent Computing) runtime that supports, for the first time, parallel intermittent computing and provides the highest degree of flexibility of programmable general-purpose multiple cores. AdaMICA is adaptive since it responds to the changes in the environmental power availability by dynamically reconfiguring the underlying multicore architecture to use the power most optimally. Our results demonstrate that AdaMICA significantly increases the throughput (52% on average) and decreases the latency (31% on average) by dynamically scaling the underlying architecture, considering the variations in the unpredictable harvested energy.
Calico
Authors: Sathya Anup , Li Jiasheng , Rahman Tauhidur , Gao Ge , Peng Huaishu
Published: September 2022

We explore Calico, a miniature relocatable wearable system with fast and precise locomotion for on-body interaction, actuation and sensing. Calico consists of a two-wheel robot and an on-cloth track mechanism or "railway," on which the robot travels. The robot is self-contained, small in size, and has additional sensor expansion options. The track system allows the robot to move along the user's body and reach any predetermined location. It also includes rotational switches to enable complex routing options when diverging tracks are presented. We report the design and implementation of Calico with a series of technical evaluations for system performance. We then present a few application scenarios, and user studies to understand the potential of Calico as a dance trainer and also explore the qualitative perception of our scenarios to inform future research in this space.
Frisson Waves
Authors: He Yan , Chernyshov George , Han Jiawen , Zheng Dingding , Thomsen Ragnar , Hynds Danny , Liu Muyu , Yang Yuehui , Ju Yulan , Pai Yun Suen , Minamizawa Kouta , Kunze Kai , Ward Jamie A.
Published: September 2022

Frisson is the feeling and experience of physical reactions such as shivers, tingling skin, and goosebumps. Using entrainment through facilitating interpersonal transmissions of embodied sensations, we present "Frisson Waves" with the aim to enhance live music performance experiences. "Frisson Waves" is an exploratory real-time system to detect, trigger and share frisson in a wave-like pattern over audience members during music performances. The system consists of a physiological sensing wristband for detecting frisson and a thermo-haptic neckband for inducing frisson. In a controlled environment, we evaluate detection (n=19) and triggering of frisson (n=15). Based on our findings, we conducted an in-the-wild music concert with 48 audience members using our system to share frisson. This paper summarizes a framework for accessing, triggering and sharing frisson. We report our research insights, lessons learned, and limitations of "Frisson Waves".
Reading the Room
Authors: DiSalvo Betsy , Bandaru Dheeraj , Wang Qiaosi , Li Hong , Plötz Thomas
Published: September 2022

When in front of a classroom, a skilled teacher can read the room, identifying when students are engaged, frustrated, distracted, etc. In recent years we have seen significant changes in the traditional classroom, with virtual classes becoming a normal learning environment. Reasons for this change are the increased popularity of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and the disruptions imposed by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. However, it is difficult for teachers to read the room in these virtual classrooms, and researchers have begun to look at using sensors to provide feedback to help inform teaching practices. The study presented here sought to ground classroom sensor data in the form of electrodermal activities (EDA) captured using a wrist-worn sensing platform (Empatica E4), with observations about students' emotional engagement in the class. We collected a dataset from eleven students over eight lectures in college-level computer science classes. We trained human annotators who provided ground truth information about student engagement based on in-class observations. Inspired by related work in the field, we implemented an automated data analysis framework, which we used to explore momentary assessments of student engagement in classrooms. Our findings surprised us because we found no significant correlation between the sensor data and our trained observers' data. In this paper, we present our study and framework for automated engagement assessment, and report on our findings that indicate some of the challenges in deploying current technology for real-world, automated momentary assessment of student engagement in the classroom. We offer reflections on our findings and discuss ways forward toward an automated reading the room approach.
DeepBrain
Authors: Wu Di , Ouyang Jinhui , Dai Ningyi , Wu Mingzhu , Tan Haodan , Deng Hanhui , Fan Yongmei , Wang Dakuo , Jin Zhanpeng
Published: September 2022

With the recent advancements of electroencephalograph (EEG) techniques, some brain-computer interface (BCI) solutions have been explored to assist individuals performing various tasks with their minds. One promising application is to combine BCI with robotic systems so that the mobility-impaired people can control robots to take care of themselves. Towards this ultimate goal to design BCIs for mobility-impaired, we firstly conducted an online survey with 54 mobility-impaired participants who barely had previous experience with BCI to identify the challenges they face in life for the purpose of designing a personalized BCI system in need. The results revealed these challenges including small daily tasks (such as feeding and cleaning), which weigh on the financial burdens of hiring a caregiver. Meanwhile, the off-the-shelf high-fidelity BCIs are often expensive, whereas the cheaper devices only collect coarse-grained signals, preventing practical application in care aids due to lack of temporal resolution and accuracy. Based on the survey findings, we then designed DeepBrain, a human-centered learning augmented BCI system, that requires only coarse-grained brain signals with low-cost BCI equipment, but supports fine-grained brain-robot interaction and scalable multi-robot collaboration for domestic multi-task operations. A follow-up system comparison with other approaches show that the proposed human-centered solution is a promising step towards the ultimate goal, as it achieves satisfactory accuracy with less low computation resources. Also the practical brain to multi-robot interaction system validates the feasibility of our framework and model used in DeepBrain.
AccMyrinx
Authors: Liang Yunji , Qin Yuchen , Li Qi , Yan Xiaokai , Yu Zhiwen , Guo Bin , Samtani Sagar , Zhang Yanyong
Published: September 2022

The built-in loudspeakers of mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, smartwatches, and tablets) play significant roles in human-machine interaction, such as playing music, making phone calls, and enabling voice-based interaction. Prior studies have pointed out that it is feasible to eavesdrop on the speaker via motion sensors, but whether it is possible to synthesize speech from non-acoustic signals with sub-Nyquist sampling frequency has not been studied. In this paper, we present an end-to-end model to reconstruct the acoustic waveforms that are playing on the loudspeaker through the vibration captured by the built-in accelerometer. Specifically, we present an end-to-end speech synthesis framework dubbed AccMyrinx to eavesdrop on the speaker using the built-in low-resolution accelerometer of mobile devices. AccMyrinx takes advantage of the coexistence of an accelerometer with the loudspeaker on the same motherboard and compromises the loudspeaker by the solid-borne vibrations captured by the accelerometer. Low-resolution vibration signals are fed to a wavelet-based MelGAN to generate intelligible acoustic waveforms. We conducted extensive experiments on a large-scale dataset created based on audio clips downloaded from Voice of America (VOA). The experimental results show that AccMyrinx is capable of reconstructing intelligible acoustic signals that are playing on the loudspeaker with a smoothed word error rate (SWER) of 42.67%. The quality of synthesized speeches could be severely affected by several factors including gender, speech rate, and volume.
Composing Word Embeddings for Compound Words Using Linguistic Knowledge
Authors: Komiya Kanako , Kono Shinji , Seito Takumi , Hirabayashi Teruo
Published: September 2022

In recent years, the use of distributed representations has been a fundamental technology for natural language processing. However, Japanese has multiple compound words, and often we must compare the meanings of a word and a compound word. Moreover, word boundaries in Japanese are unspecific because Japanese does not have delimiters between words, e.g., “ぶどう狩り” (grape picking) is one word according to one dictionary, whereas “ぶどう” and “狩り” are different words according to another dictionary. This study describes an attempt to compose word embeddings of a compound word from its constituent words in Japanese. We used “short unit” and “long unit,” both of which are the units of terms in UniDic—a Japanese dictionary compiled by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics—for constituent and compound words, respectively. Furthermore, we composed a word embedding of a compound word from the word embeddings of two constituent words using a neural network. The training data for the word embedding of compound words was created using a corpus generated by concatenating the corpora divided by constituent and compound words. We propose using linguistic knowledge for compositing word embedding to demonstrate how it improves the composition performance. We compared cosine similarity between composed and correct word embeddings of compound words to assess models with and without linguistic knowledge. Furthermore, we evaluated our methods by the ranking of synonyms using a thesaurus. We compared several frameworks and algorithms that use three types of linguistic knowledge—semantic patterns, parts of speech patterns, and compositionality score—and then investigated which linguistic knowledge improves the composition performance. The experiments demonstrated that the multitask models with the classification task of the parts of speech patterns and the estimation task of compositionality scores achieved high performances.
Police Unionism, Accountability, and Misconduct
Authors: Rad Abdul Nasser , Kirk David S. , Jones William P.
Published: September 2022

Recent discussions of police violence in the United States and the corresponding lack of accountability have shone a light on a highly debated agent opposing police reform—police unions. Although police unionism continues to be an understudied area, a recent wave of empirical investigations, both qualitative and quantitative, have contributed to a nascent understanding of the ways in which police union mechanisms facilitate police misconduct and violence. Accordingly, in this review we first discuss the origins of police unionism in the United States, illustrating how historical forces, including racial animus, have shaped the existing landscape. Then, we highlight significant empirical work exploring the relationship between police unionism and misconduct. Thereafter, we review the potential intervening mechanisms, which are employed in ways to reduce disciplinary consequences of misconduct and excessive use of force, undermine oversight of the police, and limit police transparency. We end with a set of recommendations on future avenues for research.
Enhancer Function and Evolutionary Roles of Human Accelerated Regions
Authors: Whalen Sean , Pollard Katherine S.
Published: September 2022

Human accelerated regions (HARs) are the fastest-evolving sequences in the human genome. When HARs were discovered in 2006, their function was mysterious due to scant annotation of the noncoding genome. Diverse technologies, from transgenic animals to machine learning, have consistently shown that HARs function as gene regulatory enhancers with significant enrichment in neurodevelopment. It is now possible to quantitatively measure the enhancer activity of thousands of HARs in parallel and model how each nucleotide contributes to gene expression. These strategies have revealed that many human HAR sequences function differently than their chimpanzee orthologs, though individual nucleotide changes in the same HAR may have opposite effects, consistent with compensatory substitutions. To fully evaluate the role of HARs in human evolution, it will be necessary to experimentally and computationally dissect them across more cell types and developmental stages.
Adipose Tissue Remodeling in Pathophysiology
Authors: Auger Christopher , Kajimura Shingo
Published: September 2022

Rather than serving as a mere onlooker, adipose tissue is a complex endocrine organ and active participant in disease initiation and progression. Disruptions of biological processes operating within adipose can disturb healthy systemic physiology, the sequelae of which include metabolic disorders such as obesity and type 2 diabetes. A burgeoning interest in the field of adipose research has allowed for the elucidation of regulatory networks underlying both adipose tissue function and dysfunction. Despite this progress, few diseases are treated by targeting maladaptation in the adipose, an oft-overlooked organ. In this review, we elaborate on the distinct subtypes of adipocytes, their developmental origins and secretory roles, and the dynamic interplay at work within the tissue itself. Central to this discussion is the relationship between adipose and disease states, including obesity, cachexia, and infectious diseases, as we aim to leverage our wealth of knowledge for the development of novel and targeted therapeutics.
Compensatory saccades differ between those with vestibular hypofunction and multiple sclerosis pointing to unique roles for peripheral and central vestibular inputs
Authors: Wagner Andrew R. , Grove Colin R. , Loyd Brian J. , Dibble Leland E. , Schubert Michael C.
Published: September 2022

Compensatory saccades (CSs) are recruited by individuals with unilateral vestibular deafferentation (UVD) to compensate for an impaired vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR). The effectiveness of CS in multiple sclerosis (MS), a central vestibular impairment, is unknown. We show that in UVD and in MS, covert CSs compensate for reduced VOR gain and minimize gaze position error (GPE), yet in >50% of individuals with MS, overt CS worsened GPE, suggesting unique roles for peripheral and central vestibular inputs.
A neurodynamic model of inter-brain coupling in the gamma band
Authors: Moreau Quentin , Adel Lena , Douglas Caitriona , Ranjbaran Ghazaleh , Dumas Guillaume
Published: September 2022

The last years were marked by an increasing interest in multiple-brain recordings. However, the inter-brain coupling arising across interacting individuals also sparks debates about the underlying biological mechanisms. The inter-brain coupling in the gamma band [>30 Hz] was particularly criticized for lacking a theoretical framework. Here, by using biologically informed neural simulations with the Kuramoto model, we assess the role of intra- and inter-brain neural dynamics in the emergence of inter-brain synchrony in the gamma band.
Spinal cord injury is associated with changes in synaptic properties of the mouse major pelvic ganglion
Authors: Kyi Cindy W. , Garcia Virginia B. , Garcia Michael L. , Schulz David J.
Published: September 2022

Spinal cord injury (SCI) has substantial impacts on autonomic function, yet little is known of the impacts of SCI on autonomic neurons that directly innervate effectors impacted by injury. Here we investigated changes at the cellular level associated with SCI in neurons that are “downstream” of the central injury. An understanding of these off-target impacts of SCI ultimately will be critical in the context of effective restoration of function through neuromodulation of pharmacological therapeutic approaches.
Shifts in the eye-centered frame of reference may underlie saccades, visual perception, and eye-hand coordination
Authors: Zhang Lei , Guberman Shelia , Feldman Anatol G.
Published: September 2022

Conventional, computational theories limit the understanding of how action and perception are controlled. In an alternative scheme, the nervous system controls the values of physical and neurophysiological parameters that predetermine the choice of the spatial frames of reference (FRs) for action and perception. For example, all possible eye positions, Q, can be considered as comprising a spatial FR in which extraocular muscles (EOMs) stabilize gaze directions. The origin or referent point of this FR is a specific, threshold eye position, R, at which EOMs can be quiescent but activated depending on the difference between Q and R. Starting before eye motion, shifts in R cause displacement of the FR and resetting of the stable equilibrium position to which the eyes are forced to move. Rather than corollary discharge, the depiction of visual images integrated across the entire retina in the shifted spatial FR is responsible for remapping visual receptive fields and visual constancy. These suggestions are illustrated in computer models of saccades in the referent control framework in humans and monkeys. The existence of three types of visual RF remapping during saccades is suggested. Properly scaled, shifts in the R underlying a saccade are transmitted to motoneurons of arm muscles to guide reach-to-grasp motion in the same, eye-centered FR. Some predictions of the proposed control scheme have been verified and new tests are suggested. The scheme is applicable to several eye-hand coordination deficits including micrography in Parkinson’s disease and explains why vision helps deafferented subjects diminish movement deficits.
Three-Dimensional Numerical Simulation of Creep Crack Growth Behavior for 316H Steel Using a Stress-Dependent Model
Authors: Liu Guiqiu , Liu Shi , Xin Feng , Zhao Yi , Hu Delong , Zhang Yan
Published: September 2022

Based on detailed three-dimensional numerical simulation, creep crack growth behavior of C(T) specimen with different thicknesses of 316H steel was predicted using a stress-dependent creep ductility and strain rate model. Three regions were observed in the relation of creep crack growth rate versus fracture parameter

C

∗

. The C(T) specimen with higher thickness exhibits higher CCG rate. The turning point 1 location from low

C

∗

region to transition

C

∗

region increases with increasing thickness, while that of turning point 2 seems to be independent of specimen thickness. Based on the finite element results, constraint-dependent turning point 1 location and creep crack growth rate equations were fitted. More accurate and realistic life assessment may be made when the stress-dependent model and the constraint effect were considered for creep life assessments of high-temperature components subjecting to a low applied load.
Prolonged ICU Stay in Severe and Critically-Ill COVID-19 Patients Who Received Convalescent Plasma Therapy
Authors: Semedi Bambang Pujo , Ramadhania Nadya Noor , Tambunan Betty Agustina , Bintoro Siprianus Ugroseno Yudho , Soedarsono Soedarsono , Prakoeswa Cita Rosita Sigit
Published: September 2022

Background. Convalescent plasma administration in severe and critically-ill COVID-19 patients have been proven to not provide improvement in patients’ outcome, yet it is still widely used in countries with limited resources due to its high availability and safety. This study aims to investigate its effects on ICU mortality, ICU length of stay (LoS), and improvement of oxygen support requirements. Methods. Data of all severe and critically-ill patients in our COVID-19 ICU was collected retrospectively between May and November 2020. We dichotomized the variables and compared outcome data of 48 patients, who received convalescent plasma to 131 patients, receiving standard of care. Data were analyzed using multiple logistic regression to make prediction models of mortality, length of stay, and oxygen support device requirement. Result. Overall mortality rate in our COVID-19 ICU was 55.3%, with a median overall length of stay of 8 (4–11) days. Less patients that received convalescent plasma presented with the need for mechanical ventilation on ICU admission

p
<
0.001

, but with comparable PaO2 to FiO2 (P/F) ratio

p
=
0.95

. Factors that confounded mortality were obesity (aOR = 14.1; 95% CI (1.25, 166.7);

p
=
0.032

), mechanical ventilation (aOR = 333; 95% CI (4.5,1,000);

p
<
0.001

), higher neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR) (aOR = 7.32; 95% CI (1.82, 29.4);

p
=
0.005

), and lower P/F ratio (aOR = 7.70; 95% CI (2.04, 29.4);

p
=
0.003

). ICU LoS was longer in patients, who had prior history of hypertension (aOR = 2.14; 95% CI (1.05, 4.35);

p
=
0.036

) and received convalescent plasma (aOR = 3.88; 95% CI (1.77, 8.05);

p
<
0.001

). Deceased patients, who received convalescent plasma, stayed longer in the ICU with a mean length of stay of 12.87 ± 5.7 days versus 8.13 ± 4.8 days with a significant difference (U = 434;

p
<
0.000

). The chance of improved oxygen support requirements was lower in obese patients (aOR = 9.18; 95%CI (2.0, 42.1);

p
<
0.004

), mechanically ventilated patients (aOR = 13.15; 95% CI (3.75, 46.09);

p
<
0.001

), patients with higher NLR (aOR = 2.5; 95% CI (1.07, 5.85);

p
=
0.034

), and lower P/F ratio (aOR = 2.76; 95% CI (1.1, 6.91);

p
=
0.031

). Conclusion. The length of stay of patients in the convalescent plasma group was significantly longer than the control group. There was no effect of convalescent plasma in ICU mortality and no improvement was observed in terms of oxygen support requirements.