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Evolution of Activities of Daily Living using Inertia Measurements: The Lunch and Dinner Activities
Get PDFIn the context of designing eHealth services for fragile people, we propose to monitor Activities of Daily Living (ADL) in order to anticipate the potential loss of autonomy by behaviour changes. Nowadays, the availability of non-stigmatising sensors such as inertial sensors embedded on Smartphones allows the estimation of people’s postures in real time in order to evaluate their autonomy in daily life. Our aim is to propose an unconstrained and non-intrusive method based on inertial sensors, which gives an indicator about a person’s autonomy. This method determines the correlation between people’s postures and activities over time in order to compute an index of ADL (IndexADL), specific to each person. The IndexADL variation over time is then a useful feature for positively or negatively evaluating people’s autonomy. Our experiment, based on data collection of eight elderly people over a 3-month period, analyses the Lunch and Dinner activities with promising performances
A Clinical Management Centre Value in Triage of COPD Telemonitoring Patients
Get PDFTelemonitoring is the systematic collection of clinical data from the patient’s home and its examination by a healthcare team. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease COPD exacerbations contribute to disease progression and worse prognosis. Aim: to determine the benefits achieved by early detection of acute exacerbations of COPD (AECOPD) by telemonitoring, describing the experience of a specialised clinical management centre (CMC) which triaged the received alerts, confirmed the AECOPD, stratified them according to their level of severity and notified the doctors. Methods: 15 male COPD patients, all “C” and “D” GOLD groups were monitored of spO2, heart rate, blood pressure and skin temperature. For each patient, individual clinical alert thresholds were defined and calculated. Clinical alerts resulted in the CMC phoning the patient, completing a clinical questionnaire and confirming the presence of AECOPD and stratifying its severity. Only true positives were referred to a doctor. Results: During 18 months, 1,137 clinical alerts were detected but only 4.3% were true positives. Of these, 55.1% were level I, 36.7% level II and 8.2% level III. Conclusion: The study demonstrates the essential role of a clinical management centre in identifying, categorising and appropriately acting upon only real alerts to ensure that patients with AECOPD receive the right treatment as quickly and efficiently as possible
An Innovative AAL Light System For Aambiance, Guiding And Security
No full textIn this paper, we combine three possible light functionalities into a 3-in-1 equipment that can be used both in the smart-home and ambient assisted living contexts. The importance of colour, intensity and frequency of light signals, is described first from the user’s point of view and then in the combined contexts of comfort, guiding and security. The analysis leads to defining the relevant parameters of the 3-in-1 equipment in terms of lighting type and light signal categories. The model can be installed for individual houses, nursing homes or for luxury hotels (and others public buildings or organisations). Indeed, we derive several ranges and shapes of the basic equipment, with different prices that can fit the needs of different sales market, in the B-to-B and the B-to-C models
Decolonising initial teacher education in South African universities: More than an event
Get PDFCalls for the decolonisation of university curricula have been central to the demands of the South African student movements since they first gained prominence during 2015. In this paper, we examine this debate by examining teacher education at universities as a way of
understanding what future school teachers are exposed to and consequently learners.
Defining decolonisation as a process of expanding imaginations, and drawing on a meta analysis of teacher education curricula, and interviews with teacher education lecturers, at five South African universities, the paper examines the kinds of intellectuals and intellectual debates to which student teachers are being exposed, how teacher educators understand the factors underlying their curriculum decisions, and the broader institutional and policy dynamics that impact on efforts to rethink curricula
Interdisciplinarity, neoliberalism and academic identities:
Get PDFThis paper explicates the growing interest in interdisciplinarity as a form of knowledge organisation at the University of Botswana (UB). It accomplishes this by locating this development in a global context of a growing instrumentalisation of knowledge, partially occasioned by the advent of the knowledge society. Generally, the paper argues that interdisciplinarity is not some neutral, apolitical technical re-arrangement of knowledge, as often presented. Rather, it is a political technology implicated in attempts to break academics’ monopoly on the processes and products of higher education (HE). It attributes interdisciplinarity’s rise to the emergence in the 1970s of neoliberalism as a social settlement that privileges market rationality. There is, therefore, affinity between interdisciplinarity and neoliberalism, and it is a relationship in which the former is being deployed by the latter in HE to produce ‘neoliberal academic subjects’. The case of UB is presented as a specific case of the general argument that interdisciplinarity is designed to effect new forms of academic subjectivities attuned to market rationality
“Squeezed oranges?”: Xhosa secondary school female teachers in township schools remember their learning about sexuality to reimagine their teaching sexuality education
Get PDFSeveral concurrent and complex issues seem to influence the teaching of sexuality education in South African schools. Studies have shown that teachers believe they can teach the subject as they have the content knowledge of sexuality education, but experience discomfort when they actually begin the task. We were therefore interested in understanding their perspectives on their own learning about sexuality within their Xhosa culture. Working with 9 purposively selected female Xhosa teachers from 4 secondary schools in townships in Port Elizabeth, we used participatory visual methodology, located within a critical paradigm, generating data with them through drawing. The data was analysed using thematic analysis. The findings show that the women teachers largely learnt about sexuality through piecing together the ‘puzzle’ of limited information from various quarters; through strict rules and fear; through own mistakes and through shame. This remembering facilitated ideas to rethink and reimagine sexuality education, drawing the value-laden Xhosa cultural teachings about sexuality into contemporary sexuality education. The participatory visual research process enabled a deep and open engagement, and in more than one way the claiming back of power, demonstrating a way to engage today’s Xhosa adolescents on matters of sexuali
Analysis of teaching and learning of natural sciences and technology in selected Eastern Cape province primary schools, South Africa
Get PDFAnalysis of teaching and learning of natural
sciences and technology in selected Eastern
Cape province primary schools, South
Africa
Bongani Bantwini
(Received 8 February 2016; accepted 26 April 2017)
Abstract
Great consensus exists that high-quality natural science teaching and learning at primary
school level is fundamental for learner success and advancement in life. This paper
discusses how natural science is taught and learnt in selected primary schools in the Eastern
Cape Province, South Africa. Data was collected through 22 classroom observations during
a science lesson and 55 responses to a questionnaire. Findings reveal that: teaching in most
classrooms used non-stimulating pedagogical approaches that lacked practical activities that
promote deeper learning of science content and develop learner’s inquiry abilities; the
classroom environment was impoverished for science teaching and learning. I argue and
conclude that science teaching and learning in these schools requires attention as it hardly
aligns with the Curriculum Assessment Policy Statement requirements in South Africa.
Moreover, there is a need for stimulating classroom approaches that attract and inspire
young learners to pursue science learning at high school and tertiary level
Learning to fly: pedagogy in the Foundation Phase in the context of the CAPS reform1
Get PDFLearning to fly: pedagogy in the Foundation Phase in the context of the CAPS reform1
Ursula Hoadley
(Received 25 July 2016; accepted 12 October 2016)
Abstract
This paper presents an empirical analysis of pedagogy in relatively well-performing
classrooms in poor contexts in the context of the most recent curriculum reform, the
Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS). Amongst a set of teachers from a
recent research project, shifts in pedagogy from what had been prevalent practices in
classrooms (see Hoadley, 2012) were found. These shifts, however, appeared to be largely
surface rather than substantive. What the study found was surface compliance to policy
dictat; taking on of the form rather than substance of a different pedagogy. A subsequent,
closer analysis of the pedagogy of eight of the ‘best’ performing teachers allowed for the
theoretical development of the distinction between surface and substantive change, and to
consider more closely questions of curriculum, knowledge and pedagogy at the Foundation
Phase level. This was accomplished primarily by drawing on Bernstein’s (1996) notion of
evaluation and extending it in relation to other studies that have begun to explore the
relationship between knowledge and pedagogy, especially Venkat (2013) and Shalem and
Slonimsky (2010a; 2010b)
Non-formal adult education for selfemployment: the importance of posttrainingsupport for micro-enterprise development in South Africa
Get PDFNon-formal adult education for selfemployment: the importance of posttrainingsupport for micro-enterprise
development in South Africa
Celestin Mayombe
(Received 30 March 2016; accepted 22 February 2017)
Abstract
The concern that informed this article is that adults who face long-term unemployment due to a
lack of marketable skills remain unemployed after completing adult non-formal education (NFE)
programmes in South Africa. The purpose of the article is to investigate major challenges trainees
of NFE programmes for self-employment encounter in starting and growing small businesses, and
the types of post-training support they receive from public and private institutions in KwaZulu-
Natal (KZN) province. While the structure of the South African economy is at fault, the findings
reveal that weak institutional linkages result in trainees not having access to essential post-training
support, community resources, public goods and services. The author concludes that centre
managers did not take into consideration the importance of institutional linkages and the socioeconomic
background of the trainees who have faced long-term unemployment and poverty leading
to social isolation, which then further reduce the likelihood of self-employment
Dangers of generic pedagogical panaceas: implementing sevice-learning differently in diverse disciplines
Get PDFDescriptions of service-learning in the literature tend to position it as a powerful pedagogic tool as well as an exemplar of ‘best practice’ applicable across all disciplines and institutional contexts. Furthermore service-learning is couched as a moral imperative. In the South African context, this moral imperative is translated into policy pronouncements driving institutions of higher education to demonstrate responsiveness to the transformation needs of broader society. In this article, two departments, Philosophy and Environmental Science, at one university are used as case studies to interrogate what enables the uptake of service-learning as a pedagogic tool. Drawing on the work of Fairclough, this paper identifies the dominant discourses at play and considers how they constrain or enable the uptake of service-learning. We advocate for the infusion of service-learning in curricula, but argue that institutional culture, disciplinary values and the structure of knowledge impact on its uptake and should not be dismissed in the implementation process