1,720,956 research outputs found
Extended Reality to Improve Delivery Room Care Training
No full textMaternal and neonatal mortality in delivery rooms represents a global health challenge. Annually, approximately 300,000 women die due to delivery complications, primarily from severe bleeding, while over 800,000 newborns die due to intrapartum-related events. Among the strategies to increase the number of healthcare providers able to deliver effective perinatal emergency care, simulation-based education has emerged as a promising approach. Ranging from physical manikins to software, healthcare simulation offers the opportunity to train users in a safe and controlled environment. Despite its potential, few existing medical simulators train simultaneously all the manual, procedural and non-technical skills required in the maternal and neonatal domain. Indeed, currently available simulators mainly focus on technical or procedural skills and lack integration of non-technical abilities such as teamwork, decision-making, and stress management, unless a high-resource, high-fidelity scenario is built.
This thesis presents the design, development, and evaluation of innovative Extended Reality simulation tools to support healthcare professionals in managing complex emergencies in the delivery room, with a specific focus on both neonatal and maternal care. This research aims to build systems for the simultaneous training of technical, procedural and non-technical skills through immersive technologies such as Mixed Reality and visuo-haptic simulations.
A major contribution of this work is the development of RiNeo MR, a Mixed Reality simulation platform designed for newborn resuscitation.
The system integrates a sensorized newborn manikin with a virtual environment. The hardware includes orientation, pressure and position sensors that monitor head alignment, ventilation, and chest compressions in real time. This data is streamed to a Unity3D application where a virtual newborn is synchronized and overlapped to the physical manikin, allowing users to perform manual actions with their hands while immersed in a realistic virtual scenario. Moreover, the platform includes real-time feedback about user performance. The usability of the simulator has been tested in both immersive and non-immersive (screen-based) configurations with 11 people with no medical expertise and 5 pediatric residents. Results indicated high levels of perceived usability, realism, and engagement. Importantly, performance feedback collected during the simulation was aligned with clinical standards, offering a robust educational tool with strong potential for real-world application.
After the evaluation of the first RiNeo MR prototype, the platform was significantly enhanced to support a dual-player configuration that reflects the collaboration of neonatal emergency care. Moreover, the tracking of the physical objects was improved by developing a vision-based system using the Vuforia SDK.
The system adopts a server-host-client architecture, where one computer runs the simulation as host and the second connects as a client. To minimize latency and ensure consistent synchronization, both systems are connected via Ethernet, and IP addresses are predefined to align with the data transmission schema of the embedded microcontroller in the sensorized manikin. To guide the simulation process, a Finite State Machine was introduced to encode the clinical protocol. It governs the sequence of actions based on the Neonatal Resuscitation Algorithm, dynamically adapting the scenario flow according to the user’s performance.
In parallel, I designed, developed, and evaluated a visuo-haptic simulation system to train fundamental surgical skills such as incision, suture, and depth perception. The simulator integrates a haptic interface (Geomagic Touch) with a visuo-haptic model of the skin developed in SOFA, an open-source framework for physical simulations. I conducted two different studies to evaluate the setup usability and performance. The first study focused on evaluating whether repeated exposure to visuo-haptic simulations could improve manual dexterity. A virtual needle-threading task was developed and tested with 44 right-handed participants who were divided into four groups: those performing 132 repetitions with the dominant hand, those with the non-dominant hand using the visuo-haptic simulator, a group completing the training with the dominant hand on a physical simulation, and subjects who did not perform any training. All participants were tested before and after the training. Results indicated that even a limited number of repetitons significantly reduced task execution time, thus suggesting that visuo-haptic simulation might be an effective complementary tool for skill acquisition in surgical education.
A second study was conducted to evaluate how aging influences performance within a visuo-haptic training environment. The study involved 39 participants divided in two age groups (20–40 and 50–70 years), each completing three visuo-haptic surgical tasks: incision, dexterity, and suturing. Performance metrics such as cut length, time, trajectory path length, depth, and error rate were calculated. Results revealed that younger participants consistently outperformed older ones across all tasks. Moreover, both age groups exhibited performance gains with practice, even though younger participants showed more substantial improvements than older subjects. Usability questionnaires revealed that user experience and perceived workload were comparable across age groups, indicating that the simulator was well-accepted and usable by both younger and older adults.
Future, longitudinal and cross-sectional studies are planned to optimize the developed simulations, investigate the impact of extended practice within these environments, and identify optimal training programs.
Overall, this work represents a step toward integrating innovative technologies into medical training, by demonstrating the potential of Extended Reality for preparing professionals to manage critical situations. This project shows that Extended Reality offers modular, cost-effective, and scalable solutions enabling high-fidelity simulation-based education even with limited resources, thus expanding access to high-quality medical training for students and healthcare providers
BridGE: A New System to Train Selective Pelvis Movements
No full textBackground: Sitting balance is an important target in motor rehabilitation and injury prevention as poor sitting posture can induce musculoskeletal problems affecting life quality. Exercises to improve core stability like strengthening specific muscles of the low-back or of the pelvic floor performing selective pelvic movements exercises have been suggested to improve sitting balance promoting an efficient interaction between spine, pelvis, and the entire kinematic chain. It is in this framework and with such aim that we developed a new device BridGE and we preliminary tested it with healthy subjects.Methods: BridGE is a sensorized balance board with two IMUs, one inside the balance board and one on the trunk of the subject that is sitting on it, for training selected pelvis movements while monitoring the trunk position. Subjects performed various tasks controlling vertical and horizontal movement of a cursor on a screen with two distinct pelvic movements: lateral tilt and antero-posterior tilt. During practice we also monitored the trunk tilt as the request was to maintain the trunk as still as possible, to decouple trunk and pelvis movements.Results: After training with BridGE subject had significant improvements in pelvic movements and in trunk posture decreasing trunk undesired movements and increasing the isolation of the pelvis tilts in the antero-posterior and right-left directions.Conclusions: This is a first proof of concept that BridGE is an effective low-cost tool to train selective movements of the pelvis avoiding unnecessary trunk compensatory movements and, in the future, could be a useful tool for sitting balance rehabilitation
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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