Paper: Low-cost strategies to improve dementia care

An interest in health and science invites some thought about chaos, complexity and catastrophe theory. These suggest quite a cold - mechanistic - perspective of reality. So trying to think of clinical and nursing examples beyond fluid dynamics, the heart muscle... to more socially oriented applications demands some creative thinking.

In my work within intermediate support in the community for decades my colleagues and I come across cases were husband, wife, partner have looked their significant other to the nth degree. That degree can include hiding the extent of a person's cognitive problems from other family members. Suddenly there is a real catastrophe as the carer is taken acutely ill and hospitalised.

Left at home soon the dependency is revealed. Trying to negotiate care at home can then be a real challenge.

Alternately, when people living with dementia are hospitalised for physical reasons another host of challenges arise.

I've a relative who works over at Warrington General Hospital and it's great to be able to help highlight a paper written by Michelle Beavan their dementia champion and published in Nursing Times:

Beavan M (2014) Low-cost strategies to improve dementia care. Nursing Times; 110: online issue.

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Human-Computer Interaction journal "Body Sensing and Tracking in Healthcare"

Special Issue Editors
Kenton O’Hara (Microsoft Research)
Abigail Sellen  (Microsoft Research)
Juan Wachs (Purdue University)
Bart Jansen (University of Brussels)

Recent technical developments in sensing and tracking the human body and and its motions have sparked huge interest in healthcare domains. New interaction techniques promise to transform key aspects of healthcare practice for both diagnosis and treatment. Developments in sensing capabilities and machine learning open up rich possibilities for tracking and analysing the body’s form and movement. Alongside established optoelectronic sensing, in which machine readable markers are placed on the patient’s body, marker-free computer vision technologies (e.g., Kinect) have made body tracking cheaper and more practical. In addition, sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, and ultrasonics offer new opportunities for how body form, motion, and orientation can be understood.

These body-tracking technologies are already being explored in both patient- and clinician-oriented applications. They are being deployed in diagnosis and ongoing assessment of motor impairment conditions such as Multiple Sclerosis.  Research is examining their use in rehabilitation of movement disorders arising from injury or other conditions.  Within the operating theatre, touchless gesture recognition enables clinicians to interact with medical images without compromising sterility. Other augmented-reality research explores how cameras and projectors can be used to superimpose medical images on the patient enabling clinicians to view inside the body in relation to external anatomical features.

These systems raise important research questions that are central to the concerns of Human-Computer Interaction, from the development of new forms of interaction to the understanding of emerging practices with these systems in clinical contexts. This special issue will bring together original research exploring HCI concerns of body form and motion tracking in healthcare including: surgery, patient diagnosis, assessment, rehabilitation, and other forms of clinical intervention.  It will also address the effect of these new technologies on existing clinical and treatment practices.

Research topics include:

• Novel applications of body tracking for assessment, rehabilitation, and diagnosis of particular clinical conditions.
• New interaction techniques with clinical relevance enabled by these technologies.
• Studies of collaborative practices in clinical contexts with such systems, changes in clinical practices they enable, and challenges for existing clinical practice arising from their deployment.
• Specific modeling methods and considerations that are required for successful body tracking technologies in relation to specific clinical requirements (e.g., skeletal models and smoothing of dynamic data for motion).

Papers exploring other issues arising from the design and deployment of these new techniques are also welcome.

Timeline
Proposals due: May 30, 2014
Response to authors: July 4, 2014
Full papers due: October 31, 2014
Reviews to authors: January 30, 2015
Revised papers due: March 27, 2015
Reviews to authors: June 5, 2015
Final papers due: July 3, 2015

Submissions
To help authors align their research to the theme of this special issue, we encourage potential authors to submit proposals for papers. Proposals should be about 1000 words and provide a clear indication of what the paper is about. Proposals will be evaluated for relevance to the special issue theme, and guidance will be given. Both proposal and full paper submissions should be submitted to the HCI Editorial site (mc.manuscriptcentral.com/hci). Follow the guidelines and instructions for submissions on the site. There is a place on the submission site to note that your submission is for this special issue. Special Issue submissions will be peer reviewed to the usual standards of the HCI journal.

Kenton, Abi, Juan and Bart
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Space Station Robot Forgets Key Again

individual

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES
humanistic ------------------------------------------- mechanistic
SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

group

Memory: artificial (jokes aside) and real

Just-be? Making sense of the activities of daily living Chunking	Space Station Robot Forgets Key Again
Making sense of someone else's sense of the  activities of daily living	Funding for research (competition!)

group - population

Additional link: The Economist - Rise of the robots 29.3.14
Image source: APOD

a reflection on relaxation or ...?

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES
humanistic ------------------------------------- mechanistic
SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

individual

group - population

Quotation Search:
http://www.quotationspage.com/search.php3?homesearch=lying+down&startsearch=Search

'Pictures to Share' book titles for people with later stage dementia

Hi

I am contacting you as one of our LinkedIn colleagues working in the field of dementia. One of our 'Pictures to Share' book titles for people with later stage dementia has been shortlisted for the UK 'People's Book Prize'

By winning this award we can help to to raise awareness of the needs of people with dementia, so it would be great if you could take a look at the People's Book Prize website, and consider voting for our book 'Proverbs and Sayings'.

The link is below:

http://www.peoplesbookprize.com/book.php?id=982

Many thanks for your help

Helen Bate and Michelle Forster
http://www.picturestoshare.co.uk/

[I will register and vote Michelle - good luck PJ ]

2013 Year of Piri Reis & Navigating the world of nursing care - in Jordan

The conference in Jordan is over it has been an intense and excellent two days, with a free day tomorrow. It has been a brilliant opportunity to share and learn not just about nursing, but travel, culture and some of the people that make up the global nursing community.

I am truly grateful to the Jordanian Nursing Council for accepting my abstract. The welcome and hospitality has been truly amazing.

In the flight magazine on the way here there was an article about Piri Reis, which reminded me of Paul Cunliffe's book about Pytheas.

From the UNESCO website:

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has agreed to declare 2013 the year of Piri Reis on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of a map he drew up that included seven continents, reported the Anatolia news agency. 

“This map marks a significant event in the history of the country and has enabled its collective knowledge to be transmitted through generations. As a rare world map from the 15th and 16th centuries, Piri Reis World Map is an invaluable piece of the world's documentary heritage as it provides insight on the history of its time. It is therefore part of the Memory of the World and should be made better known,” stated UNESCO.

The world-renowned Ottoman captain and cartographer Reis is best known for world maps and charts collected in his “Kitab-ı Bahriye” (Book of Navigation).

Source: http://www.todayszaman.com/newsDetail_getNewsById.action?newsId=294065

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piri_Reis_map

I have written before about Hodges' model as a map -

a cognitive periplus 

- for navigation through the complex world(s) of health and social care.

Would a new mariner take to the sea without a clear sky, a compass, map, or satnav? What then of our students?


Additional link: Please see the entry for Iran -

http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/events/prizes-and-celebrations/celebrations/anniversaries-celebrated-by-member-states/2013/