No abstract

The use of innovative technology in the field of Speech and Language Therapy (SLT) has gained significant attention nowadays. Despite being a promising research area, Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) have not been thoroughly studied and used in SLT. This paper makes two main contributions: firstly, providing a comprehensive review of existing research on the use of SARs to enhance communication skills in children and adolescents. Secondly, organizing the information into tables that categorize the interactive play scenarios described in the surveyed papers. The inclusion criteria for play scenarios in the tables are based only on their effectiveness for SLT proven by experimental findings. The data, systematically presented in a table format, allow readers to easily find relevant information based on various factors, such as disorder type, age, treatment technique, robot type, etc. The study concludes that the despite limited research on the use of social robots for children and adolescents with communication disorders (CD), promising outcomes have been reported. The authors discuss the methodological, technical, and ethical limitations related to the use of SARs for SLT in clinical or home environments, as well as the huge potential of conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a secondary assistive technology to facilitate speech and language interventions.

Humanoid robots have a substantial potential to serve as teaching and social assistants. However, the expectations of the children from robots to interact like humans are huge. This study presents a general model for understanding the natural language in human-robot interaction by applying Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) language models as a service in the Internet of Things. Thus, the physical presence of the robot can help in fine-tuning the GPT model by prompts derived from the environmental context and subsequent robot actions for embodiment understanding of the GPT outputs. The model uses web or cloud services for Natural Language Processing (NLP) to produce and play human-like text, question answering or text generation. Verbal questions are processed either via a local speech recognition software or via a Speech-to-Text (STT) cloud service. The converted question into machine-readable code is sent to one of the GPT language models with zero- or few-shot learning prompts. GPT-J model has been tested and deployed either in the web or cloud with options for varying the parameters for controlling the haphazardness of the generated text. The robot produces human-like text by using Text-to-Speech (TTS) cloud services that convert the response into audio format rendered on the robot to be played. Useful requirements how the model to be used in order to be feasible were determined based on the evaluation of the outputs given from the different NLP and GPT-J web or cloud-services. We designed and implemented the model in order to be used by a humanoid NAO-type robot in the speech language therapy practice, however it can be used for other open-source and programmable robots and in different contexts.

"The aim of the study is to identify the content components of the leadership styles in healthcare during COVID 19 crisis. Another goal of the study is to examine the relationship between value preferences and various demographic indicators, such as gender, age, education, position in the hierarchy, length of service and place of residence. The study was conducted among 376 people between February and March 2021 during the COVID 19 crisis. The methodology of B. Bass and B. Avolio -""Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire"" was applied. The instrument was standardized for Bulgarian conditions by S. Karabelyova (Karabelyova S., 2011) and it described the transforming (charismatic) leadership style, the transactional leadership style, and the avoiding (liberal) leadership style. The data was processed via the software programme SPSS - 21 and for the purpose of the analysis descriptive statistics and dispersion analysis have been made. The study assumes that if the sources of changes in leadership styles are known, activities of an organization could be optimized, and the results of their joint activities could be maximized. The data show that demographic indicators differentiate leadership styles to varying degrees."

In order to determine whether there is an association between mumps orchitis and serum sperm antibodies, we tested patients at the time orchitis was diagnosed (n = 7) and individuals who had had orchitis at least 1 month previously (n = 14). Data were compared with the results for a control group of blood donors (n = 20). Sperm antibodies were detected by the gelatin agglutination test of Kibrick, the tray agglutination test of Friberg and the ELISA. Clinically significant sperm antibody levels were not found in patients in the early stages of the disease. Four subjects tested post-disease were positive in the Friberg test and one was positive in the ELISA. One control serum was also positive in the latter test. Significant differences were not found between levels in patients in the early stages of the disease and levels in individuals post-disease, although the results of the Friberg test differed significantly between controls and former mumps orchitis cases. These data do not support the assumption of an involvement of humoral immunity against spermatozoa in mumps orchitis patients.