Introduction: In this paper, we evaluated patients' perspectives on the use of a system for home tele-rehabilitation, designed for subjects with low computer literacy suffering hand impairment due to rheumatic diseases. Methods: After a clinical trial assessing device effectiveness, the Psychosocial Impact of Assistive Devices Scale (PIADS), Quebec User Evaluation of Satisfaction with Assistive Technology (QUEST) and Individually Prioritised Problem Assessment (IPPA) questionnaires were administered to evaluate the system's impact on each patient's life, and the results were correlated with clinical indices. Patients were asked to continue self-administered rehabilitation with common objects. One year later, a semi-structured telephone interview gathered data on their experience. Results: The system received a positive QUEST score (4.5 AE 0.3) and a modest PIADS score (0.84 AE 0.8) due to the small impact on adaptability and self-esteem. The IPPA (3.7 AE 3.4) revealed improvement in the ability to perform tasks considered important, which was significantly correlated (r ¼ 0.60; p < 0.02) with the clinical Health Assessment Questionnaire (HAQ) index improvement. The interviews revealed a positive engagement effect, enhanced by the need to develop skills to be able to use the device (technological challenge) and by the perception of more attention by the medical staff. This may explain the significant dropout rate (80%) from the post-trial rehabilitation of the patients who used the device. Discussion: The system was largely accepted by the patients. The results suggest that the need for information on their rehabilitation progress and the technological challenge deserves further study to make patients more autonomous in cases of continuous rehabilitation.
Natural User Interfaces are often described as familiar, evocative and intuitive, predictable, based on common skills. Though unquestionable in principle, such definitions don't provide the designer with effective means to design a natural interface or evaluate a design choice vs another. Two main issues in particular are open: (i) how do we evaluate a natural interface, is there a way to measure 'naturalness'; (ii) do natural user interfaces provide a concrete advantage in terms of efficiency, with respect to more traditional interface paradigms? In this paper we discuss and compare observations of user behavior in the task of pair programming, performed at a traditional desktop versus a multi-touch table. We show how the adoption of a multi-touch user interface fosters a significant, observable and measurable, increase of nonverbal communication in general and of gestures in particular, that in turn appears related to the overall performance of the users in the task of algorithm understanding and debugging.
Telerehabilitation aims to solve problems like equitable access to the rehabilitation and cost reduction by providing rehabilitation services at a distance. The largest part of telerehabilitation systems implement a real-time one-to-one process involving patient and therapist. Even though they can be successfully exploited in conditions such as post-traumatic recovery, in complex scenarios, this simple model should be replaced by a more structured collaborative one envisioning a multidisciplinary team.\ud \ud This paper presents the design and evaluation of a patient-centric collaborative telerehabilitation framework aimed at supporting a multidisciplinary team in the follow-up of domiciliary patients. The proposed framework follows the experience of a clinical trial that exploited a novel telerehabilitation device not conceived to support collaborative scenarios. Compared with the original system, the proposed extension allows the hierarchical division of the responsibility within the medical team, promoting a collaborative management of the rehabilitation. Proactive and decisional behaviors, as well as consulting practices on shared data within the medical team, are fostered by the system. Semi-structured interviews have been administered to a panel of experts to evaluate the proposed approach. The collected feedback can be exploited to finely tune the system in view of a new clinical trial including new functionalities
In this research, we focus the attention on some of the most successful Open Source (OS) projects. We are interested in studying the characteristics of the social networks comprising these popular and mature OS developer communities. By examining developers Mailing Lists (MLs), we adopt some Social Network Analysis (SNA) measures to evaluate interactions among community members. A knowledge of these relationships is useful for a better understanding of communication flows among team members and whether there is someone coordinating, controlling and facilitating the information process. Communication in OS communitiesOpen Source (OS) Communities grow up around code sharing: members participate in the same software development project to improve the released product. To achieve this, information sharing, active participation in community life, bug reporting, informing other members about new releases are essential for the success of the project. As the code is open, communication needs to be facilitated. Team members may often be dispersed worldwide thus it is essential that they are able to readily communicate with one another. In OS communities each person involved plays an important role. Community members are basically volunteers, each accomplishing a different task. One space where it is interesting to observe intercommunity communication is the developers mailing list (ML). Social Network AnalysisWork organization often means working in a team, as many different aspects of our daily routine involve a particular group. Social Network Analysis (SNA) is useful for studying relationships among people in the same team. In fact, SNA has been defined [15] as a way to describe relationships among social entities, as well as the patterns and implications of these connections. So, adopting the SNA approach, the people are actors in contact with one another. To depict the network for each team, actors become nodes and each relationship between two actors is represented by a link. One of the most important aspects of SNA is undoubtedly the identification of the most prominent or central actors, that is, as Freeman pointed out [5], those who are particularly visible to other actors in the network, and are able to maintain several relationships with them. As Friedkin observed [7], we cannot take into account only direct ties to evaluate how central a node is in the network, but also indirect paths that link one actor to another. Several measures have been proposed so far to quantify the centrality characteristic and most of them have been reviewed by Freeman [5], who focused his attention on three fundamental measures: degree, betweenness and closeness. He then chose the most simple and usable from among those related to the single network node (the point or actor measures), and based on these he elaborated the network-level (so they are graph or group measures) centralization indexes. This kind of index grows with the gap between the most prominent actor (as far as the point centrality measure is concerned) and all the re...
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