Search Results (6)

Voice-controlled devices are becoming increasingly common in our everyday lives as well as in medicine. Whether it is our smartphones, with voice assistants that make it easier to access functions, or IoT (Internet of Things) devices that let us control certain areas of our home with voice commands using sensors and different communication networks, or even medical robots that can be controlled by a doctor with voice instructions. Over the last decade, systems using voice control have made great progress, both in terms of accuracy of voice processing and usability. The topic of voice control is intertwined with the application of artificial intelligence (AI), as the mapping of spoken commands into written text and their understanding is mostly conducted by some kind of trained AI model. Our research had two objectives. The first was to design and develop a system that enables doctors to evaluate medical data in 3D using voice control. The second was to describe the legal and ethical issues involved in using AI-based solutions for voice control. During our research, we created a voice control module for an existing software called PathoVR, using a model taught by Google to interpret the voice commands given by the user. Our research, presented in this paper, can be divided into two parts. In the first, we have designed and developed a system that allows the user to evaluate 3D pathological medical serial sections using voice commands. In contrast, in the second part of our research, we investigated the legal and ethical issues that may arise when using voice control in the medical field. In our research, we have identified legal and ethical barriers to the use of artificial intelligence in voice control, which need to be answered in order to make this technology part of everyday medicine. Full article

Learners of additional languages, particularly in adulthood and instructed settings, are typically exposed to large quantities of written input from the earliest stages of learning, with varied and far-reaching effects on L2 phonology. Most research investigating this topic focuses on learning across languages that share the same orthographic script, often involving the Latin alphabet and English. Without exploring phonological learning over a greater diversity of spoken and written language combinations, our understanding of orthographic effects on L2 phonology remains narrow and unrepresentative of the many individuals acquiring languages across writing systems, globally. This paper draws together preliminary research relating to the influence of written input, in a distinct script from known languages, on L2 phonology. Studies are grouped into those with naïve participants, where the written forms are entirely unfamiliar to the participant, and those with experienced learners, who have varying levels of proficiency and familiarity with the target orthography. While there is great scope and need for further investigation, initial evidence suggests that even entirely unfamiliar written input impacts phonological learning and is certainly influential with growing proficiency in the spoken and written language. The article concludes with theoretical and methodological considerations for future research in this emerging field. Full article

Gestures are hand movements that are produced simultaneously with spoken language and can supplement it by representing semantic information, emphasizing important points, or showing spatial locations and relations. Gestures’ specific features make them a promising tool to improve spatial thinking. Yet, there is recent work showing that not all learners benefit equally from gesture instruction and that this may be driven, in part, by children’s difficulty understanding what an instructor’s gesture is intended to represent. The current study directly compares instruction with gestures to instruction with plastic unit chips (Action) in a linear measurement learning paradigm aimed at teaching children the concept of spatial units. Some children performed only one type of movement, and some children performed both: Action-then-Gesture [AG] or Gesture-then-Action [GA]. Children learned most from the Gesture-then-Action [GA] and Action only [A] training conditions. After controlling for initial differences in learning, the gesture-then-action condition outperformed all three other training conditions on a transfer task. While gesture is cognitively challenging for some learners, that challenge may be desirable—immediately following gesture with a concrete representation to clarify that gesture’s meaning is an especially effective way to unlock the power of this spatial tool and lead to deep, generalizable learning. Full article

This paper reports on a corpus-driven study on teachers’ use of three personal metadiscourse markers, namely, engaging you, inclusive-we, and self-mentioning I, in teachers’ classroom discourse. The analysis is based on eight sessions of teacher contributions to classroom discourse from four native English-speaking English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teachers in the UK. A quantitative analysis shows that teachers unanimously attach great importance to actively engaging students in classroom instructions. The qualitative analysis identified four types of metadiscourse functions in relation to teacher–student(s) interactions, including managing comprehension, managing students’ responses, imagining scenarios, and managing students’ discipline, which were further divided into nine sub-categories. This study extends the scope of existing research on personal metadiscourse functions and enriches metadiscourse research in formal instructional settings, thereby enhancing our understanding of personal metadiscourse use in spoken academic genres. Moreover, it may also provide insights for researchers and practitioners in EAP teaching by providing a fine-tuned functional categorisation of personal metadiscourse markers. Full article

In air traffic control (ATC), speech communication with radio transmission is the primary way to exchange information between the controller and aircrew. A wealth of contextual situational dynamics is embedded implicitly; thus, understanding the spoken instruction is particularly significant to the ATC research. In this paper, a comprehensive review related to spoken instruction understanding (SIU) in the ATC domain is provided from the perspective of the challenges, techniques, and applications. Firstly, a full pipeline is represented to achieve the SIU task, including automatic speech recognition, language understanding, and voiceprint recognition. A total of 10 technique challenges are analyzed based on the ATC task specificities. In succession, the common techniques for SIU tasks are categorized from common applications, and extensive works in the ATC domain are also reviewed. Finally, a series of future research topics are also prospected based on the corresponding challenges. The author sincerely hopes that this work is able to provide a clear technical roadmap for the SIU tasks in the ATC domain and further make contributions to the research community. Full article

Parental health literacy plays an important role in children’s health. Experiences from pharmacy practice show that is necessary to check if parents understand instructions about use of medicines for children. This study aimed to assess pharmacotherapy literacy of parents of pre-school children and to examine association of parental pharmacotherapy literacy level with parent’s socio-demographic characteristics. The study was cross-sectional, conducted among parents of pre-school children (1–7 years of age), in kindergartens in several municipalities of Belgrade, Serbia, during regular parents meetings, from May to October 2016. Functional health literacy was measured by the Serbian version of the Short Test of Functional Health Literacy in Adults (S-TOFHLA). Parental pharmacotherapy literacy was assessed with newly constructed PTHL-SR questionnaire with good psychometric characteristics (Parental pharmacotherapy literacy questionnaire—Serbian). Overall, 813 parents participated in the study, mostly females (81.30%), between 30 to 40 years of age (70.85%) with two children (56.70%). Almost all of our study participants (99%) had adequate health literacy as assessed by S-TOFHLA. Mean score on PTHL-SR was 72.83% (standard deviation was 13.37), with better results among females than males (72% of women were in the group of highest PTHL-SR results). Our study showed that many parents (76.5%) knew the appropriate usage of non-prescription medicine for children, 57.2% parents were able to correctly calculate the dose of oral syrup for a child, and only 43.3% were able to interpret non-prescription dosage information written on the package. The majority of parents (61.3%) would make a dosage to child based on age and not on their weight. Every fifth parent with adequate functional health literacy measured by S-TOFHLA test, achieved the lowest results measured by PTHL-SR. Higher performance of the PTHL-SR was significantly correlated with education (p < 0.001), female sex (p < 0.001), married parents and those living in common-law (p < 0.001), older parents (p < 0.05) and parents who have more children (p < 0.05), and are non-smokers (p < 0.05). These results provide evidence that limitations in understanding common information about use of medicines are widespread among parents of pre-school children and encourage efforts for further investigation. PTHL-SR questionnaire may be a useful tool for identification of parents who need more instructions and assistance from healthcare providers, above all in providing better communication, written or spoken at community pharmacy settings. Full article