Search Results (37)

This survey provides a comprehensive review of the integration of large language models (LLMs) into autonomous robotic systems, organized around four key pillars: locomotion, navigation, manipulation, and voice-based interaction. We examine how LLMs enhance robotic autonomy by translating high-level natural language commands into low-level control signals, supporting semantic planning and enabling adaptive execution. Systems like SayTap improve gait stability through LLM-generated contact patterns, while TrustNavGPT achieves a 5.7% word error rate (WER) under noisy voice-guided conditions by modeling user uncertainty. Frameworks such as MapGPT, LLM-Planner, and 3D-LOTUS++ integrate multi-modal data—including vision, speech, and proprioception—for robust planning and real-time recovery. We also highlight the use of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) to model object deformation and support precision in contact-rich manipulation tasks. To bridge the gap between simulation and real-world deployment, we synthesize best practices from benchmark datasets (e.g., RH20T, Open X-Embodiment) and training pipelines designed for one-shot imitation learning and cross-embodiment generalization. Additionally, we analyze deployment trade-offs across cloud, edge, and hybrid architectures, emphasizing latency, scalability, and privacy. The survey concludes with a multi-dimensional taxonomy and cross-domain synthesis, offering design insights and future directions for building intelligent, human-aligned robotic systems powered by LLMs. Full article

Objective: Relaxation delivered via audiotapes can reduce stress and improve wound healing. Virtual humans are a promising technology to deliver relaxation, but robust research is needed into their effectiveness. This randomised controlled trial investigated whether relaxation delivered by a virtual human could improve healing and reduce stress after an experimental wound. Methods: A total of 159 healthy adults underwent a tape-stripping wounding procedure and were randomly assigned to relaxation delivered by a virtual human, human audiotape, or a control condition. Skin barrier recovery (SBR) was measured by assessing changes in transepidermal water loss at baseline, post-tape-stripping, and post-intervention. Psychological and physiological variables were measured over the session. Participants’ perceptions of the interventions were assessed. Results: There were no significant differences in SBR between conditions. All conditions experienced significant improvements in the psychological variables, heart rate, and cortisol over time. After controlling for the baseline values, the virtual human and audiotape conditions were significantly more relaxed post-intervention than the control condition (p = 0.005), the audiotape condition had lower post-intervention anxiety than the control condition (p = 0.016), and alpha-amylase was significantly reduced in the virtual human group compared with the audiotape (p = 0.041). The audiotape received the highest satisfaction and engagement ratings, with qualitative results suggesting the appearance and lip-syncing of the virtual human could be improved. Conclusions: Relaxation instructions delivered by a virtual human increased participants’ relaxation levels with similar effects to traditional audiotapes. Furthermore, it reduced physiological stress indices. Further work with other wound types and stressed samples is needed. The voice and interactiveness of the virtual human should be improved to promote greater engagement and satisfaction. Full article

The integration of vision–language models (VLMs) with robotic systems represents a transformative advancement in autonomous task planning and execution. However, traditional robotic arms relying on pre-programmed instructions exhibit limited adaptability in dynamic environments and face semantic gaps between perception and execution, hindering their ability to handle complex task demands. This paper introduces GPTArm, an environment-aware robotic arm system driven by GPT-4V, designed to overcome these challenges through hierarchical task decomposition, closed-loop error recovery, and multimodal interaction. The proposed robotic task processing framework (RTPF) integrates real-time visual perception, contextual reasoning, and autonomous strategy planning, enabling robotic arms to interpret natural language commands, decompose user-defined tasks into executable subtasks, and dynamically recover from errors. Experimental evaluations across ten manipulation tasks demonstrate GPTArm’s superior performance, achieving a success rate of up to 91.4% in standardized benchmarks and robust generalization to unseen objects. Leveraging GPT-4V’s reasoning and YOLOv10’s precise small-object localization, the system surpasses existing methods in accuracy and adaptability. Furthermore, GPTArm supports flexible natural language interaction via voice and text, significantly enhancing user experience in human–robot collaboration. Full article

Hearing the word ‘death’ applied to oneself is a remarkably sobering experience. This is particularly true when the ‘one’ being referred to is a Pentecostal, a theologian, and a friend of Martin Luther. Reading Luther with Pentecostal ears is always a deconstructive process against the accumulated Luther scholarship that champions his view of the objective nature of Word and Sacrament over against the vicissitude of spiritual experience. Nevertheless, two moments in Luther’s life (the recovery of Philip Melanchthon and the death of his daughter Magdalena) open perspectives on the personal appropriation of the theologia crucis in the later Luther. In the process they illuminate the Pentecostal longing for healing, while critiquing some of its popular paradigms. Together they voice this particular ‘one’s’ journey through a bout of cancer. Full article

Background: Voice alteration is a recognized complication of thyroid surgery, impacting the quality of life and communication for affected individuals. In this prospective observational study, the Acoustic Voice Quality Index (AVQI) was employed to assess vocal outcomes after thyroidectomy. Method: Between February 2018 and August 2022, 224 patients underwent Thyroid surgery in our department, of which 74 with differentiated thyroid carcinoma (DTC) were enrolled in accordance with the inclusion criteria. Endoscopic findings and AVQI scores were evaluated before and after surgery (voice analysis was conducted using the Praat software program version 6.0.33). Results: Vocal fold impairment was present in 6.76% of patients after surgery (T1), with full recovery within 3 months. During preadmission evaluation, an AVQI score > 2.35 indicating hoarseness was present in 37 patients (despite normal vocal cord motility). Of these, 25 (67.57%), 26 (70.27%), and 24 (17.76%) maintained this trend at T1, T2, and T3, respectively. No significant variation in mean AVQI values was observed based on gender, age, and central neck dissection. Conclusion: AVQI values did not show significant variations comparing pre- and postoperative values. Thyroid surgery for DTC performed by experienced surgeons does not seem to impact significantly on patients’ voice quality. Full article

As governments in various countries and regions issue tourism-friendly policies in the post-pandemic period, the voices for tourism consumption recovery and innovative transformation have attracted great attention. Many scholars, experts and industry professionals in the field of festivals are actively exploring efficient solutions for festival marketing and sustainability. It is worth rethinking tourists’ consumption psychology and perceived image regarding exiting festival products as well as the antecedents that affect festival loyalty. The Qingdao International Beer Festival, as one of the most influential festivals in China, was selected as the research case for this study. The main goal of this study was to investigate festival consumption promotion mechanisms by proposing a conceptual framework in which the associations between destination familiarity, product familiarity and loyal intentions (re-patronage and recommendation) were examined with mediators of overall festival image, perceived value and overall satisfaction. The moderating role of visitor involvement in the proposed framework was also adequately demonstrated. Moreover, the causal recipes for loyalty intentions have also been identified by employing a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and a necessary condition analysis (NCA). The research findings are expected to provide a significant reference for the recovery and improvement in competitiveness of the entire festival industry. Full article

Researchers have asserted that patients who generally rely on powerful external sources to control their disorders can benefit from examining their coping mechanisms, which can potentially lead to a better understanding of the initiation and progression of some chronic diseases. By trusting their own internal powers and virtues, it is possible for some people to discover and navigate available strategies to balance and enhance their psycho-spiritual well-being and possibly their treatment and recovery. This review serves as a user manual for investigators who choose to use the CSI-SF to conduct their research on coping behaviors. The CSI-SF, which measures four coping strategies based on 16 items, was first assessed using the Jackson Heart Study (JHS) cohort in 2007. The reliability and construct validity of the CSI-SF was also later assessed among hemodialysis patients across 13 countries. In this study, the CSI-SF was assessed to be a reliable and valid instrument for measuring coping strategies. The CSI-SF serves the purpose of developing an inner voice that can assist with understanding how people cope with everyday life. The information gathered from the administration of the CSI-SF can inform investigators about environmental cues and triggers that can also impact individual health. Full article

Despite the potentially catastrophic nature of disasters, survivors can be highly resilient. Resilience, the capacity to successfully adapt to adversity, is both individual and collective. Policymakers and academics have recently emphasised the importance of community resilience, but with little consideration of local survivors’ perspectives, particularly young survivors within low- and middle-income countries. Therefore, this exploratory study aims to give voice to disaster-affected caregivers, teachers and female adolescent students by examining their conceptualisations of community coping and priorities for resilient recovery following the 2018 Central Sulawesi earthquake and tsunami. A total of 127 survivors of the devastating disaster, including 47 adolescents, answered open-ended survey questions related to post-disaster resilience. A content analysis identified key constituents of community resilience. The results indicate that survivors highly value community cohesion and participation, drawing on the community’s intra-personal strengths to overcome post-disaster stressors. Student conceptualisations of and recommendations for a resilient recovery often differ from the views of important adults in their lives, for example, regarding the role played by the built environment, “trauma healing” and religiosity in the recovery process. These findings have implications for the design of disaster resilience interventions. Full article

Recently, studies have examined COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and/or hesitancy amongst adult populations across the globe. However, there is a paucity of literature illustrating children’s voices in vaccination debates. This article draws on qualitative data collected via a mixed-methods study that explored South Africans’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic between 2020 and 2021. Interviews were conducted with a purposive sample (N = 29) of children (>18 years) and their parents regarding their initial perspectives on COVID-19 vaccines. Given the dyadic nature of our study, we explored the intergenerational influence that parents’ perspectives had on children’s vaccine acceptability and the role that vaccine literacy, or lack thereof, played in vaccine decision making. Findings showed a great level of vaccine acceptability among children and parents, where many placed hopes in the vaccines to promote societal health and wellbeing. Intergenerational transfer of perspectives was observed where children’s willingness to receive a vaccine was intrinsically linked to their parents’ vaccine acceptability. Some participants also expressed concerns about COVID-19 vaccines, related to misinformation, mistrust, and limited vaccine literacy. We discuss the findings as they relate to vaccine and health literacy, also considering the prospective implications of this work as we enter the “recovery” period of the pandemic. Full article

Background: Total laryngectomy is an operation that involves numerous problems for the patient, especially in daily life: loss of the fact, loss of voice, evident scars and persistence of the tracheostoma. Much is known about rehabilitation programs involving the voice, swallowing, shoulder girdle rehabilitation; less explored is the field of sport and sports rehabilitation in the laryngectomized patient. Methods: We conduced systematic review was conducted according to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) statement in order to evaluate the possibilities of practicing sports for the patient after total laryngectomy. Results: From an initial search of 4191 papers, we have come to include six papers for this literature review. We have also reported one of our clinical cases referring to a laryngectomized patient who swims competitively at an amateur level even after surgery with a particular device. The purpose of this work is to understand the role and importance of sport in rehabilitation and the possibilities that a frail patient like the laryngectomized patient has in practicing sport. Surely the best results are obtained in subjects who practiced sports before surgery. Conclusion: It is evident that sport is important in the psychological and motor recovery of the laryngectomized patient. There is still a lack of clear rehabilitation protocols, especially for water sports, which allow all laryngectomized patients to return to sports. We believe that early resumption of physical activity makes the experience of the disease less dramatic. Full article

Most previous speech enhancement methods only predict amplitude features, but more and more studies have proved that phase information is crucial for speech quality. Recently, there have also been some methods to choose complex features, but complex masks are difficult to estimate. Removing noise while maintaining good speech quality at low signal-to-noise ratios is still a problem. This study proposes a dual-path network structure for speech enhancement that can model complex spectra and amplitudes simultaneously, and introduces an attention-aware feature fusion module to fuse the two features to facilitate overall spectrum recovery. In addition, we improve a transformer-based feature extraction module that can efficiently extract local and global features. The proposed network achieves better performance than the baseline models in experiments on the Voice Bank + DEMAND dataset. We also conducted ablation experiments to verify the effectiveness of the dual-path structure, the improved transformer, and the fusion module, and investigated the effect of the input-mask multiplication strategy on the results. Full article

Skin-inspired flexible tactile sensors, with interfacial microstructure, are developed on cellulose fiber substrates for subtle pressure applications. Our device is made of two cellulose fiber substrates with conductive microscale structures, which emulate the randomly distributed spinosum in between the dermis and epidermis layers of the human skin. The microstructures not only permit a higher stress concentration at the tips but also generate electrical contact points and change contact resistance between the top and bottom substrates when the pressure is applied. Meanwhile, cellulose fibers possessing viscoelastic and biocompatible properties are utilized as substrates to mimic the dermis and epidermis layers of the skin. The electrical contact resistances (ECR) are then measured to quantify the tactile information. The microstructures and the substrate properties are studied to enhance the sensors’ sensitivity. A very high sensitivity (14.4 kPa⁻¹) and fast recovery time (approx. 2.5 ms) are achieved in the subtle pressure range (approx. 0–0.05 kPa). The device can detect subtle pressures from the human body due to breathing patterns and voice activity showing its potential for healthcare. Further, the guitar strumming and chord progression of the players with different skill levels are assessed to monitor the muscle strain during guitar playing, showing its potential for posture feedback in playing guitar or another musical instrument. Full article

Urban public space environments are critical to the health of residents. In previous studies on urban park environments and health, landscape environment questionnaires have been the main method to evaluate the environmental quality and comfort of urban parks. The research on sound perception also focuses on the exploration of evaluation methods and evaluation indicators; there is little objective empirical evidence in these studies. To further explore the nature of the health role of urban parks, this study started with the sound types of urban parks, based on a field survey, combined the electrocardiogram (ECG) index with the sound type of the park through a portable intelligent device, and HR and RMSSD were selected as the ECG indicators to evaluate the stress relief status. The regression model between the type of acoustic environments and the ECG data was established through the analysis of relevant data. This paper tries to improve the physiological recovery benefit and influence mechanism of sound types in urban parks from an objective point of view and puts forward reasonable suggestions to improve the sound environment in urban parks. The preliminary results show that, in a short time frame, natural sound has a strong relieving effect on mental pressure, while mechanical sound has an obvious impediment effect on the recovery of mental pressure. The results also reveal that the human voice has no obvious impediment effect, and changes in wind and broadcast sound have little impact on the recovery of mental pressure. Full article

Despite the lack of findings in laryngeal endoscopy, it is common for patients to undergo vocal problems after thyroid surgery. This study aimed to predict the recovery of the patient’s voice after 3 months from preoperative and postoperative voice spectrograms. We retrospectively collected voice and the GRBAS score from 114 patients undergoing surgery with thyroid cancer. The data for each patient were taken from three points in time: preoperative, and 2 weeks and 3 months postoperative. Using the pretrained model to predict GRBAS as the backbone, the preoperative and 2-weeks-postoperative voice spectrogram were trained for the EfficientNet architecture deep-learning model with long short-term memory (LSTM) to predict the voice at 3 months postoperation. The correlation analysis of the predicted results for the grade, breathiness, and asthenia scores were 0.741, 0.766, and 0.433, respectively. Based on the scaled prediction results, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve for the binarized grade, breathiness, and asthenia were 0.894, 0.918, and 0.735, respectively. In the follow-up test results for 12 patients after 6 months, the average of the AUC values for the five scores was 0.822. This study showed the feasibility of predicting vocal recovery after 3 months using the spectrogram. We expect this model could be used to relieve patients’ psychological anxiety and encourage them to actively participate in speech rehabilitation. Full article

Despite the high prevalence of adverse health and trauma-related outcomes associated with intimate partner violence (IPV), help-seeking and service utilization among survivors is low. This study is part of a larger mixed-methods and survivor-centered validation study on the Icelandic Barriers to Help-Seeking for Trauma (BHS-TR) scale, a new barriers measure focused on trauma recovery. A mixed-methods legitimation strategy of integration was employed to evaluate the BHS-TR structure in samples of IPV survivors. The merging of qualitative (n = 17) and quantitative (n = 137) data through a joint display analysis revealed mainly complementarity findings, strengthening the scale’s overall trustworthiness and validity evidence. Divergent findings involved items about mistrust, perceived rejection, stigmatization, fearing vulnerability, and safeguarding efforts that were significant help-seeking barriers in the survivors’ narratives, whereas factor analysis indicated their removal. These BHS-TR items were critically evaluated in an iterative spiraling process that supported the barriers’ influence, illuminated core issues, and guided potential refinements. This work contributes to the growing field of mixed methods instrument validation placing equal status on qualitative and quantitative methods and emphasizing integration to provide more complete insights. Moreover, the study’s findings highlight the added value of further exploring divergence between two sets of data and the importance of giving attention to the voices of the target population throughout the validation process. Full article