Telemedicine in Schools: Promoting Health (and Mental Health)

Telemedicine might be coming to a school near you in the future!

The use of a Telemedicine cart, made by Rubbermaid, will be piloted in one of the Union County Public Schools soon. In the article below,  the school district's superintendent was quoted as saying that she hopes the technology can also be used to tackle the problem of mental health:

Presbyterian, UCPS partner to put Telemedicine in schools
Carolyn Steeves, The Enquirer Journal, 1/9/13 


According to information from the Rubbermaid Healthcare Telemedicine website, the cart supports high definition video teleconferencing, a plug and play I/O panel, platform computing, and is white board capable. The touchscreen has annotation capabilities.  

For more information, view the following video and also see the Rubbermaid Telemedicine Resources site.



Here's the promotional information from the Rubbermaid website:

HD Video, Touch-Screen Apps, & Shared Content 

"The Rubbermaid Telemedicine Cart combines full computing capabilities with HD video conferencing into one, easy-to-use, mobile point-of-care clinical platform. Its clean, slim line design and small footprint provide access into the smallest and busiest clinical settings. Its multi-touch interface, simple integration, and superior maneuverability streamlines work flow and creates high adoption rates by staff members."

 "Each Telemedicine Cart comes equipped with a 720p HD video camera, upgradable to 1080p HD video. It also provides computing access to any software or web-based application, including electronic medical records and PACS imaging systems. It can be outfitted with any number of optional medical devices (both analog and digital) that can be shared through the computer or video conferencing equipment or both. The Telemedicine Cart supports digital input through DVI and HDMI as well as legacy inputs such as VGA, S-Video, and composite video. In addition, it is a fully portable platform that runs for two hours via built-in battery power and can be quickly and easily wheeled from room to room, requiring only a standard, high speed internet connection (wired or wireless) to initiate an HD video conference."

Below is a screen shot of telemedicine images from a Google search:

RELATED
Rubbermaid Healthcare Telemedicine Resources (Videos, Whitepapers, News)
Rubbermaid Healthcare Telemedicine
FCC Gives Telehealth $400M Boost
Mary Mosquera, Healthcare IT News, 1/10/13

InteractiveTV Today (ITVT): Links to information and updates about CES 2013, via Tracy Swedlow.:

If you want a quick look at the latest news related to interactive TV, including cool stuff featured at CES 2013, a good resource is the InteractiveTV Today website.   

Below are a few quick links to posts written by Tracy Swedlow, the founder of ITVT.  You'll see that there has been a flood of news and information generated from the companies featured at the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2013) held in Las Vegas:

Interactive TV headlines Round-Up (I): Aereo, Amazon, A +E Networks, Turner, Warner Bros., Samsung, Roku, Nintendo Wii U, CBS, Microsoft Xbox

Interactive TV Headlines Round-Up (II):  ConnectTV, DDD, LG, Delivery Agent, Samsung, Magic Ruby, "Sons of Anarchy", Digitalsmiths, Time Warner Cable, i.TV

Interactive TV Headlines Round-Up (III): DirectTV, Dish Network, Ensequence, Sony, ES3, Azuki Systems, Microsoft Mediaroom

Interactive TV Headlines Round-Up (IV): Asus, Google TV, Marvell, Sony, Ubitus, Amazon, YouTube

It might take a while to catch up!

BTW, the ITVT website has a number of bloggers who share insights and news related to interactive TV and multimedia.  The ITVT Community Blogstream is a good place to start.

Gesture Markup Language (GML) for Natural User Interaction and Interfaces

Quick post:

Gesture ML Wiki 

"GML is an extensible markup language used to define gestures that describe interactive object behavior and the relationships between objects in an application.  Gesture Markup Language has been designed to enhance the development of multiuser multi-touch and other HCI device driven applications." -Gesture ML Wiki

GestureML was created and maintained by Ideum. 

More information to come!

Photo credit: Ideum

RELATED
Ideum Blog

OpenExhibits Free multitouch and multiuser software initiative for museums, education, nonprofits, and students

GestureWorks  Multi-touch authoring for Windows 8 & Windows 7

Ideum's GestureWorks Platform Will Let Developers Create Complex Gestures for Ultrabook Apps  -Alex Williams, Tech Crunch, 11/18/12

5 Perspectives On The Future Of The Human Interface -Alex Williams, Tech Crunch, 11/4/12

NUI Group

More to come!

KAPi Kids at Play Awards: Best in Children's Technology 2013 Winners Announced

The following information is from a PRWeb press release announcing the winners of the Fourth Annual KAPi Awards:

Living in Digital Times and Children's Technology Review Announce 2013 KAPi Award Winners  The Most Innovative in Children's Technology to be honored on Thursday, January 10, at the 2013 International CES ® in Las Vegas

"Collaboratively organized and produced by Living in Digital Times and Children’s Technology Review, the fourth annual KAPi Kids at Play Awards honor the best of the best in children’s technology."- PRWeb, 12/18/12

The 2013 KAPi Award Winners Are… 
 1. Best Younger Children’s App: LetterSchool by Boreaal Publishers 
 2. Best Older Children’s App: IMAG-N-O-TRON by Moonbot Studios 
 3. Best Tech Leveraged Toy: Skylanders Giants by Activision 
 4. Best Video Game Software: Kinect Sesame Street TV by Microsoft Studios 
 5. Best Hardware or Peripheral: Kindle Fire HD with Kindle FreeTime Unlimited by Amazon 
 6. Best Technology Toy: littleBits by littleBits Electronics 
 7. Best Educational Technology: BrainPOP GameUp by BrainPOP LLC. 
 8. Innovation: The Cube by 3D Systems, Inc. (3D Printer)
 9. Pioneer: Dale Dougherty, Co-Creator, Maker Faire; Publisher, MAKE Magazine 
 10. Pioneering Team: Toca Boca 

Judges of the KAPi Awards consisted of 13 journalists and/or experts in children’s interactive media, they were: 
Warren Buckleitner, Children’s Technology Review
Chris Crowell,  Children’s Technology Review  
Dan Donahoo, Wired GeekDad and Project Synthesis 
Chip Donohue, Erikson Institute 
David Kleeman, American Center for Children and Media 
Ann McCormick, Co-Founder, The Learning Company 
Frank Migliorelli, Mig Idea 
Robin Raskin, Living in Digital Times 
Reyne Rice, Toy Expert 
Carly Shuler, PlayScience 
Andrea Smith, Mashable 
Aleen Stein, Organa 
Scott Traylor, 360 Kid

Interactive Big Data for Gov, Biz, - and the rest of us? (long post, resources and links)

I've moved this post to the "pages" section of my blog:

Big Data for All: Resources, References, Links

Photo Credit: DARPA

Interactive Tablets and Learning: One Laptop Per Child now One Tablet Per Child in Ethiopia

One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is a philanthropic organization that focuses on learning technologies, distributing thousands of low-cost laptops to children in developing countries.  In most cases, children have been provided access to OLPC laptops within teachers within traditional school settings.  But what about children who live in remote areas, where there are no schools, teachers, or even access to electricity?  They now have the opportunity to learn, even without teachers, through a small experiment conceived by Nicholas Negroponte, of OLCP and other researchers.  In this experiement, each child was provided with a Motorola Xoom tablet.  No teachers were around, because the children lived in a remote village that had no teachers. 

The following video provides a brief overview of what happened over the course of a few weeks and months after the children received the tablets:

To learn more, I encourage you to follow the link to a video of Nicholas Negroponte's presentation at the October 2012 EmTech conference, held in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  He discusses learning and how it can be supported through technology, anywhere.

EmTech Video: Nicholas Negroponte: Teaching Children to Learn

"Nicholas Negroponte, founder, One Laptop Per Child, on his latest experiment with the democratization of education - can children teach themselves to read?"

In his presentation, Negroponte discusses the differences between knowing and understanding, and the importance for teachers (or learning applications) to understand the learner.  He goes on to discuss the OLPC research project Ethiopia where children living in remote villages with no teachers, no exposure to print, illiterate communities, and no access to technology, learned to use tablets without instruction or guidance.  The village was provided with a solar panel and one village member was taught how to use it to supply power for the tablets.

Each tablet provided to the children had over 100 applications.  Within four minutes, one child open the box, turned on the on-off button. Within 5 days, each child was using an average of 47 applications.  Within five months, a child hacked the Android tablet to turn on the camera capability.  According to Negroponte, the children were each using different applications, but collaborated with one another.



Maryann Wolf, Director of  the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, has collaborated with with the "OTPC" project. Other collaborators include Cynthia Breazeal and team at the MIT Media Lab, and Sugata Mitra at Newcastle University, according to Chris Ball, lead software engineer at OLPC.

The tablets include software that tracks data from all of the interactions from the children.  What a goldmine for education and cognitive/developmental psychology researchers According to Negraponte, the data is free for analysis.   (I will update this post with additional information about how the data can be accessed as soon as I can find the link.)

Although the OTPC concept is a noble idea, it does not appear to address the fact the children and their families who live in remote villages do not have access to literacy support in their own language.  


RELATED

OLPC Literacy Project

Given Tablets but No Teachers, Ethiopian Children Teach Themselves:  A bold experiment by the One Laptop Per Child organization has shown "encouraging" results.
David Tabolt,  MIT Technology Review, 10/29/12


OLPC Project Puts Tablets in the Hands of Formerly Illiterate Children with Amazing Results John Biggs, TechCrunch, 11/1/12

Motorola Xoom hacked by Ethiopian kids who can't read; with no instructions whatsoever.
Joe Hindy, 11/4/12
 


DIG DEEPER: SOMEWHAT RELATED
Hourcade, J.P., Beitler, D., Cormenzana, F. and Flores, P. (2009). Early OLPC Experiences in a Rural Uruguayan School. In A. Druin (Ed.), Mobile Technology for Children: Designing for Interaction and Learning. Boston: Morgan Kaufmann.

Growing Up With Nell:  A Narrative Interface for Literacy (pdf)
IDC 2012, June 12–15, 2012, Bremen, Germany
Authors: C. Scott Ananian, Chris J. Ball, Michael Stone
One Laptop Per Child Foundation, 222 Third Street, Cambridge, MA 02142

ABSTRACT
"Nell is a tablet-oriented education platform for children in the developing world.  A novel modular narrative system guides learning, even for children far from educational infrastructure, and provides personalized instruction which grows with the child.  Nell's design builds on experience with the Sugar Learning Platform, used by over two million children around the world"

Quote from above article:
"To further promote collaboration, Nell is free and opensource and implemented in standard web technologies (JavaScript, HTML5, and WebGL) with offline caching. Resources are named by URL, even when disconnected from the internet, which simplifies the distribution of updates to story modules and the Nell system. URL-based identifiers also allow third parties to manage their own namespaces when extending Nell."

TinkRBook
A. Chang and C. Breazeal. TinkRBook: Shared reading interfaces for storytelling. (pdf) In Proc. of the 10th Int’l Conf. on Interaction Design and Children (IDC ’11), pages 145–148. ACM, June 2011.
NOTE:  The above article provides good references about early language and literacy development.



Wilox, Bruce Beyond Facade: Pattern Matching for Natural Language Applications (pdf)
Telltale Games, Feb. 2011
Note:  This paper reviews the history of Natural Language Processing (NLP) as applied to games, and includes information about AIML (Artificial Intelligence Markup Language), Facade, and ChatScript.  The author explains how string matching is no longer simply a matching of words. It now focuses matching patterns of meaning.

ChatScript 
ChatScript Website

Note:  One of my assignments for a class in AI for Games, back in 2006, was to create a mini-game that involved the use of AIML.  I realized that a "smart" chat feature would be useful to incorporate in an educational game. In my opinion, it has the potential to support scaffolding of learning, based on the learner's responses, positive as well as errors.