Today, Smart Assistants (SAs) are supported by significantly improved Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) engines as well as AI-enabled decision support, enabling efficient information communication, easy appliance/device control, and seamless access to entertainment services, among others. In fact, an increasing number of modern households are being equipped with SAs, which promise to enhance user experience in the context of smart environments through verbal interaction. Currently, the market in SAs is dominated by products manufactured by technology giants that provide well designed off-the-shelf solutions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: R4Alz is utilized for the early detection of minor neurocognitive disorders. It was designed to assess three main dimensions of cognitive-control abilities: working-memory capacity, attentional control, and executive functioning.
Objectives: To reveal the cognitive-control dimensions that can differentiate between adults and older adults with healthy cognition, people with subjective cognitive impairment, and people diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment by examining the factorial structure of the R4Alz tool.
Background: The diagnosis of the minor neurocognitive diseases in the clinical course of dementia before the clinical symptoms' appearance is the holy grail of neuropsychological research. The R4Alz battery is a novel and valid tool that was designed to assess cognitive control in people with minor cognitive disorders. The aim of the current study is the R4Alz battery's extension (namely R4Alz-R), enhanced by the design and administration of extra episodic memory tasks, as well as extra cognitive control tasks, towards improving the overall R4Alz discriminant validity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealthcare (Basel)
January 2022
Virtual assistants are becoming popular in a variety of domains, responsible for automating repetitive tasks or allowing users to seamlessly access useful information. With the advances in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing, there has been an increasing interest in applying such assistants in new areas and with new capabilities. In particular, their application in e-healthcare is becoming attractive and is driven by the need to access medically-related knowledge, as well as providing first-level assistance in an efficient manner.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Subjective cognitive decline (SCD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI) are acknowledged stages of the clinical spectrum of Alzheimer's disease (AD), and cognitive control seems to be among the first neuropsychological predictors of cognitive decline. Existing tests are usually affected by educational level, linguistic abilities, cultural differences, and social status, constituting them error-prone when differentiating between the aforementioned stages. Creating robust neuropsychological tests is therefore prominent.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe challenge of providing quality healthcare to underserved populations in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) has attracted increasing attention from information and communication technology (ICT) professionals interested in providing societal impact through their work. Sana is an organisation hosted at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that was established out of this interest. Over the past several years, Sana has developed a model of organising mobile health bootcamp and hackathon events in LMICs with the goal of encouraging increased collaboration between ICT and medical professionals and leveraging the growing prevalence of cellphones to provide health solutions in resource limited settings.
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