3D Printing in ENT Training: Current State-of-the-Art and Perspectives.

Objectives: Three-dimensional (3D) printing has been incorporated into medical research and numerous applications have been reported since its development in the 1980s. Ear, nose and throat (ENT) surgery is one of the fields that 3D printing is gaining increasing popularity, as it can contribute to surgical training, patient education and bioengineering. This article aims at providing an updated review of 3D printed models applications in improving ENT trainees' surgical skills.

SmartHypnos: An Android application for low-cost sleep self-monitoring and personalized recommendation generation.

Background And Objective: Sleep is an essential biological function that is critical for a healthy and fulfilling life. Available sleep quality assessment tools contain long questionnaires covering a long period of time, not taking into account daily physical activity patterns and individual lifestyles.

Methods: In this paper we present SmartHypnos, an Android application that supports low-end devices.

Identifying the Health Educational Needs of Refugees: Empirical Evidence from a Delphi Study.

Refugees experience poorer health outcomes especially which can be exacerbated by or can be a result of low health literacy of refugee populations. To address poor health outcomes, health literacy, and health usage in refugee populations, it is essential to develop health educational interventions for refugees' healthcare integration. To do so, learning objectives must be identified based on refugees' health knowledge gaps.

Experimentation of AI Models Towards the Prediction of Medium-Risk Emergency Department Cases Disposition Outcome.

The overwhelming volume of patients in emergency departments (EDs) is a significant problem that hinders the delivery of high quality healthcare. Despite their great value, triage protocols are challenging to put into practice. This paper examines the utility of prediction models as a tool for clinical decision support, with a focus on medium-severity patients as defined by the ESI algorithm.

Empowering Ageing with Ingenuity: A Scoping Review on the Methods and Technologies Used into Elderly Health Monitoring.

With the rise in global life expectancy, ensuring healthier aging experiences for the older population becomes paramount. This scoping review delves into the technologies employed in the remote health monitoring of the elderly over the past 15 years. Exploring the concept of "Healthy Ageing" as proposed by the World Health Organization, this paper attempts to highlight the techniques and technologies used in health monitoring of the elderly population.

Sparing the Hippocampus in Prophylactic Cranial Irradiation Using Three Different Linear Accelerators: A Comparative Study.

Hippocampus protection, as an organ at risk in brain radiotherapy, might protect patients' quality of life. Prophylactic cranial irradiation (PCI) has been used traditionally in small cell lung cancer (SCLC) patients as it increases survival. This study aimed to discover the contributing parameters for a successful PCI with simultaneous protection of the hippocampus by using three different treatment machines.

Masked emotions: does children's affective state influence emotion recognition?

Introduction: Facial emotion recognition abilities of children have been the focus of attention across various fields, with implications for communication, social interaction, and human behavior. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing a face mask in public became mandatory in many countries, hindering social information perception and emotion recognition. Given the importance of visual communication for children's social-emotional development, concerns have been raised on whether face masks could impair their ability to recognize emotions and thereby possibly impact their social-emotional development.

Neurological Examination via Telemedicine: An Updated Review Focusing on Movement Disorders.

Patients with movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease (PD) living in remote and underserved areas often have limited access to specialized healthcare, while the feasibility and reliability of the video-based examination remains unclear. The aim of this narrative review is to examine which parts of remote neurological assessment are feasible and reliable in movement disorders. Clinical studies have demonstrated that most parts of the video-based neurological examination are feasible, even in the absence of a third party, including stance and gait-if an assistive device is not required-bradykinesia, tremor, dystonia, some ocular mobility parts, coordination, and gross muscle power and sensation assessment.

Thematic analysis of stakeholder perceptions for co-creative healthcare XR resource design and development; traversing a minefield of opportunities.

Introduction: The expansive curricular volume of healthcare education makes a necessity the incorporation of innovative methods and immersive media in it. The core challenge in such approaches is the timely development of relevant immersive content such as Virtual, Augmented or Mixed Reality (VR/AR/MR) resources for healthcare topics. There is currently significant interest in the use of co-creative methods for streamlining immersive content development.

Creating and running an escape room for healthcare curricula: AMEE Guide No. 168.

In this guide we provide instructions and recommendations about creating and running escape rooms for healthcare education. In recent years there has been a growing interest in adopting escape rooms as an educational tool to be included in healthcare curricula, and we attempt to explain why and how these tools are fit for the particularities of this type of education. We first describe the steps that a design team will have to follow to create an educational escape room from scratch, from core characteristics like target audience and learning goals to actual puzzle design and testing.

Unravelling the multisensory learning advantage: Different patterns of within and across frequency-specific interactions drive uni- and multisensory neuroplasticity.

In the field of learning theory and practice, the superior efficacy of multisensory learning over uni-sensory is well-accepted. However, the underlying neural mechanisms at the macro-level of the human brain remain largely unexplored. This study addresses this gap by providing novel empirical evidence and a theoretical framework for understanding the superiority of multisensory learning.

Categorizing digital data collection and intervention tools in health and wellbeing living lab settings: A modified Delphi study.

Background: Health and Wellbeing Living Labs are a valuable research infrastructure for exploring innovative solutions to tackle complex healthcare challenges and promote overall wellbeing. A knowledge gap exists in categorizing and understanding the types of ICT tools and technical devices employed by Living Labs.

Aim: Define a comprehensive taxonomy that effectively categorizes and organizes the digital data collection and intervention tools employed in Health and Wellbeing Living Lab research studies.

Medical Doctors Approaches and Understanding of Health Literacy: A Systematic Literature Review.

A physician's role is critical in fostering patient health literacy (HL) and influencing various aspects, including patient-physician communication and treatment effectiveness. The purpose of this systematic literature review is to analyze physicians' perspectives, comprehension, and management of HL. The focus of this review is on physicians' views, opinions, experiences, and strategies related to HL.

Comparative assessment of synthetic time series generation approaches in healthcare: leveraging patient metadata for accurate data synthesis.

Background: Synthetic data is an emerging approach for addressing legal and regulatory concerns in biomedical research that deals with personal and clinical data, whether as a single tool or through its combination with other privacy enhancing technologies. Generating uncompromised synthetic data could significantly benefit external researchers performing secondary analyses by providing unlimited access to information while fulfilling pertinent regulations. However, the original data to be synthesized (e.

Education of Patients With Atrial Fibrillation and Evaluation of the Efficacy of a Mobile Virtual Patient Environment: Protocol for a Multicenter Pseudorandomized Controlled Trial.

Background: Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common sustained cardiac arrhythmia and is a leading cause of mortality and morbidity. Patient knowledge about AF and its management is paramount but often limited. Patients need to be appropriately informed about treatment options, medicinal adherence, and potential consequences of nonadherence, while also understanding treatment goals and expectations from it.

The Pre-Interictal Network State in Idiopathic Generalized Epilepsies.

Generalized spike wave discharges (GSWDs) are the typical electroencephalographic findings of Idiopathic Generalized Epilepsies (IGEs). These discharges are either interictal or ictal and recent evidence suggests differences in their pathogenesis. The aim of this study is to investigate, through functional connectivity analysis, the pre-interictal network state in IGEs, which precedes the formation of the interictal GSWDs.

Animacy Processing in Autism: Event-Related Potentials Reflect Social Functioning Skills.

Though previous studies with autistic individuals have provided behavioral evidence of animacy perception difficulties, the spatio-temporal dynamics of animacy processing in autism remain underexplored. This study investigated how animacy is neurally encoded in autistic adults, and whether potential deficits in animacy processing have cascading deleterious effects on their social functioning skills. We employed a picture naming paradigm that recorded accuracy and response latencies to animate and inanimate pictures in young autistic adults and age- and IQ-matched healthy individuals, while also employing high-density EEG analysis to map the spatio-temporal dynamics of animacy processing.

A hackathon as a tool to enhance research and practice on electronic health record systems' interoperability for chronic disease management and prevention.

Objectives: The development of a standardized technical framework for exchanging electronic health records is widely recognized as a challenging endeavor that necessitates appropriate technological, semantic, organizational, and legal interventions to support the continuity of health and care. In this context, this study delineates a pan-European hackathon aimed at evaluating the efforts undertaken by member states of the European Union to develop a European electronic health record exchange format. This format is intended to facilitate secure cross-border healthcare and optimize service delivery to citizens, paving the way toward a unified European health data space.

Sensorized T-Shirt with Intarsia-Knitted Conductive Textile Integrated Interconnections: Performance Assessment of Cardiac Measurements during Daily Living Activities.

The development of smart wearable solutions for monitoring daily life health status is increasingly popular, with chest straps and wristbands being predominant. This study introduces a novel sensorized T-shirt design with textile electrodes connected via a knitting technique to a Movesense device. We aimed to investigate the impact of stationary and movement actions on electrocardiography (ECG) and heart rate (HR) measurements using our sensorized T-shirt.

Greek medical professionals approaches and understanding of health literacy: a qualitative study.

Background: Health literacy holds significant importance for medical professionals, as it is widely acknowledged as a key element in enhancing health promotion and overall well-being. The primary objective of this study is to explore Greek physicians' comprehension of health literacy, the significance they attribute to it, their strategies for addressing patients with low health literacy, and the potential barriers they face while striving to enhance a patient's health literacy. In this context, we examine the communication methods employed by physicians as an integral part of their approach to improving a patient's health literacy.

Involving Patients into the LifeChamps Project: Preliminary Findings.

Patient involvement in research has been highlighted as a major requirement for the development of products and services that cover actual patients' needs. However, there has not been an agreement on a commonly used standard for patient involvement in research, at least not in the EU, partially because of lack of common terminology and implementation methodology. Within the standardization activities of "LifeChamps: A Collective Intelligent Platform To Support Cancer Champions", this qualitative study was developed to discover patients' views for their engagement in research.

Creative Art Therapy as an Efficient Way to Improve the Well-Being of People Living with Dementia.

Dementia is characterized by a decline in cognition and loss of functional abilities. It is becoming more and more prevalent which places a tremendous strain on the health and social care systems, in parallel the caregivers are under a lot of stress. Engaging in creative activities such as painting, drawing, dance, music, and drama can help reduce stress, anxiety, and depression, and promote a sense of can be beneficial for patients with dementia as it can help them maintain their cognitive abilities.

ClinApp: A Microservices-Based Platform for Efficient Medical Visit Scheduling.

Clin App is a platform streamlining medical appointment management and patient data collection using a conversational agent. Focused on healthcare professionals and patients, it offers appointment automation, questionnaire creation, and medical data management. This work showcases ClinApp's microservices-based architecture and its user-centered design.

Towards an Explainable AI-Based Tool to Predict Preterm Birth.

Preterm birth (PTB) is defined as delivery occurring before 37 weeks of gestation. In this paper, Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based predictive models are adapted to accurately estimate the probability of PTB. In doing so, pregnant women' objective results and variables extracted from the screening procedure in combination with demographics, medical history, social history, and other medical data are used.

Streamlining Tangible 3D Printed and Intangible XR Content Creation and Evaluation: The ENTICE Experience.

ENTICE aimed to use co-creative methodologies in order to build a solid creation pipeline for medical experiential content. The project has developed and evaluated immersive learning resources and tools aiming to support well-defined learning objectives using tangible and intangible resources (AR/VR/MR, 3D printing) that are highly sought in the fields of anatomy and surgery. In this paper the preliminary results from the evaluation of the learning resources and tools in 3 countries as well as the lessons learnt are presented towards to the improvement of the medical education process.