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To evaluate whether there are differences among orthodontists in the clinical management of facemask treatment for early treatment of Class III malocclusion, a survey consisting of 16 questions was conducted among members of the Italian Society of Orthodontics (SIDO). Sixty percent of the respondents were Specialists in Orthodontics (S) whereas 40% were General Dentists practicing Orthodontics (GD). Descriptive statistics were calculated to summarize the collected data. Differences in answers between S and GD were assessed with the Fisher's exact test for dichotomous variables, chi-square test for qualitative variables, and Mann–Whitney test for ordinal variables. A total of 151 clinicians participated in this survey. As for treatment timing, about 80% of the participants reported treating Class III patients with RPE and facemask between 5 and 8 years of age. Most of the participants requested the patients to wear the facemask in the afternoon and at night for a period of 9 or 12 months with recommended forces of 500 g per side. Comparisons between S and GD showed that S preferred the Petit facemask whereas GD favored the Delaire's type facemask (Fisher's Exact test, p = 0.0005). S and GD also differed significantly in their judgment of the most critical time of treatment, which for the majority of GD was the initial period but for the S was the final period (Chi-square test p = 0.0188). This survey showed that the facemask is not well received by the patients who, along with their parents, express concerns regarding its tolerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ICOM (International Council of Museums) envisions a role for the museum as an accessible and inclusive institution open to the public, which operates professionally and with the participation of communities. This vision requires research and practice to be fully implemented. The paper illustrates the participatory ideation and evaluation of new museum services that are inclusive and accessible for people who cannot visit the museum due to disability and age-related impairments. It illustrates the co-design process carried out within the EU project BeauCoup, which aims to make the cultural heritage accessible beyond the museum’s walls. This objective implies that the museum must play a key role in promoting inter-institutional partnerships between the cultural and the social sectors to engage marginalised communities. The paper describes the approach and the outcomes of the co-design process which involved various stakeholders and institutions, offering a reflection on the benefits and shortcomings of the approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper outlines the use of modular robotics to encourage and facilitate nonverbal communication during therapeutic intervention in dementia care. A set of new socially interactive modular robotic devices called rolling pins (RPs) has been designed and developed to assist the therapist in interacting with dementia-affected patients. The RPs are semitransparent plastic tubes that are capable of measuring their orientation and the speed of their rotation; at a local level, they have three types of feedback: red, green, and blue light, sound, and vibration. The peculiarity of the RPs is that they are able to communicate with each other or with other devices equipped with the same radio communication technology. The RPs are usually used in pairs, as the local feedback of an RP can be set depending not only on its own speed and orientation but also on the speed and the orientation of the peer RE The system is not used as a therapeutic tool per se but as a facilitator and a mediator of social dynamics during normal therapy to counteract social isolation that can result in dementia through the loss of social skills. An experiment is reported that shows that by using the RPs, the patients participated in the activity by coordinating their behavior with the therapist and imitating the same interaction patterns generated by the therapist. Index Terms--Dementia, gesture-based interaction, imitation, modular robotics, social exchanges, tangible media.

This paper presents an experiment in which participants had to discriminate three mid-air haptic shapes (circle, square, point) by reporting whether the haptic stimulus (e.g. circle on the palm of the hand) was compatible with an image (e.g. a circle) or a word (e.g. 'circle') displayed on a screen. Results indicate that only the 'point' stimulus was appreciably recognised and discriminated in terms of accuracy and time needed for the identification. Accuracy increased with repetition, and response time decreased, suggesting a learning effect. The comparison between visual and textual labels shows that for the haptic point stimulus there is no significant difference but a tendency to have greater accuracy with images than with texts, while the opposite result is found for the circle stimulus. This outcome suggests the need for new experiments focussed of the effect of visual/textual labels to make the recognition/discrimination tasks of haptic stimuli easier. Practitioner Summary: Three haptic shapes were presented with images or texts, matching or not the stimuli. The point was easy to recognise, while the circle and the square were difficult to discriminate against each other. Visual/textual labels bring contradictory results for different shapes. Abbreviations: 1D: one-dimensional; 2D: two-dimensional; 3D: three-dimensional; API: application programming interface; cm: centimeter; GLMM: generalised linear mixed-effect model; HCI: human-computer interaction; Hz: hertz; LMM: linear mixed-effect model; MCC: Matthews' correlation coefficient; mm: millimeter; ms: millisecond; QQ-plot: Quantile-Quantile plot; SD: standard deviation [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]