Well-being for all through E-health

E-health uses electronic processes and communications to enhance healthcare. The aim is to improve patient care, reduce costs, and empower patients to work towards maintaining their own well-being.

To work e-health needs a lot of data about patients. This health data is also crucial to discovering new drugs and improving patient care. Using specialised devices and telemedicine, a wide range of conditions can be monitored at home. Smartphones can process the information and transmit it to healthcare professionals and/or patients. Using e-health, conditions can be monitored continuously providing real-time monitoring of the condition and its treatment. 

For the full potential of e-health to be realised electronic health records need to be linked to other information, like images and text. This combined knowledge then needs to be distributed through a cloud service, so that a patient or doctor can see it immediately. Genetic profile and socio-economic factors can also be included to provide improved diagnoses and health predictions. In addition, approaches such as data mining offer exciting research opportunities. Data mining can help identify more effective treatments, improve drug safety, reduce risk, and better public health systems. E-health can improve how diseases develop and disabilities are spread throughout different populations.

Assistive technology can be provided through an intelligent healthcare device. These devices include a dispenser that might text you to remind you to take your pills — especially useful for patients with memory problems. If the patient does not take their medication after multiple reminders, the system could automatically alert a family member or carer. This could prove a lifesaver for patients with depression or dementia. Through relatively simple technology, patients can take care of themselves at home, reducing the burden on hospitals.

At the University of Ulster we have been researching e-health solutions for decades. It ranges from cloud computer systems for ‘big’ healthcare data to home-sensor based reminder systems for Alzheimer’s patients. We have also worked with designers to embed sensors into clothing designed to help older people become more active outdoors. Our focus has been to developed new algorithms (computer programmes that do a specific task) to analyse data collected by a system of devices. What we learn from these algorithms can be used to adapt the environment to take better care of the patient. Such feedback is essential to make the technology seamlessly integrate with a patient’s needs and preferences. Feedback could either be through an audio prompt or transmit an alert to a carer indicating that assistance is required. The research opportunities are endless.

In Malta, the University of Malta is well placed to leverage research opportunities for local solutions. Key components are already in place in several faculties, where the focus on Communications and Intelligent Computer Systems is particularly relevant to Malta, with a number of ongoing e-health research projects.

E-health provides business opportunities for the private sector. It can take academic research and use it to develop new technologies, deploy it, or manage it. For example in Northern Ireland there has been a huge interest in developing these business opportunities by creating awareness among investors. This investment can bring improved health and well-being, while supporting economic development. Such developments could be relevant to Malta which is similar to Northern Ireland in having a geographically peripheral location within Europe, an integrated healthcare system, and a technically skilled workforce. Due to its objective of establishing a regional hub for a knowledge-based and ICT-enabled economy, SmartCity Malta could be well placed to bring together the research expertise of the University of Malta and businesses. Together they could advance Malta’s healthcare for everyone. 

Prof. Sally McClean is a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Ulster (Belfast, Northern Ireland), and participated in the 2013, Workshop in Information and Communication Technology (WICT) organised by the Faculty of ICT at the University of Malta.

Which tablet?

Tech Review

A few weeks ago a good friend of mine made the mistake to ask, ‘Which tablet should I buy?’ After two hours and a long rant, I think he regretted asking that question.

The reason? Until a few years ago buying a tablet was easy, few products really competed with the iPad. Now, however, the choice is much more difficult.

The tablet market is very varied with products ranging in price from a few hundred euro to €1000. So are the more expensive tablets always better?

The answer has to be a resounding ‘no’. And the choice is not limited to budget. You would also need to consider size, both physical and memory-wise, OS (Operating System), and manufacturer.

The right choice mostly depends on the intended use. As an e-book reader alternative, a light and portable 7 to 8 inch tablet seems ideal. Here Google’s Nexus 7 proves an excellent budget choice, with the iPad Mini a more expensive but stylish alternative.

Size does matter. If you intend to use your tablet to browse the internet or watch movies a 10 inch tablet is your best choice. Here the iPad Air still provides a powerful tablet with an excellent display in a lightweight package. Equally strong and stylish are the offering from other manufacturers such as the leather cladded Samsung Galaxy Note and the waterproof Sony Xperia Z2.

If you wish to replace your laptop with a tablet, now you can. Windows based tablets as the Microsoft Surface Pro 2 add a clever keyboard and a full Windows 8.1 experience to provide a real alternative to a laptop. Hybrids such as the Asus Transformer, a netbook with a detachable screen, and the Lenovo Yoga show that functionality does not need to be sacrificed when opting for a tablet.

I could go on, and on and on…

TxK

Game Review_Costantino

TxKTxK marks the return of seminal designer Jeff Minter whose career spans over 30 years. The recurring themes in Minter’s works are frenetic action and psychedelic experiences. All these abound in TxKa new arcade shooter for PS Vita.

The game starts off with the player in a wireframe setting being attacked by what looks like an army of angry ribbons. Soon you will discover that you are actually an oddly shaped spider(ish) creature that is crawling at extremely high velocity. Once your attacking abilities have been mastered, the environment will constantly reshape around you. Before you know it, you will find yourself up-side down fighting enemies from every direction. 

It is an exercise in minimalism; so much is achieved with few details. It is up to the player to make sense of the bizarre juxtapositions of graphics and sounds. Thanks to its unique style, TxK shines.

This article forms part of The Gaming Issue

FundMalta

Prof. Gordon Calleja

Picture a Maltese crowdfunding website dedicated specifically to locally based creatives. It would be supported and promoted by government entities to the Maltese public, based locally and abroad. For this to work the public sector plays a crucial role in promoting the site and educating the public on how crowdfunding works. 

The site creates a platform for followers of local creatives to contribute towards performances and products made by artists they love. Unlike sites like Kickstarter, products that can be digitally distributed or ordered will remain on the site doubling as a digital distribution platform for locally made works. 

This article forms part of The Gaming Issue.

The School of Games

cassi-camilleri

In ancient times games played an integral role in society. Whilst in today’s hyperlinked world, games have evolved into complex, sophisticated mechanisms that enthral millions. Now, however, games are dismissed as trivial, and of no real value. But is this really the case? Cassi Camilleri meets the research team gamED from the University of Malta to find out.

Continue reading

Onirim

BoardGame-Review

Solo board games are a funny business. First of all, nobody can catch you cheating. The temptation of closing an eye to a few little mistakes or ‘forgetting’ a rule are alluring. Second, you have nobody to rub the wrong way when you make a good move. Third, there’s nobody to beat. Board games initially strike us as a multi-player group affair, but solo games do exist. We have all played solitaire.

Onirim is a one-player card game. Although two people can play co-operatively I like it best solo. In Onirim you play as a ‘Dreamwalker’: a person stuck in a dream trying to find his way out before he is consumed by his own nightmares. To escape you must assemble a total of eight doors before the deck runs out. If it does you’re in trouble and stuck forever (till the next game).

By playing cards you move from room to room inside a labyrinth. When you manage to play three rooms of the same colour consecutively, a door of that colour ‘appears’, as in, you search for one inside the deck.

‘Hah, sounds easy!’ you might say. ‘Hah, you’re wrong’. There are nightmare cards, and nightmare cards are… horrible. You can only play one card per turn, and you might have a cunning plan set up cheerfully in your hand, but then a ‘nightmare’ happens, and you need to discard all your cards, and start over. Thankfully, the ‘nightmares’ can be dodged. Prophecies allow you to see the future, while keys negate a ‘nightmare’s’ effects.

I like Onirim. It is different, has gorgeous art, and is wonderfully balanced. The only downside is that it is out of print. But worry not, Dreamwalker! Onirim will be reprinted this year and you can get your dreamy paws on it… soon enough.

This article forms part of The Gaming Issue

Why so Serious?

How do you help school children handle fights, bullying, and other conflict properly? You build a game, of course, and you let children take on different roles in a village. But how does that lead to resolving conflicts? Ashley Davis met researchers Prof. Rilla Khaled and Prof. Georgios N. Yannakakis to find out more

 

Do you chuckle at the thought of a serious game? The phrase is an oxymoron. How can a game be serious? Games are meant to be fun, frivolous, a way to pass the time. Or else you sometimes hear that games are anything but frivolous. That video game violence in particular is a threat to social order. The idea that games can be used to advance human understanding about the world, and that they can help us to teach, train, or motivate people in some way, is something that still needs to enter our mentality.

Designing games to explore research questions and to solve real world problems is actually a very important aspect of games research, an area of applied research that now has a strong presence at the University of Malta with the establishment of the Institute of Digital Games. Researchers from the Institute work on European-funded projects to create games that tackle serious problems affecting children and adults alike.

Village Voices has been voted the best learning game in Europe at the 2013 Serious Game Awards

Prof. Rilla Khaled and Prof. Georgios N. Yannakakis are two researchers now based at the Institute of Digital Games who work on serious game projects. Khaled’s work focuses on serious game design, while Yannakakis is a specialist in artificial intelligence and computational creativity. Computational creativity tries to build upon the latest technological innovations in human–computer interaction that enable computers to act intelligently to some aspects of human beings. These two areas, game design and game technology, represent a large part of the teaching and research strengths of the Institute.

One game that Khaled and Yannakakis recently helped develop is Village Voices which has been voted the best learning game in Europe at the 2013 Serious Game Awards. It was developed as part of the SIREN project, an FP7-funded interdisciplinary consortium made up of researchers from Malta, Greece, Denmark, Portugal, the UK and the US, along with Serious Games Interactive, a Danish Games Studio.

Let’s take a look at what makes a serious game and think about what made the project a success and what didn’t work so well.

The serious side of Village Voices aims to help school children learn conflict resolution skills. Players take on the role of one of four interdependent villages that are situated in a farm setting and given various quests to complete. Sitting side-by-side at separate computers, they may collaborate, share resources and help each other, or they may spread rumours and steal from each other. Much like any playground setting, children can play nicely, or they can be bullies.

The purpose of the SIREN project was to apply the latest advancements in game technology to the creation of serious games. The brief focused on innovations in procedural content generation, an area of artificial intelligence that automatically builds game elements like game levels or quest structures that would otherwise need to be designed manually. Another part of this innovative technology is detecting the emotions of players. Physiological responses can be measure through various tech like Electroencephalographic (EEG) sensors that can be used to detect a person’s emotional state directly by reading their brain’s electrical signals. Virtual agents were another technology that interested the research team. These agents are believable non-player characters that interact with the player with perceived intelligence.

The idea was to then create a game that would adapt to player behaviour, using emotion recognition tools to create an individual experience for each player. The decision to focus the game on teaching children about conflict resolution came later. Rather than to create a game about bullying behaviour, which is what a lot of people think of when they picture conflict between children, the research team wanted to explore the kinds of everyday conflicts that take place in school-yards. Friendship disputes, differences in opinion, and arguments over the possession of classroom items might seem trivial to adults, but they are important problems for children for whom school is their entire world. The SIREN consortium envisioned a game where players could experience and resolve conflicts in a dynamic setting. 

Some people who make serious games say that the serious application of the game should take precedence over fun. They say that serious games should offer players a safe environment to try out new behaviours. Khaled disagreed with this approach to game design. ‘Serious game experiences need to feel real and not trivial. Otherwise why would we then use them to raise a mirror to reality?’

Village Voices allows actions that teachers might find surprising. Players can be destructive in that world. They can steal from each other. The game gives aggressive players a noose with which to hang themselves. Knowing that the person whose labours you just destroyed, or who stole the items you were collecting, is sitting right there next to you intensifies the game’s emotional experience. Exchanges can become heated between players. It is these kinds of heated exchanges that often makes games fun.

Some of the characters children can play in Village Voices
Some of the characters children can play in Village Voices

Games are usually poor at provoking emotional responses. Village Voices does exactly that. Khaled told me about one session in a British classroom (the game was tested across Europe). A female student had such an upsetting experience that she cried. After reflecting on the incident with her teacher, the researcher, and the other players, the girl later returned to play again. Khaled thought this was a breakthrough learning moment for the student.

So Village Voices is a good learning tool, and it is also fun to play. But how successful was the team in applying game technologies like procedural content generation and emotion detection to its design? Khaled said that the experience of designing a game primarily for the purpose of testing technological innovations was the hardest part of the project. You might think that the role of a game designer is to work out the best solution to a problem given the technologies at hand. However, when the application of technology is the problem, the relationship between design and technology is more complex. Khaled said that the need to include particular game technologies in the design of Village Voices created a situation much like a rock band that needs to accommodate a peripheral member, such as a violin player. ‘While the violin player is not core to the project, the whole project needs to be compromised in some way in order to show off the violin player’s skills. It is not clear that the violinist is going to help the band make a new hit song, but it is clear he has to be there. So the band tries to find the violin player’s most positive qualities because he has got to be there.’

In Village Voices, the violin player’s best qualities are adaptive technologies that make the player experience more personalised. Because support for emotion detection plug-ins was never actually included in the final prototype, the game instead asks players directly how they feel about events in the game and introduces variations to the player experience according to their responses.

So far we have seen that Village Voices was successful according to the popular opinion of game-design peers at the European Serious Games — it won an award. We have also seen anecdotally that it is a provocative, if not fun game, based on the British student’s emotional response. But what does the SIREN team think about the game?

You cannot sit a child down in front of a computer and hope that they will magically learn something

According to Khaled, it can be difficult to implement learning games in classroom settings, and even more difficult to properly evaluate them. Project funding usually runs dry after around three years, and games take most of that time to develop. Gaining access to schools is also difficult. The game is a good fit for classes like social studies that are often held only once or twice a week. Together with the problem of semester breaks and short evaluation periods, as well as the tendency for teachers to have access to only a few computers often equipped with obsolete hardware, researchers would rarely see students engage with Village Voices over a long period of time. All these things place limitations on the design, testing, and evaluation of games for research purposes.

Rigorous evaluation is important as, ultimately, learning games are not black box tools. You cannot sit a child down in front of a computer and hope that they will magically learn something. That vital learning moment comes when players discuss their in-game experiences. As Khaled explained, ‘Playing the game is just half the experience. The other half is the subsequent discussion of the game experience.’

Given that discussion is so essential to the evaluation process, and that it is so difficult to get a sample of those discussions in a research setting, I asked Khaled if it was possible to turn the discussion into a game as well, to include it as part of the package. Khaled mentioned the meta-game, the part of the game where a player is both playing and watching themselves play the game. It is in the meta-game that players achieve the highest level of reflection. It works well as a kind of after-game discussion, a debriefing for players as they leave behind the conflicts of the game world and return to the everyday life of the school-yard; but Khaled added that of course it could be turned into a game. Achieving this level of reflection in the game package itself is just another challenge for the designers of serious games. 

The Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta offers word-class postgraduate education and research in game studies, design, and technology. The inter-disciplinary team includes researchers from literature and media studies, design, computer science and human-computer interaction. Visit game.edu.mt or contact Ashley Davis (ashley.davis@um.edu.mt) for information about the Institute’s Master of Science (taught or by research) and Ph.D. programmesThis article forms part of The Gaming Issue.


Find out more:

Some SIREN Gameplay Shots

Mirrorless Revolution

Tech Review

About 2 years ago I was faced with a tough camera choice. I had been a Canon user for years having used a number of their DSLRs (a professional camera) and amassed more lenses than I needed.

Nevertheless, mirrorless cameras were starting to interest me with their attractive features. I loved the idea of carrying a lighter, compact camera with DSLR capabilities.

Ok, some explanations for the less geeky: film SLRs required a mirror. The mirror diverts the image to the viewfinder (where your eye can look through) but moves out of the way to expose the film when taking a picture.

Digital SLRs making use of an optical viewfinder still require a mirror. However, there is an alternative. A small display can replace the optical viewfinder. The main advantage being that eliminating the mirror allows for smaller and lighter cameras. There are disadvantages. Older electronic viewfinders are of low quality — a problem that is disappearing with the latest cameras such as Sony’s NEX, Olympus OM-D and Fuji X ranges.

Another disadvantage is focusing speed. Mirrorless cameras adopt slower contrast detection methods rather than the phase systems found on DSLRs. Such problems are being addressed through on-chip phase detection in the Nikon 1 cameras.

Finally, the smaller sensor size of mirrorless cameras reduces the camera’s image quality. Again, Sony’s new cameras, the Alpha 7 and 7R, provide full-frame sensors in a small and sturdy body .

With the ever-increasing range of high quality lenses for mirrorless cameras, it is tough to ignore them when choosing a new camera. I now find myself picking up my mirrorless camera, rather than my DSLR, more and more often.