Search results for "Phone"

Misuse and addiction to mobile phone in a sample of first-grade secondary school students of Palermo

2020

Abstract Background Nowadays, smartphone overuse affects massively teenagers and young adults. From 2014 to 2018 in Italy, for the 11-17 years age group, there has been an increase from 79.9% to 85.8% of daily mobile phone users. This project aims to investigate usage prevalence and misuse/addiction of mobile phones in a representative sample of first-grade secondary school students of the Province of Palermo, Italy, carrying out educational interventions to promote a proper and conscious use of smartphone. Materials and Methods An anonymous, standardized and previously validated pre-intervention questionnaire consisting of 39 items on general socio-demographic characteristics, attitudes an…

Acceptance of E-Learning Devices by Dental Students

2013

Background: E-Learning programs and their corresponding devices are increasingly employed to educate dental students during their clinical training. Objective: Recent progress made in the development of e-learning software as well as in hardware (computers, tablet PCs, smartphones) caused us to more closely investigate into the habits of dental students in dealing with these learning techniques. Methods: Dental students during their clinical training attended a survey compiled in cooperation with biostatisticians. The questionnaire probands were asked to complete based on previous surveys of similar subjects, allowing single as well as multiple answers. The data, which were obtained with re…

Female sex workers' use of mobile phones in India: Lessons in effective engagement

2019

Despite the widespread impact of mobile phone technology, research on female sex workers’ (FSWs) access and use of this technology is sparse. This study aimed to document FSWs’ subjective perceptions of the benefits of mobile phone technology as well as examine the potential for its use by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Employing a phenomenological study built on in-depth qualitative interviews and focus group discussions with 67 FSWs and 18 staff and leaders from local NGOs in Mumbai and various locations of the Karnataka State in India between January and May 2015. Findings revealed complex trajectories for FSWs regarding accessing, learning about, and using mobile phone technology…

Telephone Consultation

2016

The article by Martina Albrecht and her co-authors (1) addresses an important aspect of patient-oriented medical decision making in Germany: to what extent does the advice dispensed by the freely accessible telephone consultation services correspond with the evidence? In other words: Can people who turn to these services understand and trust the information they are given? Only six of 293 consultations fulfilled the criteria defined by the authors—on the face of it, an alarming outcome.

2020

Background: Despite increased enrolments at primary schools in Zambia, more than half of the children in Grades 1–4 are unable to meet the required minimum standards for literacy. Aim: The study set out to examine the effects of using a phone-based mobile literacy game (Graphogame) to improve literacy skills in children and adults in rural family settings. Setting: The study was conducted in the Katete District, a rural town in the eastern province of Zambia. Methods: Participants were 73 Grade 2 learners (52% boys, mean age 9 years and 48% girls, mean age 10 years) and 37 parents (mean age 36 years). Three literacy tests, measuring letter-sound identification, phonological awareness, spell…

Methodological issues in a cross-sectional survey on cervical cancer screening using telephone interviews in Sicily (Italy): a SWOT analysis

2019

Objective A cross-sectional study on knowledge, perceptions, and adherence to cervical cancer screening was conducted using telephone interviews of Sicilian women that were performed in 2016. This study aimed to identify areas that need to be addressed to improve the validity of data collection and to minimize possible biases. Methods We performed a qualitative study through SWOT analysis, which is a multidimensional method based on evaluation of Strengths (S), Weaknesses (W), Opportunities (O), and Threats (T) of the research project. The contents of the SWOT forms underwent categorical, inductive, and deductive data analysis using the long table analysis method. Results The full availabil…

A Bayesian direction-of-arrival model for an undetermined number of sources using a two-microphone array.

2014

Sound source localization using a two-microphone array is an active area of research, with considerable potential for use with video conferencing, mobile devices, and robotics. Based on the observed time-differences of arrival between sound signals, a probability distribution of the location of the sources is considered to estimate the actual source positions. However, these algorithms assume a given number of sound sources. This paper describes an updated research account on the solution presented in Escolano et al. [J. Acoust. Am. Soc. 132(3), 1257-1260 (2012)], where nested sampling is used to explore a probability distribution of the source position using a Laplacian mixture model, whic…

Real-time Sound Source Localization on Graphics Processing Units

2013

Abstract Sound source localization is an important topic in microphone array signal processing applications, such as camera steering systems, human-machine interaction or surveillance systems. The Steered Response Power with Phase Transform (SRP- PHAT) algorithm is one of the most well-known approaches for sound source localization due to its good performance in noisy and reverberant environments. The algorithm analyzes the sound power captured by a microphone array on a grid of spatial points in a given room. While localization accuracy can be improved by using a high resolution spatial grid and a high number of microphones, performing the localization task in these circumstances requires …

Automatic Detection and Characterization of Acoustic Plane-Wave Reflections Using Circular Microphone Arrays

2013

The spatial characteristics of the sound field inside a room can be meaningfully described by means of microphone array processing techniques. In this context, the set of impulse responses sampled by a microphone array can be seen as an image made of acoustic plane-wave footprints. Due to the circular geometry of the microphone array, these footprints have a cosine-like shape that can be fully described as a function of the direction of arrival (DOA) of the impinging plane wave. This paper proposes a Hough-transform-based approach to plane-wave detection in microphone array multi-trace impulse responses. Experiments using a set of real microphone recordings are described, showing the potent…

Self-Localization of Distributed Microphone Arrays Using Directional Statistics with DoA Estimation Reliability

2019

This paper addresses the problem of self-localization of distributed microphone arrays from microphone recordings by following a two-step optimization procedure. In the first step, the relative geometry of the sources and arrays is inferred by the proposed maximum likelihood estimator. It is derived under the assumption that the acquired unit-norm vectors pointing towards the unknown source positions follow a von Mises-Fisher distribution in a D-dimensional space. In the second step, the absolute positions and synchronization offsets between the arrays are estimated from the inferred relative geometry by using the Least Squares procedure. To improve the accuracy of the method, we propose as…