Digital assistants engage with us with increasingly human-like conversations, including the expression of human emotions with such utterances as
“I am sorry…”, “I hope you enjoy…”, “I am grateful…”, ...or “I regret that…
”. By 2021, digital assistants will outnumber humans. No one seems to stop to ask if creating more digital companions that appear increasingly human is really beneficial to the future of our species. In this essay, we pose the question:
“How human should computer-based human-likeness appear?”
We rely on the philosophy of humanness and the theory of speech acts to consider the long-term consequences of living with digital creatures that express human-like feelings. We argue that feelings are the very substance of our humanness and therefore are best reserved for
human
interaction.
The paid provision of care for dying persons and their families blends commodified emotion work and attachments to two often-conflicting role identities: the caring person and the professional. We ...explore how health care employees interpret personal grief related to patient death, drawing on interviews with 12 health care aides and 13 nurses. Data were analyzed collaboratively using an interpretively embedded thematic coding approach and constant comparison. Participant accounts of preventing, postponing, suppressing, and coping with grief revealed implicit meanings about the nature of grief and the appropriateness of grief display. Employees often struggled to find the time and space to deal with grief, and faced normative constraints on grief expression at work. Findings illustrate the complex ways health care employees negotiate and maintain both caring and professional identities in the context of cultural and material constraints. Implications of emotional labor for discourse and practice in health care settings are discussed.
•CNAs want to partner on research to improve direct care work.•Knowledgeable nursing assistants as creative caregivers (KNACC) development is described.•KNACC provides guidelines to facilitate CNA ...use of creative caregiving techniques.
Certified nursing assistants (CNAs) provide 80% of direct care in long-term care settings and are critical to maintaining resident well-being. Arts-based approaches to enhancing meaningful engagement have the potential to empower CNA ownership in the process of improving patient-centered care. We held a series of focus groups with CNAs (n = 14) to adapt arts-based creative caregiving (CCG) techniques for use in long-term care. Iterative revisions focused on CCG techniques, factors influencing implementation, and usability. The Knowledgeable Nursing Assistants as Creative Caregivers (KNACC) manual developed from the adapted CCG describes training guidelines and instructions to facilitate CNA use of creative caregiving techniques in direct care.
Background
Long term care facilities are important environments for the delivery of palliative care, which includes end of life care. Despite this, staff may feel this care focus is separate to their ...roles. Consequently, this study explores and makes visible how palliative care is understood in long term residential care facilities for older people. It focuses on how relationships with residents and families are experienced by nurses and health care assistants and how this influences the introduction and provision of palliative care to older people in long term care facilities.
Objectives
To develop an understanding of what palliative care means to staff caring for older people in residential care.
Methods
A co‐operative inquiry action research approach was used. A total of 18 healthcare assistants and 16 registered nurses in two older person long term care facilities participated in co‐operative inquiry groups. Co‐inquirers reflected on deaths that occurred over a 6‐month period and generated narratives on their relationships in the context of palliative care.
Results
Three themes were identified to describe relationships which were immersed in an ethos of person‐centred care. These were living, loving and letting go. Living rather than dying was the predominant focus of care. Loving described deep engagement with older people and families while letting go navigated the dying process.
Conclusions
Staff in nursing homes experience deep attachments to residents when delivering palliative care and end of life care. There is a need to understand these relationships and how they impact on the understanding and integration of palliative care in older person residential care as well as acknowledging and addressing staff’s grief processes to enhance resilience.
In the last few years, chatbots have become mainstream solutions adopted in a variety of domains for automatizing communication at scale. In the same period, knowledge graphs have attracted ...significant attention from business and academia as robust and scalable representations of information. In the scientific and academic research domain, they are increasingly used to illustrate the relevant actors (e.g., researchers, institutions), documents (e.g., articles, patents), entities (e.g., concepts, innovations), and other related information. Following the same direction, this paper describes how to integrate conversational agents with knowledge graphs focused on the scholarly domain, a.k.a. Scientific Knowledge Graphs. On top of the proposed architecture, we developed AIDA-Bot, a simple chatbot that leverages a large-scale knowledge graph of scholarly data. AIDA-Bot can answer natural language questions about scientific articles, research concepts, researchers, institutions, and research venues. We have developed four prototypes of AIDA-Bot on Alexa products, web browsers, Telegram clients, and humanoid robots. We performed a user study evaluation with 15 domain experts showing a high level of interest and engagement with the proposed agent.
Graduate students often teach in higher education but lack necessary experience, while enrolment for teacher-training courses is often voluntary with varying standards. The development and ...malleability of graduate students' teaching approaches, self-efficacy, interest and teaching ability were evaluated in a mandatory teaching course at a research-intensive university using latent SEM (variable-centred) and latent profile transition (person-centred) analyses. Participants (n = 310) completed items from the Approaches to Teaching Inventory, Teacher's Sense of Efficacy Scale, and Teaching Interest Scale at the beginning and end of the course. Trainers assessed participants in end-of-course teaching. Prior student-focused teaching predicted future self-efficacy (β = .30) which predicted achievement (end-of-course teaching, β = .33). Prior self-efficacy was also found to predict future interest (β = .17). Initial differences in teaching approach reported by STEM and non-STEM participants did not persist, suggesting training can shape and alter previous conceptions. Three subgroups: Low-Teacher-Focused, Mid-Mixed, and High-Student-Focused indicated a developmental progression in teaching beliefs. Results suggest teaching beliefs can be developed and shaped during a short course. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
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