Technologies can support the well-being of people living with dementia in residential care by fostering meaningful interactions through multimodal and playful features. This article presents the evaluation of A Better Visit, an app that aims at engaging residents and visitors in shared activities. We define engagement in terms of dyadic interactions with the interface of the device, and interactions within the social context of the care home. We generated two Motivational Models that describe different perspectives of how people engaged with the system: the first was built with the design team, and the second was built using the first Motivational Model as a sensitising concept for the analysis of data from four care homes that used the app for periods of three months. Our findings show that the facilitation of activities plays a relevant role for engaging in social interaction. We discuss how technologies can contribute to engaging people living with dementia in social interaction: firstly, facilitation can be understood as a concept that is supported by people and technology. Secondly, we discuss the influence of the social context of the setting and the understandings of the individual in how people assess the engagement of the residents in social interaction.
Students are faced with a wide range of writing tasks during their studies, including writing literature reviews, summarising papers and producing reflective reports. Writing tasks present a challenge for students who are not writing in their native language due to studying overseas. Indeed, students writing in their native language have a distinct advantage in assignments involving writing. The rapid emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI) over the past three years has the potential to significantly impact the quality and efficiency of writing of non-native English speakers by providing international students with an opportunity to minimise the language barrier when writing in academia. This paper reports on a series of structured exercises we developed to determine how using Gen-AI tools built on large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Claude might improve student writing in the context of computing degrees. Two of the exercises were successfully repeated with a second and independent group of students. We analyse some issues to be aware of when using Gen-AI tools and make suggestions as to their effective use. The key underlying message is that students need to develop their own distinct voice.
29 September 2007 in Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems