Volume 12, Issue 4

Nowadays, medical simulators and computer simulation programs are used to train various skills required in medicine. The development of medicine, including orthopedics and rehabilitation, has meant that resident physicians, within a much shorter period of time, must acquire the knowledge and skills that their older colleagues gained over years, learning as they operated on patients. For this reason, simulation very often helps the doctor and others engaged in health care train some techniques necessary during the work before they start working in a clinical environment. They have a chance of fine-tuning certain skills under nonclinical environment. On the other hand, simulation techniques are used in medical scientific research to know and explain the different biological processes that can be used for better patient treatment in the future. In this paper (Part I), the authors focused on the presentation of different types of simulators for the following purposes: test (conducted under laboratory conditions), training (incorporated into school, universities syllabus), diagnostic and therapeutic (within the hospital, clinics, private medical practice).

Simulations in medicine have already become the mainstream trend in the field of research and education. It includes simulations on simulators through which students are afforded the opportunity to train manual skills as well as series of simulations that enable one to train not just motor and manual skills alone. Some of these offer the student the basis to train decision-making process and conduct experiments that visualize biological phenomena that are important from a doctor’s perspective. The authors have done a review of medical computer simulations and found that simulations in medicine focus, in respect of the issues raised, on techniques and computer science aspects. The first one is discussed in the paper “Simulations in orthopedics and rehabilitation – Part I: Simulators.” The second one is discussed in this paper. In the paper, the authors focus on computer simulations, in the broadest sense, presenting them while taking into consideration the distinction between simulations used for the following purposes: test (conducted under laboratory conditions), training (incorporated into school, universities syllabus), and diagnostic and therapeutic (within the hospital, clinics, private medical practice).

The paper describes an application that allows to use a humanoid robot as a stutterer’s assistant and therapist. Auditory and visual feedback has been used in the therapy with a humanoid robot. For this purpose, the common method of “echo” was modified. The modification is that the speaker hears delayed speech sounds uttered by the robot. The sounds of speech coming from an external microphone are captured and delayed by a computer and then, using User Datagram Protocol (UDP), sent to the robot’s system and played in its speakers. This system allows the elimination of negative feedback and external sound field’s noise. The effect of this therapy is enhanced by the fact that, in addition to the effect, relating to the action of the delayed feedback, the speaker has company during the difficult process of speaking. Visual feedback has been realized as changes in the robot’s hand movements according to the shape of the speech signal envelope and possibility of controlling speech with a metronome effect.

Diabetic foot is one of the most severe complications of diabetes. Early diagnosis of this syndrome can ensure proper medical care and adequate treatment. Various image analysis methods can be used to speed up the diagnosis process, and automated diagnosis can be applied as a screening technique to reduce its cost. Introducing auxiliary diagnostic parameters may help to detect polyneuropathy or neuropathy, both of which often precede the appearance of diabetic foot syndrome. The present paper describes a study performed on a group of diabetic patients by analyzing plantar pressure distribution images. As part of this study, 2D discrete cosine transform (DCT) is computed for the forefoot and rearfoot regions of each diabetic subject in a group of 37 patients. Three new DCT-based parameters are introduced to help to detect polyneuropathy or at least indicate that the patient may have polyneuropathy without a time-consuming examination. The results indicate a certain relationship between these parameters and the presence of polyneuropathy. This information could be used in further diagnosis to prevent foot ulcers from developing in patients with diabetes.

This article presents the RoboCorp game. RoboCorp is a game with a purpose aimed at facilitating the annotation process of a natural language data. What makes this game unique and novel is the use of various mechanisms known from the popular Free to Play model to provide a fun and attractive gameplay. These mechanisms are presented and described in detail in the context of RoboCorp. The obtained annotation results are discussed and compared to other similar annotation tools available.

This paper discusses the level of acceptation of different kinds of computer games and the changes of the attitude depending on the respondents’ knowledge and context of playing activity. The forms of entertainment for the young generations are the extremely popular computer games. The main goal of this paper is to show the attitude of people toward the game industry and the correlation between the ways of spending spare time and the level of acceptation of computer games. The study is based on a questionnaire in which respondents could declare their opinions in open questions. The study included more than 60 parents, both men and women. It is not surprising that, despite the popularity of computer games, they still arouse much controversy, particularly as they relate to children. Collected parents’ opinions give the picture of the most important pros and cons of playing games and the goals and circumstances of the game activity. When respondents have been informed about term “serious games”, they have changed their previous perceptions of computer games, and the acceptance to the children’s activity grows.