Enhancing the conversational agent with an emotional support system for mental health digital therapeutics.

As psychological diseases become more prevalent and are identified as the leading cause of acquired disability, it is essential to assist people in improving their mental health. Digital therapeutics (DTx) has been widely studied to treat psychological diseases with the advantage of cost savings. Among the techniques of DTx, a conversational agent can interact with patients through natural language dialog and has become the most promising one. However, conversational agents' ability to accurately show emotional support (ES) limits their role in DTx solutions, especially in mental health support. One of the main reasons is that the prediction of emotional support systems does not extract effective information from historical dialog data and only depends on the data derived from one single-turn interaction with users. To address this issue, we propose a novel emotional support conversation agent called the STEF agent that generates more supportive responses based on a thorough view of past emotions. The proposed STEF agent consists of the emotional fusion mechanism and strategy tendency encoder. The emotional fusion mechanism focuses on capturing the subtle emotional changes throughout a conversation. The strategy tendency encoder aims at foreseeing strategy evolution through multi-source interactions and extracting latent strategy semantic embedding. Experimental results on the benchmark dataset ESConv demonstrate the effectiveness of the STEF agent compared with competitive baselines.

Socio-demographic factors, dental status, oral health knowledge and attitude, and health-related behaviors in dental visits among 12-year-old Shenzhen adolescents: a multilevel analysis.

BACKGROUND: Dental visits can provide education, prevention and treatment measures for teenagers, and help to form correct oral health knowledge and attitude. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of socio-demographic factors, dental status, oral health literacy, and health-related behaviors on dental visits in early 12-year-old adolescents. METHODS: 953 subjects aged 12 in Longhua district of Shenzhen were investigated. The questionnaire and clinical examination were applied in schools, and two-level logistic regression models were constructed to interpret the effect of individual and contextual factors on Shenzhen adolescents' dental visits. RESULTS: A total of 27.6% of the participants had not been to a dentist. After the multiple factors binary logistic regression analysis, it confirmed that the following variables: Shenzhen Hukou (OR 2.133, 95% CI 1.429-3.185), moderate caries (OR 1.404, 95% CI 1.022-1.928) and severe caries (OR 2.546, 95% CI 1.461-4.437), Angle Class II malocclusion (OR 1.703, 95% CI 1.134-2.556), sometimes or never toothbrushing (OR 2.985, 95% CI 1.491-5.975), dental floss usage (OR 1.829, 95% CI 1.250-2.677), having had a toothache within the last 12 months (OR 1.469, 95% CI 1.086-1.986), high knowledge attitude level (OR 1.570, 95% CI 1.106-2.229), moderate knowledge attitude level (OR 1.534, 95% CI 1.073-2.193), were associated factors for dental visit experience. CONCLUSIONS: The dental visits of 12-year-old children in Longhua district of Shenzhen is affected by multi-dimensional factors. It is suggested that oral health education should be strengthened, good oral hygiene habits should be cultivated, and the needs and utilization of oral health services for non-Shenzhen Hukou adolescents should be paid attention to, so as to effectively improve the overall oral health level of adolescents.

Traditional versus blended CPR training program: A randomized controlled non-inferiority study.

Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) training and its quality are critical in improving the survival rate of cardiac arrest. This randomized controlled study investigated the efficacy of a newly developed CPR training program for the public in a Taiwanese setting. A total of 832 adults were randomized to either a traditional or blended (18-minute e-learning plus 30-minute hands-on) compression-only CPR training program. The primary outcome was compression depth. Secondary outcomes included CPR knowledge test, practical test, quality of CPR performance, and skill retention. The mean compression depth was 5.21 cm and 5.24 cm in the blended and traditional groups, respectively. The mean difference in compression depth between groups was -0.04 (95% confidence interval -0.13 to infinity), demonstrating that the blended CPR training program was non-inferior to the traditional CPR training program in compression depth after initial training. Secondary outcome results were comparable between groups. Although the mean compression depth and rate were guideline-compliant, only half of the compressions were delivered with adequate depth and rate in both groups. CPR knowledge and skill retained similarly in both groups at 6 and 12 months after training. The blended CPR training program was non-inferior to the traditional CPR training program. However, there is still room for improvement in optimizing initial skill performance as well as skill retention. Clinical Trial Registration: NCT03586752; www.clinicaltrial.gov.

Dual-functional SiOC ceramics coating modified carbon fibers with enhanced microwave absorption performance.

Multi-functional carbon fiber (CF) based composites have great potential as new-type microwave absorption materials (MAMs). However, it was still a huge challenge to integrate antioxidation and MA properties into CF based composites. Herein, the SiOC ceramics coating modified carbon fibers (SiOC/CFs) were prepared by a polymer precursor pyrolysis method. The X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) revealed that the SiOC coating was composed of SiOC, SiO2, and amorphous carbon phases. The SiOC ceramics as dual-functional coating not only heightened the oxidation temperature from 415 °C to 890 °C, but also highly improved the microwave absorbing ability from -12.60 dB to -47.50 dB. The enhanced MA performance could be attributed to multiple reflections in the cross-linked structure, various polarization relaxation processes, and the favorable impedance matching effect. The SiOC ceramics coating as a semiconductor could suppress the skin effect originating from the cross-linked CF network, thus leading to a favorable impedance matching behavior.