Browsing by Projects - Department "Department of Applied Data Science"

Education is highly important because it brings knowledge and skills essential for survival in the world. A large number of students across the world have developmental dyslexia, which is a specific learning disability affecting reading and writing skills. Some researchers suggested that around 17% of the world’s population experience dyslexia. Detecting dyslexia is the first step towards clinical or teaching interventions for children with dyslexia. In suspected cases, referrals are given to children to undertake dyslexia assessment at assessment centres. However, the waiting time for dyslexia assessment services is often long, the assessment procedure is highly complicated, and the accuracy of the assessment is often subject to teacher biases...

Developmental speech sound disorder is a common communication disorder among young children and highly affects early childhood development and even their future educational, professional, and social success. Based on the literature review, researchers reported that at most, 24.6% of young children in the world were estimated to have speech delay or speech sound disorder (SSD). Among these children, 48.1% of 3- to 10-year-old children and 24.4% of 11- to 17-year-old children had speech sound problems only. Children with developmental SSD do not have other symptoms, and they can improve their speech intelligibility after regular training. Since Cantonese is primarily a spoken language, and written Cantonese is not acceptable in standard written Chinese, it increases the difficulty for young children in Hong Kong to learn and understand spoken Cantonese, especially for Cantonese-speaking children with SSD. Training materials for Cantonese-speaking children with SSD are much less available compared with other languages.

Once children with SSD are identified, speech-language pathologists (SLPs) select initial therapy programs for children with regular review and adjustments on therapy. An appropriate treatment program is carried out by SLPs, parents, and teachers together. The success of therapy highly relies on the effectiveness of long-term home training. There is a need for beyond-clinic measurements to support parents to accompany their children during speech therapy training at home, and to provide SLPs with better insight into the training progress of children with SSD. Furthermore, due to the insufficient number of SLPs in many places, more resources to support the work of SLPs are required; for example, helping SLPs to collect and understand the correct conditions of patients quickly during short in-clinical treatment periods. At the same, children might feel bored during long-term regular training at home and would therefore require motivation and encouragement from their parents.

To address the above problems, I propose an AI mobile app to act as a speech language pathology robot to provide training to children with SSD at home. The mobile app has a cartoon face, collects visual data from a camera and voice data from a microphone, and provides visual instructions through a screen and audio instructions through speakers. Therefore, the mobile app can act as a robot. However, parents do not need to buy the robot or learn how to use it – they simply download the mobile app, which can be accessed easily in a home setting. The mobile app can automatically monitor the training progress of children with SSD by collecting video data and voice data, and by analyzing these data in an intelligent cloud-based platform. Additionally, the analyzed results in the cloud can be used by SLPs for in-clinic consultation sessions, thus SLPs can understand the training progress of the children easily, quickly, and accurately, and provide better therapy for the children.

This research project aims at investigating the possibility of employing Urie Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model (1977, 1979) for the holistic analysis of gaming addiction and the development of a prevention programme in the context of burgeoning esports culture, supported by the massive promotion of e-entertainment and e-gaming entrepreneurs and the influence of a newly-evolved community of Key-Opinion Leaders (KOL). Existing models for gaming addiction include Kimberly Young’s model for Internet Addiction (Young, 1996, 2004) which focuses on personal aspects such as a preoccupation with the internet, loss of control, a resistance to cutting down on internet use, the jeopardizing or risking the loss of important aspects in life and using virtual reality as a form of escapism, Mark Griffiths’ model that aims at providing a more specific diagnosis of gaming addiction that makes a distinction between professional involvement in e-sports (e.g. Griffiths et al., 2016, Griffiths, 2019) and the current diagnostic criteria for Gaming Disorder and Hazardous Gaming from the World Health Organization 11th Revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) (World Health Organization, 2018). This study intends to extend the scope of analysis by adopting the holistic bioecological model (Bronfenbrenner, 1977, 1979) that emphasizes the need for ground work that analyses the interaction between various levels including the micro-level (neurological, physiological and motivational aspects), the meso-exo level (the meso-level mainly focuses on those who are in direct contact with the subject, for example, family, school and service providers; while the exo-level refers to stakeholders that are not directly related to the subject, but are exerting an indirect influence on them, for example, stakeholders in entertainment, e-gaming and e-sports), and the macro-chrono level (the macro-level is more concerned with policy and culture from a geographical perspective, while the chrono-level is concerned with historical-cultural changes over time). By analyzing e-gaming and esports according to Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model, a holistic intervention programme that integrates intervention at various levels could be developed. This study is divided into three phases, namely the Problem Identification Phase (meta-analysis of existing literature on gaming, e-gaming, e-entertainment, e-sports, internet addiction, internet gaming addiction, and prevention; and experiments on micro-level variables including in the neurological, physiological and motivational domains), the Programme Development Phase (interviewing various stakeholders related to the meso-; exo-; and marco-levels; and discourse analysis of macro- and chrono-level trends), and the Implementation-Evaluation Phase (provision of preventive programmes for e-gaming addiction for secondary school students, evaluation of impact, and the development of a sustainable development knowledge platform that allows the uploading of articles, announcement of events, downloading of material, and provides a forum for discussion.). Output from the project, which will include best practices, toolboxes and assessment protocols, will be available to researchers, practitioners and the general public to promote the culture necessary for the prevention of gaming addiction in the context of a burgeoning e-sports phenomenon in Hong Kong.

Social media are a necessity in modern life. According to a recent Pew study (2018), over 80% of teenagers and post-Millennials said that social media made them feel more connected, built stronger friendships, provided emotional support, and exposed them to a more diverse world. However, previous research suggested that the excessive and compulsive engagement with FDS1 (Nov 2019) 12 social media and their users’ perceived need to be constantly connected to social media are considered problematic (Kuss & Griffiths, 2017). Moreover, recent research showed a potential association between problematic social media use and psychiatric disorders (Hussain & Griffiths, 2018). Although there are high levels of public, scholarly, and clinical interest in the relationship between mental health and the use of digital media, there are three major shortcomings in the existing research on problematic social media use: 1) the amount of time spent on social media as an indicator of the problematic use of social media; 2) the focus on individual attributes as antecedents, whereas external factors are overlooked; and (3) few causal mechanisms in examining how the use of social media might affect psychological distress (PD). Hence, the variables of usage and frequency may have failed to capture the nuances of specific social media engagements. In addition, there is little knowledge about which specific social media engagements are associated with PD, emotional problems, and a range of other non-specific declines in mental health...