Young pediatric patients who undergo venipuncture or capillary blood sampling often experience high levels of pain and anxiety. This often results in distressed young patients and their parents, increased treatment times, and a higher workload for healthcare professionals. Social robots are a new and …

A hospital visit is often an anxious and uncertain event for patients and their relatives. Patients are often concerned about a diagnosis and/or the treatment of their disease in an outpatient or inpatient setting. In these hospital settings, the impact of the environment on patients is still not well …

CC-BY-NC-ND Taylor & Francis Online, Reading & Writing Quarterly The main focus of this study was the role of attention in children with dyslexia (n = 137), who participated in a literacy-remediation program. Prior to and during four assessment moments (pretest and follow-ups 1–3), the attentional …

Purpose – As hospitals are now being designed with an increasing number of single rooms or cubicles, the individual preference of patients with respect to social contact is of great interest. The purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of the experience of patients in an outpatient infusion …

Hospitalisation is stressful for children. Play material is often offered for distraction and comfort. Weexplored how contact with social robot PLEO could positively affect a child’s well-being. To this end, we performed a multiple case study on the paediatric ward of two hospitals. Child life specialists …

Natalie Bookchin’s work is synonymous with the Video Vortex network and the rise of YouTube. Whereas we got to know each other’s work in the turbulent net.art late nineties years, this particular story started with a DVD I got from Natalie, containing The Trip (2008), a video collection of early YouTube …

Teachers and students need good learning environments to perform well. In this study it is pre-supposed that the spatial properties of classrooms can contribute to the quality of the educational process. Thermal, acoustic and visual conditions and indoor air quality (IAQ) may be extremely powerful in …

10 tips to improve study performance by gaining focus and getting less distracted. These tips have been compiled on the basis of scientific insights from cognitive psychology, neuropsychology and educational science and from our own research into stress, engagement and study performance.

Super Bowl commercials teach us how to conceive of surveillance. While Apple promises to fight Big Brother with a personal computer, Coca-Cola invites us to think different, i.e. positively about security cameras. The whitewashing of surveillance accompanies the ‘big brotherization’ of Apple. However, …

Disillusion with social media only stimulates the search for ever more refined techniques of manipulation. Detoxing won’t help, writes Geert Lovink: it is collective action, not will power, that can free us from the permanent state of distraction.