A text-based conversational agent for asthma support: Mixed-methods feasibility study.

Objective: Millions of people in the UK have asthma, yet 70% do not access basic care, leading to the largest number of asthma-related deaths in Europe. Chatbots may extend the reach of asthma support and provide a bridge to traditional healthcare. This study evaluates 'Brisa', a chatbot designed to improve asthma patients' self-assessment and self-management. Methods: We recruited 150 adults with an asthma diagnosis to test our chatbot. Participants were recruited over three waves through social media and a research recruitment platform. Eligible participants had access to 'Brisa' via a WhatsApp or website version for 28 days and completed entry and exit questionnaires to evaluate user experience and asthma control. Weekly symptom tracking, user interaction metrics, satisfaction measures, and qualitative feedback were utilised to evaluate the chatbot's usability and potential effectiveness, focusing on changes in asthma control and self-reported behavioural improvements. Results: 74% of participants engaged with 'Brisa' at least once. High task completion rates were observed: asthma attack risk assessment (86%), voice recording submission (83%) and asthma control tracking (95.5%). Post use, an 8% improvement in asthma control was reported. User satisfaction surveys indicated positive feedback on helpfulness (80%), privacy (87%), trustworthiness (80%) and functionality (84%) but highlighted a need for improved conversational depth and personalisation. Conclusions: The study indicates that chatbots are effective for asthma support, demonstrated by the high usage of features like risk assessment and control tracking, as well as a statistically significant improvement in asthma control. However, lower satisfaction in conversational flexibility highlights rising expectations for chatbot fluency, influenced by advanced models like ChatGPT. Future health-focused chatbots must balance conversational capability with accuracy and safety to maintain engagement and effectiveness.

Resilient multi-agent RL: introducing DQ-RTS for distributed environments with data loss.

This paper proposes DQ-RTS, a novel decentralized Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning algorithm designed to address challenges posed by non-ideal communication and a varying number of agents in distributed environments. DQ-RTS incorporates an optimized communication protocol to mitigate data loss between agents. A comparative analysis between DQ-RTS and its decentralized counterpart Q-RTS, or Q-learning for Real-Time Swarms, demonstrates the superior convergence speed of DQ-RTS, achieving a remarkable speed-up factor ranging from 1.6 to 2.7 in scenarios with non-ideal communication. Moreover, DQ-RTS exhibits robustness by maintaining performance even when the agent population fluctuates, making it well-suited for applications requiring adaptable agent numbers over time. Additionally, extensive experiments conducted on various benchmark tasks validate the scalability and effectiveness of DQ-RTS, further establishing its potential as a practical solution for resilient Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning in dynamic distributed environments.

Sensing and Detection of Traffic Signs Using CNNs: An Assessment on Their Performance.

Traffic sign detection systems constitute a key component in trending real-world applications such as autonomous driving and driver safety and assistance. In recent years, many learning systems have been used to help detect traffic signs more accurately, such as ResNet, Vgg, Squeeznet, and DenseNet, but which of these systems can perform better than the others is debatable. They must be examined carefully and under the same conditions. To check the system under the same conditions, you must first have the same database structure. Moreover, the practice of training under the same number of epochs should be the same. Other points to consider are the language in which the coding operation was performed as well as the method of calling the training system, which should be the same. As a result, under these conditions, it can be said that the comparison between different education systems has been done under equal conditions, and the result of this analogy will be valid. In this article, traffic sign detection was done using AlexNet and XresNet 50 training methods, which had not been used until now. Then, with the implementation of ResNet 18, 34, and 50, DenseNet 121, 169, and 201, Vgg 16_bn and Vgg19_bn, AlexNet, SqueezeNet1_0, and SqueezeNet1_1 training methods under completely the same conditions. The results are compared with each other, and finally, the best ones for use in detecting traffic signs are introduced. The experimental results showed that, considering parameters train loss, valid loss, accuracy, error rate and Time, three types of CNN learning models Vgg 16_bn, Vgg19_bn and, AlexNet performed better for the intended purpose. As a result, these three types of learning models can be considered for further studies.

A pseudo-softmax function for hardware-based high speed image classification.

In this work a novel architecture, named pseudo-softmax, to compute an approximated form of the softmax function is presented. This architecture can be fruitfully used in the last layer of Neural Networks and Convolutional Neural Networks for classification tasks, and in Reinforcement Learning hardware accelerators to compute the Boltzmann action-selection policy. The proposed pseudo-softmax design, intended for efficient hardware implementation, exploits the typical integer quantization of hardware-based Neural Networks obtaining an accurate approximation of the result. In the paper, a detailed description of the architecture is given and an extensive analysis of the approximation error is performed by using both custom stimuli and real-world Convolutional Neural Networks inputs. The implementation results, based on CMOS standard-cell technology, compared to state-of-the-art architectures show reduced approximation errors.