How Paro the robot seal is being utilized to help United kingdom dementia individuals | Andrew Griffiths

Ron Abbott, 85, is sitting on a bench in the courtyard backyard of a Sheffield hospital with what looks like a baby seal on his knee. He is searching into its eyes, lost in a world, then he brushes its whiskers and tickles its nose with a slow finger. “Itchy-itchy-itchy-coo,” he says. The seal wriggles, gazes back at him and tends to make little, seal-like noises. Abbott’s smile exhibits his pleasure.

Beside him is Claire Jepson, an occcupational therapist at The Grange, an NHS specialist assessment unit for dementia sufferers.

A single of the most significant issues employees encounter during the four- to eight-week evaluation time period is managing distressed and disturbed behaviour. Medication is one particular recourse. Paro is an additional.

Paro is a robot seal, modelled unashamedly on a little one harp seal, both in terms of seems to be and the plaintive cry that it tends to make. Its Japanese creater, Takanori Shibata, chose it because folks are unlikely to have unhelpful memories of actual seals. It also mitigates towards the charge that vulnerable individuals are getting deceived into believing that this is a actual animal, that this cute cartoon of a creature is anything at all other than synthetics and circuitry, and not flesh and blood.

Paro has some artificial intelligence. It has the ability to “find out” and bear in mind its own identify, and it can learn the behaviour that final results in a pleasing stroking response and repeat it. Paro is not new – the robot has been all around since 2004, which in terms of robotics helps make it ancient background. But clinically, that is what tends to make it so interesting – Paro has been about prolonged enough to give some thought of whether or not it really functions. Which is why the effectiveness of the robotic seal in a dementia care setting is now currently being evaluated in a joint venture involving Sheffield Overall health and Social Care NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Sheffield.

“My perspective is that something that makes folks come to feel comforted and far more at ease with the world is really worth it when individuals are in the later on phases of dementia,” says Gail Mountain, professor of overall health service analysis at the university of Sheffield.

With dementia affecting 800,000 men and women in the United kingdom and numbers set to double more than twenty years, the Grange introduced Paro final 12 months. There are some 3,000 Paro seals globally, the vast majority in Japan exactly where they have even been employed to befriend earthquake survivors. There are about 10 in the United kingdom two of which are at the Grange.

“When I very first noticed Paro on YouTube I thought it was extremely twee,” says Jepson, as she prepares to give me a demonstration. We are in a quiet rest spot of the ward and the seal sits on the table among us, inanimate, eyes closed, looking like a child’s cuddly toy. But once it is switched on, it is obviously not a toy. Its eyes are remarkably affecting, and as it moves and responds to your touch there is a musculature apparent in its face that conspires to give it a genuine “residing” come to feel.

Select it up and it is a surprisingly hefty bit of kit. On your knee you know it is there, and weighing 3kg it feels comparable to a canine of a comparable dimension. This fat gives it a gravitas, and as it waddles and flaps its flippers as you stroke it, the total thing vibrates.

Jepson employs Paro to inspire social behaviour, she explains. “There is a good deal of humour with Paro. A lot of of the sufferers anthropomorphise the seal, enjoy pretending that it is a true, residing creature, with all the related foibles. As well as the nurturing: ‘Let’s look after it and stop it crying’, a whole lot of people refer to its bodily functions,” says Jepson. “They will say [as a joke]: ‘Oh it’s farted on me!’ or ‘Don’t you go peeing on my leg!’ and then people will laugh, and the jokes will come in, and it creates a good social interaction.” Encouraging social interaction and calming distressed individuals are proving to be two of Paro’s most promising utilizes.

Jepson uses it in structured therapeutic sessions and admits that she has “fallen for this fabulous bit of kit”.

“It is a robot companion. It is about empowerment,” she says. “It enables individuals to even now truly feel a sense of achievement, a sense of identity. They grow to be the carer alternatively of the cared for.”

The use of companion robots and assistive technology in care for older individuals is in its infancy. Toyota, for example, is experimenting with assistive robots that can lift and carry patients to alleviate risks for carers. But they are not with no controversy. Two concerns are that users are deceived, believing that the robot is genuine, and that it infantalises them, demeaning patients’ dignity.

At the Grange, Abbott appeared convinced that the seal was real, but Pam, yet another dementia patient enjoying with the robot, was clearly mindful that as seals go, it was a fraud.

With the government unveiling the UK’s first official robotics method final week, which could lead to an enhanced use of robots in our every day lives, Amanda Sharkey, a senior lecturer in Sheffield University’s division of laptop science, warns: “I believe we require to be a bit mindful about human interactions with robots, so we do not finish up with previous men and women becoming looked soon after by robots and nothing else. So I think you could misuse Paro in the sense of: we have given this previous lady the seal to search right after and now we don’t have to go and talk to her.”

Initial outcomes of the study are due out subsequent month. Mountain would like to area Paros in a lot more dementia care environments. But as each and every Paro fees £4,000, like a day’s coaching, funding is crucial.

Abbott’s daughter, Sarah O’Neill, 43, believes that if tools such as Paro can assist individuals with dementia to find some peace then they should be utilised.

“Some folks could think, ‘Oh, he is enjoying with a doll and that isn’t truly what an adult should do’, but they have misplaced so considerably of the core of what can make them a ‘grown-up’ adult, I do not truly think that should be utilized,” says O’Neill.

“Basically, when you see somebody in such a distressing state, it is horrible for you and it is horrible for them. Who knows what is taking place in Dad’s brain chemistry? But if something can just stop that for a minute and make him smile, or laugh, then brilliant.”

How Paro the robot seal is being utilized to help United kingdom dementia individuals | Andrew Griffiths

Entrepreneurial Profile - Scott Griffiths, 18|8 Hair Salons

In this second of my entrepreneurial profile series I’m going to profile Scott Griffiths, a buddy and enterprise colleague from my executive MBA plan at the UCLA Anderson organization college.

My last profile was of Matt Remuzzi, owner of CapForge.  Matt is a quiet, thoughtful, understated man with a dry wit, a very good listener who generally opines when he feels he has one thing essential to say.  In contract to Matt, Scott is a lively, gregarious, boisterous man given to loud aloha shirts and lengthy sea, interesting stories.  My level in drawing this distinction is that I’ve noticed all types of personality sorts in productive entrepreneurs, from introverts (on the Myers Briggs scale I go as far on the introverted scale as it goes) to extroverts, charismatic revenue individuals to people with various degrees of Aspergers syndrome.

Scott has been an entrepreneur for nicely over twenty many years. He has a quite powerful advertising and product sales background, and his newest and most productive gig has been as the co-founder of the 18|eight chain of men’s hair salons.  Scott started this venture in 2001 right after the MBA system and had a series of problems and setbacks, but his business has dramatically taken off by means of his choice to group with a franchise group and franchise out his companies.  In 2013 his goal was to promote thirty franchise retailers and he doubled that objective by offering 60 merchants.  In buy to begin this business Scott invested his retirement money and did a close friends and household fundraising.

Like nearly every entrepreneur, Scott has had his successes and failures.  His successes have included the 18|eight idea and execution, the Mitch for Guys brand, the Crystal Cruises brand, and the Vertu brand for Nokia.  His failures have included a microbrew known as Rhino chasers.  He had clear lessons discovered from this failure, nevertheless, and notes that the speedy growth of the Rhino Chasers brand triggered him to burn up via all of his friends and household funds and go to a Venture Capital company for money.  The VC firm demanded that he place in an “MBA CEO”, who very rapidly drove the company into bankruptcy, a story that I have heard from several entrepreneurs more than the many years.  This failure prompted Scott to go to the UCLA plan and get an MBA, to which he attributes significantly of his reason for accomplishment in his most current venture.

Scott is a brand and marketing guy by nature, but also counts as his core strengths a robust correct-left brain balance, (he describes this idea in his guide “Beyond Genius”), his tenacity, the capability to visualize one thing in his head as well as the information of how that picture will perform out in time, a “strong enough” capability in finance and math to be capable to construct numbers all around situations, the ability to articulate these situations in a compelling way to others, and the capability to stimulate and orchestrate other people.

His weaknesses are typical of a lot of entrepreneurs I’ve met.  In his words he “doesn’t endure fools”, can be impatient and arrogant.  Numerous successful (and unsuccessful) entrepreneurs I’ve met have these same weaknesses, although many would not label them as weaknesses.

With respect to his success with the 18|eight brand, Scott credits currently being a pupil of Starbucks and Apple – he tries to emulate and bring characteristics of people icons into 18|eight, specifically Steve Jobs’ layout genius and Howard Schultz’ revenue and advertising genuis.  Scott states that “Jobs was a enormous fan of style ‘design helps make a difference’, and that Schultz practices “retail and detail” to develop a merchandise that is better than the sum of the components, generating an expertise all around a commoditized cup of coffee.  Scott credits his success with 18|8 with emulating the two of those iconic firms.

“Men shouldn’t be going to a women’s salon” – with that as a premise, Scott came up with a organization idea.  “A guy spends $ 40-60 every single two-3 weeks to go to a women’s salon and really do not want to be there, so I decided to conceive what a guy would want to locate in an best men’s salon.”  Scott invested 10 many years creating and proving his notion, and the final couple of years perfecting the model for franchising.  Howard Schultz continually looked at the buyer knowledge and enhanced upon it, a practice Scott also emulates.  Scott’s self stated fashion of entrepreneurism is to create a brand. He started out doing this as a advisor, made the decision that he desired to do it for himself, and now has had a amount of successes and setbacks in the approach, and a very profitable ongoing enterprise.

In future blogs I’ll concentrate on other entrepreneurial profiles.  My purpose in carrying out this is to give enough examples to aspiring entrepreneurs to inspire them to comply with their own ideas to produce their own organizations.

Entrepreneurial Profile - Scott Griffiths, 18|8 Hair Salons

Dr Vivian Griffiths - obituary

Christened Fred, but always known by his second identify, Vivian, Griffiths was born at Hove, Sussex, on Might 26 1922. He was one particular of four young children of a Scottish mom, and a Welsh father who, as a soldier in the Very first Globe War, had been gassed. Vivian was educated in Sevenoaks and, when his dad and mom refused to let him join up at the outbreak of the 2nd Planet War, took a occupation in a bank, delaying the begin of his education with the RAF until finally May possibly 1940.

Already displaying the prickly but intuitive character that his sufferers would later on bear in mind, he flew 66 sorties in Hurricanes above north-west Europe. After a single mission he was forced to radio an accompanying Free French pilot in a Spitfire who failed to set a return program to Britain: “If you really don’t flip back I’ll shoot you down!” The Frenchman obeyed.

Griffiths served with No 3 Squadron, based at North Weald, then with No 607 Squadron, flying from Scotland, from Martlesham, Suffolk, and then Manston in Kent .

Following transfer to India in 1942 and converting to Spitfires at Alipore, Calcutta, he joined a Photographic Reconnaissance Unit, creating 44 sorties across the Arakan mountain selection, each and every time completing eight straight and level runs with wing-mounted cameras in excess of targets in enemy-held jungle. He carried a cyanide capsule in situation of capture. He flew both at 27,000ft or beneath the region’s immense periodic cloud formations, at times going perilously reduced.

Griffiths photographed the landing grounds for the Airborne Landing Force in preparation for Operation Thursday in 1944, when Brigadier Orde Wingate’s Chindits went in by gliders towed by Dakota aircraft. By the time the operation really got underneath way, even so, Griffiths had succumbed to amoebic dysentery and been invalided house.

In the latter component of the war Griffiths worked in RAF hospitals at Halton, Buckinghamshire, and Northallerton, Yorkshire, and it was with that experience that he was accepted in 1946 as a healthcare student at the Middlesex Hospital, London. He qualified in 1953.

He manufactured obstetrics and gynaecology his early speciality, and was elected to the Royal School of Surgeons. He then went into common practice at Hove in 1959, prior to moving in 1962 to London, first to Tooting Bec, when he had a practice in Clapham, and then to Albert Bridge Street, when his practice was in Chelsea.

Vivian Griffiths is survived by his wife and by their daughter and four sons. Shortly right after his marriage, at the end of the war, he drove his wife home from a ball in Brighton fully in reverse gear for 3 miles simply because the clutch of their Austin vehicle had caught. In his forties he discovered to play the piano, but stopped when at Grade 5 he made the decision that concert-level proficiency would elude him.

Dr Vivian Griffiths, born Might 26 1922, died December 30 2013

Dr Vivian Griffiths - obituary

Why green is very good for you | Jay Griffiths

‘What is it that transpires to the human thoughts in the normal world that no study can ever quite grasp and pin down?’ Photograph: OJO Pictures/Rex Characteristics

Depression. Its colour is grey. Of all the psyche’s pains, it is the dullest, the most stagnant ache. It is stale with unhappiness, misery at its most lifeless. Typically, it is compounded by the reduced-degree nerve-eroding hum of continual anxiousness.

A new examine illustrates that individuals in urban regions who dwell near parks and green spaces suffer much less depression. Taking socioeconomic standing into account, the study showed that those who “move to greener places have significant and extended-lasting improvements in mental well being”.

Green is very good for you. Ecotherapy, supported by Thoughts between other folks, is a type of treatment method proven to be successful for mental wellness issues. In my last book, Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape, I explored some of the numerous studies which display the useful results for the mental well being of young children of possessing accessibility to green places: from how taking part in on asphalt appeared to create a lot more conflict compared to taking part in in normal environments, to the value of pets, and the great effects of adventure treatment and forest colleges. Quite small green things is needed. Small but not nothing at all.

There are studies which hyperlink proximity to green area with bodily fitness but, though workout is very good for depressives, there is much more going on when it comes to mental health and nature. Our minds are not lego sets developed for a Bauhaus world. We are not machines we are animals. Incontrovertibly so, and a lead to for celebration. We happily use the phrase human nature to describe our humanity, and can do so without having the fatuous dualism which always seeks to oppose nature to culture. The prevalence of psychological well being distress tells us 1 issue as a society: we have to be kinder to our human nature and our animal bodies.

If a canine is caged indoors and not allowed to perform outdoors, its owners may be prosecuted for not allowing the puppy to “express normal behaviour” in accordance to the law. We humans, wanting outside greenery, are expressing normal behaviour and ought to have rights equal to dogs.

What is it that happens to the human mind in the organic planet that no investigation can ever fairly grasp and pin down? The research, taken collectively, show the truth that the green things is good for the psyche, but they can seldom say specifically why this is the situation. And in that margin, several of us who know the two depression and a enjoy for nature might come to feel our way, tendril by tendril, like ivy asking inquiries of the gaps amongst the railings and the branch.

In depression, the psyche turns inwards, feeding on itself, for the ill mind demands focus as much as the unwell body does. In green spaces, although, the thoughts is repeatedly invited to turn its gaze outward, to discover, see and hear. When the wonderful psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl articulated Man’s Search for Meaning, one particular of the areas of that means he describes as existence-conserving is that of simply getting attentive to, and appreciative of, the natural globe. No solution. No cost. No profit. Nature takes us outdoors ourselves, making us convivial with the carnival green of the vivid and turning world.

Nature is good medicine for the sick psyche. Nature doesn’t judge and can not lie, and individuals are healing attributes. Judgmentalism and dishonesty are two responses from the outdoors globe that depressives rightly abhor. Many depressives really feel torn among needing business and needing solitude: nature supplies each, at the identical time.

What else happens, then, in this meeting of mind and green? Lifestyle happens: wriggly, thriving and green. In all its turning cycles – a season, a snail, a whirlpool of leaves in the wind – the sheer liveliness of the green globe is great for the thoughts, for our psyches are life-lit, and on the lookout for all the important indications, written in green.

Why green is very good for you | Jay Griffiths