Brighton and Hove City Council

BackgroundIt is increasingly commonplace to involve relevant professionals and people with lived experience within healthcare research. Although valuable case studies regarding such involvement exist, there is currently a paucity of case studies highlighting the professional and personal impacts of uniting a diverse group of professionals and people with lived experience within the development of new, theory-based interventions. The aim of this paper is to provide insight into the impacts of involving a diverse range of individuals, unified within a single steering group, within the development of a new, theory-based, paediatric speech and language therapy intervention (“Supporting Words and Sounds” - SWanS). By describing the involvement process in detail and providing our personal insights, we hope our recommendations will be of use to future healthcare researchers.Main bodyOur project steering group consists of two people with lived experience (an adult with Developmental Language Disorder-DLD, a parent of a child with DLD), three specialist NHS speech and language therapists (including one university lecturer with equality and diversity expertise), and two individuals working in the education sector (a specialist teacher and a bilingual educational support worker). Group members have been involved across the 4 phase intervention development process. Tools such as the PiiAF (Public involvement impact Assessment Framework) have guided our personal and professional reflections on our individual experiences of being in a diverse steering group responsible for developing a new and complex theory-based intervention.ConclusionWe found that having a diverse range of people unified in a singular intervention development steering group had unexpected benefits. Learning from each other has enriched professional practice and developed individuals’ confidence in terms of playing an active role in research. Our structured reflection has implications for future intervention development research, by highlighting that the provision of a safe, supportive space and nurturing of shared values is key when involving a diverse range of parties. Such contexts promote sustained involvement and therefore have longer term implications for increasing the relevance of the research for those it is aiming to help.

People with HIV are an ageing population with an increased risk of cognitive impairment. Although cognitive impairment is dependent upon assessment, the acceptability of screening for cognitive impairment is unclear. This study aimed to explore the views of people with HIV and healthcare workers regarding routine screening for cognitive impairment. In-depth individual qualitative interviews were conducted with purposively sampled people with HIV and focus groups of healthcare workers from a UK HIV service. Verbatim pseudonymized transcripts were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis supported by NVivo. Twenty people with HIV were interviewed and 12 healthcare workers participated in three focus groups. People with HIV were concerned about developing cognitive issues and were receptive to routine screening. Screening was seen as relevant and an important part of managing health in older age. Healthcare workers expressed concerns regarding the capacity of HIV services to implement routine screening and questioned the validity of screening measures used. People with HIV felt that screening and subsequent detection of cognitive impairment, if present, may help them to prepare for future issues and promote active management strategies and care pathways that would support cognitive health. People with HIV felt that screening should be brief and delivered by the HIV service and that they should be given a choice of administration method. Indications of cognitive impairment detected by a brief screening assessment should be discussed face to face and followed up with a comprehensive assessment. People with HIV are concerned about cognitive impairment and would welcome regular screening for this as part of the holistic care provided by the HIV team. Both people with HIV and healthcare workers would like more information on cognitive impairment, its screening and ways to support cognitive health.

In modern-era video streaming systems, videos are streamed and displayed on a wide range of devices. Such devices vary from large-screen UHD and HDTVs to medium-screen Desktop PCs and Laptops to smaller-screen devices such as mobile phones and tablets. It is well known that a video is perceived differently when displayed on different devices. The viewing experience for a particular video on smaller screen devices such as smartphones and tablets, which have high pixel density, will be different with respect to the case where the same video is played on a large screen device such as a TV or PC monitor. Being able to model such relative differences in perception effectively can help in the design of better quality metrics and in the design of more efficient and optimized encoding profiles, leading to lower storage, encoding, and transmission costs. However, to the best of our knowledge, open-source datasets providing subjective scores for the same content when viewed on multiple devices with different screen sizes do not exist, thus limiting a proper evaluation of the existing quality metrics for such multi-screen video streaming applications. This paper addresses this research gap by presenting a new, open-source dataset consisting of subjective ratings for various encoded video sequences of different resolutions and bitrates (quality) when viewed on three devices of varying screen sizes: TV, Tablet, and Mobile. Along with the subjective scores, an evaluation of some of the most famous and commonly used open-source objective quality metrics is also presented. It is observed that the performance of the metrics varies a lot across different device types, with the recently standardized ITU-T P.1204.3 Model, on average, outperforming their full-reference counterparts. The dataset consisting of the videos, along with their subjective and objective scores, is available freely on Github 1 .

In recent years, we have seen significant progress in advanced image and video upscaling techniques, sometimes called super-resolution, or AI-based upscaling. Such algorithms are now broadly available in the forms of software SDKs, as well as functions natively supported by modern graphics cards. However, to take advantage of such technologies in video streaming applications, one needs to (a) add support for super-resolution upscaling in the video rendering chain, (b) develop means for quantifying the effects of using different upscaling techniques on perceived quality, and c) modify streaming clients to use such more advanced scaling techniques in a way that leads to improvements in quality, efficiency, or both.

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Bjontegaard Delta Bitrate (BD-BR), proposed in 2001, remains one of the most widely and also misunderstood tools for the computation and comparison of codec compression efficiency of two or more video codecs. This paper presents three different studies evaluating different open-source implementations, extensions and alternatives on two different datasets, considering three objective quality metrics (PSNR, SSIM and VMAF) and subjective quality ratings.