Edinburgh College is a further and higher education institution with campuses in Edinburgh and Midlothian, Scotland. It serves the Edinburgh Region, Edinburgh, East Lothian and Midlothian, and is the largest college in Scotland. It was formed on 1 October 2012 as part of the merger of Edinburgh's Jewel and Esk, Telford, and Stevenson colleges.
Photo-based reminiscence can support well-being in older adults, yet most systems remain text-driven and offer little real-time adaptivity. We first conduct expert interviews to derive design considerations for accessibility, cultural fit, and safe emotional engagement. We then implemented Eye2Recall, an intelligent conversational interface that converts users’ gazes on old photos into mixed-initiative prompts for a large language model (LLM). We evaluated it in a pilot study with 12 older adults. Participants reported low-effort, smooth interactions, and perceived the agent’s questions as aligned with what they were looking at. Immediately after use, self-reported positive mood increased and negative mood decreased. Interviews further indicated that gaze-driven prompts helped retrieve concrete details and supported reflective storytelling. Our contribution is a concrete mechanism for gaze-to-prompt adaptivity that operationalizes mixed-initiative dialogue for older adults’ reminiscence experience.
This study establishes AI Interaction as a transdisciplinary meta-framework—a systematic approach to understanding how artificial intelligence (AI) engages with human activity, social structures, and natural environments. In contrast to existing highly specialised fields, AI Interaction advances a systemic paradigm that unites philosophical foundations, methodological frameworks, and the practical dimensions of AI safety and ethics. In contrast to existing highly specialised fields, AI Interaction advances a systemic paradigm that unites philosophical foundations, methodological frameworks, and the practical dimensions of AI safety and ethics. AI Interaction is not a mere sum of existing interdisciplinary studies but a transdisciplinary meta-framework that integrates philosophical reasoning with empirical methodologies for analysing AI’s systemic engagement with the world. The proposed methodological nucleus is grounded in dialectical materialism, enriched by complementary approaches suited to the analysis of dynamic and interdependent systems. The article articulates criteria for the prioritisation of research trajectories and delineates key domains of reflection, including ethics, ontology, transformations in labour, ecological sustainability, and the integration of AI into healthcare. The overarching aim is to elaborate practical instruments that enable the harmonious co‑evolution of AI and society, preserving a critical equilibrium between technological advancement and sustained philosophical reflection. The framework has direct applications in AI safety, verification, and human–AI collaboration.
Background:The emergency department represents a potentially valuable opportunity to support smoking cessation. Evidence is lacking around the use of e-cigarettes in opportunistic settings like the emergency department. Objective:To undertake a randomised controlled trial in people who smoke attending United Kingdom emergency departments, testing a brief intervention which included provision of an e-cigarette versus signposting to smoking cessation services, assessing smoking abstinence. Design:A two-arm pragmatic, multicentre, parallel-group, individually randomised, controlled superiority trial with an internal pilot, economic evaluation and mixed-methods process evaluation. Setting:Six emergency departments across England and Scotland. Participants:Adults who smoked daily, who were attending the emergency department for medical treatment or accompanying someone attending for medical treatment, were invited to participate. People were excluded if they had an expired carbon monoxide of < 8 parts per million, required immediate medical treatment, were in police custody, had a known allergy to nicotine, were daily e-cigarette users, were considered not to have capacity to consent or had already taken part in the trial. Intervention:Brief stop smoking advice, e-cigarette starter kit and referral to stop smoking services. Main outcome measures:The primary outcome was biochemically validated sustained abstinence at 6 months. Those lost to follow-up, or not providing biochemical verification, were considered not to be abstinent. Secondary outcomes were: self-reported 7-day smoking abstinence, number of quit attempts, number of cigarettes per day, nicotine dependence and incidence of self-reported dry cough or mouth or throat irritation. Results:At 6 months, of 972 participants randomised, biochemically verified smoking abstinence was 7.2% in the intervention group and 4.1% in the control group (percentage difference = 3.3%) (95% confidence interval 0.3 to 6.3; p = 0.032) [relative risk 1.76 (95% confidence interval 1.03 to 3.01)]. Self-reported 7-day abstinence at 6 months was 23.3% in the intervention group and 12.9% in the control group (percentage difference = 10.6%) (95% confidence interval 5.86 to 15.41; p < 0.001) [relative risk 1.80 (95% confidence interval 1.36 to 2.38)]. Daily e-cigarette use was 39.4% in the intervention group and 17.5% in the control group at 6 months. No serious adverse events related to taking part in the trial were reported. The economic evaluation found the intervention was likely to be cost-effective, judged by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence threshold. The process evaluation found the intervention to be acceptable to both staff delivering it and participants receiving it. The brief nature of the intervention was highly adaptable to context, and interviews demonstrated how the intervention supported different pathways towards cessation. Limitations:The inability to blind participants or researchers, the relatively low level of biochemical verification due to the nature of the population recruited and the fact that those in the control group did not receive usual care. Conclusions:An opportunistic smoking cessation intervention comprising brief advice, an e-cigarette starter kit and referral to stop smoking services is effective for sustained smoking abstinence with few reported adverse events. Future work:Future work will include testing other behaviour change interventions in the emergency department and adapting the Cessation of Smoking Trial in the emergency department intervention for other settings. Funding:This synopsis presents independent research funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Health Technology Assessment programme as award number NIHR129438.
Qualitative research has effectively captured the views and experiences of stakeholders and revealed the degree of suffering associated with eczema. We aimed to amplify the voices of people living with eczema and to convey this message beyond academic manuscripts to a broader audience, using an ambitious, multidisciplinary patient and public engagement project led by creative researchers. We have worked with patient communities to find meaningful, thought-provoking ways to record and amplify eczema voices, using previously reported and newly collected quotes to describe their experiences. A combination of creative visualization methods, professional voice actors, synthetic speech synthesis and sound artists has been used in our project called ‘surface echoes’. A script for participatory performance and a digital audio of the powerful and moving quotes is available for public release. Themes presented in this work include hurtful comments about visual appearance and the mental burden of embarrassment and shame (‘it’s a kind of social handicap during those periods when it is bad’); pain as well as itch; lack of clarity around topical and other treatments (‘I think this “trial and error” is a very primitive form of medicine’); the challenges of communicating effectively with healthcare professionals; and the morbidity associated with sleep deprivation (‘It’s impossible to be on sick leave just because you are tired. So I carried on throughout the spring and then I completely collapsed’). The participants also reported positive and validating experiences: ‘I felt listened to…it was a conversation’ and their imagination of a better future, for example, ‘…consistent advice about caring for your skin’ and ‘…taking the stress out of it’. We have tested the output material with a range of stakeholders from groups that patients with eczema identified as being important, including medical and nursing colleagues, academic researchers and the general public. Feedback gathered from these tests will be used to capture the impact of the material. This work has been designed to raise awareness, promote discussion, reduce stigma and increase understanding of eczema. The presentation to healthcare workers has been specifically requested by the participants whose voices are amplified, to guide an empathic treatment approach, improve discussion with professionals at all levels and inform future clinical research priorities. This work was funded by a ScotPen Wellcome Engagement Award and conducted in partnership with Eczema Outreach Support.
