Human Behavior

Human Behavior Study Identifies Four Basic Personality …

Summary: 90 percent of the population can be classified into one of four main personality types, and of those, 30 percent fall under the envious personality type, a new study reports.

Source: Carlos III University of Madrid.

A study on human behavior has revealed that 90 percent of the population can be classified into four basic personality types: optimistic, pessimistic, trusting and envious. However, the latter of the four types, envious, is the most common, with 30 percent compared to 20 percent for each of the other groups.

This is one of the main conclusions of a study recently published in the journal, Science Advances by researchers from Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, together with colleagues from the universities of Barcelona, Rovira i Virgili and Zaragoza. The study analyzed the responses of 541 volunteers to hundreds of social dilemmas, with options leading to collaboration or conflict with others, based on individual or collective interests.

Specifically, this work is part of game theory, a branch of mathematics with applications in sociology and economics, which examines the behavior of people when they face a dilemma and have to make decisions. These decisions will have different consequences which will also depend on what the other party involved decides to do. Those involved are asked to participate in pairs, these pairs change, not only in each round, but also each time the game changes. So, the best option could be to cooperate or, on the other hand, to oppose or betray .. In this way, we can obtain information about what people do in very different social situations, explained one of the authors of the study, Anxo Snchez, who is a professor in GISC (Grupo Interdisciplinar de Sistemas Complejos / Interdisciplinary Group of Complex Systems), which is part of the Department of Mathematics at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M).

According to Yamir Moreno, who is the coordinator of the Cosnet group (Grupo de Redes y Sistemas Complejos / Networks and Complex Systems Group) at BIFI (Instituto de Biocomputacin y Fsica de Sistemas Complejos / Institute of Biocomputation and the Physics of Complex Systems) at the Universidad de Zaragoza, and also president of the Sociedad de Sistemas Complejos (Complex Systems Society), The results go against certain theories; the one which states that humans act purely rationally for example, and, therefore, they should be taken into consideration in redesigning social and economic policies, as well as those involved in cooperation. He goes on to say that, these types of studies are important because they improve existing theories on human behavior by giving them an experimental base.

After carrying out this kind of social experiment, the researchers developed a computer algorithm which set out to classify people according to their behavior. The computer algorith organized 90% of people into four groups: the largest group, accounting for 30%, being the Envious those who dont actually mind what they achieve, as long as theyre better than everyone else; next are the Optimists who believe that they and their partner will make the best choice for both of them on 20%. Also on 20% are the Pessimists who select the option which they see as the lesser of two evils and the Trusting group who are born collaborators and who will always cooperate and who dont really mind if they win or lose.

There is a fifth, undefined group, representing 10%, which the algorithm is unable to classify in relation to a clear type of behavior. The researchers argue that this allows them to infer the existence of a wide range of subgroups made up of individuals who do not respond in a determined way to any of the outlined models.

Anxo Snchez explains this with an example of a specific dilemma: Two people can hunt deer together, but if they are alone, they can only hunt rabbits. The person belonging to the Envious group will choose to hunt rabbits because he or she will be at least equal to the other hunter, or maybe even better; the Optimist will choose to hunt deer because that is the best option for both hunters; the Pessimist will go for rabbits because that way he or she is sure to catch something; and the hunter who belongs to the Trusting group will cooperate and choose to hunt deer, without a second thought.

Experiment based on citizen participation

The study is based on an experiment organized by Barcelona City Council and the Barcelona Citizen Science Office, within the framework of the DAU festival, also in Barcelona. One of main principles of this study is the fact that the experiment has been developed in such a way to encourage the participation of citizens within the framework of one of the citys public activities, explains Josep Perell, leader of the group, OpenSystems in the Condensed Matter Physics Department at Universitat de Barcelona, and also coordinator of the Barcelona Citizen Science Office. In this sense, the results have been shared with the participants, thus, the subjects of the study become active participants in the research, concludes the researcher.

The really funny thing is that the classification was made by a computer algorithm which could have obtained a larger number of groups, but which has, in fact, produced an excellent rating in four personality types, explains Yamir Moreno. Jordi Duch, a researcher at Universitat Rovira i Virgili in Tarragona, and one of the authors of this study, goes on to explain, This type of classification algorithm has previously been used with success in other fields, such as biology. However, its application to the study of human behavior is quite revolutionary, given that previous works prefixed the behaviors expected before the experiment was carried out, instead of allowing an external system to then automatically give us information about which groupings were most logical. This is of capital importance because it isnt something imposed by the researchers. The objective of using mathematics was precisely to guarantee impartiality, adds Anxo Snchez.

Previously, the experiments were performed by dozens of people. Now, with this platform, it is possible to significantly increase the volume of participants in the study, as well as being able to test using the heterogeneous population; this also allows us to record much more specific data on how the participants behave during the experiment. This has opened up the door to setting up much more complex tests than those that have been carried out so far in this field, says Jordi Duch.

In the same way, the research results shed light in relation to what moves the collective or individual interest in the processes of negotiation, and as such, it is useful for the management of business, organizations or for political reformulation. Furthermore, it also serves to open the door to improving machinery, to make robots more humanized, concludes Anxo Sanchez.

About this psychology research article

Source: Francisco Javier Alonso Carlos III University of MadridImage Source: NeuroscienceNews.com image is credited to UC3M.Original Research: Abstract for Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games by Julia Poncela-Casasnovas, Mario Gutirrez-Roig, Carlos Gracia-Lzaro, Julian Vicens, Jess Gmez-Gardees, Josep Perell, Yamir Moreno, Jordi Duch and Angel Snchez in Science Advances. Published online August 5 2016 doi:10.1126/sciadv.1600451

Cite This NeuroscienceNews.com Article

[cbtabs][cbtab title=MLA]Carlos III University of Madrid. Human Behavior Study Identifies Four Basic Personality Types. NeuroscienceNews. NeuroscienceNews, 7 October 2016.<https://neurosciencenews.com/behavior-personality-types-5238/>.[/cbtab][cbtab title=APA]Carlos III University of Madrid. (2016, October 7). Human Behavior Study Identifies Four Basic Personality Types. NeuroscienceNews. Retrieved October 7, 2016 from https://neurosciencenews.com/behavior-personality-types-5238/%5B/cbtab%5D%5Bcbtab title=Chicago]Carlos III University of Madrid. Human Behavior Study Identifies Four Basic Personality Types. https://neurosciencenews.com/behavior-personality-types-5238/ (accessed October 7, 2016).[/cbtab][/cbtabs]

Abstract

Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games

Socially relevant situations that involve strategic interactions are widespread among animals and humans alike. To study these situations, theoretical and experimental research has adopted a game theoretical perspective, generating valuable insights about human behavior. However, most of the results reported so far have been obtained from a population perspective and considered one specific conflicting situation at a time. This makes it difficult to extract conclusions about the consistency of individuals behavior when facing different situations and to define a comprehensive classification of the strategies underlying the observed behaviors. We present the results of a lab-in-the-field experiment in which subjects face four different dyadic games, with the aim of establishing general behavioral rules dictating individuals actions. By analyzing our data with an unsupervised clustering algorithm, we find that all the subjects conform, with a large degree of consistency, to a limited number of behavioral phenotypes (envious, optimist, pessimist, and trustful), with only a small fraction of undefined subjects. We also discuss the possible connections to existing interpretations based on a priori theoretical approaches. Our findings provide a relevant contribution to the experimental and theoretical efforts toward the identification of basic behavioral phenotypes in a wider set of contexts without aprioristic assumptions regarding the rules or strategies behind actions. From this perspective, our work contributes to a fact-based approach to the study of human behavior in strategic situations, which could be applied to simulating societies, policy-making scenario building, and even a variety of business applications.

Humans display a reduced set of consistent behavioral phenotypes in dyadic games by Julia Poncela-Casasnovas, Mario Gutirrez-Roig, Carlos Gracia-Lzaro, Julian Vicens, Jess Gmez-Gardees, Josep Perell, Yamir Moreno, Jordi Duch and Angel Snchez in Science Advances. Published online August 5 2016 doi:10.1126/sciadv.1600451

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Human Behavior

Three Science-Backed Ways To Increase Covid-19 Compliance (And One Way Not To) – Forbes

BERLIN, GERMANY - DECEMBER 02: Police officers take security measures as a group against Covid-19 ... [+] measures named "Querdenken 30 " gather in front of ZDF television channel's building located at Unter den Linden street to protest media outlets in Berlin, Germany on December 02, 2020. Protesters hold banners and chant slogans as they march in front of buildings of media outlets such as Axel Springer, Funke, Tegesspiegel, Berliner Verlag and Tageszeitung. (Photo by Abdulhamid Hosbas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)

Since the beginning of the pandemic, psychologists and social scientists have been working diligently to understand the best ways to encourage people to comply with Covid-19 directives.

A new working paper published by researchers at the University of Amsterdam suggests they are having an easier time figuring out what doesnt work than what does.

It turns out, for instance, that deterrence efforts such as punishment severity and punishment certainty do little to move the needle.

Deterrence, in the form of both punishment severity and punishment certainty, is not linked to compliance in the majority of studies, state the researchers, led by Dr. Emmeke Kooistra. This indicates that fining people for not following the Covid-19 social distancing measures the major intervention for authorities to increase compliance will most likely not result in more compliance.

They hedged this conclusion a bit, saying it would take more research to fully understand the relationship between deterrence measures and behavioral compliance.

The critical question, however, is what can be done right now to increase compliance. Analyzing the combined results of 45 studies conducted during the first wave of the pandemic, the authors offer the following three suggestions.

#1. Self-interest reigns supreme

People are more likely to comply with social distancing directives to the extent that they view Covid-19 as a serious threat. To be exact, 22 out of the 34 studies that measured the perceived threat of the virus found it to be a significant driver of compliance behavior.

People comply because they see a benefit in doing so: it keeps themselves, friends and family, and possibly society at large safe from the disease, state the researchers. For authorities, this means that they should keep informing the public of the risk of the disease, and especially in between peaks when fear of disease may reduce temporarily.

Also playing into the self-interest equation is peoples age. Older people, in general, are more likely to comply with social distancing guidelines than younger people. They also happen to be more susceptible to the viruss negative effects.

Psychologists and behavioral economists are quick to point out the limits of rational self-interest as an explanation for human behavior, however. In this case, it fails to explain why women exhibit higher coronavirus fear and greater compliance than men even though data show that men have higher Covid-19 mortality rates than women. It also fails to explain why punishments such as fines havent been all that effective at increasing social distancing compliance.

#2. Psychological factors are an important part of the equation

The researchers found a strong relationship between the personality trait of impulsivity and Covid-19 compliance. Impulsive individuals were far less likely to follow social distancing guidelines.

They also found that negative emotional states such as depression decreased the likelihood that people would keep up with social distancing directives.

The finding that people with feelings of depression are more likely to violate the rules should be a warning for policymakers that they should not disregard mental health in their attempt at preserving physical health, state the researchers.

#3. Situational factors also make a difference

Perhaps the best way to encourage people to remain compliant is by tapping into the power of social norms. Of the studies analyzed, two-thirds showed that people who were more likely to see others complying with the rules, or who were more likely to feel socially judged by not complying, were more compliant overall.

People who believe that others follow the rules are more likely follow the rules themselves, state the researchers. Accordingly, [policymakers] may benefit from emphasizing the group of people that do follow the measures, as opposed to the group that does not.

Conclusion. Until a vaccine is ready, behavioral change is the best weapon we have in the fight against Covid-19. The authors conclude, These insights provide vital theoretical lessons about crisis-induced behavioral change and compliance with policy measures.

Full coverage and live updates on the Coronavirus

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Three Science-Backed Ways To Increase Covid-19 Compliance (And One Way Not To) - Forbes

Human Behavior

ABC27 Exclusive: Current COVID-19 deaths in Pennsylvania more than triple what CDC expected a month ago – ABC27

HARRISBURG, Pa. (WHTM) The fall resurgence of COVID-19 was widely expected. The extent of it, as measured by CDC forecasts as recent as a month ago after the surge, as its also known, began was not.

An ABC27 analysis found the CDC, in early November looking ahead then toward early December underestimated the now-known actual death counts by two-thirds, in terms of what the CDC considered a likely scenario.

Even its near-worst-case scenario (technically the upper end of its 95-percent confidence interval) was less than two-thirds of reality. The CDCs forecasts, in turn, rely on the work of 36 other organizations from Ivy League universities to companies like Microsoft that meet the CDCs data quality requirements.

As of Nov. 2, 2020, the CDCs midpoint expectation for weekly deaths now was about 225. It was 95 percent confident weekly deaths wouldnt exceed about 375. The real number, counting the 194 new deaths reported for Tuesday alone? 661.

Why were the forecasts off by so much? Possibly because the biggest variable of all isnt molecular.

In essence, models that do this kind of prediction, you have to predict human behavior, which is hard, said Dr. Mark Roberts, a professor of health policy and management at the University of Pittsburghs Graduate School of Public Health and also director of the universitys Public Health Dynamics Laboratory.

And human behavior, Roberts said, has been unhelpful.

The cases and the spread is because were, you know, COVID-tired. Were not social distancing. Were losing the intensity with which were supposed to socially distance, Roberts said.

He said this tool, developed by Massachusetts General Hospital at Harvard Medical School, is useful for gauging different pandemic outcomes based on different inputs public policy, human behavior and so forth and would have done a good job predicting the current state of affairs, given the correct assumptions about behaviors such as Thanksgiving travel.

Asked Tuesday whether the degree of the surge has caught the PA Department of Health by surprise, Michael Huff, the departments director of testing and contact tracing, said were not surprised by anything we see anymore but agreed with the idea that the surge has been supercharged by conducive behavior, including Thanksgiving gatherings.

Ominously, considering the current numbers, he said we wont see those cases for another week, maybe 10 days.

Hospitalizations and deaths, in turn, typically lag diagnoses by another week or two. This is a very dangerous time, Huff added.

Here are Pennsylvania COVID-19 deaths per day for the most recent seven days available:

Day-to-day variance occurs partly because not all deaths are reported the day they occur. Epidemiologists consider seven-day moving averages, on the other hand, to be more stable representations of reality.

One major difference between the current surge and the first surge, in March and April, is that the majority of deaths during the first surge occurred in long-term care facilities.

Indeed, despite a recent reversal of this trend, fully 64-percent of COVID-19 deaths in Pennsylvania 6,885 out of 10,757 deaths since the pandemic began have occurred in what the state classifies as nursing and personal care facilities.

But now? Of the 180 deaths reported Monday, just 30 or 17 percent occurred in such facilities.

Although a Department of Health spokeswoman couldnt confirm this, the ABC27 analysis found a high probability that the state is now setting new COVID-era highs for daily deaths due to community spread outside long-term care facilities.

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ABC27 Exclusive: Current COVID-19 deaths in Pennsylvania more than triple what CDC expected a month ago - ABC27

Human Behavior

The Internet of Things: Difficult to Define, Quick to Grow – ETF Trends

As difficult as it may be, when you look for positive things in 2020, you may cite the internet of things (IoT). Among many other things, the internet has helped to facilitate communication amidst a pandemic stressing the need for social distancing. It is certainly benefitting the Global X Internet of Things ETF (SNSR).

Per Morningstar performance numbers, the fund has been able to generate a return of 29% year-to-date amid the pandemic. It boasted a stellar 48% gain in 2019. As more societal demands on social distancing increase as the number of coronavirus cases rise, the internet will continue to play a vital role through the end of 2020 and beyond.

SNSR seeks to provide investment results that correspond generally to the price and yield performance, before fees and expenses, of the Indxx Global Internet of Things Thematic Index. The fund invests at least 80% of its total assets in the securities of the underlying index.

The underlying index is designed to provide exposure to exchange-listed companies in developed markets that facilitate the Internet of Things industry, including companies involved in wearable technology, home automation, connected automotive technology, sensors, networking infrastructure/software, smart metering, and energy control devices.

Per a CRN article, the pandemic took a hit on worldwide IoT spending this year, according to research firm IDC, but double-digit growth is expected to return in the next few years. Among the drivers for this increased spending which will reach an annual growth rate of 11.3 percent over IDCs 2020-2024 forecast period will be a greater need for connected devices to enable remote operations and artificial intelligence to monitor human behavior.

That said, SNSR should continue to experience exponential growth.

The COVID-19 pandemic drove businesses and employees to become more reliant on technology for both professional and personal purposes, Forrester wrote in October for its Predictions 2021: Technology Diversity Drives IoT Growth.

For more news and information, visit the Thematic Investing Channel.

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The Internet of Things: Difficult to Define, Quick to Grow - ETF Trends

Human Behavior

Local Hospitals See Rush Of Severe COVID-19 Cases As Second Surge Intensifies – 27east.com

A second wave of the coronavirus pandemic continued to explode across Long Island this past week, much like it did last spring, as government and health officials scrambled to find ways to tamp down the wildfire as well as prepare to defend against its onslaught.

Local hospitals have seen new patients streaming in with severe symptoms of COVID-19 infections, some requiring intensive care and the support of ventilators to help them survive the respiratory distress.

Health officials said that contact tracing has continued to show that the spread of infections is mostly tied to small social gatherings of people from different households at which attendees do not wear face coverings or adhere to social distancing recommendations. The recent Thanksgiving holiday, officials say, seems certain to exacerbate that trend in the mushrooming spread.

East Hampton Town this week continued to see the steepest rise in new cases it has seen since the start of the pandemic. Between November 25 and December 2 there were 58 new cases confirmed in the town, an increase of 13 percent. There have now been 489 total infections confirmed among town residents since March.

Town Supervisor Peter Van Scoyoc said that the town is teetering on the edge of being classified as a microcluster under the state Department of Healths zone classification system. If the town were to reach the threshold for the first tier of microcluster designation, known as the Yellow Zone, there would have to be new testing protocols for schools, further restrictions on the size of public gatherings and how restaurants can operate.

Despite our constant urgings, the disease seems to be spreading within the community, he said, nodding to the pleadings in recent weeks of elected officials and public health experts for people to avoid social gatherings at which social distancing precautions are not being followed. This is concerning.

In Southampton Town, there were 131 new infections confirmed since November 25, a 7-percent increase in the total number, which now stands at 1,853.

There were 609 new cases confirmed on Tuesday, a 5.2 percent positivity rate among all those tested in the previous 24 hour period. The countys seven-day positivity rate is 4.2 percent.

As health officials said they have been expecting, the rising number of cases earlier this month is now staring to reflect in rising numbers of hospitalizations.

Both Stony Brook Southampton Hospital and Peconic Bay Medical Center in Riverhead reported steep increases to the number of COVID-19 cases they are treating in the past week.

As of Wednesday morning, PBMC had 31 admitted patients, even after two patients were discharged on Tuesday. There were just seven COVID-19 admissions on November 17.

Stony Brook Southampton Hospital has seen the number of patients it is treating nearly double in the past seven days, from eight on November 24 to 14 as of Wednesday morning. Four of those patients are in the hospitals intensive care unit, and two of those have had to be put on ventilators to help them breathe because of severe respiratory distress.

The hospital last week again halted all visitation by friends and family of admitted patients because of concern about spreading infection.

At the height of the first surge in the spring, the hospital had as many as 51 patients admitted for treatment of COVID-19 symptoms, and 20 in its intensive care units.

There are now more than 260 people hospitalized across Suffolk County, 48 of them in intensive care. Three people died on Tuesday from complications due to COVID-19 infections.

On Monday, Governor Andrew Cuomo ordered that all hospital networks begin planning for load balancing distributing patients among their various hospitals so that certain hospitals are not overwhelmed while others are mostly empty.

We are not going to live through the nightmare of overwhelmed hospitals again, he said.

He also ordered hospitals to begin organizing retired doctors and nurses as reserves to their current staffing to be prepared for a sustained surge in the number of COVID-19 patients being treated.

The governor said that the patterns of the new spread means there will not be an opportunity for one region of the state where infections are low to lend assistance to another region where they are higher, like in the spring, when the vast majority of infections and hospitalizations were in downstate regions.

Mr. Cuomo also hinted that if the state again approaches a hospitalization crisis, it could be forced to return to the NY Pause restrictions on non-essential businesses that were imposed, and largely paid dividends, in the spring.

Perhaps the lone bright spot in the renewed surge has been that it has not manifested itself in schools. On Tuesday, Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone said that the lack of spread in schools has been remarkable and is a testament to how well the infections spread can be controlled when the recommended protocols are adhered to. He said it also should mean that the region will not be closing schools a key fear of parents and childhoold education experts alike.

As long as students and faculty are kept safe, schools should be kept open, Mr. Bellone said.

Where the sort of protocols that are protecting students from spreading the virus have not been followed namely small gatherings infections have exploded, the governor said.

This is all a function of human behavior, he said. If you wanted to get the rate to near zero, you could do it if you agree to certain behavior patterns.

Because that has not proven to be the case of late, the state expects the growth in cases to continue through the middle of January, Mr. Cuomo said, before plateauing, at a much higher level of infections than has been seen since the first surge waned in May.

So we have to settle in, he said on Monday. The good news is, New York is doing better than almost any other state. New York is better prepared than any other state. We did this before and well do it again.

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Human Behavior

Block by block: Northampton resident walking all of the city’s streets – GazetteNET

NORTHAMPTON You may run into Francine M. Deutsch while taking a walk in Northampton if youre walking on a street that starts with a letter midway through the alphabet.

Shes on a mission to walk the entirety of every street in the city and has been walking them in alphabetical order. On a recent Saturday, she was walking on Kingsley Avenue and on a later weekday she strolled down Lake Street.

Im sort of compulsive person, she said. I like these projects where you do all of something. She added, When I was a kid I wanted to read all the books in the library until I realized it was impossible.

Deutsch retired in 2017 from her job as a professor of psychology and education at Mount Holyoke College, and started walking all the streets as a hobby.

I was just doing it very haphazardly, she said. But when COVID-19 hit in the spring, she started doing it religiously. Since March 15, Ive been doing it pretty much every day.

A 2014 list of city streets, the most recent one she could find, serves as her guide.

She has lived in Northampton for more than 30 years, but says shes now seeing a lot shes never seen before.

The most amazing thing is I didnt realize how big, physically big, Northampton is, she said. And also there are just so many little neighborhoods that even though Ive live here for over 30 years, theres so many places Ive never been to.

She was also struck by how many really rural or wild paces there are in Northampton horses, farms, woods, beautiful views of the mountains.

There are about 160 miles of paved and unpaved roads in Northampton, according to Donna LaScaleia director of the Department of Public Works. Some streets are too long for Deutsch to walk in one day, like Burts Pit Road, which she did over two days.

Deutsch is also documenting her walks with photos. I have thousands of pictures of Northampton, she said.

Those snapshots include houses, political signs and people. When she runs into someone on a walk, she asks to take their photo for record. About half of people she asks say yes, she estimated.

Im always curious about why people dont want their picture taken, she said. Im a social psychologist, so Im interested in human behavior. Its funny, people will sometimes say things like, not today, as if I am coming back next week. There are also many who are happy to be photographed. Thats just an interesting aspect of human behavior that I get to observe.

Deutsch saw William Helmreich walk all of New York Citys streets more than 6,000 miles. He was sort of my inspiration, she said. Helmreich died of COVID-19 in March. I always imagined I would meet him sometime and tell him how he inspired me, she said.

Though winter is around the corner, Deutsch plans to continue the project. I have cleats on my shoes which I recommend to everyone, she said. As long as were not in a blizzard I plan to keep going as long as its not zero degrees or inclement weather.

Greta Jochem can be reached at gjochem@gazettenet.com.

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Block by block: Northampton resident walking all of the city's streets - GazetteNET

Human Behavior

Letters: Student loans, OSU’s name and restoring unity in the USA – The Columbus Dispatch

Letters to the Editor| The Columbus DispatchCollege students should be responsible, pay off loans

There is talk circulating that some in the new administration want to forgive student loan debt. Really!

My family was not "dirt poor," but we were poor. When I started college in 1958 they did not have student loan programs and tuition assistance programs like today. I had to work while attending college, 32 hours weekly during the school year and 40 hoursIn the summer.

On Mondays and Thursdays, I went in at 3 p.m.and got off the next morning at 2 a.m.,followed by 8 a.m.classes. I survived and carried a 3.22 GPA (out of 4.0). By working, I missed the card parties, the drinking at local pubs, the tennis and golf matches, etc. Instead, I learned valuable life lessons regarding financial management and how to take care of myself.

Many kids today have an entitlement mentality and think the world owes them everything. Put everything on the "tab" and pay later. To those I say: "you reap what you sow." You run up the tab, you pay for it. It is called being responsible.

James A. Gambert, Pickerington

Here is the answer for Buckeyes who don't know why theTheis capitalized.

When I enrolled atOhio State Universityin 1954 (tuition was $75/quarter, season football tickets $18),we had a fraternityalumni adviser named Tom Johnson.Johnsonalsowas stadium announcer for OSU football games.

EverySaturday when the band came down thenorth ramp and into formation at thenorth goal post,Johnsonwould announce "Ladies and gentlemen,TheOhio State University marching band!!"

Thus, TheOhio State University.

Robert Leftwich, West Chester

Seventy million people voted for Donald Trump.This country is not just divided, but dangerously divided. The Democrats need to stop celebrating the win and start thinking about what they need todoto change some minds.

Susan Miller, Columbus

Public policy change requires more than three-word catch phrases. Calling for public policy change invites clever phrases suitable for media moments. However, these phrases often mask the complexity of real change and undermine real change.

Nancy Reagans Just say no! campaign sounded like a good idea but failed because public policy related to drug abuse is more complicated than three words. Trickle-downeconomics sounds good in theory but has never worked because the economy and human behavior are more complicated than three words. In this context, I am concerned about defund thepolice.

I am horrified by the racist abuse and killings by police and policing culture locally and nationwide. I strongly agree we need to include social workers, crisis intervention specialists, educatorsand other nonpolice resources in our public safety strategies. However, if someone steals my car, I dont want a crisis intervention specialist trying to find it.

If I see a car speeding the wrong way on a busy street, Im not going to call a social worker to stop it. Defunding police sounds like an easy solution to a complicated problem. It also has the effect of polarizing the community. We need to increase funding for prevention activities, crisis intervention, treatment, civilian review of police,police culture changeand more.

We also need public participation in creating and monitoringthoughtful policies that reflect best practices of public health, safety andinclusion.

Chris Kloth, Columbus

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Letters: Student loans, OSU's name and restoring unity in the USA - The Columbus Dispatch

Human Behavior

‘Grey’s Anatomy’s’ Medical Expert: "COVID Is No. 1 on the Call Sheet" in Season 17 – Hollywood Reporter

Grey's Anatomy, television's longest-running primetime medical drama, has dedicated its 17th season to front-line workers battling the novel coronavirus pandemic. It is also not shying away from accurately depicting every facet of how COVID-19 is impacting medical professionals, patients and their families.

Since Grey's returned for its current season in mid-November, many of the headlines have focused on the surprising return of former leading man Patrick Dempsey, whose Derek Shepherd was shockingly killed off in season 11. But for Zoanne Clack, a doctor, writer and exec producer who has been with Grey's since the pilot, COVID-19 is the season's real headliner.

Clack, who spent a year working with the CDC after her residency in emergency medicine at Emory University before following her dreams of writing creatively, is among those charged with overseeing medical storylines on Grey's. After Meredith Grey (series star Ellen Pompeo) was hospitalized with COVID-19 during the Nov. 19 episode and became the second doctor on Grey's to have the virus, Clack revealed that the show's fictional infection rate was similar to the world's and that the show is "going all in" on its portrayal of the pandemic.

Below, Clack interviewed via email talks with The Hollywood Reporter about the lengths to which Grey's Anatomy is going to accurately portray all the ways the pandemic is impacting medical professionals, why the show won't politicize the pandemic (or mask wearing) and her hopes for what the audience takes away from seeing an accurate portrayal of history onscreen.

Krista Vernoff has said she previously didn't think Grey's should tackle COVID-19. As a doctor and a writer on the series, why did you feel it was important for Grey's to not only portray the pandemic but to do so as accurately as possible?

We were definitely concerned about COVID fatigue from the audience: living with COVID news day-to-day and watching it on a fictional show was a hard barrier to cross. But talking to front-linehealth care workers pushed us forward onto our current path. On our show, I've started a program called the Medical Communications Fellowship that allows active surgical residents to spend three to six months with the writers during the research years of their residencies. This has led to a few of them staying on as consultants, and we also always have working residents in our midst. Those doctors, in addition to some of our tried-and-true consultants that we go to for advice and expert opinions on everyepisode, pressed upon us the overall life-changing effects COVID is having and will continue to have on our medical system. We also spoke to a number of otherphysicians once we decided to go in that direction and we felt their stories had to be told.

This pandemic is the single-biggest medical story of our time and likely a permanent game-changer as to how we practice medicine and how we look at the world. Being a medical show that focuses on our doctors' professional and private lives and one that takes great pride in being a voice for the voiceless and understanding that responsibility, we felt compelled to tell the stories of loneliness, fear and bravery that our health care workers and the patients are going through. Of course, we were scared that people would not want to go through the misery of COVID once more, but I think we've found a nice balance of keeping a Grey's vibe on the episodes. It's not all COVID, all the time, but COVID is always the backdrop. As I've heard people say, COVID is No. 1 on the call sheet. I also believe that going through the pandemic with these characters, whom people love dearly or love to hate makes the audience feel like they're going through it with friends, which makes me think it is felt more deeply, and not just a rehash of the constant roll of statistics and mortality rates. The audience is seeing real stories by characters played by real people that they can relate to, and bringing these stories into their homes and feeling like we're all in this together can actually be comforting.

Through two episodes, the series has not politicized the pandemic or wearing masks. As the medical community continues to post videos encouraging things like social distancing and mask wearing, is that territory Grey's will explore?

We will never politicize COVID because COVID should never have been politicized in the first place. We are dealing only with science and facts, not conjecture. We take our information from first-hand experience, medical journals and experts. We will always model mask wearing and social distancing even when we are not directly saying the words. There's a theory in public health that I feel validates my existence being a writer instead of a doctor on the front lines, and that is Bandura's Social Learning Theory. It basically says that a lot of human behavior is learned observationally through modeling, especially when the modeling is done by beloved people or characters to which the learner or in our case, audience has a particular attachment. In the case of Grey's Anatomy, people have grown with these characters some have literally grown up with them over 17 seasons! and the actions that these characters take can be very impactful. We never question the validity of COVID. Every character, like the medical profession, takes it as fact, and it is our hope that the audience does too and goes along this ride with us. And yes, there will be times when it is said outright that people need to wear their mask or stay 6 feet away it was done in the first episodes but we try to make it flow as easily into the stories as the medicine always has; it should never take you out of the story being told. Washing and sterilizing hands is also a big backdrop of the season. There should be a bingo game where you can mark off every time a character uses sanitizer or washes their hands while they're doing their regular dialogue or moving in and out of scenes.

You tweeted that the COVID infection rate on Grey's is similar to where things were at the time in the real world. What have you specifically pushed for in depicting how the pandemic impacts first responders at a hospital?

We have been trying to strike a balance between our characters contracting COVID and the rate at which health care workers are contracting it. I wrote that tweet actually coming off of finding out that Koracick (played by Greg Germann) had tested positive for COVID. That story served a double punch: first, that people can walk around asymptomatic and spread the disease unknowingly; and second, that health care workers are out there every day working hard and being exposed especially since this was our second character to contract COVID. It shows that anyone can get it and that it spreads easily. Our decision to start just a bit after the pandemic began in America was a wise one, because we never have to worry about being ahead of the reality. We are basing our characters' actions on what was known early on, and we get more information and integrate it into the show as the world got more information and integrated it into their practice. Fortunately, we have many more therapies now and a decreased mortality rate, but sadly the positivity rates are still increasing exponentially. Historically, people will be able to watch this season of Grey's and see the medical story of our lifetime unfold.

The docs are all in these big almost helmet-like masks with tubes down their backs. Are those an invention of the show designed to see the actors' faces or are they working masks being used in hospitals to battle the pandemic?

Those helmet-like masks are real and are calledPAPR but of course we wanted to see their faces as much as possible! "PAPR" stands for Powered Air Purifying Respirator. In the real world, they are used when individuals have the potential to be exposed to airborne pathogens and are convenient because they don't have to be "fit-tested" like an N95 mask does. I thought they did get fogged up sometimes early on but I asked someone in production and he said it was never a problem probably because they do allow airflow in and out of them. But we had to do a lot of figuring out about how to light them properly to prevent glare and we ended up with some kind of anti-glare material that was fitted into them.

In two episodes, we're seeing the pain of the pandemic told from two COVID-positive doctors in Meredith and Tom, one of whom is on death's door and seeing visions, and the other is asymptomatic. Why is it important to portray both ends of the spectrum?

This goes back to how our knowledge of COVID is increasing daily. New symptoms, no symptoms, asymptomatic spread, less spread from surfaces these are all things we learned as we went and our doctors on the show are just learning. Since testing was and still is in some areas so unavailable at the start, we didn't realize that people could basically be asymptomatic but positive and spreading the disease. Tom Koracickeven says, "I'm not symptomatic," when he's told to go home and quarantine. As the episodes unfold, our doctors will see all or at least very many of the complications of COVID as we learn like science learned that it is very much a vascular disease thatattacks blood vessels and the consequences from that.We'll see people who recover, people who die, people who have mild symptoms, people who have post-COVID syndrome in one way or another the full spectrum. On the one hand, it's a very complicated disease, mostly because it's new and unheard of and we're still trying to figure it out. On the other hand, it's a virus. It spreads like a virus. Once we learn more, we integrate more, we learn how to live with it and how to treat it better, and that journey will be reflected on the show.

Many of the headlines are focusing on the return of Patrick Dempsey. How much of Meredith's visions of Derek are inspired by what COVID-19 patients are experiencing i.e. seeing visions, having visceral dreams?

From the small amount of research that I've done on visceral "COVID dreams," they seem to be the stuff of non-COVID victims, just people going through this pandemic, whether they have COVID or not. We actually started early in the season talking about different characters having very vivid, very surreal COVID dreams in each episode, but it evolved to what you see on your screen. Mer's COVID dreams are more like her experience in season three, where she's kind of in limbo between life and death, holding on to one and reaching out to the other. And it's a chance to bring some joy into the abyss that is COVID and that is 2020. I loved how people on Twitter were saying that Grey's saved 2020 for them. One of our writers said we were making America Grey's again.

This season started by portraying events in April and continues to reflect the early days of the pandemic. Will the number of docs who test positive for COVID continue to be portrayed by the rates hospitals are experiencing?

Yes, we will try to reflect the reality of what's happening out there in the real world. Grey's Anatomy is letting people know that we're all living through this together, and no one is alone, no matter how isolating it might feel.

Creatively speaking, will the season always be a few months behind where we are in the pandemic? How are you talking about ending a season given the uncertainty around rising COVID cases and hospitalization rates and the evolving news around vaccines?

Honestly, the season is ever-evolving, day to day. Some days we think the season will span two weeks, other days we say we're going to catch up to present time. We really just let the stories be our guide. The vaccine looks so promising that maybe there will be a way to integrate it in the future, though we haven't discussed that possibility yet or how we would tackle that subject, if at all.

As you were researching the impact of the pandemic on hospitals, what was the most striking thing you discovered?

Oh, so many things! In speaking with front-line providers, we learned how this pandemic is fundamentally and perhaps permanently changing medicine. The use of masks in hospitals may become permanent because they've noticed other infection rates ones that historically spread within hospitals have gone down. The advancement of telemedicine has led to the ability to perhaps expand access to care in the long run. The creative ways that people were working together to expand their hospitals has led to using cafeterias and ORs for COVID patient care even after we were initially so unprepared for such devastation. And seeing, reading about, and conversing with people has shown us the utter strength and resilience of mankind, especially our health care workers who have been working tirelessly during this pandemic and suffering unfathomable mental and physical strain because of it.

The series is also portraying the emotional impact on doctors who are losing an ungodly number of patients with Maggie's (Kelly McCreary) character. How closely is Maggie's journey adhering to other doctors you've spoken with?

One-hundred percent accurate. We're portraying the emotional impact with most of the characters in one way or another. During our pre-writing research time, we watched a lot of video diaries of doctors and read innumerablearticles about what they are going through. We talked to a lot of doctors ourselves also, and made a point to speak with a lot of doctors of color since, as you know, COVID is disproportionately hitting marginalized communities. We took a deep dive into that aspect of it and all the rage and sadness that surrounds that fact, and that's a lot of what Maggie is portraying. But I would say that Meredith also had her moment of throwing things around before she got sick, and the audience can see the strain of the shortage of PPE with Koracick beating up boxes with a golf club they're definitely all feeling it.

There's also the grief of having to see patients dying alone as their family members are not permitted in to visit them. What have you heard from other fellow medical professionals about how this especially devastating part of the pandemic is impacting patients and their families?

This was one of the biggest points echoed throughout most of our consultations. The fact that so many people were dying alone. Many doctors were and are trying to make concessions and have family come and see their loved one if they are near death. I had that kindness afforded to me when my own mom was sick in the hospital with COVID. They arranged it so that I could see her and be with her for a short period of time when they thought it was potentially her last day. My mom ended up becoming a COVID survivor but that was after spending many, many weeks in the hospital. But even with that visit, I wouldn't have been able to be there at the moment she took her last breath if that had been the case. I got my hour visit, and then waited for the call that fortunately did not come. The loneliness is on all sides patients dying alone, health care workers not seeing their families for days or sometimes weeks at a time, those that have to quarantine if they're positive. People maintaining 6 feet and avoiding hugging, friendly cheek kisses or even handshakes. This whole disease is isolating and scary.

Grey's Anatomy airs Thursdays on ABC. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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'Grey's Anatomy's' Medical Expert: "COVID Is No. 1 on the Call Sheet" in Season 17 - Hollywood Reporter

Human Behavior

TEXAS VIEW: Why are we bringing thousands of rodeo fans to Fort Worth area? – Odessa American

The advice comes over and over again, often with urgent, dire tones: avoid large gatherings with other people. Its crucial to curtailing the rapidly growing pandemic.

Why, then, are Fort Worth and Arlington eagerly welcoming thousands of rodeo fans to town in early December? After all, theyre not coming here to enjoy our hotels, lovely though they may be. Theyre coming, by the thousands, for public events.

Its confusing at best to say in one moment that a family holiday dinner will spread disease while thousands of people in an arena or other venue Globe Life Field for the 2020 Wrangler National Finals Rodeo or, say, AT&T Stadium for Dallas Cowboys games is fine.

Though the main events for the rodeo are at the Rangers ballpark, Fort Worth will see a host of related activities, especially in the Stockyards. Both cities and event organizers have taken steps to make the events safe, and they vow mask requirements will be enforced.

This Editorial Board has urged adaptation to the virus, following science about how its spread and figuring out how activities can be altered to be safe. But part of adaptation is acknowledging reality about the current moment of the pandemic and whether a gathering that might have been safer before is too dangerous now. With Tarrant County and Texas setting COVID-19 case records, the timing is terrible.

Plans are in place for limited capacity, giving out masks and stringent cleaning, but organizers cant control human behavior. Visitors will cluster in hotels and restaurants. Masks will slip. The virus will spread.

In this phase of the pandemic, the bar for events such as these should be high. When the deal to move the event from Las Vegas to Arlington was announced in September, perhaps it seemed the virus would remain under better control. And the area certainly needs the economic boost, particularly in the hospitality industry. But future requests for crowd permits must be closely scrutinized.

After all, if illness threatens to overwhelm our hospitals, any financial gain will be lost if businesses have to reduce their operating capacity under Gov. Greg Abbotts standing emergency order.

Its a high threshold: If 15% of hospital beds in a region of the state defined as a trauma service area are filled with COVID-19 patients for more than a week, businesses must ratchet back from 75% to 50%. Tarrant County and its urban/suburban neighbors are grouped with more rural counties near the Red River, so itll take more than just the local case surge. But the area has been close to the limit in recent days.

And make no mistake, our hospitals are in danger. A University of North Texas Health Science Center epidemiologist warned that we could quickly run out of beds, based on the explosive growth in coronavirus cases. Overwhelmed health care facilities would be a problem for anyone needing care, not just COVID-19 patients.

Throughout the pandemic, the most difficult question for leaders and policymakers is how to enforce restrictions. County leaders grappled with the question last Tuesday as commissioners voted to extend the local emergency declaration and the mandate that businesses require customers to wear masks.

Theres been confusion over how far the governors order goes. County Judge Glen Whitley, acting on the advice of District Attorney Sharen Wilsons office, says Abbotts order doesnt allow enforcement of social-distancing requirements in businesses, a key question for restaurants especially.

City leaders are adamant that the order does impose such rules. Theyre the ones doing the bulk of enforcing, through code-compliance departments. And the need for distancing should be obvious.

Its a shame if local businesses, the backbone of our economy, face tougher scrutiny than big, tourist-drawing events. Fort Worth and Arlington leaders need to tread carefully in allowing such gatherings.

This area excels at attracting events and their cash-generating crowds. But right now, we dont need to draw more coronavirus cases, too.

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TEXAS VIEW: Why are we bringing thousands of rodeo fans to Fort Worth area? - Odessa American

Physiology

Utilizing consumer cameras for contact-free physiological measurement in telehealth and beyond – Microsoft

Our research is enabling robust and scalable measurement of physiology. Cameras on everyday devices can be used to detect subtle changes in light reflected from the body caused by physiological processes. Machine learning algorithms are then used to process the camera images and recover the underlying pulse and respiration signals that can then be used for health and wellness tracking.

According to the CDC WONDER Online Database, heart disease is currently the leading cause of death for both men and women in the United States. However, most deaths due to cardiovascular diseases could be prevented with suitable interventions. Early detection of changes in health and well-being can have a significant impact on the success of these interventions and boost the chances of positive outcomes. Atrial fibrillation (AFib) is an example of a symptom that can indicate increased risk of heart disease, and when detected early, it can inform interventions that help to reduce risk of stroke.

Physiological sensing plays an important role in helping people track their health and detect the onset of symptoms. However, there are barriers to conducting physiological sensing that act as a disincentive, such as access to medical devices and the inconvenience of performing regular measurements. Making physiological sensing more accessible and less obtrusive can reduce the burden on people to perform physiological assessments of this kind and help catch early warning signs of symptoms like AFib.

Over the past decade, researchers have discovered that increasingly available webcams and cellphone cameras combined with AI algorithms can be used as effective health sensors. These methods involve measurement of very subtle changes in the appearance of the body across time, in many cases changes imperceptible to the unaided human eye, to recover physiological information. In essence, as ambient light in a room hits your body, some is absorbed and some is reflected. Physiological processes such as blood flow and breathing change the appearance of the body very subtly over time.

A smartphone camera can pick up this reflected light, and the changes in pixel intensities over time can be used to recover the underlying sources of these variations (namely a persons pulse and respiration). Using optical models grounded in our knowledge of these physiological processes, a video of a person can be processed to determine their pulse rate, respiration, and even the concentration of oxygen in their blood.

Building on previous work, our team of researchers from Microsoft Research, University of Washington, and OctoML have collaborated to create an innovative video-based on-device optical cardiopulmonary vital sign measurement approach. The approach uses everyday camera technology (such as webcams and mobile devices) and a novel convolutional attention network, called MTTS-CAN, to make real-time cardio-pulmonary measurements possible on mobile platforms with state-of-the-art accuracy. Our paper, Multi-Task Temporal Shift Attention Networks for On-Device Contactless Vitals Measurement, has been accepted at the 34th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2020) and will be presented in a Spotlight talk on Monday, December 7th at 6:15PM- 6:30PM (PT).

Camera-based physiological sensing has numerous fitness, well-being and clinical applications. For everyday consumers, it could make home monitoring and fitness tracking more convenient. Imagine if your treadmill or smart at-home fitness equipment could continuously track your vitals during your run without you needing to wear a device or sync the data. In clinical contexts, camera-based measurements could enable a cardiologist to more objectively analyze a patients heart health over a video call. Contact sensors, necessary for monitoring vitals in intensive care, can damage the skin of infantsremote sensing could provide a more comfortable solution.

Perhaps the most obvious application for camera-based physiological sensing is in telehealth. The SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic is transforming the face of healthcare around the world. One example of this revolution can be seen in the number of medical appointments held via teleconference, which has increased by more than an order of magnitude because of stay-at-home orders and greater burdens on healthcare systems. This is due to the desire to protect healthcare workers and restrictions on travel, but telehealth also benefits patients by saving them time and costs. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending the use of telehealth strategies when feasible to provide high-quality patient care and reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission in healthcare settings. The COVID-19 virus has been linked to increased risk of myocarditis and other serious cardiac (heart) conditions, and experts are suggesting that particular attention should be given to cardiovascular and pulmonary protection during treatment.

In most telehealth scenarios, however, physicians lack access to objective measurements of a patients condition because of the inability to capture signals such as the patients vital signs. This concerns many patients because they worry about the quality of the diagnosis and care they can receive without objective measurements. Ubiquitous sensing could help transform how telehealth is conducted, and it could also contribute to establishing telehealth as a mainstream form of healthcare.

It can take many years for new technologies such as these to transition from research discoveries to mature applications. The fields of AI and computer vision, as a whole, are six decades old, yet it is only in the past 10 years that many applications have started to reach fruition. Research on camera-based vital sign monitoring began much more recentlywithin the past 15 yearsso there is still a lot of effort required to help it reach maturity.

Contact sensors (electrocardiograms, oximeters) are the current gold standard for measurement of heart and lung function, yet these devices are still not ubiquitously available, especially in low-resource settings. The development of video-based contactless sensing of vital signs presents an opportunity for highly scalable physiological monitoring. Computer vision for remote cardiopulmonary measurement is a growing field, and there is room for improvement in the existing methods.

First, the accuracy of measurements is critical to avoid false alarms or misdiagnoses. The US Federal Drug Administration (FDA) mandates that testing of a new device for cardiac monitoring should show substantial equivalence in accuracy with a legal predicate device (for example, a contact sensor). This standard has not been obtained in non-contact approaches. Second, designing models that run on-device helps reduce the need for high-bandwidth internet connections, making telehealth more practical and accessible. Our method, detailed below, works to improve accuracy with a newly designed algorithm (see Figure 1) and runs on-device.

Camera-based cardiopulmonary measurement is also a highly privacy-sensitive application. This data is personally identifiable, combining videos of a patients face with sensitive physiological signals. Therefore, streaming and uploading data to the cloud to perform analysis is not ideal. This motivated our focus to develop methods that run on devicehelping keep peoples data under their control.

Finally, the ability to run at a high frame rate enables opportunistic sensing (for example, obtaining measurements each time you look at your phone) and helps capture waveform dynamics that could be used to detect atrial fibrillation, hypertension, and heart rate variability where high-frame rates (at least 100Hz) are a requirement to yield precise measurements of the waveform dynamics.

To help address the gaps in the current research, we developed an algorithm for multi-parameter physiological measurement that can run on a standard mid-range mobile phone, even at high frame rates. The method uses a type of deep learning algorithm called a convolutional neural network and analyzes pixels in a video over time to extract estimates of heart and respiration rates. The algorithm extracts two representations of the face: 1) the motion representation that contains the temporal changes pixel information and 2) the appearance representation that helps guide the network toward the spatial regions of the frame to focus on. Our specific design of this method is called a multi-task temporal shift convolutional attention network (MTTS-CAN). See Figure 2 below for details.

We introduced several features to help address the challenges of privacy, portability, and precision in contactless physiological measurement. Our end-to-end MTTS-CAN performs efficient temporal modeling and removes sources of noise without any added computational overhead by leveraging temporal shift operations rather than 3D convolutions, which are computationally onerous.

These shift operations allow the model to capture complex temporal dependencies, which are particularly important for recovering the subtle dynamics of the pulse and respiration signals. An attention module improves signal source separation by helping the model learn which regions of the video frame to apply greater importance to, and a multi-task mechanism shares the intermediate representations between pulse and respiration to jointly estimate both simultaneously.

Multi-task learning is effective for two reasons. First, the heart rhythms are correlated with breathing patterns meaning the two signals share some common propertiesthis is a principle known as Respiratory Sinus Arrhythmia (RSA). Second, by sharing many of the preliminary processing steps, we can dramatically reduce the computation required.

By combining these three techniques, our proposed network can run on a mobile CPU and achieve state-of-the-art accuracy and inference speed. Ultimately, these features result in significant improvements for gathering real physiological signals, like heart rate and pulse (see Figure 3).

One concern with optical measurement of vital signs is whether performance will work equally across people, including all skin types and appearances (for example, those with facial hair, wearing cosmetics, head coverings, or glasses). We have worked on characterizing these differences and helping to reduce them using personalization and data augmentation. Improving sensing technology to create equitable performance is a central focus to this research.

We hope that this work advances the speed at which scalable non-contact sensing can be adopted. Atrial fibrillation (AFib) is just one of most common cardiovascular symptoms that impact millions of people and could be better detected with more accurate, easily deployed non-contact health sensing systems. Our work is a step in this direction. Through our research we are continuing to develop methods for sensing other physiological parameters, such as blood oxygen saturation and pulse transit time.

If youre interested in learning more about our research in physiological sensing, there are a number of resources available. Our project page is a hub for publications and related content, including links to open-source code. We also recently gave a webinar on contactless camera-based health sensing that further elaborates on this work and dives deeper into how the technology works. Register now to watch the on-demand webinar/Q&A.

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Utilizing consumer cameras for contact-free physiological measurement in telehealth and beyond - Microsoft