In interpersonal interactions, individuals often exhibit avoidance behaviors toward others they find unpleasant, which can undermine the comfort of everyday social experiences. Existing human-computer interaction (HCI) research has primarily focused on promoting social connections, while support for avoidance-oriented social situations remains underexplored. To address this gap, we propose leveraging Diminished Reality (DR) technology to obscure perceptual cues of undesirable individuals. We designed and implemented a mixed reality prototype system and conducted experiments manipulating both the occlusion method and social distance. Results indicate that DR significantly reduces users’ social anxiety and sense of social presence. Moreover, participants generally expressed positive attitudes toward usage intention and ethical considerations. This work extends HCI research on social comfort, shifting the focus from “facilitating connection” to “supporting avoidance”.

Colon endoscopic robots represent a promising screening modality for the visualization of colon cancers with high sensitivity. However, current colonoscopy robots are often characterized by intricate and bulky mechanical structures, which pose practical challenges when moving through the complex and narrow environment of the colon. Moreover, these robots are typically equipped with a single camera, limiting their ability to accurately estimate the depth of haustral folds in the colon, which is of great importance for the active colonic navigation of the robots. To address these challenges, we develop a track-based stereoscopic endoscopic robot (TSER) which is equipped with four tracks positioned at the corners of its body. This innovative design maximizes the contact between the tracks and the colon wall, enhancing maneuverability. The tracks are constructed from de-molded polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and incorporate micro-patterns on their outer surfaces. We have proposed a straightforward strategy for detecting haustral folds using TSER’s stereo camera, which allows for precise identification of their position and depth. The TSER achieves an average motion speed of 9.8 mm/s in a bellows tube that contains silicone oil and a speed of 5.2 mm/s in an exvivo porcine intestinal segment. Impressively, the TSER boasts an 88.11% accuracy rate in haustral fold depth estimation, surpassing the performance of existing geometric shape fitting methods. These results demonstrate that the TSER holds great potential for effective and efficient movement and inspection within the colon, offering a promising solution for improved colon cancer screening.

In the field of clinical chronic diseases, common prediction results (such as survival rate) and effect size hazard ratio (HR) are relative indicators, resulting in more abstract information. However, clinicians and patients are more interested in simple and intuitive concepts of (survival) time, such as how long a patient may live or how much longer a patient in a treatment group will live. In addition, due to the long follow-up time, resulting in generation of longitudinal time-dependent covariate information, patients are interested in how long they will survive at each follow-up visit. In this study, based on a time scale indicator-restricted mean survival time (RMST)-we proposed a dynamic RMST prediction model by considering longitudinal time-dependent covariates and utilizing joint model techniques. The model can describe the change trajectory of longitudinal time-dependent covariates and predict the average survival times of patients at different time points (such as follow-up visits). Simulation studies through Monte Carlo cross-validation showed that the dynamic RMST prediction model was superior to the static RMST model. In addition, the dynamic RMST prediction model was applied to a primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC) population to dynamically predict the average survival times of the patients, and the average C-index of the internal validation of the model reached 0.81, which was better than that of the static RMST regression. Therefore, the proposed dynamic RMST prediction model has better performance in prediction and can provide a scientific basis for clinicians and patients to make clinical decisions.