Verónica Violant

The biological family from the perspective of kinship fostered adolescents

BACKGROUNDnPrevious studies emphasise the importance of the biological family to the welfare of fostered adolescents. However, the majority of these studies only take into consideration the viewpoints of the professionals, foster parents and biological parents, not those of the adolescents themselves. For this reason little is known about the perceptions the adolescents have and the needs they express.nnnMETHODnThis study has gathered data from 57 adolescents in kinship family foster care in Spain (AFE). The study applied qualitative research, using focus groups to gather data, and the Atlas.ti programme to analyse the data. The qualitative data give us a more profound understanding of how the fostered adolescents relate to their biological families.nnnRESULTSnThe results highlight the specific needs of these adolescents with regard to: a) understanding of their family history, b) the impact of visits from and relationship with their biological family, and c) the relationship between the biological family and the foster family.nnnCONCLUSIONSnThese findings reveal implications to consider when creating support programmes aimed at this group.

A Gesture Recognition System for Detecting Behavioral Patterns of ADHD

We present an application of gesture recognition using an extension of dynamic time warping (DTW) to recognize behavioral patterns of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We propose an extension of DTW using one-class classifiers in order to be able to encode the variability of a gesture category, and thus, perform an alignment between a gesture sample and a gesture class. We model the set of gesture samples of a certain gesture category using either Gaussian mixture models or an approximation of convex hulls. Thus, we add a theoretical contribution to classical warping path in DTW by including local modeling of intraclass gesture variability. This methodology is applied in a clinical context, detecting a group of ADHD behavioral patterns defined by experts in psychology/psychiatry, to provide support to clinicians in the diagnose procedure. The proposed methodology is tested on a novel multimodal dataset (RGB plus depth) of ADHD children recordings with behavioral patterns. We obtain satisfying results when compared to standard state-of-the-art approaches in the DTW context.

Skills and professional practices for the consolidation of the support group model to foster families

ABSTRACT The research presented here is justified by the lack of tradition in Spain with regards to socio-educational intervention programmes based on training and group support, as well as the proven benefits of these methods in foster care. It addresses the need to go deeper into the acquisition and consolidation of the core professional competences for running socio-educational groups with foster families. After a process of participatory action-research with 39 professionals from the Child Protection System from different regions of Spain, we see an improvement in the development of the competences necessary to establish a supportive relationship with families, management and group dynamics, as well as the crystallization of attitudinal changes in professional practices. Data have been collected on the basis of methodological complementarity and a pre-test–post-test design that has identified and explained the changes in the evolution of competences and professional practices.