Browsing by Author "Perera, I."

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7

Developing a Narrative Assessment Tool for Sinhala Speaking Children through Cross-cultural Collaboration: The Process and the Product
(University of Kelaniya, 2012) Wijesinghe, T.; Perera, I.; Shadden, B.
Background: The lack of standardized assessment protocols for the Sinhala and Tamil languages used in assessing clients with communication disorders poses a challenge to speech and language therapists working in Sri Lanka. Assessments are carried out by translating the norms of English and its standardized assessments into Sinhala and Tamil. The language specifics of Sinhala and Tamil are not addressed in these translated assessments. This presents questions regarding best practice in the health service provision for people with communication difficulties in Sri Lanka. Aim: To describe the process of an international, cross-cultural collaboration in translating American narrative discourse assessment procedures used for pediatric and adult populations, into the development of a tool for children aged 6-10 years speaking Sinhala. Methods: The participants were 10 Sinhala speaking children of 6-10 years living in Sri Lanka. Two assessment tools were developed and administered. The first tool was a story re-telling task (spoken and written). The second tool was a story generating task (spoken and written). Record sheets were developed and audio and video recordings were obtained. Results: The child narratives displayed age appropriate aspects of story grammar and true narrative skill level in the story re-telling task. Contradictory results were obtained in information analysis of story generating task. The influence of culture and the Sinhala language was seen with respect to diglossia and in analysis of 3rd person pronoun cohesive ties. Conclusions: The implementation of the pilot study within the Sri Lankan context was invaluable in fine tuning of the tool to be linguistically and culturally appropriate. More collaboration with Sri Lankan educators and speech and language pathologists will make the assessment tool appropriate for use. The tool will be invaluable in the early identification of spoken and written narrative skill difficulties among primary school children in Sri Lanka.
Multimodal user interaction framework for e-commerce
(IEEE International Research Conference on Smart computing & Systems Engineering (SCSE) 2019, Department of Industrial Management, Faculty of Science, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2019) Hewawalpita, S.; Perera, I.
E-commerce has grown to be a major user of e-services and online purchases through e-commerce are largely preferred over the traditional brick and mortar purchasing. Yet it is challenging for the consumers to fully experience the products or services with limited senses, lack of tangibility and sense of presence. Therefore, the objective of this study is to assess how multimodal interactions can be used in e-commerce, to improve the consumer experience. This research describes the design and implementation of multimodal interactions enabled prototype framework for ecommerce developed to address that issue. The framework supports three interaction modes: speech inputs, gesture inputs and interactive 3D product presentations. A case study and a usability study conducted on this framework showed satisfactory results and also revealed some interesting social and cultural barriers to multimodal interactions that involve language and psychological factors
Psychosocial Impact of Puberphonia
(Faculty of Medicine, University of Kelaniya, 2014) Premarathna, M.S.S.; Wijeratne, L.T.; Perera, I.; Wickremasinghe, A.R.
The persistence of adolescent voice even after puberty in the absence of an organic cause is known as puberphonia. This condition is commonly seen in males. Voice plays an important role in the socialization process. The pychosocial effects of puberphonia has not been explored extensively. Aims of the study were to identify psycho-social challenges faced by young adults with puberphonia and coping strategies used to overcome these challenges. The study was carried out as a descriptive cross-sectional study. A self-administered questionnaire consisting of 20 questions was used. The first part of the questionnaire inquired about functional communication and social participation and second part focused on emotional responses. All participants filled out the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ 30) and also took part in individual interviews to gather in depth information. Conversing over the telephone was a problem for 87% while 73% experienced difficulties when talking to same age girls. 60% reported difficulties in work place or place of education. 77% had difficulties in social situations. Only 20% experienced difficulties when interacting with family members. More adolescent participants reported that puberphonia was a problem than the young adult participants. When considering the coping strategies, 73% didn’t talk to others when they are in a group. 60% avoided talking to strangers while 20% communicated using gestures and signs. 10% communicated by writing on paper and 87% used text messages to communicate. 70% of the participants showed psychological distress in the GHQ. Psychosocial difficulties are common in people with puberphonia. Different coping strategies are used to overcome these difficulties. Adolescents are more affected than young adults. It is important to identify these issues and provide psychological counseling for those who need support.
A Scalable Bioinformatics Analysis Platform based on Microservices Architecture
(IEEE International Research Conference on Smart computing & Systems Engineering (SCSE) 2019, Department of Industrial Management, Faculty of Science, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka, 2019) Rajapaksa, S.; Wickramarachchi, A.; Mallawaarachchi, V.; Rasanjana, W.; Perera, I.; Meedeniya, D.
With the advancement of technologies, web services play a significant role to maintain infrastructure in healthcare domain due to the increasing demand of performance. In such systems, adoption of novel technologies is necessary to increase the productivity and reduce the burden of maintenance associated with legacy systems. Microservices architecture has become prominent in deploying server-side enterprise applications by allowing maintainable functionalities. However, it is challenging to utilize microservices in the domain of bioinformatics, although it enables independent process execution and maintenance. This paper introduces the utilization of microservices architecture to build an optimized platform for bioinformatics analyses. We present a hybrid architecture that consists of different hardware platforms to execute accelerated computational services, independently. The core communication is based on an Application Programming Interface (API) gateway. Furthermore, the paper presents the evaluation of results related to the performance of the proposed solution under varying biological sequences as inputs and algorithms
Severe hyponatremia-induced stress cardiomyopathy: A case report and review of literature
(Hindawi Pub. Corp., 2020) Perera, I.; Rajapakse, S.; de Silva, S.T.
ABSTRACT: Takotsubo or stress cardiomyopathy is a non ischemic disease affecting the myocardium, which presents with typical features of myocardial ischemia. Although the presentation with acute central chest pain and shortness of breath mimics acute myocardial ischemia, there is an absence of actual disruption of cardiac blood supply via the coronaries due to acute plaque rupture or vascular spasm. The underlying pathophysiology of this clinical entity remains largely unclear, but a definite association with physical or emotional stress has been well established, hence the term "stress cardiomyopathy." The list of potential triggers continues to grow as the disorder is increasingly detected by clinicians and cardiologists, with better clinical insight and improved availability of cardiac investigations. We report a patient with Takotsubo cardiomyopathy associated with severe hyponatremia.
Sri Lankan medical officers’ attitudes towards the elderly: a pilot study
(Postgraduate Institute of Medicine University of Colombo, 2022) Fernando, R.; Ratnayake, G.; Liyanage, N.; Fonseka, M.; Perera, I.; Kuruppuarachchi, K.A.L.A.; Hapangama, A.
Ageism among doctors influences treatment options and care of the elderly. Attitudes of Sri Lankan doctors towards the elderly have not been studied previously. This descriptive cross-sectional study using Fraboni’s scale of ageism explored doctors' attitudes towards older people in three selected hospitals in Sri Lanka and the relationship of such attitudes with demographic, employment, education and training-related factors. No association between the attitude of doctors toward the elderly and the factors studied in this pilot study were found.
Strategies two - three year olds acquiring Sinhala use to achieve communicative functions
(University of Kelaniya, 2011) Perera, I.
The developmental norms for communication are defined by statistically valid data gathered from studying typically developing children speaking a specific language. These norms define the baseline for diagnosing atypical development. A literature review reveals that Sinhala has very few studies on child language. This gap in the knowledge base has negative implications in providing an equitable speech and language therapy service for Sinhala speaking children. This study is of a preliminary nature, exploring themes of communication development in children acquiring Sinhala. The objective was to explore the linguistic and non-linguistic strategies 2-3 year children acquiring Sinhala use to achieve communicative functions. The focus of the study is the production of language, not comprehension. The influences of gender, age, region, bilingual and monolingual environments were considered. The participants in this case study were 8 children with typical communication development (2-3 year age range) acquiring Sinhala, and their parents. The children were matched for age, gender, region and lingual environment. Each child was visited at three intervals over a 4- 6 ½ month period. The data was collected through the observation of children in naturalistic settings, parent questionnaires and focus group discussions. The data was recorded using written notes, audio and video recording. The data identified 9 communicative functions used by this age range. Both linguistic and non linguistic strategies used by the 8 children were identified. The influence of regional dialects, topography, cultural beliefs and political environments were identified. The children exposed to a bilingual environment displayed use of English vocabulary with Sinhala patterns of syntax. Age dependant variations were also observed. No evidence was obtained that differences in gender, urban, rural settings, bilingual and monolingual environments affected the rate of acquisition. Implications for an equitable therapy service provision and the directions for future research are discussed.