At the same time that the number of senior adults in the United States is steadily rising, there is also a rising shortage of allied healthcare professionals, including occupational therapists, to meet the current and expected needs of the senior adult population. There are national standards that all occupational therapy (OT) programs have to meet; however, there is not a set national curriculum. It is assumed that students will enter their respective occupational therapy programs with a base knowledge of aging due to prerequisite requirements. To test that assumption, with IRB approval, over four consecutive years 192 first year, first semester occupational therapy students were administered the Facts on Aging Quiz along with additional questions regarding year of birth and anticipated employment. Results showed that first-year occupational therapy students’ knowledge of aging was poor (67.9% mean) regardless of their age or population work preference. Most students stated that pediatrics—only 11.5% stated geriatrics—was their preferred population with which to work. Statistical tests indicated a trend of decreasing mean scores of the cohorts. If this trend of decreasing gerontological literacy exists in occupational therapy, other health care disciplines may be experiencing similar fates. Healthcare education should meet the needs of society and it appears there may be a significant gap that needs to be addressed to prepare health care practitioners to best meet the needs of the current population. Based on these study results, more emphasis needs to be placed in gerontological literacy for new occupational therapy students.
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Traywick L., Saviers B., Griffin T.W., Brown T., 2022, Journal of Occupational Therapy Education
Restructuring farmer–researcher relationships and addressing complexity and uncertainty through joint exploration are at the heart of On-Farm Experimentation (OFE). OFE describes new approaches to agricultural research and innovation that are embedded in real-world farm management, and reflects new demands for decentralized and inclusive research that bridges sources of knowledge and fosters open innovation. Here we propose that OFE research could help to transform agriculture globally. We highlight the role of digitalization, which motivates and enables OFE by dramatically increasing scales and complexity when investigating agricultural challenges.
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Lacoste M., Cook S., McNee M., Gale D., Ingram J., Bellon-Maurel V., MacMillan T., Sylvester-Bradly R., Kindred D., Bramley R., Tremblay N., Longchamps L., Thompson L., Ruiz J., Garcia F., Maxwell B., Griffin T., Oberthur T., Huyghe C., Zhang W., McNamara J., Hall A., 2022, Nat Food
Distributed ledger technology applied to Big Data in agriculture presents challenges and opportunities. Opportunities exist to solve decades-old farm data management problems. Real-world examples of applying distributed ledger technology to current farm data problems in cotton include (1) yield monitor data quality assurance, (2) sustainability metrics and resource tracking of cotton lint quality data from ginner back to subfield locations, and (3) increasing supply chain coordination by providing more information to warehouse managers. The culmination of the discussion across three aspects of cotton production data is of interest to farmers, researchers, policy makers, and consumers.
Griffin, T.W., Harris, K.D., Ward, J.K., Goeringer, L.P., Richard, J.A. 2022, Applied Economics Perspectives and Policy
Research Objectives
To examine the effects of a community bowling program with COVID-19 protocols on quality of life and physical abilities in children with disabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Design
Researchers retrospectively examined data collected by the community-based program. Data collection occurred pre and post participation in the community-based bowling program.
Setting
The study was conducted in four public bowling facilities within the general community.
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Curtis D., Traywick L., James D., Griffin T., 2022, Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation
Space weather (SpWx) impacts civilian technology that is used in our everyday life, ranging from personal technology, like cell phones, to national infrastructures, such as the power grid. Some of the most difficult challenges to the study of SpWx are understanding and communicating the interconnection of the space environment to technology and end users. The Aerospace Corporation supported an initiative to tackle these challenges, with the goals to (1) identify specific current and future difficulties facing specific user groups due to ionospheric disruptions, and
(2) develop potential strategies for addressing them through a combination of mitigation strategies, including the SpWx research, technology, operations, and end-user communities. Precision navigation technologies utilizing Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), were selected as the first focus area, with an emphasis on the precision agriculture (PA) user community. The following report summarizes the information presented and subsequent findings from a two-day workshop, the Space Environment Engineering and Science Applications Workshop – Ionospheric Impacts: Precision Agriculture (SEESAW-II), that brought together members of the PA end-user community, technology engineers and researchers, and SpWx researchers and forecasters. The early sections of the report provide a contextual overview of PA and SpWx meant to be accessible to nonexperts and provide a common level of knowledge for subsequent discussions. The final section of the report documents the five most important observations during the workshop:
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1. The determination of signal disruption sources is key for real-time operations and future technology/system developments.
2. Multi-frequency GNSS systems will likely mitigate the day-to-day quiet and moderately disturbed ionospheric variability impacts on PA end users.
3. Ionospheric nowcasts of ionospheric conditions indicative of signal degradation or loss of lock would enable performance improvements to PA navigation system.
4. The most significant economic impacts due to ionospheric conditions occur at low latitudes where intense, more frequent ionospheric scintillation occurs.
5. The communities represented at the workshop were generally unaware of the available resources, data, and technology available to assist in their respective area of operation and research.
Each observation is followed by a discussion of potential strategies to address them now and in the future. This report is intended to be an initial bridge between the communities that will continue to grow through further discussions and collaborations.
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Rebecca L. B., Joseph E. M., Steven W. L., Robert D. R., and Jehosaphat J. C.-G., Bart C., Septentrio Alisa W. C., Kenneth A. S., Patricia D., Terry W. G., William J. M., Howard J. S., and Robert A. S., Mark L. R., Stephen F. R., Stuart R.