Neurodegenerative Parkinson's Disease is one of the common incurable diseases among the elderly. Clinical assessments are characterized as standardized means for PD diagnosis. However, relying on medical evaluation of a patient's status can be subjective to physicians' experience, making the assessment process susceptible to human errors. The use of ICT-based tools for capturing the status of patients with PD can provide more objective and quantitative metrics. In this vein, the Personalized Serious Game Suite and intelligent Motor Assessment Tests, produced within (...) the i-PROGNOSIS European project, are explored in the current study. More specifically, data from 27 patients with PD at Stage 1 and Stage 3 produced from their interaction with PGS/iMAT are analyzed. Five feature vector scenarios are set, including features from PGS or iMAT scores or their combination, after also taking into consideration the age of patients with PD. These FVs are fed into three machine learning classifiers, i.e., K-Nearest Neighbor, Support Vector Machines, and Random Forest, to infer the stage of each patient with PD. A Leave-One-Out Cross-Validation method is adopted for testing the classification performance. The experimental results show that a high classification accuracy is achieved from both data sources, justifying the effectiveness of PGS/iMAT to efficiently reflect the motor skill status of patients with PD and further potentiating PGS/iMAT enhancement with a machine learning a part to infer for the stage of patients with PD. Clearly, this integrated approach provides new opportunities for remote monitoring of the stage of patients with PD, contributing to a more efficient organization and set up of personalized interventions. (shrink)

Human-Computer Interaction and games set a new domain in understanding people’s motivations in gaming, behavioral implications of game play, game adaptation to player preferences and needs for increased engaging experiences in the context of HCI serious games. When the latter relate with people’s health status, they can become a part of their daily life as assistive health status monitoring/enhancement systems. Co-designing HCI-SGs can be seen as a combination of art and science that involves a meticulous collaborative process. The design elements (...) in assistive HCI-SGs for Parkinson’s Disease patients, in particular, are explored in the present work. Within this context, the Game-Based Learning design framework is adopted here and its main game-design parameters are explored for the Exergames, Dietarygames, Emotional games, Handwriting games, and Voice games design, drawn from the PD-related i-PROGNOSIS Personalized Game Suite holistic approach. Two main data sources were involved in the study. In particular, the first one includes qualitative data from semi-structured interviews, involving 10 PD patients and four clinicians in the co-creation process of the game design, whereas the second one relates with data from an online questionnaire addressed by 104 participants spanning the whole related spectrum, i.e., PD patients, physicians, software/game developers. Linear regression analysis was employed to identify an adapted GBL framework with the most significant game-design parameters, which efficiently predict the transferability of the PGS beneficial effect to real-life, addressing functional PD symptoms. The findings of this work can assist HCI-SG designers for designing PD-related HCI-SGs, as the most significant game-design factors were identified, in terms of adding value to the role of HCI-SGs in increasing PD patients’ quality of life, optimizing the interaction with personalized HCI-SGs and, hence, fostering a collaborative human-computer symbiosis. (shrink)

In the article “Settlement on Lusignan Cyprus after the Latin Conquest: The Accounts of Cypriot and other Chronicles and the Wider Context” the narratives of various chronicles of the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries on settlement in Cyprus in the years following the Latin conquest, from the end of the twelfth to the early thirteenth century, will be examined and compared. The details provided by the chronicles, where the information given derived from, the biases present in the various accounts, the (...) extent to which they are accurate, especially in cases where they are corroborated or refuted by documentary evidence, will all be discussed. The chronicles that will be referred to are the thirteenth century continuation of William of Tyre, that provides the fullest account of the settlement of Latin Christians and others on Cyprus after the Latin conquest, the fifteenth century chronicle of Leontios Makhairas, the anonymous chronicle of ‘Amadi’ that is probably dateable to the early sixteenth century although for the section on thirteenth century Cypriot history it draws on earlier sources and the later sixteenth century chronicle of Florio Bustron. Furthermore, the Chorogra a and the Description of Stephen de Lusignan, two chronicles postdating the conquest of Cyprus by the Ottoman Turks in 1570, will also be referred to on the subject of settlement in thirteenth century Cyprus. By way of comparison, the final part of the paper examined the extent to which the evidence of settlement in other Mediterranean lands derives chiefly from chronicles or from documentary sources. In conclusion, it can be stated that the various accounts of settlement on Cyprus following its cession to King Guy of Jerusalem in 1192 show differences in terms of the value of the fiefs, the geographical regions from which the settlers came and the types of properties which were granted to them. The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem resembles Cyprus in that the source material for early Latin settlement is narrative, not documentary. But this is not the case for the Venetian Crete and the Hospitaller Rhodes, where the source materials recording the arrival of the first Latin settlers are wholly documentary. (shrink)

The Middle Ages have their great love stories. We owe one of them to Peter I Lusignan, King of Cyprus. Married to Eleanor of Aragon, who bore him a son and a successor, he had a mistress pregnant with his child. The queen decided to eliminate this rival by inducing a premature delivery. The incident was recorded by Leontios Makhairas, a Cypriot chronicler, who described the cruelty of Eleanor and mourned the fate of the baby. But it is (...) not his account which keeps this tragedy alive in Cyprus even today. There is a folk song about beautiful Arodaphnousa, who suffered because of the bad queen. The song is deprived of historical context, but it is a historical source nevertheless. Its remote counterpart is the Catalan story of Eleanor, who was expelled from Cyprus and lived in Aragon for a long time. This story creates an image of a benign, calm lady who was venerated after death by her subjects. The clash between these images makes one think about the black and white PR created in every epoch. But this is not the point of this story. The point is the fate of an innocent child, both the flower and the victim of love. This is a rare motif in medieval literature; children are seldom present on the pages of its manuscripts. The emotion connected with this story deserves the reader’s attention. (shrink)

Leontios Eustratios, called Philoponos, was a prolific scribe and tireless traveler, though neglected by modern research. The first part of this article is devoted to the reconstruction of Leontios’ life and activity, while the second describes a new witness of the theological works by the patriarch Nicephorus and offers new data for research on philology and textual transmission.

Die neue diplomatische Ausgabe der Chronik von Leontios Machairas setzt zwar die Publikationen von K. Sathas (Venedig 1873, Nachdruck Athen 1972) und Dawkins (Oxford 1932, Nachdruck Famagusta 1969, und AMS Press New York 1980) voraus, Methode und Zielsetzungen der neuen Bearbeitung und Veröffentlichung der Chronik – der 2. Band mit der Kritischen Ausgabe wird noch geliefert – weichen jedoch davon ab und nähern sich den zeitgenössischen textphilologischen Forderungen. Die Herausgeber des hier zu präsentierenden 1. Bandes haben schon seit langem (...) in zahlreichen Abhandlungen an dem Dialog über die Chronik von Machairas selbst und ihre Interpretationsmöglichkeiten wie auch über andere Textausgaben früher neugriechischer Werke teilgenommen, wobei sie immer den starken oralen Charakter beider Versionen, die die Handschriften uns überliefern (S. 19), betonen. (shrink)

The changes in the short version of Leontios of Neapolis’ Life of John the Almsgiver are analyzed in order to evaluate their cause and to expose their literary character. It is shown that the saint’s oaths are suppressed due to a misunderstanding of a passage in the Prologue, and by respect of the Evangelical commandment. The short version also eliminates pagan concepts of fortune, emphasises the social hierarchy, the accordance between words and thoughts, the action of God as a (...) cause of miracles, and avoids to name God as a reason. The short version raises the stylistical level of the text using the methods of the Metaphrast which is common in the 10th century. The textual tradition also allows to date it into this century. The long version is surely the original text, and the changes made to it show a cultural change between the 7th and 10th centuries. (shrink)

This study is about two political church crises that the Greek Cypriot Orthodox Church, which regained its freedom with the conquest of the island of Cyprus by the Ottoman Empire, experienced during the British rule. The British administration in Cyprus is divided into two periods. The first is the period that lasted until 1914 within the scope of the two-point agreement with the Ottoman Empire in 1878, and when the island was actually accepted as Ottoman territory; the second is the (...) period from the British unilateral annexation of the island in 1914 to the establishment of the Republic of Cyprus in 1960. The first of the church crises during the British administration took place in 1900-1910, between the Bishop of Kitium Kyrillos Papadopoulos and the Bishop of Kyrenia Kyrillos Basileiou. The second one took place in 1933-1947, because of the Metropolitan of Paphos Leontios Leontiou's declaration that the metropolitans who were in exile outside of the island due to the 1931 revolts declared that elections could not be held without their return to the island. Since the Greek Cypriot Orthodox Church is an autocephalous church, it did not want to interfere with other churches in its internal affairs, but the intervention was inevitable due to the stalemate choice of diocese. The Greek Cypriot Orthodox Church, which has had an influence in politics until today, was able to overcome the church crises it had experienced at the beginning of the 20th century only with the influence and help of politics. The first Greek flag in Cyprus was used as a supporter gathering effort during the first church crisis. He was taken to Trooditissa Monastery by Kyrillos (Kyrillos Papadopoulos). However, the island of Cyprus has no ties with Greece, neither in previous periods nor now. It is the church that tries and claims to create a bond between the Greeks living on the island of Cyprus and Greece. The church crises mentioned in the process played an important role in the election of Makarios III, the first president of the Republic of Cyprus, as archbishop. During this period, among the archbishop candidates, there had been accusations of not defending Enosis passionately against the rival island and being too close to the British administration. Makarios III fiercely defended Enosis and was, at the same time, always in conflict with the British administration. This process brought him first the archbishopric, and then the Presidency of the Republic of Cyprus. The Turkish hostility, which came to the fore in the aforementioned period in Cyprus, was considered the first condition of being an archbishop. After the British annexed the island unilaterally, the archbishops of the Greek Orthodox Church, who were almost sure that the British would leave the island to them, made church propaganda out of hostility to the British administration and then to the Turks. In the study, the attitude of the Greek Cypriot Orthodox Church, which is an autocephalous church, in intra-church disputes and its adherence to church rules are also discussed. These two crises, in which the effect of the idea of enosis on the choice of diocese will be seen more clearly, are very important in terms of understanding the present day of the church. (shrink)