Vivian presents at World Federation of Occupational Therapy Conference

Introduction

CPERL Senior Research Specialist Vivian presented a lightning talk at the World Federation of Occupational Therapy (WFOT) Congress held in Bangkok, Thailand. The conference brought together occupational therapy researchers and practitioners from around the world to share advances relevant to practice.

At the conference, Vivian introduced the CareCorpus+ dataset of caregiver strategies to a global occupational therapy audience. This new CareCorpus+ dataset contains >3,000 participation-focused strategies across the broader early childhood age range and care continuum.  She shared our findings about automatically classifying caregiver strategies data using this larger, more diverse, and more balanced data source. She also provided preliminary results on the value of synthetic data augmentation to strengthen model performance. The findings prompt for further research on ethically sound directions for generating and classifying this type of data in advancing applications utilized by pediatric OTs.

Vivian shares: "I am beyond grateful to have represented the CPERL team at my first WFOT Congress! It was exciting to see how OT practitioners/researchers around the world are using PEM, connecting with CPERL alumni, and seeing the city decorated for Lunar New Year. I was delightfully surprised how many international colleagues I knew in attendance and it was so nice meeting individuals whom I have only connected with over email all these years."

We are excited to share our ongoing work with an international audience and to contribute to global conversations about innovation in occupational therapy.