Stroke is a leading cause of death and disability worldwide [8], underscoring the need for effective digital solutions for stroke patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals. Given that, this thesis aims to evaluate quality aspects of usability, accessibility, and readability of stroke-related mobile health (mHealth) applications, with the primary objective of identifying strengths and weaknesses to enhance user experience and app quality. This study assessed sixteen stroke-related apps through a comprehensive methodology, including accessibility testing with the Google Accessibility Scanner, Mobile Application Rating Scale (MARS) evaluation, heuristic evaluation, and readability assessment. Key findings indicate significant issues with touch target sizes and text contrast, which are crucial for users with impaired visionand motor skills. MARS evaluations revealed that “Constant Therapy” excelled in engagement and functionality due to its interactive features and personalized schedules. At the same time, “Stroke Recovery Predictor” and “Conversation Therapy Lite” scored lower due to limited functionality and unclear interfaces. The heuristic evaluation highlighted frequent violations of the visibility of system status and insufficient error messaging. Readability assessments showed a range of reading difficulty levels, with some apps lacking privacy policies that could be found either within the application or on the developer’s website. The study provides actionable recommendations for developers, such as improving touch target sizes, improving text contrast, increasing functional variety, optimizing navigation, and ensuring privacy policy transparency. Addressing these areas can significantly improve the usability and accessibility of stroke-related mHealth apps, ultimately supporting better health outcomes and quality of life for stroke survivors. Future research should involve more evaluators, use multiple assessment tools, and focus on specific types of stroke apps to refine the evaluation process and provide more targeted insights.

Performance in software describes the efficiency with which a system or a component fulfills its intended tasks, considering factors such as execution speed, resource consumption, and accuracy. It is a quality that can determine whether a software system is a success or a failure and can bring both financial profits and losses to companies. Developers, however, do not fully utilize existing best practices to maximize performance or try to increase it by reducing other quality attributes. The performance issues they face are often more complex and require more effort to be solved than functional bugs. To provide more insight into the subject of such issues, a study is conducted on 54 real-life performance issues found in 7 C# projects, which are analyzed for root causes, affected quality (response time or memory allocation), and applied solutions. Issues are classified based on their root cause, and the taxonomy consisting of 12 categories used in the process is derived from different performance issue classifications proposed by related research through a literature review. Additionally, through another literature review, 11 patterns that can improve software performance are identified and described. Out of those 11 patterns, 4 are found to be commonly applied when solving performance issues in C#. The aim of this study is to provide insights into what kind of performance issues appear and how they are solved in the C# language.

Master of Arts / Department of Economics / Tracy M. Turner / Many municipalities are beginning to play a more central and active role in slowing and reversing the process of the economic stagnation of business and commerce within their cities. Many municipalities combat these problems through the use of providing existing businesses or start up businesses with financial assistance or incentives. Economic theory shows us that a firm’s decision on production and location is influenced by fiscal incentives that are afforded to them. This paper explores the external effects of municipally assisted redevelopment programs. This analysis strives to broaden our understanding of businesses redevelopment programs to include not just the impacts on the commercial side, but see the total effects which include the residential side as well. It analyzes key economic indicators of households who reside within and directly around publicly assisted redevelopment areas and compares these indicators to their non-redeveloped area counterparts. Specifically, it empirically examines the impact of redevelopment on house values and unemployment rates in seven large Midwestern cities: Des Moines, Wichita, Kansas City, St. Louis, Lincoln, Omaha, and Milwaukee, using census data at the block group and census tract levels. I find that redevelopment has a substantial impact in increasing house values and reducing unemployment rates in the vicinity of the redevelopment projects.

Software reuse is a powerful tool in order to reduce development and maintenance time and cost. Any software life cycle product can be reused, not only fragments of source code. A high degree of reuse correlates with a low defect density. In the literature, many theoretical and empirical researches have examined the relationship of software reuse and quality. In this thesis, the effects of reuse on software quality are investigated in an industrial setting. Throughout this study, we worked with Turkey&rsquo / s leading defense industry company: Aselsan&rsquo / s software engineering department. We aimed to explore their real-life software projects and interpret reuse and quality relations for their projects. With this intention, we defined four different hypotheses to determine reuse and quality relations / and in order to confirm these hypotheses / we designed three separate case studies. In these case studies, we collected and calculated reuse and quality metrics i.e. Object-oriented quality metrics, reuse rates and performance measures of individual modules, fault-proneness of software components, and productivity rates of different products. Finally, by analyzing these measurements, we developed suggestions to further benefit from reuse in Aselsan through systematic improvements to the reuse infrastructure and process. Similar case studies have been reported in the literature, however, in Turkey, there are not many case studies using real-life project data, particularly in the defense industry.

Japan obtained equal status with the west imperialism, like Britain and North America, after defeating Russia in 1905. For promoting their mainland policy, they set up the semi-official and semi-private company- South Manchuria Railway (SMR). It owned a huge Research Bureau to investigate some aspects like railway, natural resources, transportation and military, not only for satisfying colonial goal but also for producing rich, valuable and multidimensional knowledge .During forty-years, the Research Bureau attracted and enrolled many Japanese who had interests on, or preference to China. Japanese took this process as a approach or domain to contact with China. This process also reflected their own ideology, image and relative location to China by the rise of the Empire of Japan. This dissertation starts from reviewing important research results, such as Shina Resistance Report, Nōson Chūgoku Kankō Chōsa Surveys. The discussion goes further to four researchers in the SMR: Shūmei Ōkawa, Tachibana Shiraki, Amano Waranosuke and Itō Takeo, who were with various academic background and even standpoint. The investigators attempted to construct their own research approach and meanwhile suffered from dealing it with the subjective power structure. The last section focuses on the academic debate after the war time, in term of controversial interpretation about Mantetsu knowledge from Japanese Sinology. From these three perspectives, the dissertation intends to take Mantetsu as a example to portray the context, power relationship and conflicts within research institute in Japan. It would therefore generalize objectivity, autonomy and path-dependence from the Mantetsu knowledge.

This study mainly discusses the effect, in country level, of minority shareholder protection on shareholder wealth during mergers and acquisitions (M&A). In particular, based on the index of anti-director rights (ADRI) developed by LLSV (1998) and the index of shareholder protection index (SPI) by John Armour et al.(2009), I empirically examine the linkage between M&A activities and indexes as well as the components of these indexes. This study expects the result may show some relevance between of indices and M&A activities, and the legal value of this relevance. The purpose is to show whether minority shareholder protection is workable in M&A activities, and whether it can facilitate M&A markets. To begin with, this paper discusses LLSV¡¦s uniqueness in corporate law study ¡V using empirical method to value whether corporate law matters or not around the world. Then, I analyze LLSV¡¦s possible defects, review criticisms and effects they had incurred. Secondly, we design a study to compare the revised LLSV methodology developed by the Harvard scholar Spamann with SPI index through stock market and M&A market. I also code China¡¦s and Taiwan¡¦s data to make up the lack of samples of cross level variation, and take this as the basis for corporate institutional comparison. This study reports that each of sub-indexes from ADRI and SPI has different relevance to M&A activities: three are positive, five are negative, three are insignificant, and two are valueless of discussion (definition or design defect). Thus we may see the importance of law quantification. We appreciate further research and authorities¡¦ consideration following our work in Taiwan. Finally, the contribution of this study is to attempt to integrate empirical and comparative legal analysis, in response to global corporate governance issues of promoting cross research. On policy implications is that it can predict some investor protection mattes, direct the way of policy adjustment. Besides, this study can also suggest specific amendment for Company Law and Securities law to re-examine how to balance between market development and the protection of minority shareholders.

KM is the process of creating value from the intangible assets of an enterprise. It deals with how best to leverage knowledge internally in the enterprise (in its individual employees, and the knowledge that gets built into its structures and systems) and externally to the customers and stakeholders. As KM initiatives, projects and systems are just beginning to appear in organisations, there is little research and empirical field data to guide the successful development and implementation of such systems or to guide the expectations of the potential benefits of such systems. In addition, about 84 per cent of KM programmes failed or exerted no significant impact on the adopting organisations worldwide due to inability to consider many critical factors that contribute to the success of KM project implementation. Hence, this study is an exploratory investigation into the KM implementation based on an integrated approach. This includes: (1) a comprehensive review of the relevant literature; (2) a comprehensive analysis of secondary case studies of KM implementations in 90 organisations presented in the literature, in order to arrive at the most critical factors of KM implementation and their degree of criticality; (3) exploratory global survey of 92 organisations in 23 countries that have already implemented or are in the process of implementing KM; (4) in-depth case studies of four leading organisations to understand how KM implementation processes and the critical factors identified are being addressed. Based on the empirical findings of the study, 28 critical factors were identified that must be carefully considered in the KM implementation to achieve a successful project. Moreover, the study proposes an integrated model for effective KM implementation which contains essential elements that contribute to project success.

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Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-11T14:02:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Sergio Roberto Costa Vieira.pdf: 3218639 bytes, checksum: 3935b43e35cc99b70f873c5ddb6e1882 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-07-18 / This thesis presents a requirements elicitation technique guided by business processes modeling. This technique, called REMO (Requirements elicitation by oriented Business Process Modeling), uses a set of heuristics to extract the software requirements from business process diagrams. The purpose of the technique is to aid systems analysts in the identification of functional requirements, non-functional requirements, and business rules. To accomplish such task, the REMO technique uses business process diagrams created using the BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) notation. This thesis describes how the REMO technique was created and evaluated using an empirical-based research method. Furthermore, we present the analyses of the results obtained through three controlled experiments, which showed evidence that the REMO technique may be considered useful to be applied in software development during a requirements elicitation. / Esta dissertação apresenta uma técnica de elicitação de requisitos orientada pela modelagem de processos de negócios. A técnica de elicitação é denominada como REMO (Requirements Elicitation oriented by business process MOdeling), uma técnica que utiliza um conjunto de heurísticas para extrair os requisitos de software a partir dos diagramas de processos de negócios. O propósito da técnica é apoiar os analistas de sistemas na identificação dos requisitos funcionais, não funcionais e regras de negócios a partir dos diagramas de processos de negócios feitos em BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation). Esta dissertação descreve como a técnica REMO foi elaborada e avaliada por meio de um método de pesquisa baseado em experimentação. Além disso, apresentam-se as análises dos resultados obtidos de três estudos experimentais controlados, que apontaram indícios de que a técnica REMO pode ser considerada útil para ser aplicada no desenvolvimento de software durante a elicitação de requisitos.