The thesis project underlines the importance of designing calm and subtle technologies, by exploring how mobile communicative technologies, such as cell phones, could notify their users about incoming information in a more natural, and non-intrusive manner. The aim of the thesis was to find a way for cell phones to act more appropriately in public and social settings, where they now often are considered intrusive due to their uninhibited manifestations.The thesis provides a theoretical understanding of how normative expectations of cell phone conduct are constituted and maintained within public and social settings. The theories are further grounded in practical work, where the project employ user centered design methods and techniques to, in a collaborative manner, together with users explore the research field to generate insights. Solutions have further been prototyped and evaluated together with users in their everyday settings.Taking inspiration from calm technology, the project looks into how information can be notified, in a more subtle manner in the periphery of the user’s attention. Users’ own priming abilities have been considered as a personal way to recognize the notification and to further associate it as relevant information.As a solution for intrusive cell phones, the thesis proposes Knot; a signature based notification system, which builds on friends’ abilities to recognize each other’s characteristic traits. The system consists of a notification rope, which is a free standing phone accessory that twists and turns, when new information is arriving to the user’s cell phone. It can present whom the information is from by shaping itself into the sender’s representative Knot-signature. If the user can recognize the signature, it will immediately trigger a meaningful association to the person who sent the information.The solution builds upon the restrictiveness between those who can associate a certain signature to a certain person, and those who cannot. For those who have the ability to associate to the signature, its role as a notifier will become meaningful and informative, while for others, who do not share this ability, the signature would be subtle and meaningless, and hence not interfering. The thesis exemplifies how interfaces could provide users with output in a more natural way, by considering users’ previous skills and knowledge, and primarily their priming abilities.

Poor health care delivery in rural communities is a major problem facing the health sector in Namibia. Patients who visit rural communities often wait on queues for several hours every day before they can be examined by a medical practitioner. This is detrimental to the health care process and impacts negatively on the efficiency and effectiveness of the sector. Mobile phones can however be employed as tools to improve work processes in such hospitals and as a result improve health care delivery in rural communities. The purpose of this study was to investigate the health care services provided to patients at Outpatient Departments (OPDs) in rural hospitals through the use of data collection instruments such as interviews, questionnaires, document analysis, expert validation and photographs in order to compile a Mobile Health Service Framework (MHSF) to improve healthcare delivery processes in OPDs. From an interpretive paradigm perspective, the qualitative design was used together with a case study approach. Three hospitals in rural communities were used as case studies. These were Okuryangava Hospital, Katutura Hospital and Khomasdal Hospital. Interviews were conducted and questionnaires distributed to the participants. The findings revealed that there is a high concentration of mobile phone usage in rural communities and there is a high usage of the SMS feature on such mobile phones. / Computing / M. Sc. (Computing)

<div> <p>New information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as cell phones, email, and social media, have been transforming how social movements recruit, organize, participate in collective action, and experience repression. Yet, limited scholarship has addressed the uses of these technologies by social movements organizing within American prisons. Using a dialectical interpretive approach, I examine how a coalition of prisoners’ rights organizations uses ICTs to plan and participate in collective resistance across prison walls. The coalition, referred to here as the New Prisoners’ Rights Coalition (NPRC), organizes against low and no-wage prison labor, unhealthy and unsafe prison conditions, and inhumane prisoner treatment. The NPRC has a multi-platform public digital presence and mobilizes prisoner activists and free activists. Through narrative description, I summarize the ways NPRC activists use ICTs from December 2013 through September 2016, noting changes in ICT use over time and in response to movement repression. I find that new ICTs offer innovative ways for NPRC activists to record and document their environments, communicate privately, and communicate publicly. ICTs, however, do not remove all barriers to activism or ensure that activists’ concerns are resolved or even taken seriously. NPRC activists struggle to overcome stigma and mischaracterization online. They face physical repression, interpersonal hostilities, institutional sanctions, economic repression, legal sanctions, interpretive repression, surveillance, and monitoring. In different circumstances, the NPRC responds to repression by increasing ICT use, decreasing ICT use, going dark, migrating from one online platform to another, and shifting digital responsibilities from prisoner activists to free activists. I explain how, most of the time, the digital unreachability of the prison environment makes it difficult for NPRC activists to substantiate their claims of mistreatment, abuse, and injustice. Moreover, I consider how current prison technology policies may be inadvertently pushing NPRC activists into difficult-to-monitor online spaces and exacerbating safety concerns of corrections workers.</p></div>

Electrical energy is used at approximately the rate of 15 Terawatts world-wide. Generating this much energy has become a primary concern for all nations. There are many ways of generating energy among which the most commonly used are non-renewable and will extinct much sooner than expected. Very active research is going on both to increase the use of renewable energy sources and to use the available energy with more efficiency. Among these sources, solar energy is being considered as the most abundant and has received high attention. The mobile phone has become one of the basic needs of modern life, with almost every human being having one.Individually a mobile phone consumes little power but collectively this becomes very large. This consideration motivated the research undertaken in this masters thesis. The objective of this thesis is to design a model for solar power based charging circuits for mobile phone using Simulink(R). This thesis explains a design procedure of solar power based mobile charger circuit using Simulink(R) which includes the models for the photo-voltaic array, maximum power point tracker, pulse width modulator, DC-DC converter and a battery. The first part of the thesis concentrates on electron level behavior of a solar cell, its structure and its electrical model.The second part is to design an array of solar cells to generate the desired output. Finally, the third part is to design a DC-DC converter which can stabilize and provide the required input to the battery with the help of the maximum power point tracker and pulse width modulation. The obtained DC-DC converter is adjustable to meet the requirements of the battery. This design is aimed at charging a lithium ion battery with nominal voltage of 3.7 V, which can be taken as baseline to charge different types of batteries with different nominal voltages.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-12-12T20:22:52Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 RAFAEL ALCESTE BERRI.pdf: 28428368 bytes, checksum: 667b9facc9809bfd5e0847e15279b0e6 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-02-21 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / In this work, three proposals of systems have been developed using a frontal camera to monitor the driver and enabling to identificate if a cell phone is being used while driving the vehicle. It is estimated that 80% of crashes and 65% of near collisions involved drivers who were inattentive in traffic for three seconds before the event. Five videos in real environment were generated to test the systems. The pattern recognition system (RP) uses adaptive skin segmentation, feature extraction, and machine learning to detect cell phone usage on each frame. The cell phone detection happens when, in periods of 3 seconds, 60% (threshold) of frames or more are identified as a cell phone use, individually. The average accuracy on videos achieved was 87.25% with Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Gaussian activation function, and two neurons of the intermediate layer. The movement detection system (DM) uses optical flow, filtering the most relevant movements of the scene, and three successive frames for detecting the movements to take the phone to the ear and take it off. The DM proposal was not demonstrated as being an effective solution for detecting cell phone use, reaching an accuracy of 52.86%. The third solution is a hybrid system. It uses the RP system for classification and the DM for choosing the RP parameters. The parameters chosen for RP are the threshold and the classification system. The definition of these two parameters occurs at the end of each period, based on movement detected by the DM. Experimentally it was established that, when the movement induces to use cell phone, it is proper to use the threshold of 60%, and the classifier as MLP/Gaussian with seven neurons of the intermediate layer; otherwise, it is used threshold 85%, and MLP/Gaussian with two neurons of the intermediate layer for classification. The hybrid solution is the most robust system with average accuracy of 91.68% in real environment. / Neste trabalho, são desenvolvidas três propostas de sistemas que permitem identificar o uso de celular, durante o ato de dirigir um veículo, utilizando imagens capturadas de uma câmera posicionada em frente ao motorista. Estima-se que 80% das colisões e 65% das quase colisões envolveram motoristas que não estavam prestando a devida atenção ao trânsito por três segundos antes do evento. Cinco vídeos em ambiente real foram gerados com o intuito de testar os sistemas. A proposta de reconhecimento de padrões (RP) emprega segmentação de pele adaptativa, extração de características e aprendizado de máquina (classificador) na detecção do celular em cada quadro processado. A detecção do uso do celular ocorre quando, em períodos de 3 segundos, ao menos em 60% dos quadros (corte) são identificados com celular. A acurácia média nos vídeos alcançou 87, 25% ao utilizar Perceptron Multi-camadas (MLP) com função de ativação gaussiana e dois neurônios na camada intermediária como classificador. A proposta de detecção de movimento (DM) utiliza o fluxo ótico, filtragem dos movimentos mais relevantes da cena e três quadros consecutivos para detectar os momentos de levar o celular ao ouvido e o retirá-lo. A aplicação do DM, como solução para detectar o uso do celular, não se demostrou eficaz atingindo uma acurácia de 52, 86%. A terceira proposta, uma solução híbrida, utiliza o sistema RP como classificador e o de DM como seu parametrizador. Os parâmetros escolhidos para o sistema de RP são o corte e o sistema classificador. A definição desses dois parâmetros ocorre ao final de cada período, baseada na movimentação detectada pela DM. Com experimentações definiu-se que, caso a movimentação induza ao uso do celular, é adequado o uso do corte de 60% e o classificador MLP/Gaussiana com sete neurônios na camada intermediária, caso contrário, utiliza-se o corte de 85% e classificador MLP/Gaussiana com dois neurônios na mesma camada. A versão híbrida é a solução desenvolvida mais robusta, atingindo a melhor acurácia média de 91, 68% em ambiente real.

Made available in DSpace on 2014-12-17T14:52:42Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 PatrickRA.pdf: 1597143 bytes, checksum: be7cb13888aef28762e6bca5f5f95882 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008-12-05 / One of the best examples of the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) evolutions is on the high capability of storing and processing data into smaller devices, creating a new business condition, the mobility . This mobility in a deeper analysis proposes a business remodeling in many different areas (business segmentations), through the Internet anywhere at any time, allowing managers and researchers to think again their actual models that work nowadays in companies and public institutions, modifying the way internal and external clients can be attended. This thesis analyzes issues on mobile business adoption, technological evolutions and the impacts caused by this new reality the access to information anywhere at any time . This research is exploratory and shows a compilation of similar papers and thesis describing how was conducted the survey within 50 companies in the states of Rio Grande do Norte, Pernambuco and Cear?. The statistics analysis showed the different level of mobile technology usage from simple voice communications to wide band data transmission. The analysis pointed that canonic correlation was the most effective type of analysis to describe the relations among all groups of variables showing which of them are relevant, or not, for mobile technology adoption / Um dos principais exemplos da velocidade com que as mudan?as acontecem na Tecnologia da Informa??o e Comunica??o (TIC) est? na sua maior capacidade de processamento e armazenamento em dispositivos cada vez menores, criando uma nova condi??o para diversos neg?cios, a mobilidade. Esta mobilidade, que em uma an?lise mais aprofundada pode propor inclusive uma remodelagem de muitos neg?cios atrav?s do acesso ? internet em qualquer lugar e a qualquer tempo, permitir? ainda que gestores e pesquisadores repensem os modelos atuais de funcionamento de empresas e organiza??es al?m do atendimento a clientes internos e externos. Este trabalho avalia fatores que influenciam a ado??o de tecnologias m?veis, evolu??o tecnol?gica e o impacto provocado nas empresas por esta nova realidade a de acesso ? informa??o em qualquer lugar e a qualquer momento . O trabalho cita o que outros pesquisadores j? identificaram dentro do tema de tecnologias m?veis e como foi realizada esta pesquisa explorat?ria, que foi aplicada nas empresas atrav?s de question?rios do tipo survey em um universo de 50 empresas dos estados do Rio Grande do Norte, Pernambuco e Cear?. A an?lise dos resultados foi dividida em an?lise descritiva, an?lise de correspond?ncia, an?lise de agrupamento (por vari?veis e por caso) e an?lise de correla??o can?nica, sendo esta a que melhor permitiu identificar os diferentes n?veis de utiliza??o das tecnologias m?veis que v?o desde a utiliza??o para voz at? aplica??es que demandam grandes volumes de transmiss?o de dados e as caracter?sticas das empresas, empres?rios, e da utiliza??o da TIC que influenciam, ou n?o, na ado??o de tecnologias m?veis

Master of Technology Marketing Management in the Faculty of Business at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2013 / The advent of IT technology in particular, mobile technology has forced most of the private sector to re-evaluate how they interact and communicate with their intermediaries. Since the early 1990s most businesses have put the intermediary at the centre of their business by means of business strategies like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions. However, the speed at which technology is evolving is forcing businesses to evaluate new and alternative means of managing intermediary relationships, as intermediaries now drive the economy, not businesses. The very essence of a good CRM programme is its reliance on an IT system which is advanced enough to analyse the captured intermediary data, transform that data into usable knowledge, which is then stored in a centralised, crossfunctional database or data warehouse. Most businesses agree that the goal of CRM solutions is to maximise business profits by maximising the value of interaction with intermediaries. Successful CRM businesses have strong, clearly defined business strategies that focus on the intermediary and generate a process-orientated view of the organisation. CRM functionality therefore creates a single view of the intermediary and the business as well as support to the Marketing, Sales, Order, Production and Service processes. This dissertation investigated the CRM functionality within the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) wholesale and retail liquor sector of the City of Cape Town, paying particular attention to the three channels that the liquor industry operate in. These three channels are segmented as the formal Off-premise consumption, formal On-premise consumption and the Informal Main market. The formal Off-premise consumption channel consist of the mainstream convenience and self-service liquor retailers where stock is purchased and consumed at another location by the end user. The formal On-premise consumption channel consists of venues where patrons purchase and consume liquor on the spot. The informal Main market, which is dominated by shebeens and taverns, is a combination of the Off- and On-premise consumption channels where bottle purchases and consumption occur on site together. This dissertation investigates one primary and four secondary questions within these channels. The primary question will establish whether a mobile CRM programme can be used as a marketing instrument to create a competitive advantage within the B2B licensed liquor industry of South Africa. The secondary questions establish whether intermediaries are willing to adopt CRM technology, what barriers exist, what the benefits are for both intermediary and company and whether there will be a reduction in communication costs for both parties. The South African government regulates the South African liquor industry in that only licensed outlets may trade in liquor. Within the Western Cape region, there are approximately 4,000 licensed outlets of which approximately 2,000 licences (data obtained from a leading liquor wholesalers company database) fall within the boundaries of Cape Town. A leading liquor wholesaler has legal contracts with each one of these accounts, providing a defined database from which primary research was conducted. Primary researches, in the form of quantitative interviews with a random sample of 150 intermediaries, across the three identified channels were conducted for this study. Questionnaires were used to establish how a competitive B2B mobile CRM programme can be implemented, while possible barriers and facilitators to mobile CRM were also considered. The findings produced two results: one result was expected but the second result was not expected by the researcher. The first results were that 57.5% of respondents, across all business channels, indicated their willingness to receiving a mCRM programme on their mobile devices. The unexpected finding was that 57.3% of respondents across all business channels had no idea or did not know what a CRM programme was. From these findings several recommendations are discussed namely: the implementation of a six month tactical marketing campaign which would expose intermediaries to the concepts and ideas of a CRM programme; the establishment of a comprehensively updated intermediary database; welltrained field sales staff who would support the CRM programme once implemented; a simple, easy to use and navigate mCRM programme to begin with. This programme would have to have the ability and capability to progress in the future as intermediaries become more familiar with the system; and a complete company philosophy, with a clear, holistic and coherent business strategy, that would embrace the mCRM concept to drive future growth opportunities. Key Words: business-to-business; customer relationship management; electronic customer relationship management; Information Technology and mobile customer relationship management.

The pace of technological advancement and growth in the twenty-first century continues to soar at unprecedented levels and beyond human imagination. As the fourth industrial revolution unfolds, it has become increasingly difficult to predict the direction technological innovation will take in the not too distant future. Digital technologies have become an integral part of every aspect of human existence (work, play, schooling and personal relationships). The purpose of this study was to explore the various ways mobile technological gadgets like cell phones, tablets and laptops could be leveraged to promote a culture of leisure reading amongst a group of Zimbabwean adolescent learners. Data was collected using the literacy practices interview, mobile reading diaries, focus group interviews and the researcher’s personal field notes. Theoretically, the study was guided primarily by Urie Bronfenbrenner's Bioecological systems theory. Also, the study was supported by Guthrie and Wigfield's reader engagement model and Turner and Hicks' connected reader model. The empirical data collected through the data collection instruments were analysed inductively. The findings revealed that adolescent learners are a digital generation whose reading needs are ever growing and expectations are ever changing. The adolescent participants expect their reading to be like the rest of their digital lives, which is quick, uninterrupted, personalised and smart. It was found that the adolescent participants like to read on their terms, as they dislike being told when to read or what to read. Three reader identities were revealed namely; the eager reader, the ‘fifty fifty’ reader and the non-reader. The adolescent participants who were not already mobile readers readily accepted and adopted mobile reading as it afforded them vast reading opportunities. Besides, the findings of the study revealed that participants encountered many challenges, which in some instances militated against their mobile reading endeavours. These challenges were because of mobile phone use restrictions in schools, prohibitive data costs, a strong emphasis on academic reading as opposed to leisure reading and internet connectivity problems amongst other issues. In this study, the recommendations and guidelines outlined provide a framework with which schools, parents, mobile reading application developers and policymakers can adopt to support a robust mobile reading culture amongst Zimbabwean adolescent learners. The researcher concluded that mobile reading devices are a novel, noble and credible means through which they can foster positive leisure literacy practices amongst Zimbabwean adolescents. / Language Education, Arts and Culture / Ph. D. (Curriculum and Instructional Studies)

Poor health care delivery in rural communities is a major problem facing the health sector in Namibia. Patients who visit rural communities often wait on queues for several hours every day before they can be examined by a medical practitioner. This is detrimental to the health care process and impacts negatively on the efficiency and effectiveness of the sector. Mobile phones can however be employed as tools to improve work processes in such hospitals and as a result improve health care delivery in rural communities. The purpose of this study was to investigate the health care services provided to patients at Outpatient Departments (OPDs) in rural hospitals through the use of data collection instruments such as interviews, questionnaires, document analysis, expert validation and photographs in order to compile a Mobile Health Service Framework (MHSF) to improve healthcare delivery processes in OPDs. From an interpretive paradigm perspective, the qualitative design was used together with a case study approach. Three hospitals in rural communities were used as case studies. These were Okuryangava Hospital, Katutura Hospital and Khomasdal Hospital. Interviews were conducted and questionnaires distributed to the participants. The findings revealed that there is a high concentration of mobile phone usage in rural communities and there is a high usage of the SMS feature on such mobile phones. / Computing / M. Sc. (Computing)

No description available.