Increasingly, the ability to improve the efficiency, safety and quality of care is being recognized across the primary health sector. Increased focus on "seamless delivery of care", particularly for those with complex care needs, has highlighted the requirement for improved information exchange between health service providers. Personal Health records (PHR) as a transmission of personal health information can be powerful tools for linking the fragmented information that exists between services and allow providers immediate access to essential clinical information. This research is to make known how personal health records (PHR) can be of a greater support or possible as a backbone for continual of service for primary health care. The acquisition of knowledge by this research is about how personal health records can contribute to the planning of efficient patient’s information which in the long run helps in acquiring the rightful treatment and which also results in the benefit of primary health organization members in the whole. The results illustrate the conceptions of the need to in cooperate and encourage the use of personal health records which in the long effect can serve as a backbone for the existing primary healthcare.

ASTRA is a project that aims at studying awareness systems that help people to feel in touch with family and friends even when they are away from their computers and the existing widespread tools of today (IM, skype, twitter,...) are not enough. In this context, this thesis aims at addressing the problem of Interruption management. The focus will be on the design and development of different interaction mechanisms to support the definition of interruption rules as needed in ASTRA. This will require the extension of the existing Interruption Manager as well as the development of suitable user interfaces, also considering physical interfaces when appropriate. A limited evaluation of the proposed solutions will be evaluated with users.

This project is a continuation of my specialization project which was focused on studying theoretical concepts related to case based reasoning method, rule based reasoning method and integration of them. The integration of rule-based and case-based reasoning methods has shown a substantial improvement with regards to performance over the individual methods. Verdande Technology As wants to try integrating the rule based reasoning method with an existing case based system. This project focuses on designing, implementing and testing of a demo system that demonstrates the development of a rule based reasoning component and integrating it with the existing case based system of Verdande Technology As.

In our everyday tasks context plays an important role, we act based on the information we have or based on what we can see, hear or feel about surrounding. Using this information about context we use to adapt ourselves and our behavior for example in class room we usually whisper when we want to communicate with other class fellow, but in cafeteria we talk normally. Due to the advancements in technology and mobile computing, we are now able to carry computers and smart phones with us, almost everywhere and use them as an alternative to desktop computers. Ubiquitous computing goes step further and refers to the world where computation is being weaved into every day object. In typical ubiquitous computing scenario many invisible computers interact with each other to help user in getting his task done. The ability of being carried easily, i.e. mobility and their presence almost everywhere make it necessary for computer systems, taking part in ubiquitous computing environment, context-aware. If computers can sense the environment they are being used in, they can help user in providing only relevant information, information at correct place and time and such systems can also adapt their behavior according to their surroundings. For example, if would be nice if our mobile phone automatically set to silent profile, whenever we are in class room or in a meeting room. Ubicollab is a platform for supporting collaboration and is a result of research work done in the areas of mobility and ubiquitous computing. Mobility and ubiquity being the inherent properties of UbiCollab, requires it to be aware of context just like another ubiquitous system. It will help UbiCollab applications to adapt their behavior as per surrounding and will enhance the experience of collaboration by using the resources nearby. I researched in the area of context-aware ubiquitous computing and used the results of my research to design and implement a solution for making UbiCollab context-aware. The proposed solution answers research problem related with context itself and different aspect of context. Context definition for UbiCollab has already been defined in work previously done; my solution addresses how to represent this contextual information in simple and effective manner, how to gather location information using different and heterogeneous sensors in understandable and standard format. The outcome of this work comprises of proposed context model, design and implementation of Space Manager for working with spaces, design and usage of flexible data store for storing space information and design and implementation of Location Service Manager for gathering location information using different location sensing technologies.

This project is a continuation of research work done by (Asif, 2009) which proposed an extended architecture of Mobile Student Information System (MSIS) to integrate the systems available for the students to provide student centric services on mobile devices. The architecture was developed by using Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to provide services for collaboration and communication among the students or between students and the teachers. The mobile services are built by integrating MSIS to Twitter, Feed based systems and NTNU email system. The services have the potential to provide students an experience of a virtual environment of class, project work and discussion groups anytime-anywhere. The project has been carried out in accordance with design-science research model over a number of implementation and evaluation iterations. A user-driven evaluation of the MSIS service has been conducted among a diverse group of NTNU students. The utility as well as the usability of the system were evaluated by applying observational and empirical evaluation methods in a real-world environment at the university. The usability test identified few issues with the initial design of services, and received feedback for enhancements. The Mobile Service Acceptance Model (MSAM) has been used to examine the factors that are influential for user adoption of mobile services in the light of this project. The MSAM instrument measures different facets of a mobile information service, such as the perceived usefulness, ease of use, and usage intention. Our findings confirm that the utility of the student centric mobile services are perceived as high, and students would likely benefit from such kind of services. There is no doubt about the great potential for a service like MSIS and it is believed to be a useful addition to the existing systems.

Thesis (M.S.)--California Polytechnic State University, 2009. / Title from PDF title page; viewed on January 11, 2010. Major professor: Franz Kurfess, Ph.D. "Presented to the faculty of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo." "In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree [of] Master of Science in Computer Science." "December 2009." Includes bibliographical references (p. 67-72).

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / The Kohonen Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is an unsupervised learning technique for summarizing high-dimensional data so that similar inputs are, in general, mapped close to one another. When applied to textual data, SOM has been shown to be able to group together related concepts in a data collection and to present major topics within the collection with larger regions. Research in which properties of SOM were validated, called the Proximity and Size Hypotheses,is presented through a user evaluation study. Building upon the previous research in automatic concept generation and classification, it is demonstrated that the Kohonen SOM was able to perform concept clustering effectively, based on its concept precision and recall7 scores as judged by human experts. A positive relationship between the size of an SOM region and the number of documents contained in the region is also demonstrated.

Thesis (M.S.) in Spatial Information Science and Engineering--University of Maine, 2003. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 93-99).

Manufacturing hiring managers in the United States who fail to implement adequate recruitment strategies for skilled production workers experience reduced profits and sustainability challenges. The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore the strategies that successful manufacturing hiring managers in North Carolina used to recruit skilled production workers to sustain business profitability. Inductive analysis was guided by the human capital theory, and trustworthiness of interpretations was strengthened by member checking. The population for the study consisted of 4 business leaders who demonstrated the use of effective recruitment strategies to sustain profitability in manufacturing businesses in southeastern North Carolina. Data were collected from face-to-face interviews with the leaders and review of artifacts pertaining to employee recruitment strategies. Six themes emerged: fueling competition for local labor market, enhancing advertising methods, networking, providing job training, growing talent, and building new perceptions of manufacturing. The application of the findings from this study could contribute to positive social change by providing manufacturing business leaders with effective strategies for recruiting skilled workers. Business leaders could contribute to positive social change by increasing workplace stability and employees' abilities to support their families. Businesses and individuals could benefit from improved standards of living, thereby contributing to the sustainment and prosperity of communities.

<p>Successful project selection and management requires optimal supervision of corporate resources within specifications for time, cost, and performance. We developed a model and algorithm to support decisions on these three dimensions for project managers. It combines the advantages of the Program Evaluation and Review Technique (PERT) and the Critical Path Method (CPM). Our methodology leads to more accurate results than PERT/CPM, which typically results in optimistic planning due to less than actual completion time estimates that do not consider the possibility of more than one longest (critical) path. We also estimate performance measured by the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of the project and the tradeoffs between time/cost and performance. We allow decision makers to calculate the probability that each activity will be critical, an indication of their relative importance for managerial purposes, in polynomial time. Furthermore, our methodology provides the means to obtain the optimal time/cost schedule of expected completion times as well as the variability in these time, cost, and performance estimates. We can apply our equations to rank the desirability of projects in a proposed portfolio, thus aiding in the portfolio selection process. A stochastic extension to the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is also used in conjunction with our methodology to demonstrate the application of uncertainty calculations in managerial group choice situations.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)