Stroke rehabilitation is to train the motor function of a patients limb. In this process, functional assessment is of importance, and it is primarily based on a patients task performance. The context of the rehabilitation discussed in this thesis is such that functional assessment is conducted through a computer system and the Internet. In particular, a patient performs the task at home in a haptic virtual environment, and the task performance is transmitted to the therapist over the Internet. One problem with this approach to functional assessment is that a patients mind state is little known to the therapist. This immediately leads to one question, that is, whether an elevated mind state will have some significant effect on the patients task performance? If so, this approach can result in a considerable error. The overall objective of this thesis study was to generate an answer to the aforementioned question. The study focused on a patients elevated fatigue state. The specific objectives of the study include: (i) developing a haptic virtual environment prototype system for functional assessment, (ii) developing a physiological-based inference system for fatigue state, and (iii) performing an experiment to generate knowledge regarding the fatigue effect on task performance. With a limited resource in recruiting patients in the experiment, the study conducted few experiments on patients but mostly on healthy subjects. The study has concluded: (1) the proposed haptic virtual environment system is effective for the wrist coordination task and is likely promising to other tasks, (2) the accuracy of proposed fatigue inference system achieves 89.54%, for two levels of fatigue state, which is promising, (3) the elevated fatigue state significantly affects task performance in the context of wrist coordination task, and (4) the accuracy of the individual-based inference approach is significantly higher than that of the group-based inference approach. The main contributions of the thesis are (1) generation of the new knowledge regarding the fatigue effect on task performance in the context of home-based rehabilitation, (2) provision of the new fatigue inference system with the highest accuracy in comparison with the existing approaches in literature, and (3) generation of the new knowledge regarding the difference between the individual-based inference and group-based inference approaches.

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This dissertation investigated the occurrence and the effect of incidental noticing in a text-based Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) environment on enhancing second language learning. Learning proficiency was also examined as a possible intervening variable. This was a quasi-experimental study of sixteen nonnative English speakers from a four-year college in Taiwan, collaborating with sixteen native speaking peers in Texas, via chat agents in order to complete two communicative learning tasks over a two-month period of time. Two posttests were customized for each Nonnative English Speaker (NNES) in order to assess his/her second language learning outcomes. In addition, Language- Related Episode’s (LRE’s) characteristics were expected to serve as powerful predictors of NNES’ correct language learning outcomes. In order to unveil the possible impact of the learner’s language proficiency level and its effect on noticing, eight low- intermediate and eight high- intermediate NNESs were included in the study. The findings revealed that CMC context and native and nonnative English speaking task-based peer interactions promoted learner’s noticing and affected the learning performance of NNESs of different levels. The posttest performance showed that incidental noticing facilitated learner’s linguistic knowledge intake and memory retention. Text-based CMC created a visual and collaborative context which allowed NES peers to offer NNESs of different levels personalized feedback. Among LRE’s characteristics, successful uptake, as a powerful predictor, constantly entered all the models generated by logistic regression analysis, which underpinned the importance of quality uptake during the two-way communication for second language learning. In addition, directness (explicit feedback) and response (elicitation) also appeared in regression models of the subsets of LRE data, which indicated the particular type of feedback needed by learners, especially lower proficiency level ones. In addition, NESs’ involvement also facilitated NNESs’ noticing; NES peers applied elicitation techniques to redirect learner’s attention to the problematic utterances and initiated meaning negotiation. The findings reveal that incidental noticing is beneficial to learning, especially when learners are provided with explicit feedback and incorporate the targeted linguistic items into their language production.

In a fast-paced office setting, information workers inevitably experience expected and unexpected interruptions daily. As the volume and the diversity of information and application types grow, the impact of frequent interruptions on their task performance gets more severe. To manage the negative effects of interruptions on work performance, workers often engage in task management activities to ensure they are better prepared to resume suspended task less stressfully. However, managing tasks causes additional cognitive burden and a time cost to users who already are experiencing the tight attention and time economies. This dissertation presents an approach to augmenting users' task performance by allowing them to manage and retrieve desired work contexts with ease. The Context Browser, the implementation of the proposed approach, is designed to help the users to explore narratives of their workspace manner and restore their previous work contexts. The goals of implementing the Context Browser are to 1) unload the users? burden of taking care of their task-related or task status information promptly and thus help them focus solely on executing a given task, 2) allow them to browse their previous workspace intuitively, and 3) enhance continuity of their tasks by supporting them to retrieve desired work context more quickly and easily. In order to validate the proposed approach, a user study comparing task performances of the group with the Context Browser to the one without the Context Browser was conducted. The study produced both quantitative and qualitative results. The study confirmed that with the Context Browser subjects expressed better quantitative numbers than the ones without. Subjects using the Context Browser were able to restore and retrieve their desired work setting and task-related information more quickly and correctly. Qualitative results showed that the subjects using the Context Browser found that various contextual cues and the interfaces responsible for providing the cues offered effective artifacts to help them recover both cognitive and work contexts, while the other subjects experienced a difficult time in restoring the desired contexts that were necessary to perform their assigned tasks. In addition, we re-invited 6 subjects from the group without the Context Browser 6 weeks after the study. We asked them to perform the same tasks as the ones they did 6 weeks before with the Context Browser. It showed that with the Context Browser they outperformed their previous performance even after a lengthy period.

The main purpose of this research is to investigate the supervision behaviors , role stress and task performance with different personality traits of workers in hospitals. The effects on subordinate¡¦s task performance from different supervision behaviors are explored. In this study , there are 210 effective questionnaires from four hospitals. The main findings of the empirical study are as follow: 1. The higher role stress of the subordinate suffer , the lower task performance they show; the two variables show negative correlation. 2. The higher perceptions employees have toward the supervision behaviors, the higher task performance they show; the two variables show positive correlation. 3. The higher perceptions employees have toward the supervision behaviors, the lower role stress they suffer; the two variables show negative correlation. 4. The study proved that role stress is the medium factor between supervision behaviors and task performance. Key word: supervision behaviors, role stress, role conflict, role ambiguity, role overload, task performance.

Information Acquisition is the most essential and the most widely¡Vused function on the Internet. The Internet provides a platform on which News to be communicated to users faster and services to be delivered more efficiently. With the growth of users on the Internet, the online news database becomes a powerful tool of information acquisition under the integration of computers and communication technologies. Users can find useful information related to their work and daily life very easily. The purpose of this research is to investigate the information acquisition behavior affiliated with different uses of on-line news database. We use the Task-Technology Fit Model proposed by Goodhue and Thompson (1995) to investigate whether a better fit can result in a better decision satisfaction. An experiment was designed to study the user satisfaction under different settings of task characteristics and search tools. The results indicate that different search tools result in different satisfaction levels. More specifically, the keyword search has resulted a higher user satisfaction than the classified catalog search tool. Unfortunately, we do not find a better fit between task characteristics and the search tool can result in a higher user satisfaction. The findings can tell why Google, a pure keyword search engine, becomes dominating on the Internet search. It also provides implications for the design of search tools and the improvement on the functions of classified catalogs for developing on-line news Databases.

In order to reduce the performance gap between the processor and the memory subsystem, many researchers attempt to integrate the processor and memory on a single chip in recent years. Therefore a new class of computer architecture: PIM (Processor-in-Memory) are investigated. For this class of architecture, we propose a new transformation and parallelizing system, SAGE, to achieve the benefits of PIM architectures by fully utilizing the capabilities of the host processor and memory processors in the PIM system. In this thesis, we focus on the weight evaluation mechanism and 1H-nM scheduling mechanism. The weight evaluation mechanism is used to evaluate the weights of P.Host and P.Mem for each task. The 1H-nM scheduling mechanism takes two different weights into account to exploit the advantages of two kinds of processors in the PIM system. The experimental results of above mechanisms are also discussed.

The rapid growth of World Wide Web has created a new platform for information exchange. Although WWW makes more data easily available, it has also created many problems such as information overload, disorientation, and reduced quality of data. In order to solve these problems, most current approaches primarily focused on information filtering and searching based on the technical perspective. Few researches have provided analytical results of the information acquisition behaviors over the Web. Based on the cognitive fit theory and task-technology fit (TTF) theory, this study proposes a comprehensive research model to describe the individual information acquisition strategies on the World Wide Web. To examine the research model, a laboratory experiment was performed on a group of 120 students. Sixteen task scenarios were designed and one prototype website was developed according to the specifications defined through the literature review and a pilot study. The research results show that both task structure and system characteristics have an impact upon individual information acquisition behaviors over the website. The experiment also confirms that subjects feel more satisfactions at adopting formal search and purposeful browsing strategies. The understanding effect of the research object is a function of scanning and purposeful browsing strategies. The interaction between task structure and system characteristics is also significant. These findings allow us to have a better understanding of information acquisitions behavior on the Web.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, November, 2009. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Psych.Org.)--University of Queensland, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references.