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Residents in nursing facilities are more prone to falls than those living in the community. Injuries resulting from falls impact residents, their families, and healthcare costs. The gap in nursing practice was the lack of a comprehensive fall-prevention program in a long-term care facility that had experienced high fall rates among residents. This project addressed whether an educational program using the American Medical Directors Association's clinical practice guideline and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's STEADI (Stopping Elderly Accidents, Deaths, & Injuries) toolkit for fall- prevention improved the self-efficacy of direct-care staff in preventing falls among residents in a long-term care facility. The practice-focused question focused on whether education on the use of an integrated multifactorial fall-prevention guideline would increase confidence of long-term care staff in reducing falls in long-term care residents. The evaluation used the 11-item Self-Efficacy for Preventing Falls-Nurse scale for 5 licensed nursing staff and the 8-item Self-Efficacy for Preventing Falls-Assistant scale for 21 nursing assistants. The positive change in self-efficacy scores of nurses and nursing assistants after the education program was greatest for face-to-face team communication regarding fall risk and individual resident prevention plans. The use of best-practice guidelines that improve fall risk-assessment and use of fall precautions to decrease the number of falls and falls with injury has the potential to bring about positive social change by improving the nursing care of nursing home residents, resulting in improved resident safety and quality of life.

Typical ultrafast plane-wave ultrasound imaging involves: 1) insonifying the medium with several plane-wave pulses emitted at different angles by a linear transducer array, 2) sampling the returning echo signals, after each plane-wave emission, with the same transducer array, 3) beamforming the recorded angle-specific raw data frames, and 4) compounding the beamformed data frames over all angles to form a final image. This thesis attempts to address the following question: Given a set of available plane-wave emission angles, which ones should we select for acquisition (i.e., which angle-specific raw data frames should we sample), to achieve adequate image quality at low cost associated with both sampling and computation? We propose a simple similarity-driven angle selection scheme and evaluate its several variants that rely on user-specified similarity measurement thresholds guiding the recursive angle selection process. Our results show that the proposed scheme has a low computational overhead and can yield significant savings in terms of the amount of sampled raw data. / Graduate

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According to the U.S. energy consumption survey in 2012, about 25% of the commercial and 42% of the residential building energy were used for heating. Despite the development of new and more efficient Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems over the years, the high energy consumption in heating is still one of the major energy efficiency issues. Studies showed that decreasing HVAC operating temperature set points by 4°F will result in energy savings of 15% or more. Thus, the smart localized heating control (SLHC) system was designed and prototyped to provide localized heat directly to a person so that HVAC can run at a lower temperature set point. SLHC detects human movement and delivers the heat based on the result of the target location estimation and temperature measurement feedback. To detect the human movement, image processing techniques were used; image segmentation, mass center detection, background subtraction using the Mixture of Gaussian model, and human feature detection. In SLHC, a near-infrared heater and a tracking function were used to provide an instant and a direct heat to the person in order to minimize wasting energy. The SLHC system is divided into the sensing and processing (SP) and the heating and regulating (HR) subsystem. The SP’s primary function is to process captured video images and measured temperature data. SP also generates and sends the heater operating signal to HR. HR purposes to control the heater’s direction and power based on the signal. The communication between SP and HR was established through Wi-Fi enabled development platform. The SLHC prototype successfully processed the sensing data and transmitted the control signal. The result shows that it detected human movement and estimated the person’s location in 3D space within 10% margin of error. Also, it delivered the focused heat to the surface of the human body and increased the temperature by 10.0°F in 3 minutes at the distance of 1.5m away from the heater. This cost-effective, wireless, and localized heating system demonstrates the potential to improve energy efficiency in buildings. / Electrical and Computer Engineering

Product-oriented environmental improvement is a great challenge for SMEs. There are two main reasons for this; firstly, a contradictory situation exists because SMEs lack the knowledge and competence to adopt the mainstream principle holistic approach of environmental product policy and regulations, and, secondly, there is a growing demand to incorporate environmental management system (EMS) and product dimension via ecodesign. To address these issues, this research focused on a product-oriented environmental management system (POEMS) that has been specifically developed to solve these problems. However, POEMS studies so far lack methodological development and focus more on how to incorporate EMS and eco-design rather than how to interpret the contents and improve POEMS as a standard tool. This research aimed to develop a new model, namely, component-based POEMS (CPOEMS). The C-POEMS model is a first attempt to define a potential standardised form of POEMS in its contents and structure, and form the basis for a useable self-help format for SMEs. A C-POEMS model, comprising stages of process, categories of functional areas/units, and elements, and a diagnosis template, as a component-based application, are developed and formulated. Through primary research, the C-POEMS conceptual model was verified and applicability of a C-POEMS component to SMEs was validated. C-POEMS made major contributions of two aspects: (1) methodological development of POEMS; (2) improvement of the format applicable for SMEs incorporating mainstream principles. Regarding methodological development of POEMS, arguments of existing POEMS methods were revealed, and the suggestions as well as analytical information in this research would provide benefit for further research in this field. The C-POEMS improved POEMS by providing clear contents and structure with predefined prior and iii correlated categories of functional area/units, which are helpful for SMEs. In addition, a diagnostic approach would help SMEs recognise their own problems and focus areas. As a result, SMEs can reduce the initial time to identify a structure of product-related environmental management, and increase opportunities to focus on major targets and product aspect for environmental improvements. Because of time constraint and underdevelopment of POEMS, there remain problems, in particular, to fully integrate EMS and eco-design, and the asymmetric situation between maintaining the broad scope of POEMS and focusing upon specific areas and user demand. However, this C-POEMS model provides a foundation for the development of EMS for SME’s and for ongoing development of POEMS.

Direct marketing is becoming a key strategy for organisations to develop and maintain strong customer relationships. This method targets specific customers with personalised advertising and promotional campaigns in order to help organisations increase campaign responses and to get a higher return on their investments. There are, however, many issues related to direct marketing, ranging from the highly technical to the more organisational and managerial aspects. This research focuses on the organisational and managerial issues of the direct marketing process and investigates the stages, activities and technologies required to effectively execute direct marketing. The direct marketing process integrates a complex collection of marketing concepts and business analytics principles, which form an entirely ‘self-contained’ choice for organisations. This makes direct marketing a significantly difficult process to perform. As a result, many scholars have attempted to tackle the complexity of executing the direct marketing process. However, most of their research efforts did not consider an integrated information system platform capable of effectively supporting the direct marketing process. This research attempts to address the above issues by developing a conceptual framework for the Direct Marketing Process with Business Intelligence (DMP-BI). The conceptual framework is developed using the identified marketing concepts and business analytics principles for the direct marketing process. It also proposes Business Intelligence (BI) as an integrated information system platform to effectively execute the direct marketing process. In order to evaluate and illustrate the practicality and impact of the DMP-BI framework, this thesis adopts a case study approach. Three case studies have been carried out in different industries including retailing, telecommunication and higher education. The aim of the case studies is also to demonstrate the usage of the DMP-BI framework within an organisational context. Based on the case studies’ findings, this thesis compares the DMP-BI framework with existing rival methodologies. The comparisons provide clear indications of the DMP-BI framework’s benefits over existing rival methodologies.

Master of Science / Department of Computing and Information Sciences / Doina Caragea / Over the last decade, the Internet has become an involving medium and user-generated content is continuously growing. Recommender systems that exploit user feedback are widely used in e-commerce and quite necessary for business enhancement. To make use of such user feedback, we propose a new content/collaborative hybrid approach, which is built on top of the recently released hetrec2011-movielens-2k dataset and is an extension of a previously proposed approach, called Weighted Tag Recommender (WTR). The WTR approach makes use of tag information available in hetrec2011-movielens-2k, but it does not use explicit ratings. As opposed to WTR, our modified approach can make use of ratings to capture collaborative filtering and either user-tags, available in the hetrec2011-movielens-2k, or movie keywords retrieved from IMDB, to capture movie content information. We call the two versions of our approach Weighted Tag Rating Recommender (WTRR) and Weighted Keyword Rating Recommender (WKRR), respectively. Movie keywords (which are not user specific) allow us to use all ratings available in hetrec2011-movielens-2k, as WKKR associates the content information from movies with the users, based on their ratings. On the other hand, tags provide more specific information for a user, but limit the usage of the data to the user-movie pairs that have tags (significantly smaller number compared with all pairs that have ratings). Both our keyword and tag representations of users can help alleviate the noise and semantic ambiguity problems inherent in information contributed by users of social networks. Experiments using the WTRR approach on a subset of the dataset (which contains both ratings and tags) show that it slightly outperforms the WKRR approach. However, WKRR can be applied to the whole hetrec2011-movielens-2k dataset and results show that the information from keywords can help build a movie recommender system competitive with other neighborhood based approaches and even with more sophisticated state-of-the-art approaches.

Storage of large amounts of grain post-harvest is common during drying, distribution and preservation of crops. During storage, where grain is usually held in a large metallic container or bin, changes in temperature, moisture, and insect infestation can cause grain to spoil annual post-harvest crop losses are estimated up to 30% in some countries while Canadian losses of 2% exceed a billion dollars. Currently, locally-sensitive temperature and moisture sensors are a common way to monitor grain bins. Sensors are generally strung on heavy duty cables that can withstand the forces generated when unloading grain. This monitoring method provides a coarse sampling of the storage environment due to system cost and the fact that using many sensor cables would require significantly reinforcing the bin. Further, these cables are not suitable for monitoring stored crops that are dried by a combination of stirring and aeration. Over the past four years, I have developed multiple electromagnetic imaging based grain-monitoring systems with the goals of overcoming the deficiencies of existing sensor technology and allowing farmers and distributors a robust way to preserve our food stores and increase revenue. The proposed technology aims to produce global, quantitative images of grain properties throughout the bin from measurements taken by a few side-mounted antennas used to interrogate the bin contents. To develop this technology intensive research was put into the design of low profile, robust antennas as well as numerical analysis of the effects of different field distributions within conducting boundaries. Both electric and magnetic field sensitive antennas were built and tested in small lab-scale as well as full-scale grain bins to experimentally evaluate the performance of such imaging system. This thesis provides details on different system designs and analysis and describes the advantages and challenges associated with the techniques described. / October 2016

Dentre, os mecanismos voltados ao planejamento ambiental na atualidade e possíveis de serem implantados na gestão territorial, o Zoneamento-Antrópico- Ambiental tem se mostrado como um instrumento estratégico nas tomadas de decisões, o qual busca compatibilizar o desenvolvimento socioeconômico e manter ou preservar a qualidade ambiental de um determinado território. Nesse contexto, a presente pesquisa teve como objetivo elaborar uma proposta de Zoneamento- Antrópico-Ambiental para o Município de Iporã do Oeste-SC, a partir da caracterização e análise dos fatores socioeconômicos e ambientais juntamente com as perspectivas da população local. O embasamento teórico foi fundamentado na abordagem sistêmica. Metodologicamente a pesquisa centrou-se na proposta de Libault (1971), o qual aborda os quatro níveis da pesquisa geográfica. Para a elaboração do Zoneamento-Antrópico-Ambiental do Município de Iporã do Oeste-SC, foram delimitadas duas microbacias hidrográficas com base no Projeto Microbacias II, a microbacia hidrográfica do Lajeado Pirapó (MHLP) e a microbacia Hidrográfica do Lajeado Esperança, (MHLE), as quais apresentaram particularidades (relevo, uso da terra e localização) e relevância socioeconômica para o contexto local. Os resultados compreenderam a elaboração de diferentes produtos cartográficos (uso da terra, declividade, hipsometria, legislação e conflitos ambientais), confeccionados a partir do software Spring 4.2.1. Tais produtos foram sobrepostos gerando três zonas de uso e ocupação para ambas as microbacias. As zonas definidas foram: Zona de Uso e Ocupação Moderada (ZUOM); Zona de Uso e Ocupação Restrita (ZUOR) e Zona de Uso e Ocupação Controlada (ZUOC). A ZUOR predomina nas duas microbacias com um total de 54,66% de 2.176,09 ha da MHLP e, 41,96% de 2.823,85 da MHLE. A partir daí, cada zona foi caracterizada, destacando as potencialidades e limitações existentes, gerando um cenário atual e a incentivar, a partir das perspectivas ou projetos elencados pela população residente em cada microbacia. A proposta pretende contribuir para a discussão e a reflexão sobre as formas atuais e potenciais de uso e ocupação do espaço, orientando as tomadas de decisões por parte dos planejadores e pesquisadores, juntamente com a comunidade local, visando assim, o desenvolvimento socioeconômico e o equilíbrio do sistema socioambiental como um todo. / Among, the mechanisms returned to the environmental planning at the present time and possible of they be implanted in the territorial administration, the zoning-entropicenvironmental has shown as a strategic instrument in the decisions-making, which it looks for compatibiling the socioeconomic development and to maintain or to preserve the environmental quality of a certain territory. In that context, to present research it had as objective elaborates a proposal of Zoning-Entropic-environmental for the Municipal district of Iporã of West-SC, starting from the characterization and analysis of the socioeconomic and environmental factors together with the perspectives of the local population. The theoretical basement was based in the systemic approach. Methodologically the research was centered in the Libault proposal (1971), which approaches the four levels of the geographical research. For the elaboration of the Zoning-Entropic-environmental of the Municipal district of Iporã of West-SC, two micro basin hydrographic were delimited with base in the Micro basins Project II, the micro basin hydrographic of Lajeado Pirapó (MHLP) and the micro basin Hydrographic of the Lajeado Esperança, (MHLE), which presented particularities (relieve, earth using and location) and socioeconomic relevance for the local context. The results understood the elaboration of different cartographic products (earth using, steepness, hypsometry, legislation and environmental conflicts), made starting from the software Spring 4.2.1. Such products were put upon generating three use areas and occupation for both micro basins. The defined areas were: Use Area and Moderate Occupation (ZUOM); Use Area and Restricted Occupation (ZUOR) and Use Area and Controlled Occupation (ZUOC). ZUOR prevails in the two micro basins with a total of 54, 66% of 2.176,09 of the MHLP and, 41, and 96% of 2.823,85 of MHLE. Since then, each area was characterized, detaching the potentialities and existent limitations, generating a current scenery and to motivate, starting from the perspectives or developed projects for the resident population in each micro basin. The proposal intends to contribute for the discussion and the reflection about the current forms and use potentials and occupation of the space, guiding the decisions-making on the part of the planners and researchers, together with the local community, seeking like this, the socioeconomic development and the balance of the system socio-environmental as a completely.