Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has been an increasingly pervasive component of most workplaces throughout the past half century. In healthcare, the turn to the digital has resulted into the broad implementation of Healthcare Information Technology (HIT). The impacts of ICT on work life have been investigated predominantly through surveys, although some researchers have advocated for the use of a qualitative, experience-based approach. Meanwhile, the existing body of research on the impacts of HIT on clinicians has painted a mixed picture of digitalization. Despite some clear benefits, HIT has indeed been found to have unexpected, unintended adverse consequences for hospital staff. Typical issues include loss in efficiency, extra effort to carry out routine tasks, and the creation of new, HIT-induced work activities. Simultaneously, research outside of the healthcare domain has shown that ICT could require extra effort from some users in order for the sociotechnical system to function properly – extra work often invisible to developers. Based on observation, interview and focus group data collected at a large Swedish hospital, this thesis set out to investigate the impact of HIT on hospital nurses from an experience-based perspective, resulting in four main contributions. First, a method supporting experience-based data analysis, the HolisticUX method, is introduced. Second, 13 forms of HIT-induced additional tasks in nurses' workload are identified, five of which are not acknowledged in previous research. Third, task avoidance is identified as a consequence of nurses' increased workload, negatively affecting patient safety, care quality and nurses' professional satisfaction. Finally, four factors are argued to contribute to a suggested invisibility of the HIT-induced time burden in nurses' work life to management and developers: 1) lack of a holistic perspective, 2) the hidden cost of a single click, 3) the invisibility of nursing work, and 4) visible data, invisible work.

Experimental results show that source-tract information fusion can also improve the robustness of speaker recognition systems in mismatched conditions. For example, relative improvements of 15.3% and 12.6% have been achieved for speaker identification and verification, respectively. / For speaker verification, a text-dependent weighting scheme is developed. Analysis results show that the source-tract discrimination ratio varies significantly across different sounds due to the diversity of vocal system configurations in speech production. This thesis analyzes the source-tract speaker discrimination ratio for the 10 Cantonese digits, upon which a digit-dependent source-tract weighting scheme is developed. Information fusion with such digit-dependent weights relatively improves the verification performance by 39.6% in matched conditions. / This thesis investigates the feasibility of using both vocal source and vocal tract information to improve speaker recognition performance. Conventional speaker recognition systems typically employ vocal tract related acoustic features, e.g the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC), for discriminative purpose. Motivated by the physiological significance of the vocal source and vocal tract system in speech production, this thesis develops a speaker recognition system to effectively incorporate these two complementary information sources for improved performance and robustness. / This thesis presents a novel approach of representing the speaker-specific vocal source characteristics. The linear predictive (LP) residual signal is adopted as a good representative of the vocal source excitation, in which the speaker specific information resides on both time and frequency domains. Haar transform and wavelet transform are applied for multi-resolution analyses of the LP residual signal. The resulting vocal source features, namely the Haar octave coefficients of residues (HOCOR) and wavelet octave coefficients of residues (WOCOR), can effectively extract the speaker-specific spectro-temporal characteristics of the LP residual signal. Particularly, with pitch-synchronous wavelet transform, the WOCOR feature set is capable of capturing the pitch-related low frequency properties and the high frequency information associated with pitch epochs, as well as their temporal variations within a pitch period and over consecutive periods. The generated vocal source and vocal tract features are complementary to each other since they are derived from two orthogonal components, the LP residual signal and LP coefficients. Therefore they can be fused to provide better speaker recognition performance. A preliminary scheme of fusing MFCC and WOCOR together illustrated that the identification and verification performance can be respectively improved by 34.6% and 23.6%, both in matched conditions. / To maximize the benefit obtained through the fusion of source and tract information, speaker discrimination dependent fusion techniques have been developed. For speaker identification, a confidence measure, which indicates the reliability of vocal source feature in speaker identification, is derived based on the discrimination ratio between the source and tract features in each identification trial. Information fusion with confidence measure offers better weighted scores given by the two features and avoids possible errors introduced by incorporating source information, thereby improves the identification performance further. Compared with MFCC, relative improvement of 46.8% has been achieved. / Zheng Nengheng. / "November 2005." / Adviser: Pak-Chung Ching. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: B, page: 6647. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 123-135). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

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I det moderna samhället är vår interaktion med tjänster konstant och erbjuder möjligheter för en rikare vardag. Ett exempel är att statliga myndigheter tillhandahåller sina tjänster digitalt för att förenkla och förbättra samhällsservicen till medborgare. Samtidigt innebär interaktion med digitala tjänster en utmaning för användarna. Dessa utmaningar kan vara orsaken till att användare av Konsumentverkets digitala tjänst Budgetkalkylen uttryckt möjligheter för förbättring. I detta examensarbete används teori inom användarnytta, användbarhet och kognitiv belastning för att undersöka interaktionen mellan användare och Budgetkalkylen. Detta för att bidra med förbättringsförslag för ökad användarnytta, användbarhet samt minimal kognitiv belastning. Teorin beskriver hur den kognitiva belastningen av vårt arbetsminne påverkar användbarheten hos ett system. Användbarheten, som är av vikt då den skapar förutsättningar för bra samspel med en produkt, bildar tillsammans med nyttan produktens användarnytta. Med användarnytta menas att systemet erbjuder de funktioner och information som möjliggör måluppfyllelse för användaren. För att undersöka detta har en kvalitativ undersökning genomförts där intervjuer och användartester använts som insamlingsmetoder. Datainsamlingen utfördes med studenter som inte tidigare använt tjänsten. Resultatet visar att det fanns delar av interaktionen som utgjorde hög kognitiv belastning och minskade systemets användbarhet. Att dela upp uppgifterna och informationen i mindre steg, ge tydliga instruktioner och anpassa designen efter användarens kunskapsnivå anses minska den kognitiva belastningen. Nyttan låg i att skapa en helhetssyn över sin ekonomi, där hälften mer proaktivt ville sätta upp sparmål och den andra hälften ville använda den mer reaktivt. Litteratur som beskriver att kognitiv belastning påverkar användbarheten fick stöd genom denna undersökning. Metoden för att undersöka den kognitiva belastningen för att finna brister i interaktionen fick samtidigt stöd. / In modern society, our interaction with services is continuous and offers opportunities for a richer everyday life. One example is that state agencies provide their services digitally to simplify and improve community services to citizens. At the same time, interaction with digital services poses a challenge for users. These challenges can be the reason why users of the Swedish Consumer Agency’s service Budgetkalkylen expressed opportunities for improvement. In this thesis, usefulness, usability and cognitive load is used to examine the interaction between users and the service Budgetkalkylen. This is to contribute with proposals for improvement concerning usefulness, usability and cognitive load. The theory describes how the cognitive load on our working memory affects the constituents of the usability of a system. Usability, which is important when interplay with a product is of concern, form together with utility the products usefulness. The usefulness of a system is the reason why a product is used to achieve goals. To investigate this, a study with a qualitative approach has been conducted containing interviews and user testing. The data collection was carried out with students who had no prior experience with the service. The result shows that parts of the interaction that constituted high cognitive load reduced the usability of the service. Splitting up the tasks and information in smaller steps, giving more clear instructions and adapting the instructional design to the users level of knowledge is considered to reduce the cognitive load. The utility was expressed as a means to create a holistic view of their finances. Some wanted more proactivity through being able to set up saving goals and some wanted to use it more reactively. Literature describing that cognitive load affects usability was supported by this study. The method of examining the cognitive load to find definices in the interaction was also supported. / <p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>

This thesis covers research on group learning by using a computer as the medium. The computer software provides the basic blending of the students??? contributions augmented by the effects generated for the specific learning domain by a system of agents to guide the process of the students??? learning. The research is based on the approach that the computer as a medium is not an end point of the interaction. The development of agents in based on Human- Computer-Human interaction or HCH. HCH is about removing the idea that the role of the computer is that of an intelligent agent and reducing its role to that of a mixer, with the ability to insert adaptive electronic (software) components that add extra effects and depth to the product of the human-human interactions. For the computer to achieve this support, it must be able to analyse the input from the individuals and the group as a whole. Experiments have been conducted on groups working face to face, and then on groups using software developed for the research. Patterns of interaction and learning have been extracted from the logs and files of these group sessions. Also a pattern language has been developed by which to describe these patterns, so that the agent support needed to analyse and respond appropriately to each pattern can be developed. The research has led to the derivation of a structure that encompasses all the types of support required, and provides the format for implementing each type of support. The main difficulty in this work is the limited ability of computers to analyse human thoughts through their actions. However progress is made in analysing the level of approach by students to a range of learning concepts. The research identified the separate patterns that contribute to learning agents development and form a language of learning processes, and the agents derived from these patterns could in future be linked into a multi-agent system to support learning.

The golden generation have a wealth of experience and knowledge from throughout their lifetimes that younger generations wish to retain. In our technology filled world an obvious means of collecting this information is electronically. Digital library col- lections are increasingly used by libraries and large institutions to record their large amounts of information but they can also be used for personal collections. Seniors are often willing and keen to impart their years of experience upon people of the younger generation but time is not always on their side as they grow older. Throughout a lifetime a person could collect large amounts of papers, diaries, pho- tos and media but the time it takes to organise these documents can be long and exhausting and the person's health is not always at its best in old age. Greenstone is a suite of software for creating digital libraries, which are organised collections of documents. Greenstone has the ability to distribute collections either using a server or CD-ROM, and provides advanced searching and organization tools. While Greenstone is a versatile and useful tool in creating digital collections, its in- terface is not designed for senior users. Seniors are commonly perceived to have more physical and mental disadvantages as they get older. These disadvantages can dramatically affect how usable seniors find a piece of software. The aim of this thesis is to investigate how usable the current Greenstone interface is for use by seniors and to re-design the interface so that Greenstone may be more easily used by senior users. This thesis focuses upon what types of documents and descriptive data seniors would like to include in a collection about their life. This is to ascertain exactly what parts of the interface must be improved when it comes to metadata and classifiers. The results of this investigation also helped in the creation of a customised metadata set for senior users use.

This thesis progressively evolves and presents a practical 'theory' for mobile work – mobile trajectory – through three case studies conducted using fieldwork. The three cases presented here examine tram travellers finding their way around a city centre (Case A), health care workers looking after people with mental illness in a residential setting (Case B) and mobile clinicians caring for young people with mental illness in a community setting (Case C). My concern is to develop a 'theory' for mobile work that is both practical and theoretical,; at once supporting the practical action of completing field and analytic work while abstracting away from the ordinary affairs of society. The contribution of this ‘theory’ is to synthesise ideas from the domain of studies of ICTs mobile work to support description, rhetoric, inference and application for mobile work. This 'theory' has particular COMPONENTS, FEATURES, PROPERTIES, CONCERNS and ASSOCIATED NOTIONS. / A mobile trajectory has a CORE TRAJECTORY that involves particular work: the CORE WORK. There are ALIGNED TRAJECTORIES that feed the CORE TRAJECTORY. These are part of the CORE TRAJECTORY. The FEATURES of mobile trajectory are CYCLES, TRANSITIONS, TRAVERSALS, STREAMS, SCHEMES, POSSIBILITIES, HISTORICITY and SHAPE. The PROPERTIES are PHYSICALITY, LOCALITY, INSTRUMENTALITY, SYNCHRONICITY, INTER- DEPENDENCY, PREDICTABILITY and PALPABILITY. Important CONCERNS are RECONCILIATION CONCERNS, ALIGNMNENT CONCERNS, RECIPROCAL CONCERNS and CONTINGENCY CONCERNS. Key ASSOCIATED NOTIONS are SOCIAL SPHERES with particular WORLDS and SUB-WORLDS comprising MEMBERS with particular ROLES and INVOLVEMENT. SOCIAL SPHERES have particular BOUNDARIES, RESOURCES and MEDIA and shared KNOWLEDGE and PRACTICES. MEDIA and RESOURCES have particular AVAILABILITY and MUTABILITY. MEMBERS have particular BIOGRAPHIES, TIES and OBLIGATIONS and AWARENESS of others. Through the case material presented I demonstrate how this 'theory' supports the work of describing and discussing mobile work for the purpose of conceptualising, selecting, recommending and critically evaluating everyday Information and Communication Technologies. At the end of the thesis I compare mobile trajectory to three alternative approaches and two alternative theories with regard to supporting the same kind of work.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Nevada, Reno, 2005. / "December 2005." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 49-55). Online version available on the World Wide Web.

Depuis quelques années, l'utilisation des équations aux dérivées partielles a pourvu la recherche en traitement d'images d'une approche formelle solide, et a abouti à des algorithmes dont on peut montrer le caractère bien posé, étant donné un ensemble d'hypothèses clairement définies. Ces algorithmes forment l'état de l'art dans beaucoup de domaines d'application tels que le débruitage, la segmentation et la mise en correspondance. En parallèle à ceci, des approches combinant des principes variationnels et stochastiques ont amené à de puissants algorithmes qui peuvent aussi être décrits en termes d'équations aux dérivées partielles. C'est l'approche suivi dans ce travail, où est étudié le problème de mise en correspondance dense entre deux images, en utilisant des critères statistiques de dissemblance. Deux classes d'algorithmes sont considérées, selon que ces critères soient calculés globalement pour toute l'image, ou localement entre des régions correspondantes. Dans chaque cas, trois critères de dissemblance sont étudiés, définis comme l'opposé des critères de ressemblance suivants: information mutuelle (bien adaptée à une dépendance statistique très générale entre les niveaux de gris), rapport de corrélation (adapté à une dépendance fonctionnelle), et corrélation croisée (adaptée à une dépendance affine). La minimisation de la somme du terme de dissemblance et un terme de régularisation définit, à travers les équations d'Euler-Lagrange, un système d'équations fonctionnelles d'évolution. Nous étudions les conditions sous lesquelles ces équations d'évolution sont bien posées, c'est-à-dire ont une solution unique et montrons que les algorithmes proposés satisfont ces conditions pour deux classes d'opérateurs linéaires régularisants, dont une est connue pour encourager des variations rapides de la solution le long des contours de l'image de référence. La performance de ces algorithmes est illustrée à travers plusieurs exemples synthétiques et réels, aussi bien sur des images 2D que 3D. Comme le montrent ces exemples, les algorithmes décrits sont applicables à des problèmes qui ne font pas nécessairement intervenir des capteurs de modalités différentes. Ils sont aussi spécialement intéressants pour la communauté de l'imagerie médicale, où le problème de fusionner des données provenant de différentes modalités d'imagerie nécessite souvent de corriger des distorsions non-linéaires.

Cette thèse présente une étude du problème du contrôle d'exécution des mouvements d'un robot mobile autonome. D'une manière générale, un système décisionnel autonome est constitué de trois fonctions : la perception, la décision et l'action. La perception construit un modèle de l'environnement du robot. La décision utilise ce modèle pour générer un plan nominal et le traduire en une suite de consignes de mouvement. L'action transforme enfin ces consignes en commandes adéquates pour les effecteurs du robot. L'environnement du robot considéré est dynamique, les consignes de mouvement doivent alors assurer une réactivité du robot face aux événements imprévus qui peuvent survenir pendant l'exécution du plan nominal, nous parlons alors du contrôle d'exécution et c'est le point sur lequel nous avons concentré notre étude. Dans le cas d'un robot mobile de type voiture se déplaçant dans un réseau routier, nous avons mis au point un contrôleur d'exécution qui assure les tâches suivantes : analyse de la situation courante, adaptation du plan nominal (utilisation d'une base de règles), et génération périodique des consignes de mouvement nécessaires a` l'exécution du plan nominal adapté (utilisation de techniques de champs de potentiels). Ce contrôleur d'exécution a été d'abord intégré au sein d'une architecture de contrôle assurant l'autonomie des mouvements du robot. Nous avons ensuite adapté les techniques présentées pour une application réelle d'assistance a` la conduite automobile (démonstrateur français ProLab II, Action Pro-Art du projet Européen Eureka PROMETHEUS). Une validation expérimentale du démonstrateur a été réalisée avec succès en octobre 1994 sur une voiture Peugeot 605 (manifestation européenne Prometheus Board Members Meeting'94).