Lietuvos Respublikos pacientų teisių ir žalos sveikatai atlyginimo įstatyme yra įtvirtinta paciento teisė gauti ne bet kokias, o kokybiškas sveikatos priežiūros paslaugas. Minėtame įstatyme apibrėžta, kad kokybiškos sveikatos priežiūros paslaugos – tai prieinamos, saugios, veiksmingos sveikatos stiprinimo, ligų prevencijos, diagnostikos, ligonių gydymo ir slaugos paslaugos, kurias tinkamam pacientui, tinkamu laiku, tinkamoje vietoje suteikia tinkamas sveikatos priežiūros specialistas pagal šiuolaikinio medicinos ir slaugos mokslo lygį ir gerą patirtį, atsižvelgdami į paslaugos teikėjo galimybes ir paciento poreikius bei lūkesčius, juos tenkindami ar viršydami. Darbo tikslas – įvertinti Vilniaus miesto ambulatorinių asmens sveikatos priežiūros įstaigų paslaugomis besinaudojančių asmenų nuomonę apie asmens sveikatos priežiūros paslaugų kokybę Vilniaus mieste, o uždaviniai: ištirti asmens sveikatos priežiūros paslaugų kokybę, įvertinti Vilniaus miesto ambulatorinių asmens sveikatos priežiūros įstaigų paslaugomis besinaudojančių asmenų pasitenkinimą gautomis asmens sveikatos priežiūros paslaugomis ir nustatyti sąsajas tarp teikiamų asmens sveikatos priežiūros paslaugų kokybės ir respondentų pasitenkinimo gautomis asmens sveikatos priežiūros paslaugomis. Vykdant sveikatos priežiūros įstaigų teikiamų paslaugų vertinimo pacientų požiūriu Vilniaus mieste momentinį tyrimą, buvo Vilniaus miesto ambulatorinėse asmens sveikatos priežiūros įstaigose – Šeškinės, Antakalnio ir Centro... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / The Law on the rights of patients and compensation for the damage to their health of the Republic of Lithuania establishes the right of a patient to receive not just any healthcare services but the services of high quality. The abovementioned law defines the high quality health care services as accessible, safe, efficient health improvement, disease prevention, diagnostic, patient treatment and nursing services which are provided to an appropriate patient at an appropriate time and place by an appropriate health care professional according to the level of modern medical and nursing science and good practice, taking into account the service provider’s possibilities and the patient’s needs and expectations by satisfying or exceeding them. The objective of the paper is to evaluate the opinion of individual persons who are using ambulatory personal health care institutions in Vilnius on the quality of the services they are rendered and the tasks of the paper involved examination of the quality of the healthcare services, evaluation of the satisfaction level of the individual persons who are using the services of the personal healthcare institutions in respect of the personal healthcare services they have received and establishing the correlation between the service quality of the personal healthcare institutions and the satisfaction of the respondents in relation to the personal healthcare services they have received. During the instant survey of the quality of healthcare... [to full text]

This study is devoted to investigating and developing WSN based localisation approaches with high position accuracies indoors. The study initially summarises the design and implementation of localisation systems and WSN architecture together with the characteristics of LQI and RSSI values. A fingerprint localisation approach is utilised for indoor positioning applications. A k-nearest neighbourhood algorithm (k-NN) is deployed, using Euclidean distances between the fingerprint database and the object fingerprints, to estimate unknown object positions. Weighted LQI and RSSI values are calculated and the k-NN algorithm with different weights is utilised to improve the position detection accuracy. Different weight functions are investigated with the fingerprint localisation technique. A novel weight function which produced the maximum position accuracy is determined and employed in calculations. The study covered designing and developing the centroid localisation (CL) and weighted centroid localisation (WCL) approaches by using LQI values. A reference node localisation approach is proposed. A star topology of reference nodes are to be utilized and a 3-NN algorithm is employed to determine the nearest reference nodes to the object location. The closest reference nodes are employed to each nearest reference nodes and the object locations are calculated by using the differences between the closest and nearest reference nodes. A neighbourhood weighted localisation approach is proposed between the nearest reference nodes in star topology. Weights between nearest reference nodes are calculated by using Euclidean and physical distances. The physical distances between the object and the nearest reference nodes are calculated and the trigonometric techniques are employed to derive the object coordinates. An environmentally adaptive centroid localisation approach is proposed. Weighted standard deviation (STD) techniques are employed adaptively to estimate the unknown object positions. WSNs with minimum RSSI mean values are considered as reference nodes across the sensing area. The object localisation is carried out in two phases with respect to these reference nodes. Calculated object coordinates are later translated into the universal coordinate system to determine the actual object coordinates. Virtual fingerprint localisation technique is introduced to determine the object locations by using virtual fingerprint database. A physical fingerprint database is organised in the form of virtual database by using LQI distribution functions. Virtual database elements are generated among the physical database elements with linear and exponential distribution functions between the fingerprint points. Localisation procedures are repeated with virtual database and localisation accuracies are improved compared to the basic fingerprint approach. In order to reduce the computation time and effort, segmentation of the sensing area is introduced. Static and dynamic segmentation techniques are deployed. Segments are defined by RSS ranges and the unknown object is localised in one of these segments. Fingerprint techniques are applied only in the relevant segment to find the object location. Finally, graphical user interfaces (GUI) are utilised with application program interfaces (API), in all calculations to visualise unknown object locations indoors.

The ultra-wideband (UWB) technology has a vast unlicensed frequency spectrum, which can support precise indoor positioning in orders of centimeters. The features of UWB signals can be utilized for variety of applications. In this project first we present an empirical channel models to analyze the localization accuracy of the UWB technology for interactive electronic gaming (Ping-Pong) in Line-of-Sight (LOS) and Obstructed LOS (OLOS) scenarios. Then we introduce a new concept that we refer to as micro-gesture detection to handle the more refined motions of the hand, such as rotation, while one antenna is held by the user using features of UWB signal. We use four specific features of the UWB signals: time of arrival, power of the first peak, total power, and the Root-Mean Square (RMS) of the delay spread, for this purpose. As the hand rotates the position of the antenna in the hand and the external antenna changes from LOS to OLOS. We demonstrate that features of the UWB signals are more useful than the RSS signal of the Wi-Fi to detect this class of micro-gestures. We foresee this micro-gesture detection capabilities become helpful for the people with limited ability or visually impaired for implementation of simplified sign language to communication with electronic devices located away from a person. We compare gesture detection using multiple features of the UWB signal with traditional gesture detection using the received signal strength (RSS) of the Wi-Fi signal.

This thesis investigates sociolinguistic variation among highly fluent Slovak-English bilingual women and also long-term immigrants residing in Edinburgh, Scotland. The present study adds to existing literature on urban migratory experiences (Block, 2008; Forsberg, Lundell and Bartning, 2015; Howley, 2015), comparing cross-cultural variation of immigrants' speech with their local peers (Drummond, 2010, 2012; Meyerhoff et al., 2009), by exploring linguistic and social constraints on language attitudes and accent acquisition among bilingual Slovak immigrants. Sociolinguistic interview data were obtained from 32 women, ages 22-46: 20 Slovak immigrants, 8 Edinburgh Scottish participants, and 6 bilingual Slovak teachers of English in Slovakia. By considering linguistic and social factors that influence Slovak immigrants' variation, in this thesis I ask not just whether and to what extent do local language communities shape immigrants' identity, but also how their identity affects their language attitudes and pronunciation. The thesis pays particular attention to how implicit and explicit language attitudes combine to establish what Block (2008) called a "multidimensional" identity in immigrants. Further investigation establishes a link between identity and production (Redinger and Llamas, 2014; Podesva et al., 2015) by drawing on the variationist sociolinguistic methodologies set out by Labov (1966, 2001, 2006). Implicit language attitudes were collected via a Verbal Guise Task (VGT), during which participants evaluated speakers of foreign and native English accents (Campbell- Kibler, 2006; McKenzie, 2015; McKenzie and Carrie, 2018). Explicit attitudes were collected via a questionnaire designed to elicit attitudes in a casual setting (Dörnyei and Csizér, 2012). The combination of methodologies revealed that immigrant participants in the study held complex attitudes and motivations in relation to their host country. The results for language attitudes suggested that long-term Slovak immigrants experienced shifts to their identity while residing in Scotland, with most adopting a transnational identity that made them amenable to local language communities while maintaining connections with their home country. Their identity represented a degree of integration with Scottish communities, but transnational immigrants often felt separate from both home and host countries as a result. The present study also explores connection between identity and production which is now well recognised (Kobiałka, 2016; Regan, 2016; Regan and Ni Chasaide, 2010; Bucholtz, 2011). Immigrant participants' pronunciations of FACE and GOAT vowel lexical sets (Wells, 1982) were evaluated in comparison to two language groups that represented different standards of pronunciation: native Scottish participants in Edinburgh, with more monophthongal pronunciations (Schützler, 2015); and English-Slovak bilinguals residing in Trnava, Slovakia, whose vowel productions were highly diphthongal and similar to Received Pronunciation (RP) constructions. Comparative study of pronunciations revealed that the immigrants' FACE and GOAT realisations were relatively more monophthongal than the non-immigrant Slovak group, yet more diphthongal than the native Scottish group - effectively making immigrant Slovaks' mean pronunciations separate and distinct from both native standard varieties. However, the immigrant's pronunciations varied widely, and data modelling revealed associations between key social factors and pronunciation. Settings of high formality, strong European and Slovak identities, and intentions to return to Slovakia were associated with relatively more diphthongal pronunciations. Decreased formality, strong Scottish identities, and lack of formal education before immigration were associated with relatively more monophthongal pronunciations. Key findings in the study reinforce observations of multi-cultural identities in longterm Slovak immigrants. Drawing on work that explores variation in language attitudes (Clark and Schleef, 2010) and production in migratory settings (Meyerhoff and Schleef, 2014), I argue that there is a tendency for immigrants to shape their multi-cultural identities in response to linguistic and social contexts. However, internal contexts such as self-definition were equally important in shaping identities, which in turn affected language attitudes and pronunciation.

<p>Within the last few hundred years, English has gone from being a rather small peripheral language to what it is today – a world language, spoken by millions of people worldwide. The best-known dialects to Swedish learners of English are British English (RP, Received Pronunciation) and American English (GA, General American). Traditionally, British English has been the variety taught in Swedish schools, but due to the recent and growing influence of American English, more and more pupils are using the American dialect. The purpose of this essay is to determine which of these dialects is more common among students in one Swedish school. I have also investigated if the teachers’ English pronunciation and their opinions of the different dialects, as well as the students’ own, have an impact on what variety the students choose to use.</p><p>The results of the study show that although all students mixed both dialects, American features were predominant. A small number of students spoke mainly British English. A majority of the students claimed to be influenced more by the media than by their teachers. When it comes to the students’ opinions of the two dialects it appeared that the students who used more features from one dialect proved to be more positive towards that dialect. Many students found British English to be snobbish. It was also seen as slightly more classy and beautiful than GA. American English was generally considered cool but cocky. It was not considered as intelligent-sounding as RP, but instead more friendly and reliable.</p>

Advances in wireless communication have enabled mobility of personal computing services equipped with sensing and computing capabilities. This has motivated the development of location-based services (LBS) that are implemented on top of existing communication infrastructures to cater to changing user contexts. To enable and support the delivery of LBS, accurate, reliable, and realtime user location information is needed. This thesis introduces a cognitive dynamic system for tracking the position of mobile users using received signal strength (RSS) in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN). The main challenge in WLAN positioning is the unpredictable nature of the RSS-position relationship. Existing system rely on a set of training samples collected at a set of anchor points with known positions in the environment to characterize this relationship. The first contribution of this thesis is the use of nonparametric kernel density estimation for minimum mean square error positioning using the RSS training data. This formulation enables the rigorous study of state-space filtering in the context of WLAN positioning. The outcome is the Nonparametric Information (NI) filter, a novel recursive position estimator that incorporates both RSS measurements and a dynamic model of pedestrian motion during estimation. In contrast to traditional Kalman filtering approaches, the NI filter does not require the explicit knowledge of RSS-position relationship and is therefore well-suited for the WLAN positioning problem. The use of the dynamic motion model by the NI filter leads to the design of a cognitive dynamic tracking system. This design harnesses the benefits of feedback and position predictions from the filter to guide the selection of anchor points and radio sensors used during estimation. Experimental results using real measurement from an office environment demonstrate the effectiveness of proactive determination of sensing and estimation parameters in mitigating difficulties that arise due to the unpredictable nature of the indoor radio environment. In particular, the results indicate that the proposed cognitive design achieves an improvement of 3.19m (56\%) in positioning error relative to memoryless positioning alone.

Advances in wireless communication have enabled mobility of personal computing services equipped with sensing and computing capabilities. This has motivated the development of location-based services (LBS) that are implemented on top of existing communication infrastructures to cater to changing user contexts. To enable and support the delivery of LBS, accurate, reliable, and realtime user location information is needed. This thesis introduces a cognitive dynamic system for tracking the position of mobile users using received signal strength (RSS) in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN). The main challenge in WLAN positioning is the unpredictable nature of the RSS-position relationship. Existing system rely on a set of training samples collected at a set of anchor points with known positions in the environment to characterize this relationship. The first contribution of this thesis is the use of nonparametric kernel density estimation for minimum mean square error positioning using the RSS training data. This formulation enables the rigorous study of state-space filtering in the context of WLAN positioning. The outcome is the Nonparametric Information (NI) filter, a novel recursive position estimator that incorporates both RSS measurements and a dynamic model of pedestrian motion during estimation. In contrast to traditional Kalman filtering approaches, the NI filter does not require the explicit knowledge of RSS-position relationship and is therefore well-suited for the WLAN positioning problem. The use of the dynamic motion model by the NI filter leads to the design of a cognitive dynamic tracking system. This design harnesses the benefits of feedback and position predictions from the filter to guide the selection of anchor points and radio sensors used during estimation. Experimental results using real measurement from an office environment demonstrate the effectiveness of proactive determination of sensing and estimation parameters in mitigating difficulties that arise due to the unpredictable nature of the indoor radio environment. In particular, the results indicate that the proposed cognitive design achieves an improvement of 3.19m (56\%) in positioning error relative to memoryless positioning alone.

Indoor/Outdoor Location of Cellular Handsets Based on Received Signal Strength Jian Zhu 123 pages Directed by Dr. Gregory D. Durgin Accurate geo-location is an important emerging technology for public safety, commercial use, and military application. Especially, in the United States, the wireless Enhanced 911 (E911) rules by the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) seek to provide 911 dispatchers with additional information on wireless 911 calls. This dissertation presents a novel technique for indoor/outdoor location of cellular handsets based on received signal strength (RSS) measurements taken by a cellular handset of the surrounding base stations. RSS location accuracy for different environments is studied as a function of base station separation distance, cell sector density, measurement density, radio propagation environment, and accuracy of measurement. The analytical and experimental results in this thesis serve as a guideline for the accuracy of RSS signature location technology under different conditions. Accurate outdoor to indoor penetration models are proposed and validated for dense urban areas by introducing pseudo-transmitters to simulate the wave-guiding effects in urban canyon environments. A set of location algorithms is developed to improve location accuracy. Furthermore, an algorithm to discriminate between indoor and outdoor users is proposed and validated. The research results demonstrate the feasibility of RSS location techniques to meet the FCCs requirements for E911 accuracy in urban and semi-urban environments. The techniques remain accurate for indoor handsets. The results also suggest that a hybridization of the handset-based GPS method and the RSS signature method may prove to be the most effective solution for locating handsets across a range of environments; including rural, suburban, dense urban, and indoor.

Ubiquitous location-aware systems and services are becoming a reality as made evident by the widely known Global Position System (GPS). However, indoor location-aware sensing systems are not yet commercially viable since: (i) for a GPS-based system, the signals attenuate and can multipath indoors causing weak signal and poor location (ii) for a Radiolocation-based system, the propagation of radio signals are complex and difficult to model. In this paper, we present RadLoco, a location-sensing system that uses IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN survey techniques to create a radio Received Signal Strength (RSS) map of the propagation environment. To provide accurate location estimation, we make use of a kernel-window estimation algorithm that is used to approximate the probability density function of RSS measurement and location. Unlike parametric estimators, this non-parametric kernel approach requires less knowledge of the distributions of location and measurements, and also makes use of the prior knowledge of mobile terminal location to reduce the estimation error. The novelty of the system is an innovative radio/ultrasonic sensory network which allows for rapid data collection whereas the standard technique of defining a grid of survey points with measuring rulers, chalk, and tape would require a great amount of manpower. Using this sensory network, a 2000m sq. office building is surveyed in four hours by a single technician. Our experimental results indicate the mobile terminal is located on the correct oor with over 98% accuracy and with a mean error of less than 2.5m from the true location.

Prevailing propagation phenomena in certain areas play a vital role in deciding terrestrial wireless systems performance. Vertical refractivity profile below 1 km is a critical parameter for designing reliable systems; noting that there is a shortage of upper-air data worldwide. Anomalous phenomena may cause severe signal fading and interference beyond the horizon. The objectives of this thesis are to investigate dominant refractive conditions in the subtropical Arabian Gulf region, develop new approaches and empirical models for evaluating vertical refractivity profiles and relevant propagation parameters in the low troposphere, and to examine the impact of frequently experienced anomalous phenomena on terrestrial microwave links. Twenty-three years of meteorological measurements, from 1990 to 2013, are utilized using spatially separated surface stations and a single radiosonde in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Profiles of sea level, surface and upper refractivity components are statistically analysed. Three major atmospheric layers; namely 65 m, 100 m and 1 km above the ground are studied to analyse relevant propagation parameters such as sub-refraction, super-refraction, anomalous propagation probability parameter β0 and point refractivity gradient not exceeded for 1% of time. The effective earth radius factor k is investigated using a new weighted averaged approach. In addition, the seasonal structure of atmospheric ducting is dimensioned within 350 m layer above ground. Finally, microwave measurement campaign is conducted using multiple radio links operating in UAE using various frequency bands. The link budget simulations are compared with the signal strength measurements. Fading scenarios are studied against the observed anomalous conditions and several recommendations are concluded.