Background: 250 children develops cancer in Sweden every year and 75 percent of these children survives. History show that the treatment for cancer has improve. Every child has at least one parent who is affected and who is associated with suffering during the child's cancer diagnosis. Aim :The aim was to illuminate parents' experiences of living with a child with cancer diagnosis. Method: A literature-based study. Qualitative content analysis of 10 qualitative articles. Results: The results are presented in four main themes: "The feeling of powerlessness", "The need of support", "Lives ups and downs" and "Changed life". Conclusion: The results show that parents of a child with cancer diagnosis describe many different emotions and a changed life. The parents feel powerless and have need of support in various forms. Parents get a new life to adapt to and see life and every day as unique.

Background: Intestinal diseases that can cause a person to receive a stoma may include colorectal cancer, Crohn's disease and Ulcerative colitis. Aim: The aim of the study was to describe experiences of living with intestinal stoma. Method: A qualitative literature study in which eleven scientific articles have been analyzed according to Fribergs (2006a) analysis model. Result: The result was based on two categories which are experiences of altered body image, and experienced changes in social life. The result showed that patients with stoma felt that their body image changed and it was hard to accept the altered body image and thereby self image. Difficulties in controlling emissions, odor and leakage contributed to the experience of loss of control with limited social life as a result. The stoma also resulted in a change in everyday life which required careful planning. The sexual activity was affected due to altered body image. Despite the constraints of everyday life support, a functioning self care and acceptance contributed to a better quality of life. Conclusion: It can be concluded it's clear from the result that it is important for the patient to receive accurate information both before and after ostomy to get an adequate picture of what it means to live with a stoma. By supporting the patient and customizing information and creating a patient-centered care quality of life can significantly improve.

The purpose of this report is to evaluate the potential utility of online social networking in enhancing participation in, and maintenance of, a university-based exercise program through the provision of social support. Ninety-one employees previously enrolled in an exercise program were surveyed. Participants were asked about their online social networking habits and their opinions on the possible use of online social networks to increase social support for and adherence to an exercise program. Respondents already belonging to a social networking site (SNS) (79%) were optimistic about the utility, particularly after their exercise program, while those who do not belong to an SNS were less positive. The findings imply that using online social networking to add social support both during and after an exercise program could be effective. / text

Stroke has the ability to chronically alter both a person’s understanding and or use of language. Aphasia is a term that represents the loss or impairment of language function as a consequence of brain damage caused by a stroke and current data reveal that at least 25% of all strokes result in aphasia. Spouses often play a pivotal role in a stroke patient’s journey towards recovery. For this reason, there is a dire need for increased knowledge regarding spousal psychosocial welfare and increased insight into the experiences of these individual’s altered life situations. This paper considers aphasia, by nature of its deficits, a family disorder. Additionally, the contents of this paper explore the significance of caregiver coping strategies and ongoing caregiver involvement in recovery as a mechanism towards increased well being. Evidence to confirm the effects of stroke on spouses, as well as to support involvement of spouses in speech-language treatment to facilitate living well with aphasia, was obtained through primary and secondary research. Primary research was compiled through a telephone interview with the spouse of a 62-year-old male with aphasia while secondary research was conducted through an extensive literature search from 2000 to 2011. / text

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Business / Master / Master of Philosophy

Increasing amounts of data are being produced and consumed on a daily basis. Every mouse movement and click on a website can be analyzed to discover usage patterns and cognitive load (Jenkins et al., 2014), companies mine purchase histories to discover customer shopping patterns (Brin et al., 1997) and historical business transaction information can be used to improve business processes (Ghattas et al., 2014). Using sophisticated algorithms, data can be turned into information that helps guide marketers, policy makers, business managers, and other decision-makers. However, history has shown that increases in the amount and quality of information do not necessarily lead to better decision outcomes (Dawes et al., 1989). Human decision-makers may fail to understand the information, ignore it, or simply not believe it. Methods for effectively conveying information to humans must be studied so that the full value of information systems can be realized. This dissertation uses three studies to explain the factors that make technology persuasive. In the first study, attitudes toward technology measure how beliefs about technology influence the way people process information. Ordering effects are also examined to determine how people view information from decision support systems, and to find the optimal time to present information to decision-makers. In the second study, the persuasive power of text and audio modalities are compared. Additionally, the loss aversion bias is investigated to determine the utility of leveraging this cognitive bias in a technology context. In the third study, Protection Motivation Theory (Rogers, 1983) is used to extend the loss aversion model from study two. The study also investigates how message vividness and user participation through software personalization influence attitudes and behavior. Together, these experiments extend existing theoretical frameworks while giving actionable guidance to information systems practitioners. The studies demonstrate the importance of understanding cognitive biases, attitudes toward technology, and message delivery in a decision support scenario. These investigations are the first step in creating a more comprehensive model of factors that influence the persuasive power of technology.

Intro/Aims: Differences in end-of-life decision-making among minorities have been well described. However, among Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders (NHOPIs), this has not been well studied. Aim 1: Determine if differences in time to withdrawal of life support (WOLS) exist between NHOPIs and non-Hispanic whites (NHWs). Aim 2: If differences in time to WOLS between races are found, examine factors that may contribute to these differences. Methods: A retrospective study was conducted on patients admitted to a primary stroke center in Honolulu with diagnosis of spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH). Medical records were reviewed for occurrence of WOLS and time of WOLS. Unadjusted and multivariable logistic regression models were performed to determine associations between race and WOLS. Kaplan Meier analysis and Cox regression were performed to estimate survival time to WOLS and to compare these results between racial groups. Results: 396 patients with diagnosis of spontaneous ICH were studied. Mean time to WOLS after ICH was found to be similar between NHWs and NHOPIs (p = .925). Prevalence of WOLS was significantly lower in NHOPIs in univariate analysis (odds ratio [OR] 0.35, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.15, 0.80) and Kaplan Meier analysis predicted a significant difference in WOLS between NHOPI and NHWs within 30 days of ICH (p =<. 01). However, in multivariate analysis, race was no longer significant when adjusted for age (OR 0.59, 95% CI 0.25, 1.43) and when fully adjusted (OR 0.68, 95% CI 0.20, 2.39). NHOPIs were significantly younger at the time of ICH when compared to NHWs (p =<.001) although ICH severity and presentation such as initial Glasgow Coma Scale, presence of intraventricular hemorrhage and ICH volume were similar (p = .241; p = .604; p = .901, respectively). Conclusions: No difference in mean time to WOLS was noted between NHOPIs and NHW. However, secondary analysis showed WOLS was less prevalent after ICH in the NHOPI population compared to NHWs, although the significance of this finding was attenuated by age. NHOPIs in this population likely had a lower incidence of WOLS due to the fact that they presented with ICH at a significantly younger age, although small sample size also may have resulted in difficulty detecting variances between races.

A pressing need exists for effective decision support systems to facilitate the rapid and accurate screening of large volumes of people. Millions of travelers transit through international borders and secure areas on an annual basis. Humans are exceptionally poor at detecting lying and deception and perform, on average, no better than chance. This research study focuses on the development, design and implementation of a Kiosk for Rapid Assessment of Deception (K-RAD) that integrates questioning with response processing and deception detection. An exploratory pilot study (N=68) and a primary study (N=225) were executed.The K-RAD was designed to have a three-dimensional figure, an "Embodied Conversational Agent" (ECA), deliver the questions through speech. This delivery mechanism was chosen because human subjects have been shown in the past to react emotionally to ECAs during conversational interactions, and emotional arousal is one of the cues to deception. Responses were analyzed for deception cues, focusing on kinesic, linguistic, and vocalic characteristics that can be captured for automated processing and which would be unique to this setting.The results show unique subject behaviors. Subjects exhibited minimal movement and had very little tendency to change posture. Some subjects (6%) referred to the ECA as an authority figure, using "sir" when responding. Subjects positioned themselves at varying distances from the ECA, with significant gender differences. Post-experiment surveys indicated a gender difference in overall stress, with female subjects reporting significantly higher levels, independent of the experimental condition.Postural-based logistic regression created significant classification models for the pilot (59.1% classification accuracy) and primary (57.2% & 62.8% classification accuracies) studies. Movement analysis had varying and conflicting results. A robust deception index with a 68.1% classification accuracy was achievable in the pilot study based on high-frequency movement and arm placement. Primary study deception indices were not significant.The results include a comprehensive set of observations and lessons learned regarding kiosk design, deception technologies, detection effectiveness, and future considerations to take into account when creating a next-generation K-RAD system. Many challenges remain, but the concept is functional, promising, and could revolutionize security screening and deception detection in a variety of settings.

With the rapid advance of information technologies, human beings increasingly rely on computers to accumulate, process, and make use of data. Knowledge discovery techniques have been proposed to automatically search large volumes of data for patterns.Group Support Systems (GSS) play an important role in streamlining group activities and improving group outcomes. Various attempts have been made to help automate several tasks in group activities under GSS environment. One of the approaches is to apply automatic approach to idea organization task in GSS.This research designed and tested an SVD-enabled system to automate the idea organization task in GSS. Specifically, this research was conducted to examine how the idea organization task, typically regarded as the most labor-intensive and cognitively demanding in group problems solving, can be automated using a system enabled by singular value decomposition techniques. For the purpose of evaluation, we compared the performance of our automated approach using SVD algorithm against that of human subjects. Two separate experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the automatic approach on two essential components of an idea organization; namely, generation of topic categories and placement of relevant comments into their respective categories.The general conclusion that can be made from this research is that idea organization in group problem solving can be facilitated both efficiently and effectively with the SVD-enabled system that can automatically generate topic categories and place relevant comments into their respective topic categories. Therefore, our automatic approach may provide a useful and promising tool for the idea organization task in GSS.