Background. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer deaths worldwide. Low survival rates have been attributed to delays to diagnosis, and some patients report having symptoms for several months before presenting to health services. Strategies are needed to encourage timely help-seeking. The Web is increasingly used as a health information source. Aim. The aim of this thesis is to explore whether the Web plays a role in help-seeking behaviour of people with lung cancer prior to diagnosis, and how the Web can be utilised to encourage earlier presentation to health services for symptomatic people. Systematic review. To begin, I carried out a systematic review of the literature (N=34), which highlighted a scarcity of research on Web use for symptom appraisal among cancer populations. Mixed-methods study. I conducted a survey with recently diagnosed (6 months or less) lung cancer patients (N=113). Based on survey responses, I purposively selected a sub-sample of patients and their family/friends ("proxies") for semi-structured interviews (N=33). In the survey, 20.4% of participants reported they or proxies had researched their condition online before the diagnosis. Interview results suggest perceived impacts of online information on symptom appraisal, forming the decision to seek help, and on interactions with healthcare professionals. Intervention development and evaluation. Based on my findings, I developed a Web-based intervention. The intervention provides tailored information about lung cancer, and uses components based on the Theory of Planned Behaviour ("TPB-components") to encourage earlier help-seeking. This intervention was tested in an online feasibility study (N=130), and subsequently in an online randomised controlled trial (N=212) with a factorial design to test main and interaction effects of tailoring and TPB-components. The feasibility study and first trial helped identify methodological issues which were addressed in a second trial with a mixed factorial design. This trial (N=253) indicated that the self-reported likelihood of visiting a doctor increased significantly by 11.8% from before to after viewing study information (p < 0.001), but no effects of tailoring or TPB-components were found. When examining only those aged ≥50 years, who are at highest risk of lung cancer, those receiving tailored information reported an increase of 13.2% in likelihood of seeking help, compared to 3.2% in the untailored group (p=0.01). Participants aged 50+ receiving the TPB-component reported a larger increase (13.8%) than those who did not receive the TPB-component (5.2%), but this did not meet the significance criterion (p=0.054). Conclusions. According to patients' perceptions, the Web can impact on processes in the appraisal, help-seeking and diagnostic interval leading up to diagnosis. Presentation of information about symptoms and risk factors online can produce significant effects on self-reported likelihood of seeking help. These findings indicate that there is potential for the Web to be utlised in the endeavour to educate the public about symptoms and to promote earlier presentation to health services, but due to small effects and differential dropout in this study, further research is required.

<p>This thesis deals with clinical pain intervention research from a behavioural medicine perspective. The general aim was to develop and evaluate an individually tailored treatment protocol focused on pain management in everyday life in people who experience persistent musculoskeletal pain. Another aim was to develop and incorporate an idiographic outcome measure for behavioural goal assessment in the formal evaluation of the clinical significance of treatment outcomes. </p><p>The studies were conducted in a primary health care setting demonstrating a contribution from physical therapists in the field of behavioural medicine. Two separate samples of patients with musculoskeletal pain with a duration exceeding one month, n = 197 (Study I, descriptive and correlational design), and n = 97/82 (Study III/IV, randomized group-study) were included. In addition, four women were recruited for a series of experimental single-case studies (Study II).</p><p>The treatment protocol that was individually tailored to each participant’s behavioural treatment goals and assumed determinants of pain-related disability was more effective in reducing pain-related disability, pain intensity, fear-avoidance, and in increasing pain control when compared to an intervention including physical exercises. The individually tailored treatment was generally more beneficial for resumption of everyday life activity, increasing satisfaction, fulfilling pre-treatment expectations, and in preparing individuals for self-management of pain. The Patient Goal Priority Questionnaire that was elaborated over the course of the project can be used to a) identify and assess behavioural treatment goals, b) elaborate individual functional behavioural analyses relevant for everyday life functioning, and c) determine the clinical significance of treatment outcomes – that is, whether interventions produce outcomes of relevance for each individual’s everyday life. The inclusion of idiographic outcome measures in clinical pain intervention research is necessary and improves the ecological validity of the evaluation of clinical significance. </p>

This thesis deals with clinical pain intervention research from a behavioural medicine perspective. The general aim was to develop and evaluate an individually tailored treatment protocol focused on pain management in everyday life in people who experience persistent musculoskeletal pain. Another aim was to develop and incorporate an idiographic outcome measure for behavioural goal assessment in the formal evaluation of the clinical significance of treatment outcomes. The studies were conducted in a primary health care setting demonstrating a contribution from physical therapists in the field of behavioural medicine. Two separate samples of patients with musculoskeletal pain with a duration exceeding one month, n = 197 (Study I, descriptive and correlational design), and n = 97/82 (Study III/IV, randomized group-study) were included. In addition, four women were recruited for a series of experimental single-case studies (Study II). The treatment protocol that was individually tailored to each participant’s behavioural treatment goals and assumed determinants of pain-related disability was more effective in reducing pain-related disability, pain intensity, fear-avoidance, and in increasing pain control when compared to an intervention including physical exercises. The individually tailored treatment was generally more beneficial for resumption of everyday life activity, increasing satisfaction, fulfilling pre-treatment expectations, and in preparing individuals for self-management of pain. The Patient Goal Priority Questionnaire that was elaborated over the course of the project can be used to a) identify and assess behavioural treatment goals, b) elaborate individual functional behavioural analyses relevant for everyday life functioning, and c) determine the clinical significance of treatment outcomes – that is, whether interventions produce outcomes of relevance for each individual’s everyday life. The inclusion of idiographic outcome measures in clinical pain intervention research is necessary and improves the ecological validity of the evaluation of clinical significance.

Research in patient education suggests that tailored educational materials can improve patient's understanding of a treatment plan and help to achieve patient engagement and compliance. The goal of the HealthDoc Project has been the creation of automated Natural Language Generation systems for producing educational materials that are tailored to an individual patient's medical condition and personal situation. The project has so far focused on developing computational linguistic tools needed to author tailorable content from which customized versions could be generated. Also the HealthDoc model of document generation assumes the existence of previously authored textual material. Therefore, a new approach is needed to construct these materials and ensure that the relevant medical knowledge will be captured and delivered to the patient by providing a means to assist the health care professionals in directly authoring the required domain knowledge. <br /><br />We have used constructivist educational theory and knowledge-level modelling to define a new approach incorporating Patient-centric and Behaviour-modifying Educational Model (PBEM) and a knowledge-acquisition framework. Unlike traditional approaches, in which all patients are treated alike in terms of the medical information provided, our new model takes into account characteristics of individual patients. This facilitates the patient's assimilation of relevant information pertaining to her behaviour and health. As the information provided must address the various concerns of different stakeholders, and different patients have different concerns and concern intensities, a knowledge-acquisition framework was developed to provide a structure for patient knowledge acquisition. This framework includes the following components: a Strategic Model, a Concerns Model, and an Interrogation-based knowledge-acquisition Tool. The tool is intended to be used directly by health care professionals and to assist them in formulating, structuring, representing, and articulating their domain knowledge. This research work explores a new field, knowledge-level modelling, for generating patient-tailored educational materials and provides guidelines to implementing such a knowledge-acquisition tool.

Research in patient education suggests that tailored educational materials can improve patient's understanding of a treatment plan and help to achieve patient engagement and compliance. The goal of the HealthDoc Project has been the creation of automated Natural Language Generation systems for producing educational materials that are tailored to an individual patient's medical condition and personal situation. The project has so far focused on developing computational linguistic tools needed to author tailorable content from which customized versions could be generated. Also the HealthDoc model of document generation assumes the existence of previously authored textual material. Therefore, a new approach is needed to construct these materials and ensure that the relevant medical knowledge will be captured and delivered to the patient by providing a means to assist the health care professionals in directly authoring the required domain knowledge. <br /><br />We have used constructivist educational theory and knowledge-level modelling to define a new approach incorporating Patient-centric and Behaviour-modifying Educational Model (PBEM) and a knowledge-acquisition framework. Unlike traditional approaches, in which all patients are treated alike in terms of the medical information provided, our new model takes into account characteristics of individual patients. This facilitates the patient's assimilation of relevant information pertaining to her behaviour and health. As the information provided must address the various concerns of different stakeholders, and different patients have different concerns and concern intensities, a knowledge-acquisition framework was developed to provide a structure for patient knowledge acquisition. This framework includes the following components: a Strategic Model, a Concerns Model, and an Interrogation-based knowledge-acquisition Tool. The tool is intended to be used directly by health care professionals and to assist them in formulating, structuring, representing, and articulating their domain knowledge. This research work explores a new field, knowledge-level modelling, for generating patient-tailored educational materials and provides guidelines to implementing such a knowledge-acquisition tool.

Techn. Universiẗat, Habil.-Schr.--Cottbus, 2007.

Abstract The relationships between software producing companies, their customers and other parties involved have growing importance in the turbulent and fast developing business environment of today. The software industry itself is characterized by the Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS), tailored, and Modified-Off-The-Shelf (MOTS) businesses modes. In this versatile context of cooperation, financing and acquisitions demand exact details of the ownership of the products, i.e. the Intellectual Property Rights of these products and services. Legal forms and contracting procedures are emerging as the critical issues for the development of the information technology industry. This study addresses the problem of how software contracting has been approached and what concepts and models have been presented to understand it. Further, the question of the role of inter-organisational relationships (business-to-business) and intra-organisational process evolution in software contracting is discussed. The domains of interest and of relevance in this research are software development process, business process, legal process, and the contracting process itself, and the evolving interaction between these processes. The focus of this study is especially on contracting and on analysing the process of contracting, i.e. the dynamics, dependencies and elements of process related issues. The empirical part of the study was completed by analysing twelve software producing companies - eight were Finnish firms established in Silicon Valley (USA) and the rest were local Finnish firms with international operations. Based on the empirical findings, a software-contracting model was elaborated to describe how the contracting processes form and evolve in the context of software business. The model gives more understanding of the evolving contract processes and relationships. Further, the research produced concepts of how to manage contracting processes in the software business. Contributions of this study are, first, the well-defined model for contracting process in a software developing company. The elaborated model gives new insight into the elements, interrelationships and governance structures included in the contracting process and the relationship development between cooperating companies. Software companies can compare their contractual situation with the model. This enables them to develop their own processes further to respond to the present-day requirements. Secondly, the study specifies and introduces three different generic contracting networks for COTS, tailored, and MOTS business modes of software developing companies. It was established that these three business modes have similarities as well as differences in the application of software contracting processes. The COTS business relied firmly on multiform licensing practices, whereas the tailored business saw the framework contract as the main contractual tool and interestingly the MOTS business employed combinations of these two previous forms, i.e. both licensing and framework contracts. This study evoked some interesting future research prospects. In order to create a more accurate overall view of the whole contracting process the research should be continued and take the interplay of both customer and supplier under closer scrutiny. Another important issue would be to examine the contracts used in these different business modes from a strict legal viewpoint and the possible transformation of the predominant legal practices.

The news landscape has changed during recent years because of the digitization. News can nowadays be found in both newspapers and on different sites online. The availability of the digital newspapers leads to competition among the news companies. To make the users stay on one specific platform for news, relevance is required in the content and oneway of creating relevance is through personalization, to tailor the content to each user. The focus of this thesis is therefore personalizing newspush notifications for a digital  newspaper and making them more relevant for users. The project was made in cooperation with VK Media, and their digital newspaper. The task in this thesis is to implement personalization of push notifications by building a recommendation system and to test the implemented system with data from VK. In order to perform the task, a dataset representing reading habits of VK’s users was extracted from their data warehouse. Then a user-based and content-based recommendation system was implemented in Python.The idea with the system is to recommend new articles that are sufficiently similar to one or more of the already read articles. Articles that may be liked by one of the most similar users should also be recommended. Finally, the system’s performance was evaluated with the data representing reading habits for VK’s users. The results show that the implemented system has better performance than the current solution without any personalization, when recommending a few articles to each user. The results from the evaluation also show that the more articles the users have read, the better predictions are possible to make. Thus, this thesis offers a first step towards meeting the expectations of more relevant content among VK’s users.

Diploma theses is focused on welding experiment of maraging steel by use Yb-YAG laser. Experimet is based on testing of combination steel 11321 and maraging steel. Domex420MC, Domex720MC a QSE380. In theoretical part there are described laser technology of welding, weld defect, maraging steel and inspection of welded joints. In experimental part there are porposed test and made mechanical test of weld as transverse tensile test, bend tests, Erichsen cupping test, Vickers hardness test and makroscopic and microscopic examination of welds. In conclusion there are analysis of the experiment results.

In a time when internet connection is a central part of our everyday lives and wherewe constantly communicate through digital aids, a possible threat has arisen. Surveillance by commercial companies tracks most of what we do on their websites and then stores that data so that, for example, in the future companies can market specific goods that the user has previously looked at. The data collected by a specific supplier is not always saved for that specific company’s use only. The data is also used as a commodity between different online suppliers, the trade itself turns over billions of Swedish kronor every year. The purpose of this study is to examine young adults aged 20-30 (also called digital natives) knowledge, opinions, and thoughts regarding surveillance on the internet for commercial purposes. The study wants to find out what knowledge they say they have, what opinions they have and whether they adapt to the phenomenon by, for example, using VPN services or the like. Previous research in the field has shown that young people do not possess a deep knowledge of the subject and that they rarely adapt to any great extent to the phenomenon. The theoretical framework addresses both the user's and the supplier's perspective. The framework introduces surveillance and integrity from a theoretical perspective, but also addresses the power the supplier has and the financial conditions for the supplier. The results of the study show that, like previous studies in the same field, digital natives do not possess a deep knowledge of the subject and that they rarely adapt. Opinions differ however, where some say they do not care, and some believe that the surveillance has gone too far. In the ensuing discussion, we turn back and forth on the participants' reasoning and try to create a comprehensive picture of why the participants think the way they do.