Hearing loss has a prevalence of 10.3% in New Zealand, with the Māori population being disproportionately affected compared to the non-Māori population. Hearing loss is an impairment that is under-recognised, under-reported and under-treated. This can be explained by the many existing barriers – the shortage of audiological services, financial cost to an individual seeking treatment, the stigma of both hearing loss and hearing aids, and healthcare seeking rates, particularly among the Māori population. This study aimed to develop a Māori language adaptive digit triplet test that could be offered remotely via the telephone and Internet as a hearing-screening test. Three sets of recordings were made of digit triplets spoken in te reo Māori by a female speaker. Two of these sets were selected for normalisation in speech noise. Normal-hearing participants (8 listeners) with hearing thresholds ≤20 dB HL were tested to establish the intelligibility of the individual recorded digits at various signal-to-noise ratios (-13, -10.5, -8 and -5.5 dB). Psychometric functions were fitted to the intelligibility data, and the digits in each position of the triplet that had the steepest slope were selected as the final test stimuli. The level of each selected digit was then adjusted to achieve equal intelligibility as measured at the midpoints of the psychometric functions. These digits were then assembled into eight equivalent lists of similar difficulty, ready for pilot testing. Due to low participant numbers, the pilot testing phase was not completed. Further development of this test continues as the focus of a follow-on study.

Bakgrund: Att ge egenvårdsråd är en del av distriktssköterskans/sjuksköterskans omvårdnadsarbete i telefonrådgivning på vårdcentral. Att arbeta med telefonrådgivning upplevs självständigt och stimulerande men också svårt då DSK/SSK känner sig utlämnade pga. det ansvar och den kompetens som krävs. DSK/SSK stöter ibland på motstånd när de förmedlar egenvårdsråd. Patienterna vill inte alltid ta emot råd som ges vilket kan utgöra en belastning för DSK/SSK. Syfte: Syftet med studien var att beskriva DSK/SSK erfarenheter av motstånd mot egenvårdsråd i samband med telefonrådgivning. Metod: Studien genomfördes som en kvalitativ intervjustudie. Tolv DSK/SSK som arbetade på vårdcentraler i nordvästra Skåne intervjuades. Analysen genomfördes med kvalitativ innehållsanalys enligt Graneheim och Lundman (2004) Resultat: Resultatet visade att DSK erfarenheter av motstånd mot egenvårdsråd var att deras yrkeskompetens ifrågasattes av patienterna. Motståndet fick dem att tvivla på sin kompetens och de upplevde frustration när de försökte ge råd. DSK/SSK hanterade situationen genom att försöka förstå patienten, hantera sina känslor och sträva efter att finna en lösning. Slutsats: Det ställs stora krav på DSK/SSK yrkeskompetens och förmåga att hantera sina känslor. De strävade efter att hantera situationen professionellt men det finns behov av mer stöd och utbildning för att ge DSK/SSK de bästa förutsättningarna att nå fram till patienten. / Background: Nurses may face resistance when trying to give self-care advice in telephone in primary care. Patients are not always willing to accept self-care advice. Providing advice is a part of nurses’ work in telephone nursing and, nurses most often experience their work as independent and stimulating but also difficult due to the responsibility and competence that is required. Objective: The aim of the study was to describe nurses experiences of facing resistance when providing self care advice in telephone nursing at primary care units. Methods: Qualitative approach was used to conduct the study. Twelve nurses working at primary care units in the north west of Skåne were interviewed. The analysis was conducted with qualitative content analysis according to Graneheim and Lundman (2004). Results: The analysis revealed that nurses were challenged due to their competence being questioned. They started to doubt their competence and felt frustrated trying to give patients self care advice. They handled the situation by trying to understand the patient, striving to handle their emotions and striving to find a solution. Conclusion: There are high demands on nurses nursing skills and ability to handle their emotions when they face resistance trying to provide self care advice. They strive to face the challenge in a professional way but they need more support and education in order to give them the best opportunities to meet patients’ needs.

Voice mail has become a major communications tool. This study examined the opinions of 357 Indiana chief executive officers regarding voice mail systems--based on a random sample of the 4,697 members of the Indiana Chamber of Commerce as of November 18, 1992. A 100 percent response rate was achieved. The CEOs generally did not like calling into systems. The study concluded that 20 percent of Indiana businesses have voice mail. The major advantage--as cited by CEOs--to calling into systems was that they can leave detailed messages at anytime. The major disadvantage was that voice mail is cold and impersonal--CEOs want to speak to a real person. The CEOs who have voice mail gave major advantages and disadvantages of their internal systems as well as a rating. Oanparisons were made between various findings including how not having voice mail affects the rating of calling into other systems. / Department of Journalism

Voice mail is a computer-aided telephone system which is capable of storing and forwarding spoken messages. The voice mail market has been and is still focused on larger companies since they comprise a sizable amount of the installed base of voice processing systems (Radisich, 1994). Consequently, all voice mail research has been centered on the large company and concentrates on advantages or disadvantages found in these substantial companies.This study focused on the implementation and diffusion of a relatively new communication technology and its consequences in an unresearched arena--the small company. Also a comparatively new methodology in the field of communications research, grounded theory, was used to explore the impact of a new technology, thus possibly advancing the credibility of this research methodology.The results of this pilot study on voice mail in a small company found diffusion to be extremely successful, even to the point of surprising some of the subjects with their total acceptance of the technology.The study results indicated that the small company can benefit from voice mail usage in similar ways to the large company, especially if the company has travelers or off-site locations. The results implied that there are some ways that voice mail can assist in the small company where it has not previously had a reported effect in the large company---as a negotiating, organizing, and delegating tool.The results of the study could provide insights for other small companies concerned with successful usage of the voice mail technology in similar environments. Several concepts on novel uses of voice mail surfaced as a result of this study. These concepts could provide hypothesis for empirical testing to further voice mail investigation.The study concluded that voice mail is a communication technology that is an accepted and beneficial tool which offered several major advantages that the subject small company was able to successfully utilize. / Department of Journalism

The languages spoken in developing countries are diverse and most are currently under-resourced from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) perspective. In South Africa alone, 10 of the 11 official languages belong to this category. Given the potential for future applications of speech-based information systems such as spoken dialog system (SDSs) in these countries, the design of minimal ASR audio corpora is an important research area. Specifically, current ASR systems utilise acoustic models to represent acoustic variability, and effective ASR corpus design aims to optimise the amount of relevant variation within training data while minimising the size of the corpus. Therefore an investigation of the effect that different amounts and types of training data have on these models is needed. With this dissertation specific consideration is given to the data sufficiency principals that apply to the training of acoustic models. The investigation of this task lead to the following main achievements: 1) We define a new stability measurement protocol that provides the capability to view the variability of ASR training data. 2) This protocol allows for the investigation of the effect that various acoustic model complexities and ASR normalisation techniques have on ASR training data requirements. Specific trends with regard to the data requirements for different phone categories and how these are affected by various modelling strategies are observed. 3) Based on this analysis acoustic distances between phones are estimated across language borders, paving the way for further research in cross-language data sharing. Finally the knowledge obtained from these experiments is applied to perform a data sufficiency analysis of a new speech recognition corpus of South African languages: The Lwazi ASR corpus. The findings correlate well with initial phone recognition results and yield insight into the sufficient number of speakers required for the development of minimal telephone ASR corpora. / Thesis (M. Ing. (Computer and Electronical Engineering))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.

Telefonrådgivning är en av arbetsuppgifterna för ögonsjuksköterskor, men studier om telefonrådgivning inom ögonsjukvård är begränsat. Syftet var att beskriva ögonsjuksköterskors upplevelser av användandet av beslutsstöd vid telefonrådgivning. Metoden var kvalitativ beskrivande. Sex ögonsjuksköterskor vid tre olika ögonkliniker intervjuades. Data analyserades enligt kvalitativ innehållsanalys. Resultatet gav huvudkategorierna kunskapskälla vid behov, stöd i yrkesrollen, brister i beslutsstödet och god vårdkvalitet ur ett patientperspektiv. Ögonsjuksköterskorna var positiva till användandet av beslutsstöd vid oerfarenhet av arbetsuppgiften samt vid sällan förekommande och komplexa situationer. Användandet av beslutsstöd upplevdes underlätta prioritering och samordning av vårdinsatser vilket upplevdes leda till god vårdkvalitet ur ett patientperspektiv och en känsla av trygghet. Beslutsstödet underlättade kommunikationen med andra vårdenheter och vårdsökande. Det upplevdes inte täcka alla situationer utan uttrycktes behövdes utvecklas och uppdateras kontinuerligt. Aktivt lyssnande och tänkande i kombination av erfarenhet och kunskap ansågs vara viktiga komponenter vid telefonrådgivning. Vidareutveckling och förbättring av de beslutsstöd som används idag är av betydelse. / Telephone counseling is one of the tasks in ophthalmic nursing and research within this area was found inadequate. The aim was to describe the ophthalmic nurses’ experiences of using a decision making system in when counseling. The method was a descriptive qualitative de sign. Six ophthalmic nurses at three different eye clinics were interviewed. The data were analyzed according to qualitative content analysis. The result was four categories: a source of knowledge source if needed, supportive to the professional role, deficiencies in decision system and good quality of care from a patient perspective. Ophthalmic nurses were positive using a decision making system if inexperienced and in infrequent and complex situations. The use of decision making system facilitated the prioritization and coordination of the care taken, high quality of care from a patient perspective and a sense of security. Decision making system facilitated communication with other health care providers and patients. The system though was not useful in every situation and there was a need of a continuous development and update. Active listening and thinking in the combination of experience and knowledge were considered to be important components in the telephone counseling. Further development of the system in use today is needed.

The languages spoken in developing countries are diverse and most are currently under-resourced from an automatic speech recognition (ASR) perspective. In South Africa alone, 10 of the 11 official languages belong to this category. Given the potential for future applications of speech-based information systems such as spoken dialog system (SDSs) in these countries, the design of minimal ASR audio corpora is an important research area. Specifically, current ASR systems utilise acoustic models to represent acoustic variability, and effective ASR corpus design aims to optimise the amount of relevant variation within training data while minimising the size of the corpus. Therefore an investigation of the effect that different amounts and types of training data have on these models is needed. With this dissertation specific consideration is given to the data sufficiency principals that apply to the training of acoustic models. The investigation of this task lead to the following main achievements: 1) We define a new stability measurement protocol that provides the capability to view the variability of ASR training data. 2) This protocol allows for the investigation of the effect that various acoustic model complexities and ASR normalisation techniques have on ASR training data requirements. Specific trends with regard to the data requirements for different phone categories and how these are affected by various modelling strategies are observed. 3) Based on this analysis acoustic distances between phones are estimated across language borders, paving the way for further research in cross-language data sharing. Finally the knowledge obtained from these experiments is applied to perform a data sufficiency analysis of a new speech recognition corpus of South African languages: The Lwazi ASR corpus. The findings correlate well with initial phone recognition results and yield insight into the sufficient number of speakers required for the development of minimal telephone ASR corpora. / Thesis (M. Ing. (Computer and Electronical Engineering))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2009.

This thesis takes Discursive Psychology as its main theoretical influence. Drawing on the resources of Discursive Psychology and utilising analytic tools provided by Conversation Analysis, these principles are applied to the study of addiction, and specifically alcohol problems. The data explored are telephone calls to an alcohol helpline. Four analytic chapters are presented. The first focuses on the concept of loss of control over drinking, identifying features of how this concept is constructed in talk and suggests possible functions of control talk for both callers and Advice Workers. The second analytic chapter examines how Advice Workers respond to callers' professed impaired control over their drinking and I demonstrate that embedded in discursive sequences of problem formulation and advice giving are issues of agency, accountability and responsibility. The thesis moves on to explore the role of knowledge in calls to an alcohol helpline and the analysis reveals that both the expert status of the Advice Worker and the speciality of the topic are co-constructed between the speakers on the helpline. The final analytic chapter features just one telephone call and demonstrates the application of such an analysis for alcohol service providers. The thesis ends with a discussion of the main overall findings and the implications of the research for clinical practice. I close by arguing that initial agency contact is a very important site of study and recommend that this should be explored utilising naturally-occurring talk.

In this thesis, we considered the deconvolution problem when the channel is known a priori. LSE and MSE optimum solutions are investigated with deterministic and statistical approaches. We derived closed form LSE expressions and investigated the factors that affect the FIR inverse filters. It turns out that, minimum LSE can be obtained when the system zeros are distributed homogeneously on the z-plane. We proposed partition-based FIR-IIR inverse filters. The selection of FIR and IIR parts is based on partitioning the channel zeros into two regions and using the specified channel zeros to design the best delay FIR and all pole IIR inverse filters. Three methods for partitioning are presented, namely unit circle-based, ring-based and optimum-partitioning. It turns out that ring-based and optimum-partitioning FIR-IIR inverse filter performs better than the best delay FIR inverse filter for the same complexity by about 4-5 dB. For noisy observations, it is shown that, noise should also be considered in the delay selection and partitioning. We extended our results for the design of MSE optimum statistical inverse filters. It is shown that best delay FIR-IIR inverse filters are less sensitive to the estimation errors compared to the IIR Wiener filters and they perform better than the FIR Wiener filters. Furthermore, they are always causal and stable making them suitable for real-time implementations. When the statistical and deterministic filters are compared, it is shown that for low SNR statistical filters perform better by about 1-2 dB, while deterministic filters perform better by about 0.5-1 dB for high SNR

This thesis investigates the problem of interaction of electromagnetic radiation with human tissues. A Finite Difference Time Domain (FDTD) code has been developed to model a cellular phone radiating in the presence of a human head. In order to implement the code, FDTD difference equations have been solved in a computational domain truncated by a Perfectly Matched Layer (PML). Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) calculations have been carried out to study safety issues in mobile communication.