A case study of stakeholder perceptions of patient held records: the Patients Know Best (PKB) solution

Introduction: Patients Know Best (PKB) provide a patient portal with integrated, patient controlled digital care record. Patient controlled personal health records facilitate coordinated management of chronic disease through improved communications among, and about patients across professional and organizational boundaries. An NHS foundation trust hospital has used PKB to support self-management in patients with Inflammatory Bowel disease; this paper presents a case study of usage. Methods: The Stakeholder Empowered Adoption Model provided a framework for consulting variously placed stakeholders. Qualitative interviews with clinical stakeholders and a patient survey. Results: Clinicians reported PKB to have enabled a new way of managing stable patients, this facilitated clinical and cost effective use of specialist nurses; improved two-way communications, and more optimal use of outpatient appointments and consultant time. The portal also facilitated a single, rationalised pathway for stable patients, enabling access to information and pro-active support. For patients, the system was a source of support when unwell and facilitated improved communication with specialists. Three main barriers to adoption were identified, these related to concerns over security; risk averse attitudes of users; and problems with data integration. Conclusions: Patient controlled personal health records offer significant potential in supporting self-management. Digital connection to healthcare can help patients to understand their condition better and access appropriate, timely clinical advice

Simulating urban soil carbon decomposition using local weather input from a surface model

Non peer reviewe

Social, Private, and Trusted Wearable Technology under Cloud-Aided Intermittent Wireless Connectivity

There has been an unprecedented increase in the use of smart devices globally, together with novel forms of communication, computing, and control technologies that have paved the way for a new category of devices, known as high-end wearables. While massive deployments of these objects may improve the lives of people, unauthorized access to the said private equipment and its connectivity is potentially dangerous. Hence, communication enablers together with highly-secure human authentication mechanisms have to be designed.In addition, it is important to understand how human beings, as the primary users, interact with wearable devices on a day-to-day basis; usage should be comfortable, seamless, user-friendly, and mindful of urban dynamics. Usually the connectivity between wearables and the cloud is executed through the user’s more power independent gateway: this will usually be a smartphone, which may have potentially unreliable infrastructure connectivity. In response to these unique challenges, this thesis advocates for the adoption of direct, secure, proximity-based communication enablers enhanced with multi-factor authentication (hereafter refereed to MFA) that can integrate/interact with wearable technology. Their intelligent combination together with the connection establishment automation relying on the device/user social relations would allow to reliably grant or deny access in cases of both stable and intermittent connectivity to the trusted authority running in the cloud.The introduction will list the main communication paradigms, applications, conventional network architectures, and any relevant wearable-specific challenges. Next, the work examines the improved architecture and security enablers for clusterization between wearable gateways with a proximity-based communication as a baseline. Relying on this architecture, the author then elaborates on the social ties potentially overlaying the direct connectivity management in cases of both reliable and unreliable connection to the trusted cloud. The author discusses that social-aware cooperation and trust relations between users and/or the devices themselves are beneficial for the architecture under proposal. Next, the author introduces a protocol suite that enables temporary delegation of personal device use dependent on different connectivity conditions to the cloud.After these discussions, the wearable technology is analyzed as a biometric and behavior data provider for enabling MFA. The conventional approaches of the authentication factor combination strategies are compared with the ‘intelligent’ method proposed further. The assessment finds significant advantages to the developed solution over existing ones.On the practical side, the performance evaluation of existing cryptographic primitives, as part of the experimental work, shows the possibility of developing the experimental methods further on modern wearable devices.In summary, the set of enablers developed here for wearable technology connectivity is aimed at enriching people’s everyday lives in a secure and usable way, in cases when communication to the cloud is not consistently available

Computational Intelligence and Human- Computer Interaction: Modern Methods and Applications

The present book contains all of the articles that were accepted and published in the Special Issue of MDPI’s journal Mathematics titled "Computational Intelligence and Human–Computer Interaction: Modern Methods and Applications". This Special Issue covered a wide range of topics connected to the theory and application of different computational intelligence techniques to the domain of human–computer interaction, such as automatic speech recognition, speech processing and analysis, virtual reality, emotion-aware applications, digital storytelling, natural language processing, smart cars and devices, and online learning. We hope that this book will be interesting and useful for those working in various areas of artificial intelligence, human–computer interaction, and software engineering as well as for those who are interested in how these domains are connected in real-life situations

Advances in Information Security and Privacy

With the recent pandemic emergency, many people are spending their days in smart working and have increased their use of digital resources for both work and entertainment. The result is that the amount of digital information handled online is dramatically increased, and we can observe a significant increase in the number of attacks, breaches, and hacks. This Special Issue aims to establish the state of the art in protecting information by mitigating information risks. This objective is reached by presenting both surveys on specific topics and original approaches and solutions to specific problems. In total, 16 papers have been published in this Special Issue

Usabilidade pedagógica: um fator determinante na adoção do e-Learning no ensino superior

O artigo que apresentamos neste simpósio doutoral surge no âmbito do Curso de Doutoramento em Educação, especialidade em Tecnologias de Informação e Comunicação na Educação, do Instituto de Educação da Universidade de Lisboa. O estudo tem como objetivo principal propor e testar um modelo que permita explicar a intenção comportamental dos docentes do Ensino Superior aquando da adoção e uso continuado das plataformas de e-Learning. Para o efeito procura-se compreender o contributo da usabilidade pedagógica como fator determinante no processo de adoção da tecnologia

WICC 2016 : XVIII Workshop de Investigadores en Ciencias de la Computación

Actas del XVIII Workshop de Investigadores en Ciencias de la Computación (WICC 2016), realizado en la Universidad Nacional de Entre Ríos, el 14 y 15 de abril de 2016.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

XXIII Edición del Workshop de Investigadores en Ciencias de la Computación : Libro de actas

Compilación de las ponencias presentadas en el XXIII Workshop de Investigadores en Ciencias de la Computación (WICC), llevado a cabo en Chilecito (La Rioja) en abril de 2021.Red de Universidades con Carreras en Informátic