Alone at home

Recently there has been much public discussion about children spending long afternoons alone at home. It has been claimed that spending a lot of time alone makes children vulnerable to many kinds of risk behaviour, such as smoking, use of alcohol and drugs, depression and poor school performance. Concerns have also been voiced about children’s unsupervised television watching, playing of computer games and surfing on the Internet. Yet, do we actually know how long the times are that children do spend alone at home and what do they do during that time? The purpose of this paper is to study how much time youngsters in Finland spend alone at home, who are the youngsters who are alone and what do they do when they are alone. The research data are data relating to households from the 1999–2000 Time Use Survey of Statistics Finland. The data cover the shared days of fami-lies with children on which all family members aged 10 or over kept a time use diary. The respondents recorded into the diaries at 10-minute accuracy whether they were alone or together with children aged under 10 belong-ing to the same household, other members of the household, or with other people they knew. Besides the data concerning being alone or together with somebody, the paper also exploits diary information on whether other members of the household were at home at the time in question. The scope of the study is limited to school stu-dents aged from 10 to 18. The material contains data on 191 schooldays and 229 days off school.Intra-family time use; “with whom” context

Business begins at home

One of the most significant trends in the post-industrial era has been for the home to become an important focus for work. The boundaries between work and home are now increasingly blurred, reversing the forces of the industrial era in which places deemed suitable for each were clearly demarcated and physically separate. The most recent published figures available from the Labour Force Survey (2005)1 indicate that 3.1m people now work mainly from home, 11% of the workforce. This represents a rise from 2.3m in 1997 (9% of the workforce), a 35% increase. The majority of homeworkers (2.4m or 77% of the total) are 'teleworkers' – people who use computers and telecommunications to work at home. The number of teleworkers has increased by 1.5m between 1997 and 2005, a 166% increase. Clearly, it is the growth in the number of teleworkers which is driving the increase in homeworking

Evaluation Of Pilgrims Hospices Rapid Response Hospice At Home Service: Summary of findings March 2015

When faced with a life-limiting illness, most people say they would prefer to spend the end of their lives and die at home. However, we know that about half the people with cancer or long-term illnesses still die in hospital. Fewer than a quarter die in their own home. Patients are often admitted to hospital because of a crisis such as uncontrolled symptoms, carer fear or stress, or not having medication available when needed. Community based palliative care teams can help in such situations. In 2008 Pilgrims Hospices commissioned a review of the literature to understand what kinds of home care services provide the most benefit to patients at the end of their lives and their families. Though good quality evidence was scarce, the findings of the review suggested that successful services are able to respond rapidly, focus on supporting family carers at home and are available 24 hours a day seven days a week. Following these conclusions, Pilgrims Hospices developed the Rapid Response Hospice at Home service (Hospice at Home) to support people who are at the end of life and would like to die at home. The Hospice at Home service operates in addition to established hospice community services and is staffed by healthcare assistants (HCAs) who have been trained at the hospice. The HCAs are available day and night at four hours' notice to support patients in the last days of their lives or when they experience a crisis

Work-at-Home Patterns by Occupation

[Excerpt] Working at home can provide people with numerous benefits— flexibility in their schedules, fewer commutes, and opportunities to catch up on work. According to the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), about 12 percent of full-time workers with a single job did some work at home on an average day in 2003–07. (See table.) However, the ability to work at home is greatly affected by the nature of one’s work because some types of work can be more easily performed at home than others. ATUS data provide insight into which workers were the most likely to do some work at home, and also yield information on the share of total weekly work hours people spent at their workplace, at home, and at other locations. Data presented here are averages for people age 15 years and over and for all 7 days of the week throughout 2003–07. Also, data refer only to workers with a single job who were employed full time; that is, they usually worked 35 or more hours per week

Entertaining situated messaging at home

Leisure and entertainment-based computing has been traditionally associated with interactive entertainment media and game playing, yet the forms of engagement offered by these technologies only support a small part of how we act when we are at leisure. In this paper, we move away from the paradigm of leisure technology as computer-based entertainment consumption, and towards a broader view of leisure computing. This perspective is more in line with our everyday experience of leisure as an embodied, everyday accomplishment in which people artfully employ the everyday resources in the world around them in carrying out their daily lives outside of work. We develop this extended notion of leisure using data from a field study of domestic communication focusing on asynchronous and situated messaging to explore some of these issues, and develop these findings towards design implications for leisure technologies. Central to our discussion on the normal, everyday and occasioned conduct of leisure lie the notions of playfulness and creativity, the interweaving of the worlds of work and leisure, and in the creation of embodied displays of affect, all of which may be seen manifested in the use of messaging artefacts. This view of technology in support of leisure-in-the-broad is strongly divergent from traditional entertainment computing models in its coupling of the mechanics of the organisation of everyday life to the ways that we make entertainment for ourselves. This recognition allows us to draw specific implications for domestic situated messaging technologies, but also more generally for technology design by tying activities that we tend to regard as purely functional to other multifaceted and leisure-related purposes

Attitudes about Stay-At-Home Fathers

Research has shown that stay-at-home fathers are evaluated more negatively than stay-at-home mothers (Rosenwasser, Gonzalez, and Adams 1985; Kroska 2001) and working parents (Brescoll and Uhlmann 2005). Stay-at-home fathers who are also breadwinners have been evaluated more positively than stay-at-home fathers who do not contribute financially to their families (Rosenwasser, Gonzalez, and Adams 1985). Participants in the present study were 236 students enrolled in undergraduate classes on the UNH Durham campus. Each participant read a description of one of six hypothetical parents and answered questions about his or her attitudes toward the hypothetical parent as well as his or her perceptions of others’ attitudes toward the parent. Results indicated that UNH Durham students do not hold especially negative attitudes toward stay-at-home fathers, although they believe that others see stay-at-home fathers as less successful and less respected by their coworkers than employed parents and stay-at-home mothers

A Real time network at home

This paper proposes a home network which integrates both real-time and non-real-time capabilities for one coherent, distributed architecture. Such a network is not yet available. Our network will support inexpensive, small appliances as well as more expensive, large appliances. The network is based on a new type of real-time token protocol that uses scheduling to achieve optimal token-routing through the network. Depending on the scheduling algorithm, bandwidth utilisations of 100 percent are possible. Token management, to prevent token-loss or multiple tokens, is essential to support a dynamic, plug-and-play configuration. Small appliances, like sensors, would contain low-cost, embedded processors with limited computing power, which can handle lightweight network protocols. All other operations can be delegated to other appliances that have sufficient resources. This provides a basis for transparency, as it separates controlling and controlled object. Our network will support this. We will show the proposed architecture of such a network and present experiences with and preliminary research of our design

The Role of Web Services at Home

The increase in computational power and the networking abilities of home appliances are revolutionizing the way we interact with our homes. This trend is growing stronger and opening a number of technological challenges. From the point of view of distributed systems, there is a need to design architectures for enhancing the comfort and safety of the home, which deal with issues of heterogeneity, scalability and openness. By considering the evolution of domotic research and projects, we advocate a role for web services in the domestic network, and propose an infrastructure based on web services. As a case study, we present an implementation for monitoring the health of an elder adult using multiple sensors and clients