Improving resources and citizen science for controlling invasive coquí frogs in Pacific Island parks

Invasive species are a common problem throughout the Hawaiian Islands and have detrimental economic and environmental effects; one example is the coquí frog. This project provided the National Wildlife Research Center (NWRC) with resources, materials, and knowledge for expanding its citizen science outreach in invasive species management. We accomplished this by designing a mobile application to track occurrences of coquí frogs. To gather information, we conducted surveys and interviews with locals and experts. We then created a storyboard for a potential app and identified options to partner with other organizations. We recommended partnering with another organization that focuses on invasive species management in Hawai\u27i to develop the final app from the storyboards created

The Comparison of Wearable Fitness Devices

The wearable devices or wearable trackers help to motivate you during daily exercise or workouts. It gives you information about your daily routine or fitness by using wearable technology in combination with your smart phone to track your daily activities and fitness without the manual calculations or records that can be intrusive. Generally, companies display advertising for these kinds of products and depict them as good, user-friendly, and accurate. However, there are no subjective research results to prove the veracity of their words. Four popular wrist band-style wearable devices currently in the market were selected at the devices which are most popular (Withings Pulse, Misfit Shine, Jawbone Up24, and Fitbit Flex). The accuracy of tracking was one of the key components for fitness tracking, with some devices performing better than others. Accuracy in the tracking of daily activities such as walking, running, and sleeping is important. This research showed subjective and objective experiment results, which were used to compare the accuracy of four wearable devices in conjunction with user-friendliness. Satisfaction levels, the accuracy of tracking, and the opinion of each subject while using wearable device to track their daily activity were compared. The results determined that the cost-effectiveness was the Withings Pulse, followed by the Fitbit Flex, Jawbone Up24, and Misfit Shine

Mobile journalism at RTP: production of news - using the smartphone as a tool for news production

The goal of this paper is to show case a practical resolution for the integration a ta greater scale of the Mobile Journalism philosophy, both in the production and in the consumption of news. The production-side concerns the use of the smartphone and other light equipment in the production of news, while the consumption-side concerns how the news are displayed and consumed on a smartphone. This work project was realized in syndication with RTP and was adjust and tailored to its respective needs, resources and objectives. In order to achieve this goal, several analysis were developed to address the external and internal environment, identifying the opportunities and threats of the broad casting industry and the strenggic recommendations that ensures a work able dissemination plan for Mobile Journalism

Re-inventing the e-book: how tablets increased e-book take-up at Bern University

This paper reports how at Bern University the medical library services successfully used the tablet platform to significantly improve students’ acceptance of e-books and other e-resources.Although Bern University had closed its main medical library with the loss of its print monograph collection, students until recently rejected e-books as too inconvenient for intense revision. Only when over the last two years tablets became part of students’ basic toolkit, and the library selected e-books, apps, interface and ancillary software to work with tablets, e-books became more palatable to readers

Mobile journalism at Rtp: consumption of news - content development towards a unified news platform

The goal of this paper is to show case a practical resolution for the integration at agreater scale of the Mobile Journalism philosophy, both in the production and in the consumption of news. The production-side concerns the use of the smart phone and other light equipment in the production of news, while the consumption-side concern show the news are displayed and consume don a smartphone. This work project was realized in syndication with RTP and was adjust and tailored to its respective needs, resources and objectives. In order to achieve this goal, several analysis were developed to address the external and internal environment, identifying the opportunities and threats of the broadcasting industry and the strengths and weaknesses of RTP. The ending result of this study led to the development of interconnected structured and strategic recommendations that ensuresa work a bled is semination plan for Mobile Journalism

Review of Wearable Devices and Data Collection Considerations for Connected Health

Wearable sensor technology has gradually extended its usability into a wide range of well-known applications. Wearable sensors can typically assess and quantify the wearer’s physiology and are commonly employed for human activity detection and quantified self-assessment. Wearable sensors are increasingly utilised to monitor patient health, rapidly assist with disease diagnosis, and help predict and often improve patient outcomes. Clinicians use various self-report questionnaires and well-known tests to report patient symptoms and assess their functional ability. These assessments are time consuming and costly and depend on subjective patient recall. Moreover, measurements may not accurately demonstrate the patient’s functional ability whilst at home. Wearable sensors can be used to detect and quantify specific movements in different applications. The volume of data collected by wearable sensors during long-term assessment of ambulatory movement can become immense in tuple size. This paper discusses current techniques used to track and record various human body movements, as well as techniques used to measure activity and sleep from long-term data collected by wearable technology devices

Investigating the Use of M-Health for Learning and Clinical Training by Medical Students in Ghana

There is a challenge with healthcare access in most developing countries. With the high rate of mobile technology penetration in these countries, there is a strong belief that mobile technology can help address this and other health system and education challenges. This study investigated how clinical year medical students in Ghana used m-health and with what outcomes. This was a mixed-methods study to assess what technologies students used, what the impact of use was, what enablers and barriers they encountered, what factors explained m-health adoption and what the attitudes of students, staff and faculty members were towards m-health use. The study was conducted in four out of five medical schools in Ghana with clinical year students, namely, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology School of Medical Sciences (KNUST-SMS), University of Cape Coast School of Medical Sciences (UCC-SMS), University of Development Studies School of Medicine and Health Sciences (UDS-SMHS) and University of Ghana School of Medicine and Dentistry (UG-SMD). Online and paper questionnaires were distributed to 828 students and 291 questionnaires were returned. Questionnaires from dental students at UG-SMD (n = 5) were excluded from the analysis.Two focus group discussions were held involving seven students while three students, seven faculty members and five staff were interviewed. Qualitative data were analyzed using thematic analysis. Only one student did not own a mobile device. About 78% of students reported using m-health at some point during their medical education. The most popular devices used by students were laptop computers (90.8%), smartphones (66.2%), cellular phones (46.6%) and tablets (44.1%). Over 84% of the students owned Android devices, while 21% owned iPhones and iPads. Majority of students owned three devices or less. Students used mobile technologies in ways that suited their learning needs and contexts. M-health helped students to participate better in lessons and improve their knowledge, skills and efficiency in various contexts. The main drawbacks of m-health use were distraction and time wasting, difficulty in determining credibility of some online information and the risk of using these technologies inappropriately around patients and during assessments. The main facilitating conditions for m-health use were availability, quality and reliability of technological services, technical support, security, price value, technology competence and training, portability, task and goal fit, social influence and organizational factors. Habit and Hedonic Motivation were the only significant factors that explained intention to use m-health and actual m-health use respectively in the UTAUT2 model, in the presence of age, gender and experience. Students, staff and faculty members were open to using m-health in teaching and learning, although they recommended regulation of use through policies and guidelines to ensure effective teaching and learning and ethical m-health use. Considering the benefits offered by m-health, the study encourages medical schools in Ghana to explore mobile learning with the possibility of incorporating it into their curricula. This should be accompanied by development of policies and guidelines to spell out how mobile technologies should be used in order to mitigate most of the drawbacks identified. This study contributed empirical evidence from the Ghanaian context regarding m-health adoption and use in medical education. This evidence will contribute to theory regarding benefits, drawbacks, facilitating conditions and factors that influence m-health adoption among medical students in a developing country context. Understanding how medical students use mobile technology in learning will be useful in planning how m-health can be incorporated into their curricula. It will also help in informing development and deployment of m-health in healthcare in contexts similar to Ghana

Mobility as a Service for the older population: a transport solution to land use changes in essential services?

Land use changes in relation to everyday services are resulting in centralisation of local services from mixed land use town centres to single land use destinations on the edge of cities. Technology advances are disrupting the provision of local community services such as local shops and local health care. Cost considerations and the benefits achieved by economies of scale are driving the land use changes which are changing the landscape of service provision. Whereas hospitals, for example, were typically located in city centres they are now more often in peripheral locations. For many sections of society, these changes have offered better convenience and higher quality of service. However, these changes have both spatial and horizontal equity impacts, particularly for older people and particularly for areas of lower density where accessibility will significantly decline. This paper explores the potential contribution of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) in promoting greater equity for older people using Community Transport (CT) as the service co-ordinator. The travel needs and behaviour of older people are reviewed as well as the contribution of flexible transport services towards meeting these needs. Drawing on discussions with a group of CT operators in Australia the key characteristics of the MaaS model are explored in the context of older people to ascertain whether CT acting as the service co-co-ordinator fits the MaaS model. A series of MaaS packages are proposed to show how the model could be delivered in practice. The paper concludes that as a business model, MaaS for CT could be one way of ameliorating the lack of equity for the old and frail age group brought about by land use changes in essential services