3,964 research outputs found
Using Technology Enabled Qualitative Research to Develop Products for the Social Good, An Overview
This paper discusses the potential benefits of the convergence of three recent trends for the design of socially beneficial products and services: the increasing application of qualitative research techniques in a wide range of disciplines, the rapid mainstreaming of social media and mobile technologies, and the emergence of software as a service. Presented is a scenario facilitating the complex data collection, analysis, storage, and reporting required for the qualitative research recommended for the task of designing relevant solutions to address needs of the underserved. A pilot study is used as a basis for describing the infrastructure and services required to realize this scenario. Implications for innovation of enhanced forms of qualitative research are presented
New models for digital government: the role of service brokers in driving innovation
Executive summary
Digital Government strategies are being rolled out in many Australian and international jurisdictions, ushering in a fundamentally different approach to the design and delivery of public sector services. Digital Government makes digital services (usually delivered through internet and mobile channels) the default delivery channels for the majority of services, and places them at the centre of innovating, designing and operating government services.
Public sector or independent service brokers are increasingly important to delivering and designing these services. Service brokers are organisations or businesses that enable customers to interact with other organisations through easy-to-use and seamless interfaces.
In the digital realm, a public sector service brokers example is one that provides a customer-focussed portal, such as the Federal Department of Human Services’ MyGov website.
Independent service brokers from the private or community sectors can also provide greater service choice and innovation in how people interact with governments. Models for independent service brokers include Digital Mailboxes and Personal Safeboxes (eg Australia Post); public transport information service brokers (eg TripView, Tripgo and Google Transit), taxation service brokers (eg Xero and MYOB Online), community service brokers (eg HubCare) and access brokers for government services (eg public libraries, online access centres, etc) to assist those unable to access digital services.
It is likely that the ambitious goals for large-scale adoption of digital government will only be achieved if governments encourage the involvement of independent service brokers to complement the role of public sector service brokers. However, there is currently little guidance on best practice models for agencies seeking to collaborate with independent service brokers or the other way around. This report addresses this critical knowledge gap by providing a practical guide to the service broker model. It explains the different roles of public sector and independent service brokers and provides case studies of service broker models. This will help to inform digital government strategies and policies to encourage the development of public sector and independent service brokers.
It also considers how the emergence of a marketplace of service brokers will raise important issues such as how customer data is managed and protected, identity assured and how research and analysis of the data generated by these digital services can help inform better public policies and service improvement
Technology Trends and Predictions: Is a Flying Car in Our Future?
Discusses the future of legal research and technologies that are currently available for law offices. Highlights current technology trends and predictions and the latest innovations in courtroom technology. Concludes with a list of general technology predictions that will hopefully provide food for thought and generate excitement about the coming prospects of technology
An innovative IoT service for medical diagnosis
Due to the misdiagnose of diseases that increased recently in a scarily manner, many researchers devoted their efforts and deployed technologies to improve the medical diagnosis process and reducing the resulted risk. Accordingly, this paper proposed architecture of a cyber-medicine service for medical diagnosis, based internet of things (IoT) and cloud infrastructure (IaaS). This service offers a shared environment for medical data, and extracted knowledge and findings between patients and doctors in an interactive, secured, elastic and reliable way. It predicts the medical diagnosis and provides an appropriate treatment for the given symptoms and medical conditions based on multiple classifiers to assure high accuracy. Moreover, it entails different functionalities such as on-demand searching for scientific papers and diseases description for unrecognized combination of symptoms using web crawler to enrich the results. Where such searching results from crawler, are processed, analyzed and added to the resident knowledge base (KB) to achieve adaptability and subsidize the service predictive ability
Report on the evaluation of surveillance systems relevant to zoonotic diseases in Kenya, 2015: A basis for design of an integrated human–livestock surveillance system
The Zoonoses in Livestock in Kenya (ZooLinK) is a project that seeks to enable Kenya develop an effective surveillance programme for zoonotic diseases (infectious diseases transmissible between animals and human beings). The surveillance programme will be integrated across both human and animal health sectors. To achieve this goal the project will work in close collaboration with Kenyan government departments in responsible for animal and human health. As a prelude to the start of the project, an evaluation of the existing surveillance systems for human and animal health was carried out. The evaluation focused on the national surveillance system and the systems at the western part of Kenya (Busia county, Kakamega county and Bungoma county) where the initial programme will be developed. In conducting the evaluation the investigators used key informant interviews, focused group discussion participant questionnaires, audio recordings and observation for data collection. Data analysis for the qualitative data focused on generating themes or theory around the responses obtained in the key informants interviews and focused group discussions. Univariate analysis was performed by use of simple proportions in calculation for surveillance system attributes like sensitivity, completeness, PVP and Timeliness for the human health surveillance systems. The findings of the evaluation revealed that there was poor linkage between animal health surveillance and the human health surveillance systems. None of the systems had surveillance structures dedicated to zoonotic diseases. Most practitioners used clinical signs for diagnosis of diseases with little reference to acceptable case definitions. Laboratory diagnosis in animal health services focused more on suspected notifiable diseases as opposed to being a standard operating procedure for diagnosis. In Human health services the health care facilities that had laboratory within the facility conducted laboratory diagnosis for cases referred by the clinicians. However, some clinicians preferred using clinical signs for diagnosis to avoid the wait or turn-around time in the laboratory. For effective surveillance of zoonoses to be realized it would be advisable to establish surveillance structures specific to zoonoses and the necessary resources allocated to the surveillance activities. In addition, an integrated approach that incorporated both human and animal disease surveillance should be employed in the surveillance of zoonoses
Action Research: Fly in the Cloud then Share the View
There is a growing bifurcation of society into those who are Informed (techno-savvy) versus the increasing number of people who are Uninformed (non-techno-savvy) when it comes to utilization of cloud-based Web 2.0 applications. The authors propose wide-spread participation in a cloud-based application. This action research is designed to gather input about one cloud-based technology that has the potential to move users from Uninformed to Informed by the nature of efficient work flow, collaboration, and shared resources (Charles & Dickens, 2012; Fisher, 2011)
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