Process Transparency on Construction Sites: Examples from Construction Companies in Brazil

Process transparency is the core concept in Visual Management (VM), which is one of the founding blocks of the Toyota Production System. This paper presents the preliminary results of a collaborative research conducted between Brazil and the UK, as part of a research effort focused on the application of Visual Management in construction. How process transparency is realized on construction sites is the main research question of the paper. The use of this concept and the implementation of the transparency theory were investigated through multiple case studies, carried out in nine different construction companies. The findings are explained through six theoretical transparency increasing approaches. The affecting parameters in the application of, the management’s perception of and several methods in process transparency in construction were identified. Further work, especially exploring the functions of process transparency on construction sites and reflecting the worker perception of the issue, is necessary to elaborate the process transparency concept

Finger Lakes Interactive Play Assessment of Implementation

In 2014, New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo launched Path Through History, a project connecting New York’s historical and cultural heritage sites. This effort aimed to benefit New York State by promoting the important historical past of New York, as well as highlighting the tourism industry and economic development throughout the entire state as a whole. One million dollars in funding was distributed among ten tourism regions throughout New York State, in an effort to assist each region in creating a unique tourism-marketing plan. This paper focuses specifically on the Finger Lakes Region and its use of the Path Through History grant funding, in conjunction with Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT). Together, the Finger Lakes Regional Economic Development Council (REDC) and RIT used the grant funding allocated to the Finger Lakes by developing an interactive mobile application called Finger Lakes Interactive Play (FLIP). FLIP is an interactive application that provides an educational scavenger hunt leading visitors throughout 12 different historical sites in the Finger Lakes Region. Visitors at each site are invited to utilize the free FLIP application, which offers games and activities like trivia questions, spot the difference, and augmented reality features. The application aims to engage visitors with unique and entertaining exercises, simultaneously promoting entertainment and education. Mobile technology can be found in almost all aspects of business, leisure, and education, including libraries, museums, and cultural sites. The purpose of this paper was to analyze the objectives and explore the effectiveness of the FLIP application, as well as evaluating the challenges and successes of implementing its marketing and promotional efforts. A case study approach was used to analyze the current strategies implemented at each of the 12 historical sites

Adaptive Contents Distribution Based on Traffic Congestion on Digital Signage System

Current technological developments have been very rapid. One of them is the many choices of technology and media to deliver information to the public. Digital Signage is one of the most popular information delivery systems today, displays on digital or electronic media, and it can convey new details. The information usually showed in the form of advertising content in the format of images or videos. Ad content displayed is static, meaning that the ad content will be display in the order specified. This system usually placed next to a broad road. A place that is considered to have a broad audience and requires a significant amount of money to display ad content. However, this causes ad content owners who do not have enough costs not to be able to show the ad content in a particular place. Therefore, this research makes the content management system adaptive to road congestion situations which represented as audience quantities so that the costs can be adjusted. Data is obtained from the Google Maps API and analyzed the traffic congestion by conducting experiments. The compatibility between density and content after testing the results in 100% accuracy

Augmented reality concept to improve public awareness and safety at the beach

Rip currents pose a threat to the safety of bathers at most beaches around the world. Risk perception and swimming preference are critical factors for safety at beaches. In general, the inability to detect a rip current and a false sense of security may lead to situations where people are confronted with unforeseen dangers. The presented research intends to contribute to improving beach safety with situational-awareness data to keep bathers informed about undergoing dangers on a selected beach. As such, the need to create a beach-safety culture and a provocative social conscience in adopting safety behaviors at the beach, during leisure time, is a ground-breaking goal. The research presents a study regarding people understanding about rip currents and other (potential) beach dangerous situations and analyze their willingness to integrate a community of users and to collaboratively contribute to improving safety at the beach, in particular for social groups with children, older adults and citizens who would like to improve their beach-safety literacy. The proposed approach includes the specification of a platform to empower the user in becoming an active beach-safety agent. For this strategic objective, a service design approach was implemented to conceptualize a solution for collecting data about potential hazards, including information on the status of active rip currents. The innovation is settled over the combination of immersive technologies (e.g., Augmented Reality) with visual data analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI), in particular Deep Learning algorithms for image processing. Mobile Augmented Reality mixed with a gamification strategy are two other technologies considered in the architectural design of an interactive and gamified environment in promoting a beach-safety behavior. Such a mobile tool also addresses a strategy to create a social movement challenging citizens to integrate and benefit from the services and informational artifacts provided by the Beach Safety Community (BSC)

Classifying public display systems: an input/output channel perspective

Public display screens are relatively recent additions to our world, and while they may be as simple as a large screen with minimal input/output features, more recent developments have introduced much richer interaction possibilities supporting a variety of interaction styles. In this paper we propose a framework for classifying public display systems with a view to better understanding how they differ in terms of their interaction channels and how future installations are likely to evolve. This framework is explored through 15 existing public display systems which use mobile phones for interaction in the display space

The Development of a Wayfinding Smart Phone Application as a Large Healthcare Facility Investment Opportunity

Health care is a continually growing field. New hospitals are constantly being built, while older facilities are experiencing renovation and expansion. With this growth comes a set of difficulties for patients as they try to navigate through large, multi-building facilities. Most large facilities have multiple parking garages, numerous buildings, and medical towers with an unending number of floors. Patients are forced to rely on directional signage to find their destination that is often insufficient. Attempting to navigate through large facilities is often overwhelming for visitors leading to frustration and stress. New technology has allowed a convenient solution to this problem using visitors’ personal smart phones. NaviHealth is a wayfinding smart phone application that has been created to safely assist visitors in navigating though healthcare facilities. The application gives step-by-step, real-time navigation through parking areas, buildings, floors, and even to the facility itself. The purpose of this Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) project is to develop a wayfinding smart phone application, NaviHealth, for a large healthcare facility to decrease visitor stress and hospital costs, while improving patient satisfaction. The application was presented to a large healthcare organization in South Mississippi as an investment opportunity. Participants of the project were six employees of the organization’s marketing department. After a presentation discussing NaviHealth, participants completed a Likert-type evaluation tool to assess the organization’s interest in the investment and implementation of the application. Open-ended questions were also competed, and qualitative data was collected. Results of this project determined that although the application showed many positive benefits for the facility, the willingness to further pursue the application for investment was strong but not overwhelmingly unanimous. Changes to the application were recommended by participants to improve the likelihood of application investment

An Egocentric Spatial Data Model for Intelligent Mobile Geographic Information Systems

Individuals in unknown locations, such as utility workers in the field, soldiers on a mission, or sightseeing tourists, share the need for an answer to two basic questions: Where am I? and What is in front of me?Because such information is not readily available in foreign locations, aids in the form of paper maps or mobile GISs, which give individuals an all-inclusive view of the environment, are often used. This panoptic view may hinder the positioning and orienteering process, since people perceive their surroundings perspectively from their current position. In this thesis, I describe a novel framework that resolves this problem by applying sensors that gather the individual\u27s spatial frame of reference. This spatial frame of reference, in combination with an egocentric spatial data model enables an injective mapping between the real world and the data frame of reference, hence, alleviating the individual\u27s cognitive workload. Furthermore, our egocentric spatial data model allows intelligent mobile Geographic Information Systems to capture the notions of here and there, and, consequently, provides insight into the individual\u27s surroundings. Finally, our framework, in conjunction with the context given by the task to be performed, enables intelligent mobile Geographic Information Systems to implicitly answer questions with respect to where, what, and how

Smart Geographic object: Toward a new understanding of GIS Technology in Ubiquitous Computing

One of the fundamental aspects of ubiquitous computing is the instrumentation of the real world by smart devices. This instrumentation constitutes an opportunity to rethink the interactions between human beings and their environment on the one hand, and between the components of this environment on the other. In this paper we discuss what this understanding of ubiquitous computing can bring to geographic science and particularly to GIS technology. Our main idea is the instrumentation of the geographic environment through the instrumentation of geographic objects composing it. And then investigate how this instrumentation can meet the current limitations of GIS technology, and offers a new stage of rapprochement between the earth and its abstraction. As result, the current research work proposes a new concept we named Smart Geographic Object SGO. The latter is a convergence point between the smart objects and geographic objects, two concepts appertaining respectively to