4,188 research outputs found

    UMSL Bulletin 2023-2024

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    The 2023-2024 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1088/thumbnail.jp

    With the Participatory Consumer Audience in mind: exploring and developing professional brand identity designers reflexive practice

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    This PhD reflects upon first-hand unidirectional and passive consumer audience experience approaches prevalent in professional UK brand identity design. It explores: How brand identity designers might move towards an improved reflexive practice in the design of consumer audience experiences. This practice-led research focuses on the ideas generation stage of their design process. An ongoing constructivist audience paradigm shift signals that when thinking about and using their positionality in relation to their consumer audience experiences, designers need reflexive practice to support critical reflection of themselves, their biases and assumptions. This research uncovered a lack of relevant theory regarding reflexive practice specific to the context of brand identity design. This insufficiency throws into doubt designers' relational, participatory and equitable approaches in their working practices and their abilities to address market imperatives, including client requirements connected to the ongoing audience paradigm shift. Aligned with John Dewey's ethical pragmatism and drawing from Creswell, Tashakkori and Teddlie, my study adopts a mixed methods methodology. Alongside established qualitative and quantitative methods, this includes my practice via design visualisations, as discussed by Drucker, and builds upon Carl DiSalvo's approach of practice used to do inquiry and design as a method of inquiry. My practice enabled me to critically reflect, evaluate and construct reflexive practice knowledge, including the development of reflexive practice communications, to advance understanding of and improve other designers' reflexive practice, and to communicate my process of reflexive design practice research. Thirty UK-based professional brand identity designers participated in this research: nineteen participants in Phase One, a questionnaire, and six in Phase Two semi-structured interviews. Phase One and Two findings identified a gap in that designers are not employing a reflexive design practice and lack the resources to do so. Seeking to improve these shortcomings, eighteen initial reflexive design practice principles were explored and tested in Phase Three, a workshop involving five design participants. Results showed that the principles facilitated participants to advance prior thinking and engage in a reflexive design practice. Further reflections and insights from the same five Phase Three participants uncovered a need to refine and reduce the principles and communicate them in a guide. Eight revised overarching and eighteen sub-principles in a prototype guide were explored in Phase Four in applied practice by three brand identity designers involved in Phase Three. Results corroborated workshop findings and provided further recommendations. Contributions of this research are three-fold. First, offering an advanced understanding of professional brand identity designers' reflexive practice and process knowledge. Second, it produced a reflexive design guide with eight overarching and eighteen sub-reflexive design principles and corresponding digital app, thereby offering a preliminary new design practice method. This method offers a way to improve designers' thinking about and operation of their relational positionality, participatory consumer audience experience approaches, and reflexive design practice actions. Third, it provides a contribution to knowledge via its methodology, which integrates design visualisation practice into a mixed methods approach

    Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies

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    Climate change is perhaps the greatest threat to humanity today and plays out as a cruel engine of myriad forms of injustice, violence and destruction. The effects of climate change from human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are devastating and accelerating; yet are uncertain and uneven both in terms of geography and socio-economic impacts. Emerging from the dynamics of capitalism since the industrial revolution — as well as industrialisation under state-led socialism — the consequences of climate change are especially profound for the countryside and its inhabitants. The book interrogates the narratives and strategies that frame climate change and examines the institutionalised responses in agrarian settings, highlighting what exclusions and inclusions result. It explores how different people — in relation to class and other co-constituted axes of social difference such as gender, race, ethnicity, age and occupation — are affected by climate change, as well as the climate adaptation and mitigation responses being implemented in rural areas. The book in turn explores how climate change – and the responses to it - affect processes of social differentiation, trajectories of accumulation and in turn agrarian politics. Finally, the book examines what strategies are required to confront climate change, and the underlying political-economic dynamics that cause it, reflecting on what this means for agrarian struggles across the world. The 26 chapters in this volume explore how the relationship between capitalism and climate change plays out in the rural world and, in particular, the way agrarian struggles connect with the huge challenge of climate change. Through a huge variety of case studies alongside more conceptual chapters, the book makes the often-missing connection between climate change and critical agrarian studies. The book argues that making the connection between climate and agrarian justice is crucial

    WearPut : Designing Dexterous Wearable Input based on the Characteristics of Human Finger Motions

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    Department of Biomedical Engineering (Human Factors Engineering)Powerful microchips for computing and networking allow a wide range of wearable devices to be miniaturized with high fidelity and availability. In particular, the commercially successful smartwatches placed on the wrist drive market growth by sharing the role of smartphones and health management. The emerging Head Mounted Displays (HMDs) for Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) also impact various application areas in video games, education, simulation, and productivity tools. However, these powerful wearables have challenges in interaction with the inevitably limited space for input and output due to the specialized form factors for fitting the body parts. To complement the constrained interaction experience, many wearable devices still rely on other large form factor devices (e.g., smartphones or hand-held controllers). Despite their usefulness, the additional devices for interaction can constrain the viability of wearable devices in many usage scenarios by tethering users' hands to the physical devices. This thesis argues that developing novel Human-Computer interaction techniques for the specialized wearable form factors is vital for wearables to be reliable standalone products. This thesis seeks to address the issue of constrained interaction experience with novel interaction techniques by exploring finger motions during input for the specialized form factors of wearable devices. The several characteristics of the finger input motions are promising to enable increases in the expressiveness of input on the physically limited input space of wearable devices. First, the input techniques with fingers are prevalent on many large form factor devices (e.g., touchscreen or physical keyboard) due to fast and accurate performance and high familiarity. Second, many commercial wearable products provide built-in sensors (e.g., touchscreen or hand tracking system) to detect finger motions. This enables the implementation of novel interaction systems without any additional sensors or devices. Third, the specialized form factors of wearable devices can create unique input contexts while the fingers approach their locations, shapes, and components. Finally, the dexterity of fingers with a distinctive appearance, high degrees of freedom, and high sensitivity of joint angle perception have the potential to widen the range of input available with various movement features on the surface and in the air. Accordingly, the general claim of this thesis is that understanding how users move their fingers during input will enable increases in the expressiveness of the interaction techniques we can create for resource-limited wearable devices. This thesis demonstrates the general claim by providing evidence in various wearable scenarios with smartwatches and HMDs. First, this thesis explored the comfort range of static and dynamic touch input with angles on the touchscreen of smartwatches. The results showed the specific comfort ranges on variations in fingers, finger regions, and poses due to the unique input context that the touching hand approaches a small and fixed touchscreen with a limited range of angles. Then, finger region-aware systems that recognize the flat and side of the finger were constructed based on the contact areas on the touchscreen to enhance the expressiveness of angle-based touch input. In the second scenario, this thesis revealed distinctive touch profiles of different fingers caused by the unique input context for the touchscreen of smartwatches. The results led to the implementation of finger identification systems for distinguishing two or three fingers. Two virtual keyboards with 12 and 16 keys showed the feasibility of touch-based finger identification that enables increases in the expressiveness of touch input techniques. In addition, this thesis supports the general claim with a range of wearable scenarios by exploring the finger input motions in the air. In the third scenario, this thesis investigated the motions of in-air finger stroking during unconstrained in-air typing for HMDs. The results of the observation study revealed details of in-air finger motions during fast sequential input, such as strategies, kinematics, correlated movements, inter-fingerstroke relationship, and individual in-air keys. The in-depth analysis led to a practical guideline for developing robust in-air typing systems with finger stroking. Lastly, this thesis examined the viable locations of in-air thumb touch input to the virtual targets above the palm. It was confirmed that fast and accurate sequential thumb touch can be achieved at a total of 8 key locations with the built-in hand tracking system in a commercial HMD. Final typing studies with a novel in-air thumb typing system verified increases in the expressiveness of virtual target selection on HMDs. This thesis argues that the objective and subjective results and novel interaction techniques in various wearable scenarios support the general claim that understanding how users move their fingers during input will enable increases in the expressiveness of the interaction techniques we can create for resource-limited wearable devices. Finally, this thesis concludes with thesis contributions, design considerations, and the scope of future research works, for future researchers and developers to implement robust finger-based interaction systems on various types of wearable devices.ope

    Patient-centred ambulatory healthcare for people aged 80 and over

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    People aged 80 and over are the fastest-growing age group in most industrialised countries. On average, this life phase is characterised by a significantly higher burden of morbidity, limitations in daily activities, medical and dental treatment needs and phenomena such as multimorbidity and frailty. However, individual ageing and health trajectories are highly heterogenous. This challenges current healthcare systems that are still primarily organised around acute care occasions. Ambulatory healthcare is in particular demand as the sector closest to people’s lives and the guarantor to enable ageing in place. By now, ambulatory healthcare providers already face considerable work burdens and are the first to encounter the challenges of this demographic change, especially due to lacking adaptations on the health system level. So far, care models for the improvement of ambulatory healthcare for older people have mainly been developed without their participation. These models primarily focused on structural elements such as coordination to manage the complexity of conditions, with mixed results. A more recent approach to redesigning healthcare is the concept of patient-centred care, which puts the patients with their individual goals, expectations and living realities at the centre of healthcare design. Patient-centred care has gained widespread recognition and can now be considered an overall goal for healthcare. However, few studies have systematically incorporated older people’s views to design patient-centred care. In particular, the group of the oldest old, aged 80 and over, were seldom of interest, despite their rapid growth and special healthcare needs. Moreover, the topic of their oral health and healthcare was rarely included in researching health services. Additionally, the investigation of the perspectives of their healthcare providers is needed to understand the practical reality and to advance the support of an appropriate health workforce for an ageing population. Consequently, this dissertation aimed at investigating what matters in developing patientcentred ambulatory healthcare for people aged 80 and over. Three dissertation projects (DPs) were conducted to examine the views of community-dwelling people aged 80 and over and their healthcare providers regarding ambulatory healthcare comprehensively as well as indepth. In DP1, a systematic review of qualitative studies on the views and experiences of people aged 80 and over regarding ambulatory healthcare was conducted. A meta-synthesis of the 22 included primary studies resulted in the development of three core motives that older people have regarding healthcare: feeling safe, feeling like a meaningful human being, and maintaining control and independence. Parallel to that, a meta-summary of the same set of studies was conducted, resulting in 23 specific desirable features of ambulatory healthcare that were systematically appraised on their confidence in the evidence using the tool GRADE CERQual. In DP2, the findings from DP1 were used to further investigate desirable features of ambulatory healthcare from the perspective of community-dwelling people aged 80 and over in Cologne, Germany. In qualitative interviews using a semi-structured interview guide, 22 participants were asked about their perspectives on general ambulatory healthcare and oral healthcare. The interview transcripts were analysed thematically and resulted in a framework of 16 characteristics of good healthcare for the very old, incorporating oral healthcare equally. The study also revealed that older people particularly value and wish for trustful care relationships, that they are rarely aware of their oral health matters, and that they frequently encounter negative stereotypes of older age in the context of healthcare. In DP3, physicians and dentists providing ambulatory healthcare in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany, were researched. Using a qualitative survey design in the mode of online data collection, they were asked about their perceptions and views on their routine work and interactions with patients aged 80 and over. The results from 77 cases analysed with the approach of structuring qualitative content analysis showed that the healthcare providers found working with the very old particularly challenging due to their medical complexity and nonmedical demands, such as psychosocial matters. The results from all three DPs were taken together to describe and explain what is relevant in the design of patient-centred ambulatory healthcare for the very old. Apart from features of such healthcare, the dissertation discusses the broader implications in referring to the understanding of health, ageing and the role of healthcare, the further development of patientcentred care and the building of a healthcare workforce for the ageing population

    Health Leadership and Management Practices That Support Accountability for Results

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    Although leaders are expected to nurture and sustain a culture of accountability for results, little is known about how health leaders in developing countries perceive, interpret, demonstrate, and promote accountability in their day-to-day practices. The purpose of this generic qualitative study was to explore the management and leadership practices that leaders of public and non-profit health support organizations in Uganda utilize to embody and support accountability for key stakeholders’ results. Data from in-depths interviews with 13 participants at the governance, senior management, and middle management levels were analysed using thematic data analysis. Riggio\u27s conceptualization of using multiple perspectives and disciplines to understand leadership guided the study. The findings indicate that the combination of management and leadership practices that promote accountability results are motivated and sustained by the leaders’ ethical and moral values, character and soft skills; majorly driven by task, relations, change, and externally-oriented leadership behavior; aligned with the leaders’ perceived primary management and leadership roles and responsibilities; and focus on enabling others to identify the right problem to address, recognize and navigate the eclectic ecosystem-wide interests, and mandates. These findings add to knowledge on managing and leading accountability in low-income settings. Implications for positive social change included understanding how to identify, select, develop, promote, and retain managers and staff with the relevant skills, enduring positive intrapersonal accountability motives and practices; this results in building effective organization systems that shape, strengthen, and sustain a culture of accountability for results

    Behavior quantification as the missing link between fields: Tools for digital psychiatry and their role in the future of neurobiology

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    The great behavioral heterogeneity observed between individuals with the same psychiatric disorder and even within one individual over time complicates both clinical practice and biomedical research. However, modern technologies are an exciting opportunity to improve behavioral characterization. Existing psychiatry methods that are qualitative or unscalable, such as patient surveys or clinical interviews, can now be collected at a greater capacity and analyzed to produce new quantitative measures. Furthermore, recent capabilities for continuous collection of passive sensor streams, such as phone GPS or smartwatch accelerometer, open avenues of novel questioning that were previously entirely unrealistic. Their temporally dense nature enables a cohesive study of real-time neural and behavioral signals. To develop comprehensive neurobiological models of psychiatric disease, it will be critical to first develop strong methods for behavioral quantification. There is huge potential in what can theoretically be captured by current technologies, but this in itself presents a large computational challenge -- one that will necessitate new data processing tools, new machine learning techniques, and ultimately a shift in how interdisciplinary work is conducted. In my thesis, I detail research projects that take different perspectives on digital psychiatry, subsequently tying ideas together with a concluding discussion on the future of the field. I also provide software infrastructure where relevant, with extensive documentation. Major contributions include scientific arguments and proof of concept results for daily free-form audio journals as an underappreciated psychiatry research datatype, as well as novel stability theorems and pilot empirical success for a proposed multi-area recurrent neural network architecture.Comment: PhD thesis cop

    Woman-centred care and integrated electronic medical records within Australian maternity settings: Point prevalence audit and observational study

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    Objective: Transition to paperless records brings new challenges to midwifery practice across the continuum of woman-centred care. There is limited and conflicting evidence on the relative benefits of electronic medical records in maternity settings. This article aims to inform the use of integrative electronic medical records within the maternity services’ environment with attention to the midwife-woman relationship. Design: This descriptive two-part study includes 1) an audit of electronic records in the early period following implementation (2-time points); and 2) an observational study to observe midwives’ practice relating to electronic record use. Setting: Two regional tertiary public hospitals Participants: Midwives providing care for childbearing women across antenatal, intrapartum and postnatal areas. Findings: 400 integrated electronic medical records were audited for completeness. Most fields had high levels of complete data in the correct location. However, between time 1 (T1) and time 2 (T2), persistent missing data (foetal heart rate documented 30 minutely T1 36%; T2 42%), and incomplete or incorrectly located data (pathology results T1:63%; T2 54%; perineal repair T1 60%; T2 46%) were identified. Observationally, midwives were actively engaged with the integrative electronic medical record between 23% to 68% (median 46%; IQR 16) of the time. Conclusion: Midwives spent a significant amount of time completing documentation during clinical episodes of care. Largely, this documentation was found to be accurate, yet exceptions to data completeness, precision and location remained, indicating some concerns with software usability. Implications for practice: Time-intensive monitoring and documentation may hinder woman-centred midwifery care

    Impact of Australia’s aged care reforms on governance, operations, and recipients of residential aged care in Australia: A qualitative study

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    Australia’s ongoing aged care reforms have re-focused funding and service provisions towards enabling older Australians to stay in their own home for as long as possible by increasing homecare and community supported services. Consequently, older Australians enter residential aged care at a much later stage in life with less mobility and increased frailty, requiring a higher level of care. Residential aged care providers face the challenges of finding new ways of delivering services that meet the increasing care needs and expectations of their residents and families while ensuring financial viability of their organisations under the reform conditions. Government reviews of the aged care reforms have centred on assessing the progress and effectiveness of implementing reform initiatives. Research examining various aspects of residential aged care during the reform implementation period have focused on elements of service delivery from the perspectives of aged care workers and/or residents. There is a limited focus on a more comprehensive understanding of the experiences inclusive of provider organisations, aged care workforce and client and family perspectives in the reform environment. The purpose of this thesis study is to adopt a holistic approach to explore the impact of the reforms on residential aged care services at the levels of organisational governance, operations, and clients and families within residential aged care hence providing a snapshot of the various dimensions of reform impact on residential care delivery. The insights provided by this thesis study demonstrate the interconnectedness between different components in delivering residential aged care and how they reflect policy outcomes. These insights contribute to a deeper understanding between key stakeholders of residential aged care and highlight the importance of anticipating potential consequences of policy outcomes
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