Evaluating hospital websites in Kuwait to improve consumer engagement and access to health information:a cross-sectional analytical study

Abstract Background Current advances in information and communication technology have made accessing and obtaining health-related information easier than ever before. Today, many hospital websites use a patient-centric approach to promote engagement and encourage learning for better health-related decision making. However, little is known about the current state of hospital websites in the State of Kuwait. This study aims to evaluate hospital websites in Kuwait and offer recommendations to improve patient engagement and access to health information. Methods This study employs a cross-sectional analytical approach to evaluate hospital websites in Kuwait in 2017. The websites of hospitals that provide in-patient services were identified through a structured search. Only active websites that were available in either English or Arabic were considered. The evaluation of the websites involved a combination of automated and expert- based evaluation methods and was performed across four dimensions: Accessibility, Usability, Presence, and Content. Results Nine hospitals met the inclusion criteria. Most of the websites fell short in all four dimensions. None of the websites passed the accessibility guidelines. The usability of websites varied between hospitals. Overall, the majority of hospitals in Kuwait have rudimentary online presence and their websites require careful reassessment with respect to design, content, and user experience. The websites focus primarily on promoting services provided by the hospital rather than engaging and communicating with patients or providing evidence-based information. Conclusions Healthcare organization and website developers should follow best-practices to improve their websites taking into consideration the quality, readability, objectivity, coverage and currency of the information as well as the design of their websites. Hospitals should leverage social media to gain outreach and better engagement with consumers. The websites should be offered in additional languages commonly spoken by people living in Kuwait. Efforts should be made to ensure that health information on hospital websites are evidence-based and checked by healthcare professionals

Reducing the Cost of Grammar-Based Testing Using Pattern Coverage

Part 2: Test Derivation MethodsInternational audienceIn grammar-based testing, context-free grammars may be used to generate relevant test inputs for language processors, or meta programs, such as programming language compilers, refactoring tools, and implementations of software quality metrics. This technique can be used to test these meta programs, but the amount of sentences, and syntax trees thereof, which needs to be generated to obtain reasonable coverage of the input language is exponential.Pattern matching is a programming language feature used often when writing meta programs. Pattern matching helps because it automates the frequently occurring task of detecting shapes in, and extracting information from syntax trees. However, meta programs which contain many patterns are difficult to test using only randomly generated sentences from grammar rules. The reason is that statistically it is uncommon to directly generate sentences which accidentally match the patterns in the code.To solve this problem, in this paper we extract information from the patterns in the code of meta programs to guide the sentence generation process. We introduce a new coverage criterion, called Pattern Coverage, which focuses on providing a test strategy to reduce the amount of test necessary cases, while covering the relevant parts of the meta program. An initial experimental evaluation is presented and the result is compared with traditional grammar-based testing

Facilitating the authoring of multimedia social problem solving skills instructional modules

Difficulties in social skills are generally considered defining characteristics of High-Functioning Autism (HFA). These difficulties interfere with the educational experiences and quality of life of individuals with HFA, and interventions must be highly individualized to be effective. I explore ways technologies may play a role in assisting individuals with the acquisition of social problem solving skills. This thesis presents the design, development, and evaluation of two systems; Refl-ex, which is a collection of multimedia instructional modules designed to enable adolescents with HFA to practice social problem solving skills, and REACT, a system to facilitate the authoring of a wider variety of instructional modules. The authoring tool is designed to help parents, teachers, and other stakeholders to create Refl-ex-like instructional modules. The approach uses models of social knowledge created using crowdsourcing techniques to provide the authors with support throughout the authoring process. A series of studies were conducted to inform the design of high-fidelity prototypes of each of the systems and to evaluate the prototypes. The contributions of this thesis are: 1) the creation of obstacle-based branching, an approach to developing interactive social skills instructional modules that has been evaluated by experts to be an improvement to current practices; 2) the development of an approach to building models of social knowledge that can be dynamically created and expanded using crowdsourcing; and 3) the development a system that gives parents and other caregivers the ability to easily create customized social skills instructional modules for their children and students.PhDCommittee Chair: Abowd, Gregory; Committee Chair: Arriaga, Rosa; Committee Member: Magerko, Brian; Committee Member: Riedl, Mark; Committee Member: Tartaro, Andre

System software for enhancement of computational accuracy through user-selected number representation

With the advances in all fields of technology, accuracy has assumed a more important role. Enhancing the level of accuracy of a computation done on a computer is becoming indispensable for a growing number of computational problem classes.Due to the fact that the computer does all computations within the limits of its own frame, accuracy may be lost since numbers have to be rounded off to a finite size.The purpose of this research is to develop software algorithms to enhance the accuracy of computations.The first approach is an unconventional but really natural way in which to represent a real number as a ratio of two integers. This format will be referred to as the rational number format.The second approach explores the possibility of enhancing the accuracy of computation using conventional floating-point representation of real numbers. This approach provides a user-defined representation for the floating-point numbers within user chosen word size (32 bits, 64 bits, etc.). The user can determine and select the number of bits allocated to the exponent and the number of bits allocated to the mantissa.Due to the emergence of super computers with FLOPS (floating-point operations per second) exceeding a billion, the time taken to run these algorithms will be within acceptable limits. The effect of these algorithms on the speed of computation has been explored.The third approach for enhancing the accuracy is the possible rearranging of the order of computation at the source level. This technique can be used with each one of the previous two approaches to obtain better accuracy

Towards a framework to situate assistive technology design in the context of culture

We present the findings from a cross-cultural study of the expectations and perceptions of individuals with autism and other intellectual disabilities (AOID) in Kuwait, Pakistan, South Korea, and the United States. Our findings exposed cultural nuances that have implications for the design of assistive technologies. We develop a framework, based on three themes; 1) lifestyles; 2) socio-technical infrastructure; and 3) monetary and intellectual resources within which the cultural implications and opportunities for assistive technology were explored. The three key contributions of this work are: 1) the development of a framework that outlines how culture impacts perceptions and expectations of individuals with intellectual disabilities; 2) a mapping of how this framework leads to implications and opportunities for assistive technology design; 3) the presentation of concrete examples of how these implications impact the design of three emerging assistive technologies