Developing a smartphone app to enhance Oxfam's supply chain visibility

This paper reports on the development of a smartphone app designed to give drivers and managers in a charity organisation greater visibility of transport, donation bank and shop stock in time and space. Trials of the app with samples of drivers and shop managers across three counties in the UK showed that users’ understanding of vehicle activity and how time was utilised in the business was enhanced. The app also informed their decision making, aided some collaboration and helped in their understanding of donation bank and shop performance, with one region altering their collection schedules. The quality of 3G signal was an issue in certain areas which impeded performance and the rules by which the messaging platform should be used in such a tool need careful consideratio

Spatial uncertainty management in pedestrian navigation

Location-based services use location as contextual data to exclude irrelevant services from users. However almost all positioning technologies can only provide a location with a certain degree of accuracy. It is necessary to have a framework which can handle this inaccuracy and other uncertainties in order to provide a better and more adaptive service. In addition to positioning inaccuracy, location-based services can suffer from other aspects of uncertainty, such as data incompleteness and inconsistency. There is no universal positioning technique which can provide the position of the user seamlessly indoors and outdoors with an acceptable degree of accuracy. Consequently, it is possible to lose the position of the user for a period of time. To avoid this, some systems use more than one positioning technology, each having incomplete datasets; however they still may produce mutually inconsistent data. If an uncertain spatial dataset is stored and analysed in a framework which cannot handle uncertainty, some aspects of the input data may be missed and the outcome may not be fully applicable in real world applications. This chapter aims at developing a rough set-theory-based navigation application which can provide navigational instructions to users by taking spatial uncertainty into account

Rehabilitation following rotator cuff repair: A multi-centre pilot & feasibility randomised controlled trial (RaCeR)

Objective: To evaluate the feasibility of a multi-centre randomised controlled trial to compare the clinical and cost-effectiveness of early patient-directed rehabilitation versus standard rehabilitation following surgical repair of the rotator cuff of the shoulder. Design: Two-arm, multi-centre pilot and feasibility randomised controlled trial. Setting: Five National Health Service hospitals in England. Participants: Adults (n = 73) with non-traumatic rotator cuff tears scheduled for repair were recruited and randomly allocated remotely prior to surgery. Interventions: Early patient-directed rehabilitation (n = 37); advised to remove their sling as soon as able and move as symptoms allow. Standard rehabilitation (n = 36); sling immobilisation for four weeks. Measures: (1) Randomisation of 20% or more eligible patients. (2) Difference in time out of sling of 40% or more between groups. (3) Follow-up greater than 70%. Results: 73/185 (39%) potentially eligible patients were randomised. Twenty participants were withdrawn, 11 due to not receiving rotator cuff repair. The between-group difference in proportions of participants who exceeded the cut-off of 222.6 hours out of the sling was 50% (80% CI = 29%, 72%), with the early patient-directed rehabilitation group reporting greater time out of sling. 52/73 (71%) and 52/53 (98%) participants were followed-up at 12 weeks when withdrawals were included and excluded respectively. Eighteen full-thickness re-tears were reported (early patient-directed rehabilitation = 7, standard rehabilitation = 11). Five serious adverse events were reported. Conclusion: A main randomised controlled trial is feasible but would require allocation of participants following surgery to counter the issue of withdrawal due to not receiving surgery

Fundamental challenges in designing a collaborative travel app

The growing capabilities of smartphones have opened up new opportunities for travel coordination and transport is a fertile area for app development. One stream of development is apps that enable collaborative travel, either in the form of lift sharing or collaborative shopping, but despite growing interest from governmental agencies, there is little evidence of the efficacy of such apps. Based on trials of purpose built travel collaboration apps, deployed in tourism, urban and rural residential communities, and logistics, this paper analyses the fundamental challenges facing users adopting such travel apps. The findings suggest that transport practitioners, policy makers and app developers need to better understand the challenges associated with attracting users, the use of incentives and the types of communities most appropriate to implement collaborative travel concepts using such approaches. Also, how the users’ sense of time pressure and the issues around reciprocal exchange can impact on their long-term success and wider adoption

Protocol for a multi-centre pilot and feasibility randomised controlled trial with a nested qualitative study: rehabilitation following rotator cuff repair (the RaCeR study)

Background Shoulder pain is a highly prevalent complaint and disorders of the rotator cuff, including tears, are thought to be the most common cause. The number of operations to repair the torn rotator cuff has risen significantly in recent years. While surgical techniques have progressed, becoming less invasive and more secure, rehabilitation programmes have remained largely like those initially developed when surgical techniques were less advanced and more invasive. Uncertainty remains in relation to the length of post-surgical immobilisation and the amount of early load permitted at the repair site. In the context of this uncertainty, current practice is to follow a generally cautious approach, including long periods of immobilisation in a sling and avoidance of early active rehabilitation. Systematic review evidence suggests early mobilisation might be beneficial but further high-quality studies are required to evaluate this. Methods/design RaCeR is a two-arm, multi-centre pilot and feasibility randomised controlled trial with nested qualitative interviews. A total of 76 patients with non-traumatic rotator cuff tears who are scheduled to have a surgical repair will be recruited from up to five UK NHS hospitals and randomly allocated to either early patient-directed rehabilitation or standard rehabilitation that incorporates sling immobilisation. RaCeR will assess the feasibility of a future, substantive, multi-centre randomised controlled trial to test the hypothesis that, compared to standard rehabilitation incorporating sling immobilisation, early patient-directed rehabilitation is both more clinically effective and more cost-effective. In addition, a sample of patients and clinicians will be interviewed to understand the acceptability of the interventions and the barriers and enablers to adherence to the interventions. Discussion Research to date suggests that there is the possibility of reducing the patient burden associated with post-operative immobilisation following surgery to repair the torn rotator cuff and improve clinical outcomes. There is a clear need for a high-quality, adequately powered, randomised trial to better inform clinical practice. Prior to a large-scale trial, we first need to undertake a pilot and feasibility trial to address current uncertainties about recruitment, retention and barriers to adherence to the interventions, particularly in relation to whether patients will be willing to begin moving their arm early after their operation

Implementing smartphone enabled collaborative travel: Routes to success in the tourism domain.

Smartphone technology can help identify current and anticipate future patterns of behaviour and, with its social networking capabilities, allow users to imagine and organise collaborative travel opportunities, such as lift share. This has led to the development of collaborative apps designed to enable activities like lift sharing. Such apps require new norms of behaviour to establish a user base and research has yet to address the socio-cultural barriers to both the use of this technology to organise travel and the sharing of personal space that collaborative travel entails. This paper reports the findings of a study which designed, built and tested a collaborative travel app in the tourism domain. Data derived from exploratory interviews, post-trial interviews and a questionnaire reveal that user age and extent of mobile engagement play a less significant role than expected, while other aspects of the social exchange, notably social tie strength, trust and obligations play a more marked role. A conceptual framework and discussion of strategies to address these barriers provides insight into appropriate contexts and routes for implementation of collaborative travel apps

Indoor location based services challenges, requirements and usability of current solutions

Indoor Location Based Services (LBS), such as indoor navigation and tracking, still have to deal with both technical and non-technical challenges. For this reason, they have not yet found a prominent position in people’s everyday lives. Reliability and availability of indoor positioning technologies, the availability of up-to-date indoor maps, and privacy concerns associated with location data are some of the biggest challenges to their development. If these challenges were solved, or at least minimized, there would be more penetration into the user market. This paper studies the requirements of LBS applications, through a survey conducted by the authors, identifies the current challenges of indoor LBS, and reviews the available solutions that address the most important challenge, that of providing seamless indoor/outdoor positioning. The paper also looks at the potential of emerging solutions and the technologies that may help to handle this challenge

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