Older People’s Needs and Opportunities for Assistive Technologies

Older adults experience a disconnect between their needs and adoption of technologies that have potential to assist and to support more independent living. This paper reviewed research that links people’s needs with opportunities for assistive technologies. It searched 13 databases identifying 923 papers with 34 papers finally included for detailed analysis. The research papers identified needs in the fields of health, leisure, living, safety, communication, family relationship and social involvement. Amongst these, support for activities of daily living category was of most interest. In specific sub-categories, the next most reported need was assistive technology to support walking and mobility followed by smart cooking/kitchen technology and assistive technology for social contacts with family member/other people. The research aimed to inform a program of research into improving the adoption of technologies where they can ameliorate identified needs of older people

Big Data for the Greater Good: An Introduction

Big Data, perceived as one of the breakthrough technological developments of our times, has the potential to revolutionize essentially any area of knowledge and impact on any aspect of our life. Using advanced analytics techniques such as text analytics, machine learning, predictive analytics, data mining, statistics, and natural language processing, analysts, researchers, and business users can analyze previously inaccessible or unusable data to gain new insights resulting in better and faster decisions, and producing both economic and social value; it can have an impact on employment growth, productivity, the development of new products and services, traffic management, spread of viral outbreaks, and so on. But great opportunities also bring great challenges, such as the loss of individual privacy. In this chapter, we aim to provide an introduction into what Big Data is and an overview of the social value that can be extracted from it; to this aim, we explore some of the key literature on the subject. We also call attention to the potential ‘dark’ side of Big Data, but argue that more studies are needed to fully understand the downside of it. We conclude this chapter with some final reflections

Social website technologies and their impact on society

Introduction Web applications have dominated the concerns of most people because they take a lot of their time. Among the most prominent of these concerns is the social networking that is available through social network applications on the internet. Social websites have impacted heavily on social and national identity as well as on the social bonding within the community. Why does the social network matter? Human nature is generally social and people like to live in a community rather than in isolation. Social networks play this role electronically by connecting people as a community regardless of the distance. Evidence shows that these applications are attractive and have a strong influence in various areas. The deductive approach has been used in this chapter which analysed texts relevant to the subject of the study. Descriptive documentary in the collection of information from sources and references associated with the subject of the study described and employed an approach to describe the phenomenon as list of the diagnosis and detection aspects to determine the relationship between elements with a prospect for the future and predict scientific outcomes

Power-use profile analysis of non-domestic consumers for electricity tariff switching

For both domestic and non-domestic consumers, dynamic electricity tariffs have been proposed as a way to reduce their energy costs and to facilitate demand-side response. It is difficult for businesses which are tenants to adopt energy efficiency measures; thus, tariff switching is the easier option. Therefore, understanding the limits of the cost saving offered by tariff switching is an important step. This raises two questions: by how much could bills be reduced, and would all consumers benefit equally? Using a dataset of half-hourly electricity readings from more than 7500 British businesses, we performed an empirical analysis to discover which types of businesses might have lower or higher costs when changing between static and real-time tariffs. We identified differences in demand profiles that demonstrate that the decision whether to switch tariff types is a subtle one which may have a significant cost impact. The dataset was aggregated into five categories: Entertainment, Industry, Retail, Social, and Other. Our analytical methods can be used to distinguish the differences between typical electricity demand profiles for small- to medium-sized businesses and sectors in different market options. Our analyses of switching to a real-time tariff suggest that most of those small- to medium-sized businesses that would reduce their annual electricity bill would gain by no more than 10 %. Most of these businesses would gain by less than 5 %. This, we suggest, sets a realistic upper limit of the likely cash savings before energy efficiency, or other measures must be taken to further reduce bills.This work was supported by an UK Engineering and Physical Science Research Council grant (EP/I000194/1)