A Splendid Moment in The Living Room

Spring 2023 Showcas

The end-user perception of healthcare waiting environment designs

Waiting environments often represent the first interaction point of the healthcare journey and as such contribute to end-user overall experience. The design of these spaces should therefore make the experience as positive as possible. The body of evidence about the relationship between healthcare built-environments and end-user outcomes has grown rapidly in recent years. However, as opposed to inpatient and longterm care, few studies have focused on the design of outpatient settings and their waiting environments. In order to improve the waiting experience, it is necessary to understand how end-users perceive the design of the healthcare waiting environments. This research therefore aims to understand how end-users in the United Kingdom perceive the design of outpatient healthcare waiting environments (OHCWEs). A mixed methods research consisting of quantitative and qualitative techniques was developed to address key research objectives in four studies. In Study 1, end-user perceptions were explored through 24 photo-elicitation interviews. Content analysis of the data revealed that end-users described their perception of the design of OHCWEs using design descriptors and/or emotional, cognitive and associative terms. This contributed to the understanding of the content and language that participants used to describe the design. In Study 2a, 66 participants rated images on semantic differential scales. Using Principal Component Analysis, the level of pleasantness and typical healthcare appearance were extracted as two end-user main perceptions. As these two perceptions were found uncorrelated, a direct causal effect relationship between them could not be assumed. This challenged existing knowledge suggesting a positive effect on end-users related to untypical healthcare appearance. In Study 2b, learning from the review of the literature and from the studies 1 and 2a were consolidated to form a theoretical foundation for the research design of Study 3 to assess design attributes. In Study 3, participants (N=116) evaluated seven design attributes and their sub-attributes on perceived level of pleasantness using photo-realistic renderings which were specifically created. Conjoint Analysis revealed that wooden flooring, an open reception area, upholstered, single chairs that are arranged in rows, clear signage and additional features e.g. indoor plants or refreshment facilities were perceived most pleasant. The quantifiable measures about the contribution of each design attribute to perceived level of pleasantness extend existing knowledge in evidence-based design and hence represent conceptual contributions. In addition to the conceptual contributions, this research also contributes to the practical and methodological development of evidence-based design. The methodological framework provides a novel way of measuring end-user perceptions of the design in OHCWEs. The developed method allowed a more complete view on end-user insights which would not have been possible using traditional, pure methods. Additional learning about the design enabled the formulation of practical design recommendations to improve end-user perceptions of OHCWEs. Being able to assess the pleasantness of healthcare environments has the potential to improve the well-being of end-users

MOODLE AS A POTENTIAL ONLINE PLATFORM USED IN THE FLIPPED CLASSROOMS IN THE VIETNAMESE EFL TEACHING CONTEXT

Flipped classrooms started to be adopted in the Vietnamese EFL teaching context a few years ago. Educational technology plays a crucial role in the implementation of this teaching model. Hence, choosing a suitable online platform for these classes is a critical decision for English teachers. The current study attempted to investigate Vietnamese students’ perceptions of MOODLE as the online platform used in two flipped English grammar classes. Sixty-two students from a state university in Vietnam were recruited for this research. The study employed a mixed-methods research design to address the research question. Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected through a questionnaire designed based on Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and semi-structured interviews. The data analysis revealed that the students had positive perceptions of MOODLE in terms of system characteristics, material characteristics, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, attitude toward use, and behavioural intention. Accordingly, this learning management system (LMS) could be seen as a potential online platform in flipped classrooms for Vietnamese students.  Article visualizations

Proposal of a Combined Environmental Management Solution for Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) Separation in a Developing Country: for Pilot Realization in Hanoi, Vietnam

Municipal solid waste (MSW), thousands of tons of which increasingly generated daily in human life by the rapid urbanization, population migration and industrialization not only in Vietnam, but in all developing countries are causing many serious problems in Environmental management for the authorities of these issues. In Vietnam, various approaches, solutions and programs were studied, suggested and deployed over the last decades, but the most of them have stopped at the level of pilot-programs and have generally not been replicable, so not been applied in wide scale. The most challenging issue of MSW management systems is non-applied or not fully - done waste separation practice at sources, caused by not only limited collection equipment, staff and working efficiency, but also lack of investment in infrastructure and limited public awareness. These circumstances raised the real need of a combined Environmental Management solution for municipal solid waste (MSW) separation at sources, especially in urban residential households. This paper proposes a combined management solution for municipal solid waste (MSW) separation at sources, based on applying and combining 4 main environmental management instruments: 1- Legislation, 2- Economic, 3- Analysis, assessment and technology, 4-  Education and Communication. A pilot realization in Hanoi, Vietnam is proposed with detail description of the solution and reasonable argumentation. The solution effectiveness, judged on the basis of the collected data is presented

Building Footprint Extraction in Dense Areas using Super Resolution and Frame Field Learning

Despite notable results on standard aerial datasets, current state-of-the-arts fail to produce accurate building footprints in dense areas due to challenging properties posed by these areas and limited data availability. In this paper, we propose a framework to address such issues in polygonal building extraction. First, super resolution is employed to enhance the spatial resolution of aerial image, allowing for finer details to be captured. This enhanced imagery serves as input to a multitask learning module, which consists of a segmentation head and a frame field learning head to effectively handle the irregular building structures. Our model is supervised by adaptive loss weighting, enabling extraction of sharp edges and fine-grained polygons which is difficult due to overlapping buildings and low data quality. Extensive experiments on a slum area in India that mimics a dense area demonstrate that our proposed approach significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods by a large margin.Comment: Accepted at The 12th International Conference on Awareness Science and Technolog

An extremely rare case of ovarian abscess in third trimester of pregnancy managed by successful vaginal birth and review of literature

Ovarian abscess (OA) in pregnancy is actually rare occurrence, almost unheard, which associated with poor prognosis for mother and fetus. This diagnostic dilemma is often difficult to be elucidated because of anatomical changes in pregnancy. It was established incidentally by obstetric ultrasound or during cesarean section performed for an obstetric indication. Specially, the presentation of adnexal abscess is very hard to distinguish from appendical abscess. In this report, we presented a 20-year-old woman (G0P0) at 33-34 weeks of gestation was admitted to the clinic of our hospital with a pelvic abnormal tumour accompanied by fetal growth restriction. The patient was indicated for serial laboratory examination, which showed a right abnormal adnexal mass. At hospitalization, the patient was mostly asymptomatic so she was followed by medical treatment and by an expectant management. The surveillance was strictly controlled without complications, except intrauterine growth restriction associated with pregnancy. The patient received a conservative management and gave a well-being infant at 36-37 weeks of gestation by vaginal delivery. Twelfth days after delivery, she underwent a laparoscopic operation to remove the abscess mass. Preventive treatment is also a major importance. This report describes the clinical features and results of the case with an ovarian abscess detected in the 3rd trimester without adverse sequelae and compared to the recurrent knowledge based on the literature regarding the advanced management of OA involved in pregnancy. Through this report, we aim to carry out a literature review in order to discuss these clinical manifestations of OA, optimize the importance in definitive diagnosis and underline the appropriate treatment of an individual case

Proposal of a Combined Environmental Management Solution for Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) Separation in a Developing Country: for Pilot Realization in Hanoi, Vietnam

Municipal solid waste (MSW), thousands of tons of which increasingly generated daily in human life by the rapid urbanization, population migration and industrialization not only in Vietnam, but in all developing countries are causing many serious problems in Environmental management for the authorities of these issues. In Vietnam, various approaches, solutions and programs were studied, suggested and deployed over the last decades, but the most of them have stopped at the level of pilot-programs and have generally not been replicable, so not been applied in wide scale. The most challenging issue of MSW management systems is non-applied or not fully - done waste separation practice at sources, caused by not only limited collection equipment, staff and working efficiency, but also lack of investment in infrastructure and limited public awareness. These circumstances raised the real need of a combined Environmental Management solution for municipal solid waste (MSW) separation at sources, especially in urban residential households. This paper proposes a combined management solution for municipal solid waste (MSW) separation at sources, based on applying and combining 4 main environmental management instruments: 1- Legislation, 2- Economic, 3- Analysis, assessment and technology, 4-  Education and Communication. A pilot realization in Hanoi, Vietnam is proposed with detail description of the solution and reasonable argumentation. The solution effectiveness, judged on the basis of the collected data is presented

Sanitation safety planning in Hanoi helps identify and manage health risks to workers, farmers and consumers from reuse of wastewater

Sanitation Safety Plannings (SSPs) are currently under a piloting phase by World Health Organisation (WHO). SSPs supplement and act as practical application guidance the four volumes of the 2006 WHO Guidelines for the Safe Use of Wastewater, Excreta and Greywater. Two pilot sites were selected in Hanoi, Vietnam to test WHO’s upcoming Sanitation Safety Planning manual: (1) large scale agriculture on the outskirts of Hanoi which uses untreated sewage; and (2) an organic composting site which uses effluent from a purpose built on-site sewage treatment plant for moisture control of the compost. This paper presents a summary of how SSPs helped identify and manage health risks to workers, farmers and consumers of produce from reuse of wastewater. Simple risk-based prioritised low cost improvement plans are summarised