Trust in Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication

In traditional Pedestrian Automatic Emergency Braking (PAEB) system, vehicles equipped with onboard sensors such as radar, camera, and infrared detect pedestrians, alert the driver and/ or automatically take actions to prevent vehicle-pedestrian collision. In some situations, a vehicle may not be able to detect a pedestrian due to blind spots. Such a vehicle could benefit from the sensor data from neighboring vehicles in making such safety critical decisions. We propose a trust model for ensuring shared data are valid and trustworthy for use in making safety critical decisions. Simulation results of the proposed trust model show promise

Destination accessibility and walking for different purposes in older adults

Background: This thesis examined the associations between perceived destination accessibility of 12 types of destinations (supermarket, café/restaurant, fruit and vegetable shop, fast food restaurant, public transport, public park, post office, library, primary school, childcare centre, chemist/drug store and doctor/medical centres) within a 5-, 10- and 20- minute walk from home and self-report measures of walking for transport and recreation in older adults (people aged 65 years or older) residing in Brisbane, Australia and Hong Kong, China. The overall objective of this thesis was to investigate and compare the relationships of perceived destination accessibility in the neighbourhood with walking for transport and recreation in older adults living in low- and high-density urban environments. The overall thesis objective was divided into three principal aims and each aim was addressed by an empirical study with distinct rationales, aims and statistical methods. Study One addressed the first principal aim of the thesis. The primary aim of this study was to characterise perceived destination accessibility within a 5-, 10- and 20-minute walk from home in the two cities and examine between-city differences in perceived access to specific destinations and mixes of destinations. Study Two addressed the second principal aim. This study extended the findings from Study One by examining associations between perceived destination accessibility within a 5-, 10- and 20-minute walk from home and self-report measures of total (location nonspecific) walking for transport and recreation in older adults residing in the two cities. Further, this study examined associations of perceived destination accessibility with selfreport measures of within-neighbourhood walking for transport and recreation in older adults within the context of Hong Kong. Study Three investigated the third principal aim of the thesis. This study extended the findings from Study One and Study Two by examining the moderating effects of nine perceived neighbourhood non-destination characteristics (physical barriers to walking; pedestrian infrastructure; aesthetics; the presence of people; traffic hazards; traffic speed; safety from crime; sitting facilities; and presence of bridges/overpass) on associations of perceived destination accessibility within a 5-, 10- and 20-minute walk from home with self-report measures of walking for transport and recreation in older adults within the context of Hong Kong. Methods: This thesis used data from two extant epidemiological studies on environmental correlates of physical activity conducted in Brisbane (N= 793) and Hong Kong (N= 484) with comparable measures of 12 perceived destination accessibility and self-report measures of walking for different purposes. The Brisbane data came from the Wave 3 (2011) of a multilevel longitudinal study—the How Areas in Brisbane Influence HealTh and AcTivity (HABITAT)—among adults of 45-70 years in Brisbane (conducted in 2007-2011), while the Hong Kong data came from a cross-sectional study (the Hong Kong Elderly Study) among older adults in Hong Kong (conducted in 2007-2008). The two studies were based on the socio-ecological framework of health behaviour and used similar sampling strategies —that is, older adults nested within neighbourhood environments varying in environmental characteristics — that maximise the variability in exposures within the study sites. A range of analytical techniques were used to address the thesis aims, including a variable-centred approach (advanced regression models) and a person-centred approach (latent class/profile analysis). All models were adjusted to account for neighbourhood-level clustering arising from the two-stage sampling design. Stata 15.1 was used to perform the regression and moderation analyses, while Mplus 7.4 and 8.0 were used to perform latent class and latent profile analyses respectively. Results: The findings suggest that older adults living in Hong Kong perceived higher levels of destination accessibility within a 5-, 10- and 20-minute walk from home than older adults in Brisbane. City-specific latent structures of perceived destination accessibility varied between the two cities and also influenced walking behaviours in older adults. Further, perceived neighbourhood non-destination characteristics independently or conjointly moderated the destination-walking relationships in older adults within the context of Hong Kong. Conclusion: This thesis suggests that providing neighbourhoods with higher levels of destination accessibility can help encourage walking for different purposes, especially walking for transport in older adults. However, other perceived neighbourhood nondestination characteristics such as safety from crime, sitting facilities, pedestrian infrastructures, connectivity, aesthetics and the presence of people in the street can moderate destination-walking associations

Getting in and getting on: An intersectional approach to the careers of the visually impaired in the workplace

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonSupporting visually impaired persons to achieve their potential in a context characterised by underdeveloped markets and institutions has come to dominate the discourse on equality, inclusiveness, and diversity in the workplace. Drawing on the contemporary turn to ‘intersectionality’ in social theory as a lens, this thesis explores the careers of the visually impaired in the workplace and provides fresh empirical articulation on how their identity, situatedness, and positionality in a context marked by underdeveloped institutions may combine to shape and give form to their career outcomes. Developing the study’s contribution in the context of Ghana, the Ghana Blind Association served as the empirical research site for recruiting the research participants who met the study’s theoretical sampling strategy. Methodologically, the study took an interpretive approach and adopted an exploratory research design. The main data for the empirical inquiry were semi-structured interviews collected from twenty-eight (28) registered visually impaired people who are employed in various capacities across different industries. This was supplemented with publicly available data including Ghana government white papers and policy documents on disability, policy documents of the Ghana blind association, and popular newspaper articles on the life and careers of disabled people in Ghana. The study presents three main findings. First, challenging the taken-for-granted assumption that employers may actively provide support to visually impaired job applicants to help them get a foot in the employment ‘doorway’, the study found that entry into the job market required visually impaired persons, like any other applicant, to have the requisite educational qualifications or technical competences required for the job. Beyond this, the visually impaired, by their disability, are likely to experience micro-aggression and be subjected to personally intrusive questions when trying to get a foot in the employment doorway. Second, while the visually impaired may progress on the job through timebound promotions and participation in capacity development programmes, they frequently faced the challenge of working in disability unfriendly environment, which frequently plays out in the form of the lack of basic assistive devices and the underutilisation of skills which combine to impede their potentiality to progress in practice. Third, to survive the very challenging environments in which they work, the study identified and labelled three differential coping strategies: adaptation, avoidance, and confrontational strategies, which the visually impaired in their situated work practice tend to adopt to help them navigate, manage, and deal with the plethora of challenges they face within the contingencies of working and getting work done. The thesis contributions are three-fold. First, emphasising how the identity, situatedness, and positionality of visually impaired persons in a context marked by underdeveloped institutions interact to shape their career entry and outcomes, the intersectionality helps to uncover how taken-for-granted assumptions about the social positions of the disabled, organizing structures and workplace conditions interact, engendering the dynamics of challenges faced by the visually impaired to ‘getting in’ and ‘getting on’ at the workplace. Second, the study extends our understanding of how the visually impaired experience work by providing insights into their experiences at the workplace, elucidating how they make sense and make meaning of the intractable challenges they face in ‘getting in’ and ‘getting on’ at the workplace. Third, the study contributes to the literature on disability and work, and the theorizing of intersectionality by identifying forms and strategies employed by the visually impaired to cope with the challenges they encounter in the workplace. Pragmatic interventions to support and empower visually impaired persons in ways that could help them to enter the workplace, thrive, and pursue their careers are presented.Ghana Scholarships Secretaria

Associations among health care workplace safety, resident satisfaction, and quality of care in long-term care facilities

Objective: We performed an integrated cross-sectional analysis of relationships between long-term care work environments, employee and resident satisfaction, and quality of patient care. Methods: Facility-level data came from a network of 203 skilled nursing facilities in 13 states in the eastern United States owned or managed by one company. K-means cluster analysis was applied to investigate clustered associations between safe resident handling program (SRHP) performance, resident care outcomes, employee satisfaction, rates of workers’ compensation claims, and resident satisfaction. Results: Facilities in the better-performing cluster were found to have better patient care outcomes and resident satisfaction; lower rates of workers compensation claims; better SRHP performance; higher employee retention; and greater worker job satisfaction and engagement. Conclusion: The observed clustered relationships support the utility of integrated performance assessment in long-term care facilities

Associations between latent classes of perceived neighborhood destination accessibility and walking behaviors in older adults of a low-density and a high-density city

To examine associations between perceived destination accessibility within different distances from home and self-reported overall amounts of walking for different purposes among older adults (aged >= 65 years) in Brisbane, Australia (N = 793) and Hong Kong, China (N = 484). Perceived neighborhood destination accessibility types were derived from latent class analysis using comparable measures of perceived distance to 12 destinations from epidemiological studies in the two cities. Associations of perceived destination accessibility with measures of within-neighborhood walking were also estimated in Hong Kong participants. Better perceived destination accessibility was positively associated with the likelihood of walking in Brisbane participants only. Perceived destination accessibility within a short distance from home (5-min walk) was negatively related to the amount of within-neighborhood walking for transport in Hong Kong residents who walked. Our findings suggest that providing moderate-to-high, but not extreme, levels of destination accessibility may be optimal for the promotion of walking in older community dwellers

Evaluation of infectious bursal disease antibody titre in layers immunized with VAXXITEK HVT+IBD in Ghana

Infectious bursal disease has hampered the development of commercial poultry production in Ghana, with outbreaks continually occurring despite the introduction of the harmonized national poultry vaccination protocol (HNPVP) that incorporates two types of live IBD vaccines. One major reported reason for these vaccination failures is the vaccine neutralization by maternally-derived antibodies (MDA). This study compared the antibody titres of layers vaccinated with the HNPVP to layers vaccinated with VAXXITEK HVT+IBD, a viral vectored vaccine. An agar gel immunodiffusion test and an indirect enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) were used to detect and quantify antibodies. The results of this experiment show that high MDA did not affect VAXXITEK HVT + IBD as there was a measurable antibody response with high titre values. However, the delay before this antibody response and the resultant low antibody levels at the most susceptible period may create an opportunity for field infection. However high MDA interfere with and can neutralize live IBD vaccines even when they are applied strictly as advised in the HNPVP. It is therefore quite likely that a significant portion of the reported IBD vaccination failures in Ghana are due to failure of the HNPVP due to interference with MDA hence specific ‘farm-tailored’ vaccination schedules based on flock profiling, and recombinant vectored vaccines that have been shown to produce universal protection unaffected by high MDA may be the solutions to post vaccination outbreak commonly observed in Ghana

Walking behaviour and patterns of perceived access to neighbourhood destinations in older adults from a low-density (Brisbane, Australia) and an ultra-dense city (Hong Kong, China)

Introduction: Hong Kong older adults have been found to accumulate high levels of walking compared to their Westerns counterparts living in low-density cities. These differences in walking could be attributed to differences in destination accessibility. However, between-city differences in older adults’ walking and perceived destination accessibility have not been quantified. This study examined differences in walking and patterns of perceived destination accessibility within 5-, 10-, and 20-minute walk from home between older adults aged ≥65 years in Brisbane and Hong Kong. Methods: We used data from epidemiological studies conducted in Brisbane (n = 793) and Hong Kong (n = 484) using comparable measures of perceived distance to 12 destinations and weekly minutes of walking for transport and recreation. Regression models accounting for neighbourhood-level clustering were used to estimate between-city differences in walking and access to specific destinations. Latent class analyses were used to identify city-specific patterns of destination accessibility. Results: Hong Kong older adults accumulated significantly more minutes of walking than their Brisbane counterparts and also reported higher accessibility to most destinations. The between-city differences in percentage of older adults with access to a diversity of destinations were particularly large for shorter distances (5- and 10-minute walk from home). Conclusion: Low-density cities should provide ageing-friendly housing in the city centre with high levels of accessibility to relevant destinations and/or promote the implementation of urban planning policies that support the development of mixed land use and higher levels of residential density.</p