Technical requirements of age-friendly smart home technologies in high-rise residential buildings : A system intelligence analytical approach

Smart home technology (SHT) has been identified as a promising means of helping seniors to remain independent and maintain their quality of life (QoL) while containing spiralling care costs for older people. Despite official pilot schemes in many countries to promote SHT in seniors housing, there is limited understanding of the forms that such SHT interventions should take. This study builds on the analytical model of intelligent building control systems developed by the author; the aim is to provide a systematic approach to understanding the key intelligent attributes of smart-home devices. A qualitative participatory evaluation approach involving focus groups was adopted to investigate the needs of seniors and their SHT preferences. Fourteen features of the SHT technical requirements of four key intelligent attribute types were identified. This study's insights will help to shape the way SHT is designed and used

Development of selection evaluation and system intelligence analytic models for the intelligent building control systems

With the availability of innumerable ‘intelligent’ building products and the dearth of inclusive evaluation tools, design teams are confronted with the quandary of choosing the apposite building control systems to suit the needs of a particular intelligent building project. The paucity of measures that represent the degree of system intelligence and indicate the desirable goal in intelligent building control systems design further inhibits the consumers from comparing numerous products from the viewpoint of intelligence. This thesis is organised respectively to develop models for facilitating the selection evaluation and the system intelligence analysis for the seven predominant building control systems in the intelligent building. To achieve these objectives, systematic research activities are conducted to first develop, test and refine the general conceptual models using consecutive surveys; then, to convert the developed conceptual frameworks to the practical models; and, finally, to evaluate the effectiveness of the practical models by means of expert validations.----- The findings of this study, on one hand, suggest that there are different sets of critical selection criteria (CSC) affecting the selection decision of the intelligent building control systems. Service life, and operating and maintenance costs are perceived as two common CSC. The survey results generally reflect that an ‘intelligent’ building control system does not necessarily need to be technologically advanced. Instead, it should be the one that can ensure efficiency and enhance user comfort and cost effectiveness. On the other hand, the findings of the research on system intelligence suggest that each building control system has a distinctive set of intelligence attributes and indicators. The research findings also indicate that operational benefits of the intelligent building exert a considerable degree of influence on the relative importance of intelligence indicators of the building control systems in the models. This research not only presents a systematic and structured approach to evaluate candidate building control systems against the CSC, but it also suggests a benchmark to measure the degree of intelligence of one control system candidate against another

Stakeholder impact analysis of infrastructure project management in developing countries: a study of perception of project managers in state-owned engineering firms in Vietnam

Construction projects can involve a diverse range of stakeholders and the success of the project depends very much on fulfilling their needs and expectations. It is important, therefore, to identify and recognize project stakeholders and develop a rigorous stakeholder management process. However, limited research has investigated the impact of stakeholders on construction projects in developing countries. A stakeholder impact analysis (SIA), based on an approach developed by Olander (2007), was adopted to investigate the stakeholders' impact on state-owned civil engineering projects in Vietnam. This involved the analysis of a questionnaire survey of 57 project managers to determine the relative importance of different stakeholders. The results show the client to have the highest level of impact on the projects, followed by project managers and the senior management of state-owned engineering firms. The SIA also provides suggestions to project managers in developing and evaluating the stakeholder management process.Project management, project success, project stakeholders, infrastructure projects, Vietnam,

Hybrid Random Forest and Support Vector Machine Modeling for HVAC Fault Detection and Diagnosis

The malfunctioning of the heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) system is considered to be one of the main challenges in modern buildings. Due to the complexity of the building management system (BMS) with operational data input from a large number of sensors used in HVAC system, the faults can be very difficult to detect in the early stage. While numerous fault detection and diagnosis (FDD) methods with the use of statistical modeling and machine learning have revealed prominent results in recent years, early detection remains a challenging task since many current approaches are unfeasible for diagnosing some HVAC faults and have accuracy performance issues. In view of this, this study presents a novel hybrid FDD approach by combining random forest (RF) and support vector machine (SVM) classifiers for the application of FDD for the HVAC system. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed hybrid random forest–support vector machine (HRF–SVM) outperforms other methods with higher prediction accuracy (98%), despite that the fault symptoms were insignificant. Furthermore, the proposed framework can reduce the significant number of sensors required and work well with the small number of faulty training data samples available in real-world applications

Competitiveness factors: a study of the real estate market in China

The execution of 'macro-adjustment' policies by the central government to cool down the overheated real estate market in the past few years has created an unfavourable operating environment for real estate developers in Mainland China. Developers need to rethink their business model and create a new form of competitive advantage in order to survive. Despite this, research into the factors that influence the competitiveness of the real estate market in China has been limited. Therefore, a survey of 58 real estate practitioners, experts and academics in China was conducted to probe opinion on the factors that influence competitiveness in real estate firms in China. Survey results suggest that the developer's financial competency, market coverage and management competencies are vital to its competitiveness. Findings also highlight the importance of industry recognition/award, share in different types of property sales/development projects, profit after tax, growth rate of their securities price, and diversification of R&D in reflecting the competitiveness of real estate developers in China. The findings provide an insight into the factors that influence competitiveness in China's real estate market and also assist practitioners to formulate competitiveness improvement strategies.Competitiveness, real estate market, developer, China,

Circulating microRNA 132-3p and 324-3p Profiles in Patients after Acute Aneurysmal Subarachnoid Hemorrhage.

Aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) is a highly morbid and fatal condition with high rate of cognitive impairment and negative impact in quality of life among survivors. Delayed cerebral infarction (DCI) is one the major factors for these negative outcomes. In this study we compared the circulating microRNA profiles of SAH patients and healthy individuals, and the circulating microRNA profiles of SAH patients with and without DCI.Peripheral blood samples on Day 7 after the onset of SAH were subjected to microarray analysis with Affymetrix miRNA 3.0 array and quantitative PCR analysis. SAH patients with (N = 20) and without DCI (N = 20) and Healthy controls (N = 20) were included for analyses.We demonstrated that 99 miRNAs were found to be dysregulated in the SAH patient group with DCI. 81 miRNAs were upregulated and 18 were downregulated. Findings from KEGG pathway analysis showed that miRNAs and target genes for axon guidance and TGF-beta signaling were involved, implying that the resulted differential miRNA expression pattern reflect the results of SAH instead of etiology of the disease. miR-132-3p and miR-324-3p showed distinctive upregulations in qPCR [miR-132: 9.5 fold (95%CI: 2.3 to 16.7) in DCI group and 3.4 fold (95%CI: 1.0 to 5.8) in Non-DCI group; miR-324: 4924 fold (95%CI: 2620 to 7228) in DCI group and 4545 fold (95%CI: 2408 to 6683) in non-DCI group]. However, there were no significant differences in fold changes between SAH patients with and without DCI [fold change ratios (mean+/-SD): 2.7+/-4.2 and 1.1+/-1.1 for miRNA-132 and miRNA-324].Our study demonstrated that as compared to healthy control, miR-132 and miR-324 showed a upregulation in both SAH DCI and Non-DCI groups. However, the differences between the SAH DCI and non-DCI groups were not statistically significant