Search results for "End user"

2021

Background Self-tracking technologies are widely used in people’s daily lives and health care. Academic research on self-tracking and the quantified self has also accumulated rapidly in recent years. Surprisingly, there is a paucity of research that reviews, classifies, and synthesizes the state of the art with respect to self-tracking and the quantified self. Objective Our objective was to identify the state of the art of self-tracking and the quantified self in terms of health and well-being. Methods We have undertaken a systematic literature review on self-tracking and the quantified self in promoting health and well-being. After a rigorous literature search, followed by inclusions, exc…

Making interaction with virtual reality accessible : rendering and guiding methods for subtitles

2021

AbstractAccessibility in immersive media is a relevant research topic, still in its infancy. This article explores the appropriateness of two rendering modes (fixed-positioned and always-visible) and two guiding methods (arrows and auto-positioning) for subtitles in 360° video. All considered conditions have been implemented and integrated in an end-to-end platform (from production to consumption) for their validation and evaluation. A pilot study with end users has been conducted with the goals of determining the preferred options by users, the options that result in a higher presence, and of gathering extra valuable feedback from the end users. The obtained results reflect that, for the c…

A Universal Model-Based Solution for Describing and Handling Errors

2011

Before the system is on the way to end users’ desktops, developers should not forget about error messages their system might display. That is also true for systems with models inside. Is there a model-based solution for describing and handling errors in a universal way? We say ‘Yes’, and we show how the meta-meta level of abstraction aids here. Having error types described, particular errors are simply placed into the model repository (when needed), and the error handling mechanism automatically handles and displays them in an appropriate way.

Perceptions of Healthcare Service End Users

2016

The main objective of this study was to compare users’ perception and evaluation of both public and private healthcare services, distinguishing between primary and specialty care, with a cross-cultural approach in two Mediterranean countries: Italy and Spain. Within an exploratory approach and following a descriptive aim, we have conducted a quantitative methodology: after a literature review about health marketing and health management, we have developed a questionnaire and collected end users’ perceptions in both countries. Results highlight different aspects shaping the multidimensional healthcare service, such as the waiting lists, their experienced sensations, word-of-mouth (WOM) rele…

User Activity Recognition for Energy Saving in Smart Homes

2015

Abstract Energy demand in typical home environments accounts for a significant fraction of the overall consumption in industrialized countries. In such context, the heterogeneity of the involved devices, and the non negligible influence of the human factor make the optimization of energy use a challenging task; effective automated approaches must take into account basic information about users, such as the prediction of their course of actions. Our proposal consists in learning customized structural models for common user activities for predicting the trend of energy consumption; the approach aims to lower energy demand in the proximity of predicted peak loads so as to keep the overall cons…

Evaluation of automatically steered agricultural vehicles

2008

The popularization of automatic guidance systems for off-road vehicles, especially in agricultural environments, has led to a sudden affluence of commercial solutions. As a consequence, end users are often overwhelmed by the spread of possibilities commercially available, on top of the confusion provoked by the guidance accuracy advertised by manufacturers. Therefore, there is a need for a methodology that objectively quantifies the level of performance of any auto-steering system, classifying different solutions according to their accuracy and reliability. This paper describes a method to evaluate the behavior of any automatically driven agricultural vehicle traveling along paths of any cu…

Towards formalised end-user participation in information systems development process

2006

Creating requirements specifications is one of the most challenging tasks in the systems development. For a complete specification, different kinds of information are gathered. This includes information about the domain and context specific technical issues, and about multifaceted cultural, political, communicational, motivational, and personal issues. As there is no information systems development (ISD) method that would yield such information comprehensively, it could be achieved by user-oriented approaches, for instance by participatory design (PD). Reciprocally, unfortunately those do not provide detailed instructions for the systems development. In this paper, we will present our exper…

Tandem repeats lead to sequence assembly errors and impose multi-level challenges for genome and protein databases

2019

AbstractThe widespread occurrence of repetitive stretches of DNA in genomes of organisms across the tree of life imposes fundamental challenges for sequencing, genome assembly, and automated annotation of genes and proteins. This multi-level problem can lead to errors in genome and protein databases that are often not recognized or acknowledged. As a consequence, end users working with sequences with repetitive regions are faced with ‘ready-to-use’ deposited data whose trustworthiness is difficult to determine, let alone to quantify. Here, we provide a review of the problems associated with tandem repeat sequences that originate from different stages during the sequencing-assembly-annotatio…

Towards the evaluation of automatic simultaneous speech translation from a communicative perspective

2021

In recent years, automatic speech-to-speech and speech-to-text translation has gained momentum thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, especially in the domains of speech recognition and machine translation. The quality of such applications is commonly tested with automatic metrics, such as BLEU, primarily with the goal of assessing improvements of releases or in the context of evaluation campaigns. However, little is known about how the output of such systems is perceived by end users or how they compare to human performances in similar communicative tasks. In this paper, we present the results of an experiment aimed at evaluating the quality of a real-time speech translation engine…

Blockchain-based DR logic: a trade-off between system operator's and customer's needs

2020

This paper describes a way to include the end users of the electrical network in the Demand Response mechanism using the Blockchain technology and the Smart Contract concepts, thus developing a distributed system where customers can communicate directly with the system operator to provide their flexibility in a transparent, secure and traceable way.The historical data on energy consumption and production of the customers is recorded on the Blockchain, with the Smart Contract evaluating the baseline and the potential support that each customer can provide to fulfill the requested load adaptation communicated by the grid operator. The baseline and the optimal power reduction for a customer (e…