Context-sensitive Applications Research Articles

In EPAs we trust, is quality and safety a must? A cross-specialty analysis of entrustable professional activity guides

Purpose The inclusion of quality improvement (QI) and patient safety (PS) into CanMEDS reflects an expectation that graduating physicians are competent in these areas upon training completion. To ensure that Canadian postgraduate specialty training achieves this, the translation of QI/PS competencies into training standards as part of the implementation of competency-based medical education requires special attention. Methods We conducted a cross-specialty, multi-method analysis to examine how QI/PS was incorporated into the EPA Guides across 11 postgraduate specialties in Canada. Results We identify cross-specialty variability in how QI/PS is incorporated, positioned, and emphasized in EPAs and milestones. QI/PS was primarily referenced alongside clinical activities rather than as a sole competency or discrete activity. Patterns were characterized in how QI/PS became incorporated into milestones through repetition and customization. QI/PS was also decoupled, conceptualized, and emphasized differently across specialties. Conclusions Variability in the inclusion of QI/PS in EPAs and milestones has important implications considering the visibility and influence of EPA Guides in practice. As specialties revisit and revise EPA Guides, there is a need to balance the standardization of foundational QI/PS concepts to foster shared understanding while simultaneously ensuring context-sensitive applications across specialties. Beyond QI/PS, this study illuminates the challenges and opportunities that lie in bridging theoretical frameworks with practical implementation in medical education, prompting broader consideration of how intrinsic roles and emergent areas are effectively incorporated into competency-based medical education.

Music Emotion Recognition: Toward new, robust standards in personalized and context-sensitive applications

Emotion is one of the main reasons why people engage and interact with music <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref1" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[1]</xref> . Songs can express our inner feelings, produce goosebumps, bring us to tears, share an emotional state with a composer or performer, or trigger specific memories. Interest in a deeper understanding of the relationship between music and emotion has motivated researchers from various areas of knowledge for decades <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref2" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[2]</xref> , including computational researchers. Imagine an algorithm capable of predicting the emotions that a listener perceives in a musical piece, or one that dynamically generates music that adapts to the mood of a conversation in a film—a particularly fascinating and provocative idea. These algorithms typify music emotion recognition (MER), a computational task that attempts to automatically recognize either the emotional content in music or the emotions induced by music to the listener <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="ref3" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">[3]</xref> . To do so, emotionally relevant features are extracted from music. The features are processed, evaluated, and then associated with certain emotions. MER is one of the most challenging high-level music description problems in music information retrieval (MIR), an interdisciplinary research field that focuses on the development of computational systems to help humans better understand music collections. MIR integrates concepts and methodologies from several disciplines, including music theory, music psychology, neuroscience, signal processing, and machine learning.

Escenario sobre la aplicación de Aprendizaje Ubicuo en un Entorno Activo

Ubiquitous-Learning and its context sensitive applications (context-aware) has the potential to provide personalized and active learning, in addition to allowing the student to develop attitudes and aptitudes based on problem solving, progress monitoring, information, exchange of information, knowledge and collaboration process. Our contribution consists of the creation of a ubiquitous learning environment, which from a series of multimodal interfaces developed for an Environment Intelligence Environment and context sensitive applications, aims to influence teaching-learning activities through a laboratory of practices collaborative. The objective of the proposal is to implement the concept of Ubiquitous Learning (Ubiquitous Learning), providing the student with a space conducive, to generating knowledge and encouraging the development of cognitive skills. In this article, a description about the stage of the available technology in an Active Environment applied to the improvement of the academic performance of some subjects, where the student's evaluation is relate to their practical skills, that is, "The know-how".

Estrategias para la evaluación de actitudes y aptitudes en estudiantes de nivel superior, aplicadas a un proyecto de u-learning

A commitment of Higher Education Institutions, is to provide the labor market graduates who besides having engineering knowledge, also possess the skills and attitudes necessary to achieve an integration in work teams. On the other hand, in the university sphere the measurement of the academic performance of some subjects is directly related to the aptitudes to solve in a collaborative way the practical problems, that is to say, with "know-how". Our contribution consists in the creation of a ubiquitous learning environment, which, based on a series of multimodal interfaces developed for an Environment Intelligence Environment and context sensitive applications, aims to influence the teaching-learning process through a laboratory collaborative practice. The objective of the proposal is to generate and implement strategies for the evaluation of attitudes and aptitudes in the field of Ubiquitous Learning, as well as to provide the student with a conducive space to generating knowledge and encouraging the development of cognitive skills. For this purpose, it is necessary to discuss the strategies that will be used to evaluate attitudes and aptitudes of a work-team members.

Exploring the Efficacy of Sparse, General-Purpose Sensor Constellations for Wide-Area Activity Sensing

Future smart homes, offices, stores and many other environments will increasingly be monitored by distributed sensors, supporting rich, context-sensitive applications. There are two opposing instrumentation approaches. On one end is full sensor saturation, where every object of interest is tagged with a sensor. On the other end, we can imagine a hypothetical, omniscient sensor capable of detecting events throughout an entire building from one location. Neither approach is currently practical, and thus we explore the middle ground between these two extremes: a sparse constellation of sensors working together to provide the benefits of full saturation, but without the social, aesthetic, maintenance and financial drawbacks. More specifically, we target a density of one sensor per room (and less), which means the average home could achieve full coverage with perhaps ten sensors. We quantify and characterize the performance of sparse sensor constellations through deployments across three environments and 67 unique activities. Our results illuminate accuracy implications across key spatial configurations important for enabling more practical, wide-area activity sensing.

One Stop Center For Disaster Training Information In Smartphone Platform: A Mobile Prototype

Smartphones are used in a variety of activities, including social networking, messaging, connectivity and context-sensitive applications. The ubiquities of handheld computer technology have been found to be very useful, especially in flood training applications. This study describes the utilization of the ICT such as a smartphone as a tool in helping to convey the disaster training to communities in Malaysia. Smartphones are used as the medium between the community organizations in promoting the training provided to the public, as well as providing training services to the community about the importance of disaster training. The aim of this paper is to propose a one stop center disaster training information management through smartphone application called ‘MyDisasterTraining’. ‘MyDisasterTraining’ application is a center database and contains the information about flood disaster training in the Malaysian context. It is a simple, user-friendly, and a low cost application which is a mobile application to be used by the third parties training providers, organizations or individuals. It aims to spread the awareness on the availability of disaster training to the society as well as to inculcate voluntarily workforce during the need of the disaster. The benefits of this mobile application can also to be use in other scope such as tourism, management activities, disaster and logistics (Rosnita, 2013). In this paper, the roles of ICT are described in the context of disseminating the training information to the society, especially on the training of flood disaster. The features and benefits of the application are also described and explained in this paper.

OntoHealth: a system to process ontologies applied to health pervasive environment

In the last years, ontologies are being used in the development of pervasive computing applications. The pervasive computing has as one of its goals to facilitate interoperability between context sensitive applications and entities that may interact in that pervasive space. This paper presents OntoHealth: a system to process ontologies applied to health pervasive environment. The main idea is that a hospital could be seen as this pervasive environment, where someone, through ubiquitous computing, engages a range of computational devices and systems simultaneously, in the course of ordinary activities, and may not necessarily even be aware that they are doing so. With the proposed ontology and the tool for its processing, the medical tasks can be shared by all components of this pervasive environment.

Context-aware and automatic configuration of mobile devices in cloud-enabled ubiquitous computing

Context-sensitive (or aware) applications have, in recent years, moved from the realm of possibilities to that of ubiquity. One exciting research area that is still very much in the realm of possibilities is that of cloud computing, and in this paper, we present our work, which explores the overlap of these two research areas. Accordingly, this paper explores the notion of cross-source integration of cloud-based, context-aware information in ubiquitous computing through a developed prototypical solution. Moreover, the described solution incorporates remote and automatic configuration of Android smartphones and advances the research area of context-aware information by harvesting information from several sources to build a rich foundation on which algorithms for context-aware computation can be based. Evaluation results show the viability of integrating and tailoring contextual information to provide users with timely, relevant and adapted application behaviour and content.

Context-driven interaction in immersive virtual environments

There are many interaction tasks a user may wish to accomplish in an immersive virtual environment. A careful examination of these tasks reveals that they are often performed under different contexts. For each task and context, specialized interaction techniques can be developed. We present the context-driven interaction model: a design pattern that represents contextual information as a first-class, quantifiable component within a user interface and supports the development of context-sensitive applications by decoupling context recognition, context representation, and interaction technique development. As a primary contribution, this model provides an enumeration of important representations of contextual information gathered from across the literature and describes how these representations can effect the selection of an appropriate interaction technique. We also identify how several popular 3D interaction techniques adhere to this design pattern and describe how the pattern itself can lead to a more focused development of effective interfaces. We have constructed a formalized programming toolkit and runtime system that serves as a reference implementation of the context-driven model and a discussion is provided explaining how the toolkit can be used to implement a collection of representative 3D interaction interfaces.

On foundation of engineering context-sensitive applications

The communication environment surrounding our daily experience is more and more characterized by mobile devices that can exchange multimedia information and provide access to various services of co...

Communication in industrial automation—What is going on?

Fieldbus systems have been successfully introduced into industrial automation. Nowadays, a large community is inventing the usage of Ethernet-based local communication systems in this domain ensuring the real-time, safe and secure behaviour of these systems. Future scenarios of geographically distributed production plants or services require the use of heterogeneous networks consisting of local and wide area, and wired and wireless communication systems operated by different authorities. Thus, behaviour has to be supplemented by context awareness realised by location-based communication services and context-sensitive applications. This paper will mainly address the ongoing activities in the field of using heterogeneous networks within the automation domain.

The scalability problem of vehicular ad hoc networks and how to solve it

Intervehicle communication (IVC) and its diverse application possibilities are experiencing growing interest both in research and industry. The dissemination of active safety messages generated by context-sensitive applications in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) promises to improve passenger safety and comfort. One of the main challenges inherent to the deployment of VANETs is operability, both in very sparse and in highly overloaded networks. This scalability problem is not comprehensively addressed by existing approaches, as they only focus on parts of the problem. This article shows how a relevance-based, altruistic communication scheme helps realize scalability by optimizing the application benefit and the bandwidth usage. In-vehicle and intervehicle message selection are based on a relevance function that makes use of the current context and the content of the messages. A novel, proprietary cross-layer architecture and an IEEE 802.11e-based architecture can be used to implement the scheme

Communication in Industrial Automation - What is Going On?

The fieldbus systems have been successfully introduced in the industrial automation. Nowadays, a large community is inventing the usage of Ethernet-based local communication systems in this domain ensuring the real-time, safe and secure behaviour of these systems. Future scenarios of geographically distributed production plants or services require the use of heterogeneous networks consisting of local and wide area, and wired and wireless communication systems operated by different authorities. Thus, behaviour has to be supplemented by context awareness realised by location-based communication services and context-sensitive applications. This paper will mainly address the ongoing activities in the field of using heterogeneous networks within the automation domain.

Reconfigurable context-sensitive middleware for pervasive computing

Context-sensitive applications need data from sensors, devices, and user actions, and might need ad hoc communication support to dynamically discover new devices and engage in spontaneous information exchange. Reconfigurable Context-Sensitive Middleware facilitates the development and runtime operations of context-sensitive pervasive computing software.

Future wireless applications for a networked city: services for visitors and residents

Future wireless networks will offer near-ubiquitous high-bandwidth communications to mobile users. In addition, the accurate position of users will be known, either through network services or via additional sensing devices such as GPS. These characteristics of future mobile environments will enable the development of location-aware and, more generally, context-sensitive applications. In an attempt to explore the system, application, and user issues associated with the development and deployment of such applications, we began to develop the Lancaster GUIDE system in early 1997, finishing the first phase of the project in 1999. In its entirety, GUIDE comprises a citywide wireless network based on 802.11, a context-sensitive tour guide application with, crucially, significant content, and a set of supporting distributed systems services. Uniquely in the field, GUIDE has been evaluated using members of the general public, and we have gained significant experience in the design of usable context-sensitive applications. We focus on the applications and supporting infrastructure that will form part of GUIDE II, the successor to the GUIDE system. These developments are designed to expand GUIDE outside the tour guide domain, and to provide applications and services for residents of the city of Lancaster, offering a vision of the future mobile environments that will emerge once ubiquitous high-bandwidth coverage is available in most cities.