Encourage User Participation Research Articles

Validation of the online theoretical module of a minimally invasive surgery blended learning course for nurses: A quantitative research study

BackgroundThe progressive development of Minimally Invasive Surgery (MIS) implies the need to train health professionals in such field, for which e-learning and blended learning methods are increasingly been used. Most nurses lack experience and training in MIS, so a laparoscopic blended learning course for nursing has been created. ObjectivesTo perform the validation of the online theoretical module of such course to evaluate student perception and satisfaction, sociability and usability metrics, and also the interest of nurses in blended learning. DesignA quantitative design has been used. Participants24 nurses participated in the validation tests performing the online module of the course. MethodsSubjective (questionnaires) and objective (performance statistics) metrics were analysed. ResultsThe e-learning environment has ease of access, good layout, consistency and intuitive navigation. Chat and forums have not been used and nurses miss a moderator. Participants consider that videos provide added value to the course, and contents are easily understandable and of high quality. However, questionnaires are not well balanced in difficulty and few interactive 3D designs have been viewed. Participants consider blended learning as the most effective training method for its flexibility in time and place. ConclusionsThis study suggests that a simple, easy-to-use and attractive e-learning environment has been developed to train nurses in MIS. However, installation of additional software should be avoided. A moderator/tutor should manage forums to encourage user participation, using conversational agents. But nevertheless, chats have no interest. Questionnaires for content evaluation should be designed with efficiency and equity. Videos designed according to micro-learning, with audio and interactivity, should be included. These courses should be designed to meet factors to promote the engagement of students. Blended learning is considered by nurses as ideal method for training, but further research to assess whether it improves learning outcomes is needed.

“Hey, Such-and-Such on the Internet Has Suggested …”: How to Create Content Models That Invite User Participation

Problem: Few frameworks exist for building content strategies around user-generated content. We present a framework for building content strategies that enable user participation in the development and delivery of content. Key concepts: For this framework to be successfully implemented, this implementation team needs a working knowledge of user-generated content strategy, or the development of strategies for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content that encourage user participation. The framework also requires an understanding of the relationship between content models and technologies. Finally, practitioners utilizing the framework must also understand the role of content moderation in facilitating development of user-generated content. Key lessons: Our framework for user-generated content strategy specifies three main practices: 1. Developing a content strategy that enables interactions among administrators, moderators, users, types of content, and technologies within a given network; 2. building content models within technologies so that all interactions flow seamlessly; and 3. using content moderation to ensure that users are empowered to contribute content while respecting quality guidelines. Implications: Though there are challenges to facilitating user-generated content that unites organizational goals and user goals, the use of a framework like ours can benefit organizations that want to make user-generated content a core part of what they do.

"Worth one minute": An anonymous rewarding platform for crowd-sensing systems

Readily available and affordable consumer-grade electronics, with ever-increasing sensing, computing, and communication capabilities, have provided the ground for distributed computation and data collection systems. Crowd-sensing applications rely on volunteers providing access to their personal devices—a category encompassing smartphones, wearables, vehicles, and a wide range of ‘Internet of Things’ appliances—and using them as sensors. These systems rely on the willingness of participants to invest in a common cause, which often entails explicit efforts from users, occupation of hardware resources, and risks of sharing private data. Incentives and rewarding schemes are adopted to encourage user participation. This paper introduces the Worth One Minute (WOM) platform: an implementation of a generalpurpose rewarding system based on anonymous vouchers. The platform is designed to reward user efforts towards the common good, rewarding their contributions and the intrinsic social value they provide, while preserving their anonymity.

Energy Performance Certificates and Historic Apartment Buildings: A Method to Encourage User Participation and Sustainability in the Refurbishment Process

ABSTRACT This article presents and discusses the challenges of refurbishing historic apartment buildings by correlating findings from research projects LEAF and CulClim. Our aim is to shed light on how residents can partake in and optimise the refurbishment process after energy performance certificates (EPC) have been conducted. The background is that historic apartment buildings are generally more complex than single family buildings with respect to the energy efficiency process as they often have multiple owners with different priorities. The case studies from Norway and Sweden have conceptually contrasting energy performance certificate (EPC) systems. Identified advantages and shortcomings concerning both systems are discussed. In Sweden, the restrained recommendation of measures can lead to national mitigation targets not being realised. In Norway, excessive and unqualified recommendations risk reducing the cultural heritage values of the existing building stock as well as having a negative environmental impact on greenhouse gas emissions. A bottom-up approach incorporating the resident’s objectives is presented and discussed. Results suggest that improved EPC-systems and a broadened procedural approach to decision making will ease the process and improve the outcome of the refurbishment with respect to both energy and heritage aspects.

On Contract Design for Incentivizing Users in Cooperative Content Delivery With Adverse Selection

Cooperative content delivery using multiple air interfaces (CCDMI) is a powerful solution to mitigate congestion in cellular networks. In CCDMI, the operator distributes content to selected users that further distribute it locally among its nearby users. However, a user that is capable of contributing to CCDMI might act selfishly and refuse to participate. Although the operator can encourage user participation by offering incentives, it has incomplete information about the users’ willingness to participate. In order to overcome this problem of adverse selection in CCDMI, we propose two contract-based methods under information asymmetry. In both methods, the operator designs a performance-based contract set for the users that are capable of local content distribution. Using a mathematical analysis, we show that the optimal contract under information asymmetry achieves close to optimal utility for the users and the operator, compared with the information symmetry case. Moreover, the users with high willingness to participate get positive utility and the users with low willingness get zero utility. Hence, by assigning contracts, the operator can motivate user participation, despite the information asymmetry between them. Our results verify that the proposed methods improve the system performance in terms of the utility of the operator and the users.

Analyzing crowdsourcing to teach mobile crowdsensing a few lessons

In recent years, mobile computing has shown so much potential that one can see a boundary-blurring expansion between the physical and the digital world. In this context, one of the most sought after research areas is mobile crowdsensing. To realize the vision of crowdsensing, there is a plethora of work in the literature that focuses on the technical capabilities of a mobile device. However, an important and a critical problem that eludes literature is the issue of human participation. We base this argument on a very simple, yet powerful fact that a mobile device is still a person’s private property. Therefore, considering human mentality, can we expect a person to contribute all the time? In this respect, it is not feasible for a human dependent computational system to ignore the inevitable human factor and focus only on the mechanical properties. In this paper, we look into the often ignored human aspects and will study the problem from a psychological perspective. We take inspiration from the mature paradigm of crowdsourcing and discuss the importance of a few human factors that could teach us how to encourage user participation in mobile crowdsensing. Further, we also explore a person’s habitual characteristics that could help answer the decade’s old question: How to get quality responses from the crowd? We use a psycho-technological approach to observe, understand, and find a few details regarding human behavior in online systems. Lastly, we take inspiration from the analysis to present a roadmap that aids in engineering a better and effective crowdsensing platform.

User Participation in Collaborative Filtering-Based Recommendation Systems: A Game Theoretic Approach

Collaborative filtering is widely used in recommendation systems. A user can get high-quality recommendations only when both the user himself/herself and other users actively participate, i.e., provide sufficient ratings. However, due to the rating cost, rational users tend to provide as few ratings as possible. Therefore, there exists a tradeoff between the rating cost and the recommendation quality. In this paper, we model the interactions among users as a game in satisfaction form and study the corresponding equilibrium, namely satisfaction equilibrium (SE). Considering that accumulated ratings are used for generating recommendations, we design a behavior rule which allows users to achieve an SE via iteratively rating items. We theoretically analyze under what conditions an SE can be learned via the behavior rule. Experimental results on Jester and MovieLens data sets confirm the analysis and demonstrate that, if all users have moderate expectations for recommendation quality and satisfied users are willing to provide more ratings, then all users can get satisfying recommendations without providing many ratings. The SE analysis of the proposed game in this paper is helpful for designing mechanisms to encourage user participation.

NmrML: A Community Supported Open Data Standard for the Description, Storage, and Exchange of NMR Data.

NMR is a widely used analytical technique with a growing number of repositories available. As a result, demands for a vendor-agnostic, open data format for long-term archiving of NMR data have emerged with the aim to ease and encourage sharing, comparison, and reuse of NMR data. Here we present nmrML, an open XML-based exchange and storage format for NMR spectral data. The nmrML format is intended to be fully compatible with existing NMR data for chemical, biochemical, and metabolomics experiments. nmrML can capture raw NMR data, spectral data acquisition parameters, and where available spectral metadata, such as chemical structures associated with spectral assignments. The nmrML format is compatible with pure-compound NMR data for reference spectral libraries as well as NMR data from complex biomixtures, i.e., metabolomics experiments. To facilitate format conversions, we provide nmrML converters for Bruker, JEOL and Agilent/Varian vendor formats. In addition, easy-to-use Web-based spectral viewing, processing, and spectral assignment tools that read and write nmrML have been developed. Software libraries and Web services for data validation are available for tool developers and end-users. The nmrML format has already been adopted for capturing and disseminating NMR data for small molecules by several open source data processing tools and metabolomics reference spectral libraries, e.g., serving as storage format for the MetaboLights data repository. The nmrML open access data standard has been endorsed by the Metabolomics Standards Initiative (MSI), and we here encourage user participation and feedback to increase usability and make it a successful standard.

Patient influence in home-based reablement for older persons: qualitative research

BackgroundReablement services are rehabilitation for older people living at home, being person-centered in information, mapping and the goal-setting conversation. The purpose of this study was to gain knowledge about conversation processes and patient influence in formulating the patients’ goals. There are two research questions: How do conversation theme, structure and processes appear in interactions aiming to decide goals of home-based reablement rehabilitation for the elderly? How professionals’ communication skills do influence on patients' participation in conversation about everyday life and goals of home-based reablement?MethodsA qualitative field study explored eight cases of naturally occurring conversations between patients and healthcare professionals in a rehabilitation team. Patients were aged 67–90 years old. The reablement team consisted of an occupational therapist, physiotherapist, nurse and care workers. Data was collected by audio recording the conversations. Transcribed text was analyzed for conversational theme and communication patterns as they emerged within main themes.ResultsPatient participation differed with various professional leadership and communication in the information, mapping and goalsetting process. In the data material in its entirety, conversations consisted mainly of three parts where each part dealt with one of the three main topics. The first part was “Introduction to the program.” The main part of the talk was about mapping (“Varying patient participation when discussing everyday life”), while the last part was about goal setting (“Goals of rehabilitation”).ConclusionsHome-based reablement requires communication skills to encourage user participation, and mapping of resources and needs, leading to the formulation of objectives. Professional health workers must master integrating two intentions: goal-oriented and person-centered communication that requires communication skills and leadership ability in communication, promoting patient influence and goal-setting. Quality of such conversations is complex, and requires the ability to apply integrated knowledge, skills and attitudes appropriate to communication situations.

Consumers or prosumers, customers or competitors? - Some Australian perspectives on possible energy users of the future

Governance arrangements for electricity industries commonly claim the interests of consumers as their paramount objective. This would suggest a key decision making role for energy users, in all their diversity. However, the industry's critical role in societal, welfare, large environmental impacts, and the challenges of ensuring it's secure and reliable operation, all represent key shared long-term interests requiring high levels of coordination. The role of energy users within many electricity industries has transitioned over time from clients to citizens, then to consumers and now, in restructured industries, to customers. Increasingly, however, emerging distributed energy technologies including photovoltaics, storage and 'smart' loads are offering energy users new industry roles as prosumers rather than just consumers, and utility business partners, or potentially even utility competitors, rather than just customers. This paper outlines some of the experiences of energy users in the Australian National Electricity Market over the past decade as more than 15% of households have installed PV systems, and incumbent industry stakeholders and policy makers have struggled to reconcile formal market principles of encouraging energy user participation, with the realities of what such participation can do to existing business models. Australia's experience holds broader relevance as electricity industries worldwide look to better manage the challenges posed by prosumers while facilitating the societal benefits they can bring, particularly with the growing capabilities and falling costs of PV and energy storage systems. More generally, facilitating greater engagement with energy users will likely be essential in establishing the societal consensus required for the profound and highly disruptive transformation to a cleaner energy future.

Using a bespoke situated digital kiosk to encourage user participation in healthcare environment design

Involving users through participation in healthcare service and environment design is growing. Existing approaches and toolkits for practitioners and researchers are often paper based involving workshops and other more traditional design approaches such as paper prototyping. The advent of digital technology provides the opportunity to explore new platforms for user participation. This paper presents results from three studies that used a bespoke situated user participation digital kiosk, engaging 33 users in investigating healthcare environment design. The studies, from primary and secondary care settings, allowed participant feedback on each environment and proved a novel, engaging “21st century” way to participate in the appraisal of the design process. The results point toward this as an exciting and growing area of research in developing not just a new method of user participation but also the technology that supports it. Limitations were noted in terms of data validity and engagement with the device. To guide the development of user participation using similar situated digital devices, key lessons and reflections are presented.

TaskMe: Toward a dynamic and quality-enhanced incentive mechanism for mobile crowd sensing

Abstract Incentive is crucial to the success of mobile crowd sensing (MCS) systems. Over the different manners of incentives, providing monetary rewards has been proved quite useful. However, existing monetary-based incentive studies (e.g., the reverse auction based methods) mainly encourage user participation, whereas sensing quality is often neglected. First, the budget setting is static and may not meet the sensing contexts or user anticipation. Second, they do not measure the quality of data contributed. Third, the design of most incentive schemes is quantity- or cost-focused and not quality-oriented. To address these issues, we propose a novel MCS incentive mechanism called TaskMe. An LBSN (location-based social network)-powered model is leveraged for dynamic budgeting and proper worker selection, and a combination of multi-facet quality measurements and a multi-payment-enhanced reverse auction scheme are used to improve sensing quality. Experiments on several user studies and the crawled dataset validate TaskMe's effectiveness.

The Dark Side of User Participation - The Effect of Calls to Action on Trust and Information Revelation

Many content websites seek to encourage user participation, which has been shown to increase user satisfaction and propensity to contribute. Yet this study shows that such encouragement can cause users to expose themselves to potentially harmful consequences, by enhancing their trust in the website and leading them to be more willing to reveal personal information. We perform a series of empirical experiments, utilizing a website called VideoBook, a YouTube-like video browsing platform that provides the opportunity to study users’ behaviors and perceptions in a realistic environment and under lab conditions. We find that users who are exposed to prompts that require them to engage with the website (rate videos) subsequently report higher trust in the site and reveal more personal information, compared with users who are not exposed to such prompts. Exposure to prompts does not affect users’ general attitudes regarding privacy. We test alternative scenarios to attempt to identify the sources of the phenomena, and we link our results to previous work on website-initiated participation and self-perception theory. We discuss both theoretical and policy implications.

Framework for selecting assistive technology user-participation methods

Purpose – A number of participatory research methodologies can be used to assist with developing assistive technologies. These methods vary in the amount that users lead and contribute to the work. Selecting the correct method can be important to ensure the overall success of the project and the engagement of users. The purpose of this paper is to explore factors that can impact on the degree of user participation. Design/methodology/approach – The paper considers whether criteria, that might influence assistive technology (AT) selection made during an assessment of need, review or purchasing process, could also be used to clarify the appropriate strategies for user involvement when developing assistive technologies. It outlines how this approach has been applied to two research and development projects which aimed to improve AT provision within niche markets. Findings – The paper demonstrates that it is possible to apply a decision making process to selecting the best participatory research method, based on factors affecting AT need. It reports on the outcomes of the user participation in the two research and development projects and discusses how this design approach has been applied to a third project. Originality/value – By examining a possible framework for identifying appropriate user-participation approaches, this paper will aid those designing research and development AT projects, whilst encouraging user participation within similar projects.

A location-based Incentive Algorithm for Consecutive Crowd Sensing Tasks

Crowd Sensing (CS) is a sensing paradigm that takes advantage from the increasing use of mobile smart devices and their capabilities for sensing and computation. In this paper, we present an incentive mechanism for encourage user participation in schemes of sensing that requires consecutive and regular sampling. The proposed mechanism uses a recurrent reverse auction that no only takes into account the sample price, but also the participant's location. We show that our mechanism achieves an optimal budget utilization while guarantees area coverage and a sufficient number of participants in every round.

Irrigation water value for potato farmers in the Mooi River Irrigation Scheme of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa: A residual value approach

Explaining variation of smallholder irrigation water values is a critical element in water allocation and management. However, it has been hampered by data deficiencies at smallholder level. Both primary and secondary data were used to estimate the value of irrigation water for smallholder farmers in the KwaZulu-Natal Province of South Africa. The paper applied the residual value method to estimate water values among smallholder farmers, focusing on the potato crop. The results indicated that, on average, farmers in the Mooi River Irrigation Scheme applied less water (61.4%) to their potato crop when compared to the irrigation crop water requirements, ranging between 14% and 174%. Crops with relatively low gross margins like maize and dry beans yielded lower water values of US$0.12/m3 and US $0.10/m3 respectively, while tomatoes yielded US $1.07/m3. The average water value for potatoes was US$0.01/m3, ranging from −US$1.67/m3 to US$1.13/m3. Location of the irrigated plot along the main canal significantly influenced variability in water value, which accounted for 12.5% of variation. The number of irrigation cycles and education level of the farmer explained 5.8% and 5.9% of variation in water values, respectively. The paper illustrates that where water is provided free of charge to a large group of users, unequal distribution, poor management and inefficient use of water are common. Negative water values also revealed under-performance of smallholder farmers. A paradigm shift toward cost recovery mechanisms to encourage effective irrigation water management and water-use efficiency might need to be considered for smallholder farmers. This can also be coupled by strengthening policies and approaches that encourage user participation in water management.

Communicating About Cancer Through Facebook: A Qualitative Analysis of a Breast Cancer Awareness Page

Social media channels are increasingly being used for health communication and promotion. Social networking sites such as Facebook have become popular platforms for organizations to communicate health messages and encourage user participation around health topics. While the evaluation of social media's effectiveness in health promotion is beginning to emerge in the literature, few studies have examined actual interactions and user behaviors on Facebook Pages hosted by health organizations. The authors present a qualitative case study of a popular Facebook Page from a nonprofit organization devoted to raising awareness about breast cancer. With the goal of identifying the functions and uses of the Page, our study analyzes the content of Wall posts during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, October 2010. Common themes and characteristics are identified, including open mic communication, scarcity of health information, the commodification of breast cancer, unpredictable locations of conversation, and the use of gendered images and language. The findings have potential implications for health promotion efforts using social media platforms.

User participation in an academic social networking service: A survey of open group users on Mendeley

Although there are a number of social networking services that specifically target scholars, little has been published about the actual practices and the usage of these so‐called academic social networking services (ASNSs). To fill this gap, we explore the populations of academics who engage in social activities using an ASNS; as an indicator of further engagement, we also determine their various motivations for joining a group in ASNSs. Using groups and their members in Mendeley as the platform for our case study, we obtained 146 participant responses from our online survey about users' common activities, usage habits, and motivations for joining groups. Our results show that (a) participants did not engage with social‐based features as frequently and actively as they engaged with research‐based features, and (b) users who joined more groups seemed to have a stronger motivation to increase their professional visibility and to contribute the research articles that they had read to the group reading list. Our results generate interesting insights into Mendeley's user populations, their activities, and their motivations relative to the social features of Mendeley. We also argue that further design of ASNSs is needed to take greater account of disciplinary differences in scholarly communication and to establish incentive mechanisms for encouraging user participation.

A study on the antecedents and consequences of satisfaction and dissatisfaction in web portal usage

Unlike previous studies on web portal preference that focused mostly on satisfaction, this study considered both satisfaction and dissatisfaction. This study established that (1) web portal preference was driven by attractive, must-be, and one-dimensional qualities, (2) web portals need to develop service strategies by taking into account users’ satisfaction and dissatisfaction in accordance with preference drivers, and (3) users view security as a requisite and thus, even if they are not satisfied with services of a portal, they tend to appeal their opinion without leaving the portal. This study emphasizes that a web portal that desires to be a dominant market player must provide differentiated services according to the preference drivers and must continuously encourage user participation in order to improve service quality.

A Virtual Platform for Improving Coordination and Promoting Cooperation on Traffic Safety

ABSTRACT Successful management of traffic safety requires effective community participation in the process of traffic awareness, planning and management along with the executive bodies concerned with traffic planning and management. Just as important to reinforcing a shared vision among people and management bodies is the idea of people participation in decision-making. There is a strong need for cooperation among traffic users, planners and managers. Traffic users play a significant role in running the traffic and have been vocal about management issues. Users should be encouraged to be as involved and active as possible in all decisions that affect their traffic safety. Community Corporations go further and encourage participation by forming user organizations. Encouraging user participation also requires training for oversight and conflict resolution, in order to work through unresolved problems. It is also as important that users should try out their ideas in an open exchange, see how the ideas fare; and hopefully, the best ones will survive and users learn through each other. Therefore, there is a great need to provide users, traffic planners and managers with a platform that fosters such activities and allows traffic users to discuss, report and document their views, events, experiences related to their traffic safety, i.e. report on faults, cracks, breakdown, damages, etc. Making a good use of such data can substantially assist in improving the operation and management of traffic safety. Virtual environments can provide traffic users, planners and managers with an atmosphere to participate in a computer generated world. Virtual environments run on multiple processes in which information are shared among processes. Traffic users, planners and managers will be able to visualize and navigate the virtual traffic modeled in distributed virtual environments. Traffic management is essential to achieve better reliability and availability of traffic safety. It is important to minimize the obstacles that will impact the successful achievement of traffic safety. This paper proposes a virtual platform for encouraging users' participation in traffic safety in terms of awareness, operation and management developed and to be implemented in an interactive 3D virtual environment. This virtual environment promotes multiple participants and can be remotely accessed synchronously by different users within 3D object-oriented virtual models while they are aware of the presence of others and communicate with them. This virtual environment encourages users, planners and managers to participate in fostering the sense of community partnership and shared responsibility, while traffic managers will benefit from the users' views.