System Evaluation Procedure Research Articles

An international and interdisciplinary Delphi study to measure digital public health system maturity

Abstract Background The Covid-19 pandemic showed how crucial digital public health (DiPH) interventions are for continuous treatment and system sustainability. Several studies highlighted how the digital system transformation might improve access to and quality of healthcare services. However, there is no consensus on how to best assess the national readiness for the digitalization of such systems. Therefore, this Delphi study aimed to collect indicators to measure the maturity of DiPH systems nationally. Methods The three-stage international and interdisciplinary Delphi study included 82 experts. During the first round, participants proposed indicators to measure maturity among the technological and legal requirements of DiPH tools, the willingness of the general public to use them, and the degree of application of DiPH tools to the national healthcare system. The suggestions were qualitatively assessed and presented for ranking on a 4-point Likert scale during the second round. Experts were also able to rephrase or add indicators. In the third round, experts could only rank indicators. Results Finally, 96 indicators to measure the maturity of DiPH systems were finally. Of these, 31 fall under the legal and 24 under the technological requirements. 26 assess the social level and 15 the degree of application. All dimensions can be clustered into 3-4 sub-groups each. The qualitative analysis highlighted the importance of data protection regulations, affordable smartphone and internet access, interoperability between interventions, financial incentives, user motivation and literacy, and whether interventions were implemented as local pilots or national services. Conclusions The study identified indicators for interdisciplinary assessing DiPH system maturity. While this Delphi can’t answer how best to integrate these indicators into national health system evaluation procedures, this approach is an essential first step towards an index to measure the maturity of DiPH systems. Key messages • When assessing the digital public health system's maturity, one needs to include legal, technological, and social influencing aspects and not only evaluate the health services implementation degree. • International and interdisciplinary Delphi study panels are vital for finding consensus on indicators to create tools of international importance and usability to measure health system maturity.

UPISmartHome V.2.0 – A Consumer Product of Smart Home System with an ESP8266 as the Basis

An ESP-Mesh-based smart home system was developed in the previous research using the ESP8266 feature with 3 different nodes, such as mechanical (door lock), electrical (fan, generic power switch, or power plug), and temperature & humidity sensors. This research focused more on the addition of nodes into the IoT-based smart home infrastructure. The purpose is to design, implement, and test hardware and software intended to be incorporated into the ESP8266-based system for normal functionality. These nodes include 1) RGB lamp that is controlled by colour lightning, 2) horizontal and 3) vertical curtain 4) PIR sensor for detecting the presence of humans (suspicious people) around the house, 5) liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) sensor for examining leakage of gas cylinders within the house, 6) smoke sensor for fire detection, and 7) an electric fan using the soft-control (PWM-based) method. The fan is observed to increase in functionality from the previous research, which is regulated by a switch only (hard-control). Meanwhile, the new android application monitors the seven nodes defined without limitations. The method used by the application includes the determination of system specifications, hardware and software design (ESP8266 and android programming), implementation, and verification. The system evaluation procedure used in the previous research comprised 1) RSSI measurement, 2) power consumption, 3) Mesh connection, 4) functionality test of UPISmartHome Apps V.2.0, and 5) the overall system (hardware & software integration). The test results by observing the RSSI parameters reveal that all nodes can be managed (control & monitor) remotely via the android application with an average distance of about 70 meters without an internet connection. Furthermore, all nodes are successfully connected to the ESP-Mesh network with effective self-routing capabilities between 40 – 50 meters because the distance between nodes above 70m cannot do self-configuration; this is the ability of ESP8266. The power consumed by each node both in idle and active conditions is not more than 2 Watts.

China guideline for the screening and early detection of female breast cancer(2021, Beijing)

Breast cancer is the commonest malignant tumor among Chinese females, ranking first in terms of incidence of female cancers. Commissioned by the Disease Prevention and Control Bureau of National Health Commission of the People's Republic of China, the National Cancer Center formulated the Guideline for Screening and Early Diagnosis and Treatment of Female Breast Cancer in China according to WHO Handbook for Guideline Development. The methods on Cochrane China were referred to for the formulation of the system evaluation procedures. The GRADE methods for assessment, formulation and evaluation were adopted for the classification of evidence quality and recommendation strength, and the items were reported according to Reporting Items for Practice Guidelines in Healthcare. Based on the results of evaluation, the guideline gives evidence-based recommendations for the appropriate population and technical procedures for breast cancer screening and early diagnosis and treatment after comprehensive consideration of China's national conditions, the advantages and disadvantages of the evidence, the quality of the evidence, the economic cost of screening, the feedback of multidisciplinary clinical research respondents, and in-person expert consensus. It is aimed at regulating the practices of female breast cancer screening and early diagnosis and treatment and enhancing the effectiveness of the prevention and control of female breast cancer in China.

Developing a Test Procedure to Evaluate Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment and Chargers

This paper describes the processes used and the choices made while developing a procedure to evaluate Electric Vehicle Supply Equipment (EVSE) and Plug-in Electric Vehicle (PEV) chargers and provides some results of the testing process. The procedure defines the battery charging system (i.e., the battery charger, EVSE, battery storage system, auxiliary loads, and vehicle). Each test element is evaluated in terms of function, reliability, safety, quality, cost, efficiency and power quality. The development of a charging system evaluation procedure comes from Southern California Edison’s (SCE) responsibility to ensure safe and reliable function and to minimize system impact. Up to one million PEVs have been projected to be operating in SCE’s service area by 2020. SCE must not only serve these PEVs, but must ensure that they do not have a negative impact on the utility grid. Therefore it is critical that SCE understand the impact of those battery charging systems. SCE also supports the creation of standards to limit wasted energy and negative power quality impacts that these battery charging systems may create. SCE is also using the test procedure to evaluate EVSEs and PEV charging systems for implementation in SCE’s fleet. The results of this procedure are used to give fleet managers the information needed to acquire the most effective and efficient PEV charging equipment. The results will also tell a fleet manager or PEV owner what EVSE would work best with their selected vehicle or vice versa. The procedure provides for the discovery of PEV and EVSE individual and compatibility issues before the PEV is deployed. The final result ensures optimum performance of the PEV system. Through this process, SCE has been able to work with manufacturers of PEVs and EVSEs in order to improve the functionality, robustness, and interoperability of the products.

Information Technology Used to Evaluate Nontraditional Traffic Monitoring Systems

A new approach to traffic data collection, known as link monitoring systems–systems that “mine” location data from existing infrastructure (such as cellular telephone networks or fleet management systems) to estimate link speeds and travel times–is emerging. In general, these systems are being developed and operated by private firms, which then seek to sell the data to transportation agencies. To make sound purchasing decisions, agencies must evaluate the quality of the data that they are considering purchasing. The research effort described in this paper developed and field-tested a link monitoring system evaluation procedure. This procedure is based on the use of state-of-the-art information technology resources, namely, geographic information systems and Global Positioning Systems (GPS), to provide a flexible, thorough, and fair evaluation methodology. The methodology consists of four steps. Step 1 is baseline data collection, which includes study site investigation, route design, and probe vehicle runs. Step 2 is data reduction, involving GPS data postprocessing, spatial processing, and travel time and link speed derivation. Step 3 is temporal match, and Step 4 deals with comparisons, including accuracy quantification and temporal traffic condition comparisons. The paper illustrates the procedure based on an evaluation of the Airsage link monitoring system in Hampton Roads, Virginia. In this evaluation, 147,000 GPS points that supported comparisons with over 1,000 link and time data records provided by the Airsage system were collected.

Speech quality in wireless systems

Modern wireless communication systems require a very sophisticated design from the electrical as well as from the acoustical point of view. Since the maximum of functionality needs to be integrated in designs—getting smaller with every new generation—not much space is left for the acoustical components. In addition such sets typically are used in noisy environments. In order to provide a minimum of speech quality a careful design of the acoustical components as well as of the according electrical components is required. Very often there is a strong interaction between those. The presentation will describe the typical types of signal processing and acoustical designs used in such sets and will give methodologies on how to assess the speech quality relevant parameters of such sets. Measurements for optimizing the acoustical design will be described. In addition system evaluation procedures for nonlinear and time-variant signal processing are discussed.

Evaluation of Activated Sludge Oxygen Uptake Rate Test Procedures

A series of bench- and pilot-scale experiments was conducted to evaluate the ability of biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) bottle-based oxygen uptake rate (OUR) analyses to represent accurately in situ OUR in complete mix-activated sludge systems. Aeration basin off-gas analyses indicated that, depending on system operating conditions, BOD bottle-based analyses could either underestimate in situ OUR rates by as much as 58% or overestimate in situ rates by up to 285%. The use of a continuous flow respirometer system was used to verify the off-gas analysis observations and assess better the rate of change in OUR after mixed liquor samples were suddenly isolated from their normally continuous source of feed. OUR rates for sludge samples maintained in the completely mixed bench-scale respirometer decreased by as much as 42% in less than two minutes after feeding was stopped. Based on these results, BOD bottle-based OUR results should not be used in any complete mix-activated sludge process operational control strategy, process mass balance, or system evaluation procedure requiring absolute accuracy of OUR values.

Econometric Evaluation of Linear Macro-Economic Models

Macro-economic models are generally designed to achieve a multiplicity of objectives and correspondingly, they have been evaluated using a vast range of statistical, econometric, economic, political and even aesthetic criteria. However, in so far as they claim to represent economic behaviour, empirical macro-economic systems are certainly open to direct evaluation and testing against data information. The last few years have witnessed a substantial growth in the literature on econometric evaluation techniques, but despite important improvements in formalising evaluation procedures and their increased scope, formidable problems confront any investigation of a high dimensional, non-linear, stochastic, dynamic structure. Since system characteristics are the prime concern of economy-wide models, it might be the case that the validity of every individual component is not essential to adequate overall performance. While this viewpoint is debatable it does draw attention to the need for system evaluation procedures, at which point data limitations pose serious constraints on formal tests. Thus a new “limited information” test of forecast encompassing is proposed, based only on forecasts and requiring no other data from a model's proprietors. The derivation, merits and drawbacks of such a test are presented together with some suggestions for testing entailed relationships and inter-equation feedbacks.

A Process for Selecting Computer Software

A process for evaluating microcomputer software is essential, says this writer, who describes one school system's evaluation procedure.

Responsibility for Curriculum Evaluation in Centralized Systems

The tradition in Australia of strong system control over the curriculum has been changed significantly by the devolution of responsibility for curriculum development to the school level. The State systems, however, have not devolved the responsibility for curriculum evaluation to the same extent as they have the responsibility for curriculum development. If the system's evaluation procedures substantially influence the nature of a school's curriculum, the school cannot be said to be really responsible for that curriculum. Despite this, system authorities appear reluctant to devolve all responsibility for curriculum evaluation to schools. Indeed, there appears to be a common agreement that systems must monitor their schools for accountability purposes. If this difference in responsibility remains unresolved it could lead to overlap of effort or conflict between schools and system-level authorities. Alternatively, it could lead to schools failing to take up the curriculum freedom offered. Examples of inconsistent policies and practices in curriculum development and curriculum evaluation are presented. Explanations for these inconsistencies are sought and strategies for their removal or reduction are considered.

Results Obtained Using a Simple Character Recognition Procedure on Munson's Handprinted Data

The number of black points in each of the 25 nonoverlapping square regions of a size-normalized character matrix were used to recognize the 3822 uppercase handprinted alphabetic characters from Munson's multiauthor data set. The recognition accuracy obtained using a Bayes' classifier, which assumes statistically independent features, compares favorably with earlier results obtained using recognition systems having complexity comparable to ours. Included are results and a recommendation regarding system evaluation procedures.