Introducing health information systems to aged care in Vietnam

Similar to many other countries worldwide, Vietnam is facing a challenge of an ageing population. This challenge is even more difficult to overcome because Vietnam is a developing country lacking an established aged care infrastructure and system. Many aspects of aged care have largely been relied on families of aged people due to a strong influence of Confucian philosophy. Looking after aged parents has always been seen as a responsibility and filial piety of children and their extended families. Therefore, providing healthcare for aged people in their family and community context is important. The paper offers a rich description and an analysis of the current situation of the health state of and healthcare for aged people in Vietnam. The paper also suggests directions for integrating information communication technology into aged care in Vietnam.

Supporting information needs of senior citizens in community aged care

To address the challenge of an ageing population in an information society, it is important to introduce information systems to assist the aged people in maintaining and improving their quality of life. An understanding of what information aged people need, how they seek and use information, and how they adopt Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is required. This paper reports the findings of an empirical study undertaken in Australia to understand the information needs of senior citizens who reside in the community. The study aims to understand how ICT can support the independent living of senior people in the community from both the social and health perspectives. We offer a new understanding of the information needs of aged people in the community and extend the information systems research in aged care. This research also contributes to the development of innovative ICT enabled aged care service solutions in community aged care.

Unusual suspects : a newspaper's coverage of a scuba diving rescue and journalism's role in narrating Australia

Brisbane’s Courier-Mail newspaper ran a fantastic story a couple of years ago about a couple left at sea behind by their tour boat, after going scuba diving. The story suggested American diver Allyson Dalton and her British partner Richard Neely ignored advice when they ventured away from a lagoon where the tour boat was anchored. But the focus was on how Neely and Dalton survived by treading water for 19 hours at Paradise Reef, part of Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef, not so much (yet) on how fortunate they were not to be attacked by sharks. It would not be long, however, before that old journalistic maxim that implores practitioners to ‘question every assertion, doubt every claim’ shaped the reportage into an extended narrative about chequebook journalism, credibility, and culpability.

The scuba dive rescue story analysis presented here reflects contemporary journalism’s role in the formation of ideas about cultural value and character, and in more complex determinations of who gets a participatory stake in the formation of national narratives. As such, the article concludes with some signposts toward a critical approach to journalism-centred studies of culture in Australia.

Information needs in community aged care

This paper focuses on the information needs and behaviours of senior citizens and their carers in the community. Two case studies concerning elderly stroke patients and their carers are described and discussed. Analysis of the case study data reveals a number of themes including the actual information needs and information behaviours of the senior citizens, the importance of proxy information seekers and advocates and the need for usable, accessible and useful tool to support the needs of care recipients. A preliminary framework is developed that highlights important aspects of supporting the information needs of care recipients and carers in community aged care. Finally we suggest opportunities for technology interventions that address various information needs of senior citizens in the community.

Can qualitative content analysis be adapted for use by social informaticians to study social media discourse? A position paper

IS research on social media (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, blogs) has so far used user surveys or quantitative content analysis (QuantCA) research methods almost exclusively. There is considerable potential for social informatics research to use qualitative content analysis (QualCA) to explore social media discourse and its appropriation by people “in situ”. This paper presents the position that QualCA offers researchers the flexibility to identify emergent research questions and units of analysis which they may not have preconceived. This is likely to be important for IS research because of the infancy and evolving nature of social media discourse. The paper puts forward suggestions on how the QualCA research method can be adapted for this type of research.

pH-sensitive and targeted PLGA-based drug delivery to colorectal cancer

Investigation on targeted PLGA based drug delivery system for the therapy of colorectal cancer. The results from in-vitro cell experiments indicated that prepared systems have potent cytotoxicity and high affinity to HT-29 cancer cells. Results were published on Biomedical Engineering and Informatics and ICONN conference proceeding.

IaaS clouds vs. clusters for HPC: a performance study

The increasing amount of data collected in the fields of physics and bio-informatics allows researchers to build realistic, and therefore accurate, models/simulations and gain a deeper understanding of complex systems. This analysis is often at the cost of greatly increased processing requirements. Cloud computing, which provides on demand resources, can offset increased analysis requirements. While beneficial to researchers, adaption of clouds has been slow due to network and performance uncertainties. We compare the performance of cloud computers to clusters to make clear the advantages and limitations of clouds. Focus has been put on understanding how virtualization and the underlying network effects performance of High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. Collected results indicate that performance comparable to high performance clusters is achievable on cloud computers depending on the type of application run.

Framework for a Residential Energy Information System (REMIS) to promote energy efficient behaviour in residential energy end users

Previous studies on residential energy end use behavior reported significant reduction in energy end use of 7% to 24% when feedback is used to modify behavior in an energy efficient manner. However, most feedback systems investigated in previous studies have not benefited from advanced information systems (IS). IS can shape energy efficiency behavior by providing real-time feedback on energy consumption, cost and environmental impact. Such systems represent a new and less-researched subfield of energy informatics. This paper provides a conceptual framework for showing the potential use of IS to modify residential energy use behavior towards better energy efficiency. The framework builds on research in residential energy end use, in particular energy end use behavioral model. It provides conceptual inputs for a blue-print to develop a residential energy management information system (REMIS) and also highlights the use of new information and communications technologies (ICT) that had not been widely used, setting the grounds for further research in this area.

Effects of social characters in viral propagation seeding strategies in online social networks

Online social networks have not only become a point of aggregation and exchange of information, they have so radically rooted into our everyday behaviors that they have become the target of important network attacks. We have seen an increasing trend in Sybil based activity, such as in personification, fake profiling and attempts to maliciously subvert the community stability in order to illegally create benefits for some individuals, such as online voting, and also from more classic informatics assaults using specifically mutated worms. Not only these attacks, in the latest months, we have seen an increase in spam activities on social networks such as Facebook and RenRen, and most importantly, the first attempts at propagating worms within these communities. What differentiates these attacks from normal network attacks, is that compared to anonymous and stealthy activities, or by commonly untrusted emails, social networks regain the ability to propagate within consentient users, who willingly accept to partake. In this paper, we will demonstrate the effects of influential nodes against non-influential nodes through in simulated scenarios and provide an overview and analysis of the outcomes.

Spaced repetition tool for improving long-term memory retention and recall of collected personal experiences

A variety of electronic displays available for home use creates opportunities for intelligent applications. This paper presents a semi-passive photo reviewing tool for consolidating memories of experiences utilizing personal picture libraries. A form of spaced repetition algorithm is used to create visual journeys which link photos together around a user-chosen central theme. Systematically reviewing images from positive personal experiences can be useful to remember significant events, as well as to balance out stressful events in our lives. The design exploits existing digital home displays and aims to improve usage of media collections

A survey of approaches and frameworks to carry out genomic data analysis on the cloud

High Performance Computing (HPC) clouds have started to change the way how research in science, in particular medicine and genomics (bioinformatics) is being carried out. Researchers who have taken advantage of this technology can process larger amounts of data and speed up scientific discovery. However, most HPC clouds are provided at an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) level, users are presented with a set of virtual servers which need to be put together to form HPC environments via time consuming resource management and software configuration tasks, which make them practically unusable by discipline, non-computing specialists. In response, there is a new trend to expose cloud applications as services to simplify access and execution on clouds. This paper firstly examines commonly used cloud-based genomic analysis services (Tuxedo Suite, Galaxy and Cloud Bio Linux). As a follow up, we propose two new solutions (HPCaaS and Uncinus), which aim to automate aspects of the service development and deployment process. By comparing and contrasting these five solutions, we identify key mechanisms of service creation, execution and access that are required to support genomic research on the SaaS cloud, in particular by discipline specialists. © 2014 IEEE.

Multichannel biomedical time series clustering via hierarchical probabilistic latent semantic analysis

Biomedical time series clustering that automatically groups a collection of time series according to their internal similarity is of importance for medical record management and inspection such as bio-signals archiving and retrieval. In this paper, a novel framework that automatically groups a set of unlabelled multichannel biomedical time series according to their internal structural similarity is proposed. Specifically, we treat a multichannel biomedical time series as a document and extract local segments from the time series as words. We extend a topic model, i.e., the Hierarchical probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (H-pLSA), which was originally developed for visual motion analysis to cluster a set of unlabelled multichannel time series. The H-pLSA models each channel of the multichannel time series using a local pLSA in the first layer. The topics learned in the local pLSA are then fed to a global pLSA in the second layer to discover the categories of multichannel time series. Experiments on a dataset extracted from multichannel Electrocardiography (ECG) signals demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than previous state-of-the-art approaches and is relatively robust to the variations of parameters including length of local segments and dictionary size. Although the experimental evaluation used the multichannel ECG signals in a biometric scenario, the proposed algorithm is a universal framework for multichannel biomedical time series clustering according to their structural similarity, which has many applications in biomedical time series management.