Support and information needs of older and disabled older people in the UK

The aim of this study was to determine the support and information needs of older and disabled older people in the UK. Following an initial literature survey, an examination of data on enquiries made by older people to information providers, and a series of focus groups, a questionnaire was developed for a nationwide survey. Over 1630 questionnaires were completed by disabled older clients of Day Care Centres and less frail older members of social clubs. Findings showed that there is a serious shortfall in the number of older people getting the practical support that they need, and the information that enables access to this support, compared to the number that actually need help. Substantial percentages of the survey respondents experienced difficulty with everyday tasks and with accessing the information they needed. Implications for formal sources of support and information are discussed.

Attitudes of rural branch managers in Madhya Pradesh, India, toward their role as providers of financial services to the poor

Discussions on banking reforms to reduce financial exclusion have referred little to possible attitudinal constraints, on the part of staff at both branch and institutional levels, inhibiting the provision of financial services to the poor. The research project, funded by the ESCOR (now Social Science Research) Small Grants Committee, has focused on this aspect of financial exclusion. The research commenced in May 2001 and was completed in April 2002. Profiles of the rural bank branch managers, including personal background, professional background and workplace, are presented. Attitudes of managers toward aspects of their work environment and the rural poor are examined, using results from both quantitative and qualitative analysis. Finally, the emerging policy implications are discussed. These include bank reforms to address human resource management, the work environment, intermediate bank management and organization, and the client interface.

Forty-eight hour access to primary care: practice factors predicting patients' perceptions

Background: The government has proposed a 48-hour target for GP availability. Although many practices are moving towards delivering that goal, recent national patient surveys have reported a deterioration in patients' reports of doctor availability. What practice factors contribute to patients' perceptions of doctor availability? Method: A cross sectional patient survey (11 000 patients from 54 inner London practices, 7247 (66%) respondents) using the General Practice Assessment Survey. We asked patients how soon they could be seen in their practice following non-urgent consultation requests and related their aggregated responses to the characteristics of their practice. Results: Three factors relating to practice administration and appointments systems operation independently predicted patients' reports of doctor availability. These were the proportion of patients asked to attend the surgery and wait to be seen, the proportion of patients seen using an emergency surgery arrangement, and the extent of practice computerization. Conclusion: Some practices may have difficulty in meeting the target for GP availability. Meeting the target will involve careful review of practice administrative procedures.

An enhanced relay-enabled medium access control protocol for wireless ad hoc networks

In this paper we propose an enhanced relay-enabled distributed coordination function (rDCF) for wireless ad hoc networks. The idea of rDCF is to use high data rate nodes to work as relays for the low data rate nodes. The relay helps to increase the throughput and lower overall blocking time of nodes due to faster dual-hop transmission. rDCF achieves higher throughput over IEEE 802.11 distributed coordination function (DCF). The protocol is further enhanced for higher throughput and reduced energy. These enhancements result from the use of a dynamic preamble (i.e. using short preamble for the relay transmission) and also by reducing unnecessary overhearing (by other nodes not involved in transmission). We have modeled the energy consumption of rDCF, showing that rDCF provides an energy efficiency of 21.7% at 50 nodes over 802.11 DCF. Compared with the existing rDCF, the enhanced rDCF (ErDCF) scheme proposed in this paper yields a throughput improvement of 16.54% (at the packet length of 1000 bytes) and an energy saving of 53% at 50 nodes.

How can a blind engineer access the curriculum?

The arrival of a student who is Blind in the School of Systems Engineering at the University of Reading has made it an interesting and challenging year for all. Visually impaired students have already graduated from other Schools of the University and the School of Systems Engineering has seen three students with visual impairment graduate recently with good degrees. These students could access materials - and do assessments - essentially by means of enlargement and judicious choice of options. The new student had previously been supported by a specialist college. She is a proficient typist and also a user of both Braille and JAWS screen reader, and she is doing a joint course in Cybernetics and Computer Science. The course requires mathematics which itself includes graphs, and also many diagrams including numerous circuit diagrams. The University bought proven equipment such as a scanner to process books into speech or Braille, and screen reading software as well as a specialist machine for producing tactile diagrams for educational use. Clearly it is also important that the student can access assessments and examinations and present answers for marking or feedback (by sighted staff). So the School also used innovative in-house tactile methods to represent diagrams. This paper discusses the success or otherwise of various modifications of course delivery and the way forward for the next three years.

KAIFIA: Knowledge assisted intelligent framework for information access

Accessing information, which is spread across multiple sources, in a structured and connected way, is a general problem for enterprises. A unified structure for knowledge representation is urgently needed to enable integration of heterogeneous information resources. Topic Maps seem to be a solution for this problem. The Topic Map technology enables connecting information, through concepts and relationships, and their occurrences across multiple systems. In this paper, we address this problem by describing a framework built on topic maps, to support the current need of knowledge management. New approaches for information integration, intelligent search and topic map exploration are introduced within this framework.

Generating virtual environments to allow increased access to the built environment

The problems encountered by individuals with disabilities when accessing large public buildings is described and a solution based on the generation of virtual models of the built environment is proposed. These models are superimposed on a control network infrastructure, currently utilised in intelligent building applications such as lighting, heating and access control. The use of control network architectures facilitates the creation of distributed models that closely mirror both the physical and control properties of the environment. The model of the environment is kept local to the installation which allows the virtual representation of a large building to be decomposed into an interconnecting series of smaller models. This paper describes two methods of interacting with the virtual model, firstly a two dimensional aural representation that can be used as the basis of a portable navigational device. Secondly an augmented reality called DAMOCLES that overlays additional information on a user’s normal field of view. The provision of virtual environments offers new possibilities in the man-machine interface so that intuitive access to network based services and control functions can be given to a user.