The Social and Smart project proposes a new framework for the interaction between users and their household appliances, where social interaction becomes an intelligent social network of users and appliances which is able to provide intelligent responses to the needs of the users. In this paper we focus on one incrasingly common appliance in the european homes: the bread-maker. There are a numbe...

Managing both the technologies and the personnel needed for providing high-quality, multichannel customer support creates a complex and persistent operational challenge. Adding to this difficulty, it is still unclear how service personnel and these new communication technologies interact to influence the customer’s perceptions of the service being provided. Motivated by both practical importanc...

In distance learning systems, students’ satisfaction is a significant issue in terms of student attendance and not feeling lonely. In this study, the relationship between online students’ satýsfaction and their demographic characteristics were examined. Screening model was used in the study. With this study, whether satisfaction levels of students who are continuing in the program in which vari...

BACKGROUND This paper reports on some factors correlated with sexual satisfaction and on differences between female and male university students. SUBJECTS AND METHODS A convenience sample of 174 female and 74 male Slovene undergraduate university students was studied. RESULTS It has been found that an increased frequency of sexual interaction and agreeableness in sexual interactions increas...

Nowadays, recreational sport courses in the universities form an important element in providing the students with sport services. The quality of such services can leave a telling effect on the social and personal life of the students and their spare time, too. The present study aims at highlighting the relationship between the quality of providing such services and students’ satisfaction with r...

The present study tested Lent's (2004) social-cognitive model of normative well-being in a sample (N = 414) of first- and non-first-generation college students. A model depicting relationships between: positive affect, environmental supports, college self-efficacy, college outcome expectations, academic progress, academic satisfaction, and life satisfaction was examined using structural equatio...

This study investigates the effects of culture, robot appearance and task on human-robot interaction. We propose a model with culture (Chinese, Korean and German), robot appearance (anthropomorphic, zoomorphic and machinelike) and task (teaching, guide, entertainment and security guard) as factors, and analyze these factors’ effects on the robot’s likeability, and people’s active response to, e...

We present a methodology, called Constraint Partition and Coordinated Reaction (CP&CR), for distributed constraint satisfaction based on partitioning the set of constraints into subsets of di erent constraint types. Associated with each constraint type is a set of specialized agents, each of which is responsible for enforcing constraints of the speci ed type for the set of variables under its j...

CONTEXT Health care environments have been changing rapidly, and one of the changes is to emphasize patient satisfaction. However, most studies assume that all patients integrate their health care attribute reactions in the same way to arrive at their satisfaction. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study is to investigate how patients' experience of pain influences their attribute reaction inte...

This was a cross-sectional, observational study conducted in an outpatient specialty district health unit in the city of Ribeirão Preto, in the southeastern Brazilian state of São Paulo, with the aim to analyze the job satisfaction of the nursing staff. Data were collected using the Index of Work Satisfaction (IWS), a validated instrument which was applied to 23 members of the nursing team in J...