BACKGROUND Informal caregivers are essential figures for maintaining frail elderly at home. Providing informal care can affect the informal caregivers' physical and psychological health and labour market participation capabilities. They need support to prevent caregiver burden. A variety of existing support measures can help the caregiver care for the elderly at home, but with some limitations....

In this paper we discuss potential benefits and future directions in virtual reality rehabilitation for co-located motor training in children with developmental movement disorders. We discuss the potential for co-located VR to promote participation using cooperative virtual environments, facilitate social learning, and quantify levels of social interaction. We pay particular attention to the ca...

After noting that informal documents and formal knowledge bases are far from ideal for discussing or retrieving technical knowledge, we propose mechanisms to support the sharing, re-use and cooperative update of semi-formal semantic networks, assign values to contributions and credits to the contributors. We then propose ontological elements to guide and normalize the construction of such knowl...

A major theme within the literature on rural development is that the particular mix of formal and informal institutions present in any situation is a key determinant of development outcomes. However, there is some evidence that in policy and practice there are considerable difficulties in articulating formal organizational realities with the rules and norms embedded in informally constructed so...

A major theme within the literature on rural development is that the particular mix of formal and informal institutions present in any situation is a key determinant of development outcomes. However, there is some evidence that in policy and practice there are considerable difficulties in articulating formal organizational realities with the rules and norms embedded in informally constructed so...

If people are free to contract, will outcomes be efficient? We study the question through the lens of a non-cooperative model of contract negotiations, considering both compulsory and voluntary participation in negotiations. In either case, we find that all consistent equilibria of the contracting game are efficient in the case of two players. With mandatory participation, efficiency is attaina...

In software engineering community there is an increasing effort of design and development of multi-agent systems (MAS). However, agent system development is currently dominated by informal guidelines, heuristics and inspirations rather than formal principles and well defined engineering techniques. In this paper we present a framework for agent-based software development called Agent-SE. We pre...