The popularity and use of complementary and alternative therapies and medicines (CAM) has remained high in the UK and many other countries over at least the last two decades. Access to such modalities via publicly funded health and welfare systems has remained very limited over the same period. Personal health budgets, designed to offer significant control and personal choice over health care, ...

This paper outlines the design and implementation of the Fallen Angel, an autonomous mobile robot that can act as a personal emergency response system. Fallen Angel patrols the home avoiding obstacles while searching for someone who has fallen on the ground. Once a person is detected lying on the floor using face detection, it calls for help by sending preprogrammed text messages and e-mails to...

This paper presents the application of a radio frequency communication system to enable the bidirectional transmission of data between a robot and a personal computer. In order to get effective communication the work proposes a protocol that ensures the wireless serial transfer of information with quality and immune to errors and interferences. The system results in a simple, flexible and low c...

We present an approach to establish a personal and electronic health record (PEHR) system in our region, and describe the underlying vision, the technical aspects, the current status as well as the gained experiences. Applied are international standards (HL7, DICOM) and technologies existing today. Obstacles to overcome during the implementation have been the management of access rights, data p...

this study was conducted to identify self-directed and external professional development obstacles facing primary school efl teachers in southern zone of tigray region in ethiopia. the participants of the study were 63 primary school efl teachers, 10 school principals and 2 clusters of supervisors. school teachers were selected using random sampling technique whereas school principals and clust...

The promises of IPTV and related changes of the traditional TV environment are broadly discussed in the EuroiTV community. In this paper we present preliminary, qualitative results from a user evaluation conducted for an IPTV community platform focusing on usability and user experience issues. Our results show that major obstacles in the first phase of developing an IPTV community application a...

This paper discusses a variety of potential applications of intelligent assistants, from personal digital assistant (PDA) to team digital assistant (TDA). We identify two challenges that arise when developing intelligent assistants in crisis management and give an overview of the different technologies that could be used to address these challenges. In particular we will focus on ontologies and...

In light of the analysis framework including Political and governmental support, Economical and commercial support, Social and communities support and Technology support (PEST), this study identified motivations and obstacles for seniors’ use of social network services (SNS). Scenario simulation interviews based on four steps in which the seniors built strategies for learning about social media...

We have developed a group scheduler which allows users to specify personal preferences and request a suggestion for an activity and group of partners. This service confronts three major challenges; coordinating multiple users, modeling user intent, and maintaining privacy. We overcame these obstacles by using a central web server and optimizing a heuristic. We also describe potential attacks ag...

The aim of the present research was to study the lifetime obstacles and opportunities of academically successful women working at Iran universities. Successful female academics in Iran are concerned about the social and personal barriers to pursuing successful careers in academia. These women continually work to overcome these barriers in an ongoing process called overcoming obstacles. This bas...