Mechanisms for maintaining situation awareness in the micro-neurosurgical operating room

Interactions in micro-neurosurgical operating rooms form a complex orchestration of labor and information flows. In the center, there is the focus on patient safety and outcome quality in shortest possible time, while a neurosurgeon is fully focused on the task using a surgical microscope. To guarantee a successful outcome, maintaining a high level of situation awareness (SA) is essential. Suspension of action due to instrument exchange, interaction with a device, or communication affects information flows and collaboration. Situation awareness underlies these interactions. To further understand the mechanisms of SA, we used observations and interviews to gain insight into interactions in micro-neurosurgical theaters. We describe behaviors and strategies exhibited to maintain the interaction flow, in particular, between the scrub nurse and the surgeon. Results show how interactions based on action prediction and active observation within the well-organized environment are influenced, both positively and negatively, by the reliance of the work on the microscope. From this understanding, we discuss the opportunities in future technologies and interfaces for supporting situation awareness maintenance in operating rooms.     

Topic-centric and semantic-aware retrieval system for internet of things

The Internet of things (IoT) has been considered as one of the promising paradigms that can allow people and objects to seamlessly interact. So far, numerous applications and services have been proposed, such as retrieval service. The retrieval, however, faces a big challenge in IoT because the data belongs to different domains and user interaction with the surrounding environment is constrained. This paper proposes Acrost, a retrieval system based on topic discovery and semantic awareness in IoT environment. The initial contents with interesting information is obtained through the combination of two topic centric collectors. The metadata is extracted by aggregating regular expression-based and conditional random fields-based approaches. Moreover, the semantic-aware retrieval is achieved by parsing the query and ranking the relevance of contents. In addition, we present a case study on academic conference retrieval to validate the proposed approaches. Experimental results show that the proposed system can significantly improve the response time and efficiency of topic self-adaptive retrieval manner.     

Current trends on ICT technologies for enterprise information systems

As business conditions change rapidly, the need for integrating business and technical systems calls for novel ICT frameworks and solutions to remain concurrent in highly competitive markets. A number of problems and issues arise in this regard. In this paper, four big challenges of enterprise information systems (EIS) are defined and discussed: (1) data value chain management; (2) context awareness; (3) usability, interaction and visualization; and (4) human learning and continuous education. Major contributions and research orientations of ICT technologies are elaborated based on selected key issues and lessons learned. First, the semantic mediator is proposed as a key enabler for dealing with semantic interoperability. Second, the context-aware infrastructures are proposed as a main solution for making efficient use of EIS to offer a high level of customization of delivered services and data. Third, the product avatar is proposed as a contribution to an evolutionary social, collaborative and product-centric and interaction metaphor with EIS. Fourth, human learning solutions are considered to develop individual competences in order to cope with new technological advances. The paper ends with a discussion on the impact of the proposed solutions on the economic and social landscape and proposes a set of recommendations as a perspective towards next generation of information systems.     

Scalable control plane for intra-domain communication in software defined information centric networking

Recently there has been a new emerging trend in integrating Information Centric Networking (ICN) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) together in the future Internet research area. Software defined information centric networking (SD-ICN) may face more serious scalability problem in control plane compared with traditional SDN environment due to new features about in-network caching and content-based communication. In this paper, we propose a scalable area-based hierarchical architecture (SAHA) for intra-domain communication to address the control plane scalability problem in SD-ICN. The SAHA supports scalable awareness of network resources and content resources, as well as guarantees efficient interest matching and resource adaptation. Simulation experiments under OMNET++ show that the proposed SAHA can achieve outstanding scalability in resource awareness and content-based communication.     

Validation of “alarm bar” alternative interface for digital control panel design: A preliminary experimental study

Properly designed alarm systems can benefit operators in conducting routine and emergency tasks. With the digitization of main control rooms, the alarm interface can be designed in various ways that are different from the traditional “alarm tile” style. An innovative alarm bar interface is proposed in this paper. A preliminary lab experiment was conducted to compare the traditional alarm tile and the new alarm bar interfaces. Sixteen university students were recruited to participate in the experiment, in which two emergency scenarios, Loss of Coolant Accident and Steam Generator Tube Rupture, were tested. The experiment task included two parts: alarm detection and identification. The subjective ratings supported the innovative alarm bar design for better parameter trend perception. The objective performance measures showed that the simpler design of the alarm tile interface better aided the alarm detection performance, whereas the alarm bar interface had almost the same alarm identification performance as the alarm tile interface.Relevance to industryAn alarm system is critical for a complex industrial system. The experimental results show that design evaluation is more complex than it may seem. Although it has not been proved to be overwhelmingly superior to the tile design, the alarm bar design shows promise for aiding operators and needs to be further validated.     

Literature listing

The quarterly Literature Listing is intended as a current awareness service for readers indicating newly published books, journal and conference articles on: patent search techniques, databases, analysis and classifications; patent searcher certification; patents relating to a) life sciences and pharmaceuticals and b) software; patent policy and strategic issues; trade marks; designs; domain names; and articles reviewing historical aspects of intellectual property or reviewing specific topics/persons. The current Literature Listing was compiled early June 2017. Key resources used are Scopus, Digital Commons, publishers' RSS feeds, and serendipity! Please feel free to send the author details of newly published reports/monographs/books for potential inclusion.     

Ambient awareness: From random noise to digital closeness in online social networks

Ambient awareness refers to the awareness social media users develop of their online network in result of being constantly exposed to social information, such as microblogging updates. Although each individual bit of information can seem like random noise, their incessant reception can amass to a coherent representation of social others. Despite its growing popularity and important implications for social media research, ambient awareness on public social media has not been studied empirically. We provide evidence for the occurrence of ambient awareness and examine key questions related to its content and functions. A diverse sample of participants reported experiencing awareness, both as a general feeling towards their network as a whole, and as knowledge of individual members of the network, whom they had not met in real life. Our results indicate that ambient awareness can develop peripherally, from fragmented information and in the relative absence of extensive one-to-one communication. We report the effects of demographics, media use, and network variables and discuss the implications of ambient awareness for relational and informational processes online.     

Complementing retrofit with engagement: exploring energy consumption with social housing tenants

Councils and social housing organisations are looking to retrofit as a way to make their housing more energy efficient. Previous studies on energy use in social housing have generally focussed on the technological aspects (such as the potential savings possible by retrofitting this class of housing across the UK) or have involved one‐off interventions or measures. During a 2‐year period, we worked with previously homeless people to reduce their energy consumption. The 32 participants lived in small blocks of flats (owned by a social housing organisation) that underwent retrofitting with air source heat pumps. We ran a three‐phase tenant engagement programme to compare a range of approaches aimed at energy reduction. It was found that education, social norms and self‐awareness are all key components when it comes to initiating environmentally responsible behaviours. The three approaches complemented each other, and these ought to be considered alongside technology provision if the aim is to reduce energy consumption. A number of reflections on the implementation of medium‐term tenant engagement programmes are also presented. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Resource-awareness on heterogeneous MPSoCs for image processing

Multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC) designs offer a lot of computational power assembled in a compact design. The computing power of MPSoCs can be further augmented by adding massively parallel processor arrays (MPPA) and specialized hardware with instruction-set extensions. On-chip MPPAs can be used to accelerate low-level image-processing algorithms with massive inherent parallelism. However, the presence of multiple processing elements (PEs) with different characteristics raises issues related to programming and application mapping, among others. The conventional approach used for programming heterogeneous MPSoCs results in a static mapping of various parts of the application to different PE types, based on the nature of the algorithm and the structure of the PEs. Yet, such a mapping scheme independent of the instantaneous load on the PEs may lead to under-utilization of some type of PEs while overloading others.In this work, we investigate the benefits of using a heterogeneous MPSoC for accelerating various stages within a real-world image-processing algorithm for object-recognition. A case study demonstrates that a resource-aware programming model called Invasive Computing helps to improve the throughput and worst observed latency of the application program, by dynamically mapping applications to different types of PEs available on a heterogeneous MPSoC.     

Driver behaviour with adaptive cruise control

This paper reports on the evaluation of adaptive cruise control (ACC) from a psychological perspective. It was anticipated that ACC would have an effect upon the psychology of driving, i.e. make the driver feel like they have less control, reduce the level of trust in the vehicle, make drivers less situationally aware, but workload might be reduced and driving might be less stressful. Drivers were asked to drive in a driving simulator under manual and ACC conditions. Analysis of variance techniques were used to determine the effects of workload (i.e. amount of traffic) and feedback (i.e. degree of information from the ACC system) on the psychological variables measured (i.e. locus of control, trust, workload, stress, mental models and situation awareness). The results showed that: locus of control and trust were unaffected by ACC, whereas situation awareness, workload and stress were reduced by ACC. Ways of improving situation awareness could include cues to help the driver predict vehicle trajectory and identify conflicts.