A PSO-based intelligent service dispatching mechanism for customer expectation management

In the era of experience economy, service providers have to provide customers with high quality service experience in order to attract more customers and achieve higher customer satisfaction. Managing customer expectation is a critical approach for service providers to consider. Although customer expectation has been discussed across different research disciplines, to our knowledge, there is still no systematical and feasible way to apply customer expectation management into real environments. This study attempts to establish an intelligent service dispatching mechanism by using particle swarm optimization for customer expectation management. This mechanism can help service providers design and deliver satisfactory service experience to customers. In order to evaluate the effectiveness and robustness of this mechanism, this study employs micro- and macro-simulation experiments to confer and analyze its performance. The simulation results show service providers can gain benefit and raise customer satisfaction by managing customer expectation during service experience delivery. Meanwhile, customers can also receive memorable experiences and have positive responses to service providers and other customers. Consequently, a high performance ecosystem within service providers and customers can be formed.     

Cultures of participation—for students,by students

Culturally relevant health information is said to benefit diverse populations and is critical for health dissemination and user experience creation. Social media and online content provide mechanisms to engage specific populations while helping to reduce barriers that can often hinder participation and engagement. Using action research and informed by co‐creation theory, the MyHealthImpactNetwork.org initiative seeks to provide a user experience targeting Black female college students. Data were collected from females at a large university located in the Southeast United States. Through focus group participants' feedback, co‐creation with students as design delegates and reviews of social media resentments, MyHealthImpactNetwork.org evolved to include user‐driven content. Results indicate that Black females are interested in HIV prevention information that uses simple, non‐technical health jargon. The information should be, however, socially engaging to enable their voices to be heard, absent of cultural assumptions and biases about Black women, and embody an ownership ethos relative to social content. Informed by principals of canonical action research and the co‐creation that results between the researcher and potential user, these findings suggest that the hedonic dimension underpins the key design lessons. This research helps to fill a void in the literature regarding the creation of user experiences for health‐related messages, particularly those regarding stigmatized conditions, such as HIV, while designing for cultures of participation among under‐represented groups.     

An Architecture Supporting Intelligent Mobile Healthcare Using Human-Computer Interaction HCI Principles

Recent advancements in the Internet of Things IoT and cloud computing have paved the way for mobile Healthcare (mHealthcare) services. A patient within the hospital is monitored by several devices. Moreover, upon leaving the hospital, the patient can be remotely monitored whether directly using body wearable sensors or using a smartphone equipped with sensors to monitor different user-health parameters. This raises potential challenges for intelligent monitoring of patient’s health. In this paper, an improved architecture for smart mHealthcare is proposed that is supported by HCI design principles. The HCI also provides the support for the User-Centric Design (UCD) for smart mHealthcare models. Furthermore, the HCI along with IoT`s (Internet of Things) 5-layered architecture has the potential of improving User Experience (UX) in mHealthcare design and help saving lives. The intelligent mHealthcare system is supported by the IoT sensing and communication layers and health care providers are supported by the application layer for the medical, behavioral, and health-related information. Health care providers and users are further supported by an intelligent layer performing critical situation assessment and performing a multi-modal communication using an intelligent assistant. The HCI design focuses on the ease-of-use, including user experience and safety, alarms, and error-resistant displays of the end-user, and improves user’s experience and user satisfaction.     

Exploring healthcare experiences among online interactive weight loss forum users

Internet use for health information is increasingly popular, especially among individuals who are embarrassed or feel stigmatized by personal health conditions such as obesity. Little is known about how healthcare experiences might be linked to using online interactive weight loss forums. We used qualitative methods to analyze forum users' discussions in three high traffic weight loss forums in order to explore characteristics of healthcare experiences (including patient-provider communication) and their influence on health information-seeking. We identified five major themes related to forum users' healthcare experiences that influenced where, when, and from whom health information was sought: (1) access to (and time spent with) providers; (2) providers not adequately managing weight-related shame and emotion; (3) lack of clarity of health information from providers; (4) lack of trust of health information from providers; and (5) rapport and personal relationships with providers. We conclude with recommendations and implications for future research and practice.     

Provider experience and order selection in the sharing economy

The sharing economy, enabled by digital platforms, which connect providers and consumers for peer-to-peer exchanges, experienced rapid growth in recent years. Although researchers attempted to explore the societal or business impact of the sharing economy market, little is known about how individual providers operate their businesses, given that providers are capacity-constrained, self-scheduled and unprofessional. In this study, we are interested in the relationship between experience and providers' order selection behaviours. Leveraging a rich and proprietary dataset from a large sharing economy platform—which facilitates the exchanges of home-cooked meals in China—and employing multiple identification strategies and estimation methods, we find that the number of orders declined by a provider first increases with their experience, but later decreases. However, their sales revenue keeps increasing with experience. Our investigation further reveals that this happens because providers adjust their order selection strategies at different experience levels to achieve higher revenue in the sharing economy. Our study is among the pioneering studies to empirically understand providers' market behaviours in the sharing economy and offers important practical implications.     

Differences in intrapersonal and interactional empowerment between lurkers and posters in health-related online support communities

Participation in health-related online support communities plays an important role in the psychological empowerment of people who are faced with health problems. Research has suggested that important differences exist in terms of psychological empowerment depending on the form and intensity of participation in such domains by showing that users who contribute to health-related online support communities by posting messages (posters) generally experience greater benefits in terms of intrapersonal empowerment, compared to participants who only read messages (lurkers). However, as yet, very little is known about how the often-neglected interactional aspect of psychological empowerment is associated with participation in these online domains. Thus, the aim of this study was to explore how different forms and intensity of participation in health-related online support communities are associated with both dimensions of psychological empowerment. Drawing on a nonprobability sample of 616 participants in two health-related online support communities, the analysis of the data, obtained with an online questionnaire, revealed that posters scored significantly higher in degree of interactional empowerment than lurkers, whereas no difference was observed in terms of intrapersonal empowerment. In addition, high posting frequency was significantly associated with a high level of interactional empowerment but not intrapersonal empowerment. The study suggests that to better understand the empowering potential of participation for users of health-related online support communities, it is important to distinguish not only between various forms of participation but also between different aspects of psychological empowerment.     

Participation of Danish and immigrant cleaners in a 1-year worksite intervention preventing physical deterioration

Worksite health promotion is seldom offered to workers who are low-educated and multi-ethnic, possibly due to an assumption that they are more reluctant to participate. Furthermore, little has been done to promote health at female-dominated workplaces. The main aim of this study was to investigate differences in participation among immigrant and Danish cleaners throughout a 1-year randomised controlled study tailored to cleaners and carried out in predominantly female workplaces. No significant differences in ethnicity were found in consent and participation throughout the 1-year intervention. Dropout was equally distributed among Danish and immigrant cleaners. This study indicates that a worksite health promotion intervention among a female-dominated, high-risk occupation such as cleaning can be equally appealing for Danes and immigrants. PRACTITIONER SUMMARY: This study provides insight about participation of Danish and immigrant cleaners in a worksite health promotion intervention in a predominantly female occupation. For attaining high participation and low dropout in future worksite health promotion interventions among cleaners, the intervention ought to not only target the ethnic background of the workers, but also to be specifically tailored to the job group.     

Hedaquin: A Reputation-based Health Data Quality Indicator

A number of applications based on personal health records (PHRs) are emerging in the field of health care and wellness. PHRs empower patients by giving them control over their health data. Health data for PHRs can be supplied by patients, wellness providers and health care providers. Health care providers may use the PHRs to provide medical care. Unfortunately, the quality of the health data cannot be guaranteed in all cases (e.g. consider cases where non-professionals such as patients and wellness providers supplied the data).To address this problem, we present in this paper Hedaquin, a system that provides health care professionals with an indication of the quality of health data in a PHR. This indication is based on the reputation of the supplier and on metadata provided by measurement devices. The proposed reputation system mimics the way trust in health data and their suppliers is built in the real world.Hedaquin uses the Beta reputation system as a starting point and extends it in several directions to cover specific PHR requirements. Firstly, Hedaquin supports the automatic calculation of a rating based on a repeated measurement. Secondly, certificates for the user such as diplomas are taken into account. Thirdly, Hedaquin calculates reputation for different scopes in order to discriminate among different tasks the suppliers of health data can perform. Finally, the time difference between the ratings and the calculation of the reputation influences the weight that is given to a rating.     

Service interaction design: A Hawk-Dove game based approach to managing customer expectations for oligopoly service providers

In the “experience economy”, effectively delivering memorable and exciting customer experiences has become a key issue for service providers. Service experience delivery involves service encounters through which interactions between service providers and customers can be shaped into interactive artifacts managing customer expectations and dynamically delivering suitable services. Service interaction design aims to optimize customer interactions with services to match customer expectations and yield satisfactory service experiences. On the other hand, service providers typically make profits and cost the priority, despite knowing that high service quality can maximize satisfaction, particularly in markets served by an oligopoly, resulting in customers only accepting existing limited-value services. Hence, the oligopoly market can be regarded as a value-bounded context. Additionally, understanding customer expectations regarding a wide range of interactions is crucial to service providers selecting and designing services that match customer expectations. Therefore, this paper presents a service interaction design mechanism to help oligopoly service providers systematically and effectively manage customer expectations in dynamic interactions, even in value-bounded contexts. The proposed mechanism models this service interaction design problem as a series of Hawk-Dove games that approach an evolutionary stable state. The evaluation results suggest that oligopoly service providers should change their mindsets and design service interactions to manage customer expectations associated with service delivery, not only to ensure high satisfaction and profit but also to engage customers in co-creating value.     

Determinants of user participation: a Finnish survey

The relationship between user participation and information systems success has intrigued researchers for two decades. Despite this history there is minimal research on the antecedents of user participation. The tenet of the present paper is that the conditions of user participation are essentially changing. Especially, the European tradition of user participation has focused on blue collar workers rather than professionals and managers. Users are normally assumed to be computer illiterate. The North American tradition has almost exclusively focused on the impact of user participation on information systems success. The present paper examined the significance of organizational level of users, their task variety and computer experience as determinants of user participation including age, gender, education, computer training, organizational tenure and job tenure as control variables. The three determinants were found to have a significant positive effect on user participation, computer experience emerging as the most dominant factor. Gender, education and computer training were discovered to have significant effects mediated by organizational level, task variety and computer experience.     

Managing and sharing servants' reputations in P2P systems

Peer-to-peer information sharing environments are increasingly gaining acceptance on the Internet as they provide an infrastructure in which the desired information can be located and downloaded while preserving the anonymity of both requestors and providers. As recent experience with P2P environments such as Gnutella shows, anonymity opens the door to possible misuses and abuses by resource providers exploiting the network as a way to spread tampered-with resources, including malicious programs, such as Trojan Horses and viruses. We propose an approach to P2P security where servants can keep track, and share with others, information about the reputation of their peers. Reputation sharing is based on a distributed polling algorithm by which resource requestors can assess the reliability of perspective providers before initiating the download. The approach complements existing P2P protocols and has a limited impact on current implementations. Furthermore, it keeps the current level of anonymity of requestors and providers, as well as that of the parties sharing their view on others' reputations.     

Managing service facilities with endogenous arrival and service rates

We conduct a simulation‐based experiment to analyze how past experiences in a service facility system affect customers’ and service providers’ behavior. We study the problem faced by service providers in deciding by how much to adjust the capacity of their facility when captive repeat customers choose which facility to join based on their expected sojourn times. The customers’ decision‐making process differs from that of service providers in that the former is based on the customers’ experience, whereas the latter is based on the most recent information service providers have regarding demand. Customers use their previous experience and that of their neighbors to update their perceptions of the future average sojourn time, whereas service providers form perceptions of the future arrival rate. We use cellular automata to model the interaction between customers and service providers. We perform simulations to assess the way the customers’ and service providers’ decisions evolve and affect system behavior. Our findings demonstrate that the system we study possesses a certain degree of path dependence. The primary conclusion is that the more conservative service providers are regarding new information, the larger the market share they achieve, and the lower the probability that their facility will shut down.     

A secure web-based approach for accessing transitional health information for people with traumatic brain injury

A web-based transitional health record was created to provide regional healthcare professionals with ubiquitous access to information on people with brain injuries as they move through the healthcare system. Participants included public, private, and community healthcare organizations/providers in Eastern Ontario (Canada). One hundred and nineteen service providers and 39 brain injury survivors registered over 6 months. Fifty-eight percent received English and 42% received bilingual services (English-French). Public health providers contacted the regional service coordinator more than private providers (52% urban centres, 26% rural service providers, and 22% both areas). Thirty-five percent of contacts were for technical difficulties, 32% registration inquiries, 21% forms and processes, 6% resources, and 6% education. Seventeen technical enquiries required action by technical support personnel: 41% digital certificates, 29% web forms, and 12% log-in. This web-based approach to clinical information sharing provided access to relevant data as clients moved through or re-entered the health system. Improvements include automated digital certificate management, institutional health records system integration, and more referral tracking tools. More sensitive test data could be accessed on-line with increasing consumer/clinician confidence. In addition to a strong technical infrastructure, human resource issues are a major information security component and require continuing attention to ensure a viable on-line information environment.     

Experience-based service provider selection in agent-mediated E-Commerce

For a given service demand, it is necessary to select a suitable service provider among many possibilities. An accurate selection is difficult when consumers do not have a significant history with many of the service providers and thus need to interact with others to make informed selections. In traditional approaches, consumers rate the service providers and exchange these ratings among each other. Contrary to traditional, rating-based service provider selection, this paper advocates an objective, experience-based approach in which consumers record their experiences with service providers rather than the overall, subjective ratings. A consumer's experience with a provider captures the requested service and the delivered service in terms of service-specific attribute values. When an experience is transferred from one service consumer to another, the receiving consumer evaluates the experience using her own evaluation criteria. By sharing experiences, service consumers can model service providers accurately and thus make better selections for their needs. Rating-based strategies use highly subjective information for decision making since ratings depend on satisfaction criteria of the rater. However, the proposed method uses experiences, which do not include any interpretation. Comparisons of experience-based and rating-based strategies show that the experience-based approach results in higher customer satisfaction rates in many real-life settings.     

Expectation-based coopetition approach to service experience design

Service experience design is a key issue in the service industry. Satisfactory service experiences provide customers with good memories and increase customer satisfaction, thus increasing customer loyalty and service provider profitability. However, providing customers with quality service experiences requires considering numerous factors, and thus is a complex and difficult issue both in academia and in real service contexts. Customer satisfaction results from the difference between customer perceptions and customer expectations. Hence, customer expectation management is important in delivering quality service experiences. Additionally, a competitive relationship exists among different service providers as well as between service providers and customers. The service experience delivery process can be regarded as a value co-creation process for service providers and customers who can implement either a competitive or cooperative strategy based on their goals and needs. This study accordingly presents an expectation based coopetition approach by using a real exhibition data of AutoTronics 2009 for simulations. The evaluation results show that this expectation-based coopetition approach can help service providers design and deliver quality service experiences and co-create value with customers, yielding a high performance ecosystem.     

US Cell Phone Industry Faces an Open Future

The US wireless industry appears to be in the midst of a sea change in the way it does business. It is just beginning to move away from the traditional walled-garden approach, in which users can pick their service providers but the carriers determine the phones and applications that customers can use. This gives service providers control of the wireless experience.     

Performance analysis of server sharing collectives for content distribution

Demand for content served by a provider can fluctuate with time, complicating the task of provisioning serving resources so that requests for its content are not rejected. One way to address this problem is to have providers form a collective in which they pool together their serving resources to assist in servicing requests for one another's content. In this paper, we determine the conditions under which a provider's participation in a collective reduces the rejection rate of requests for its content - a property that is necessary for such a provider to justify its participation within the collective. We show that all request rejection rates are reduced when the collective is formed from a homogeneous set of providers, but that some rates can increase within heterogeneous sets. We also show that, asymptotically, growing the size of the collective will sometimes, but not always, resolve this problem. We explore the use of thresholding techniques, where each collective participant sets aside a portion of its serving resources to serve only requests for its own content. We show that thresholding allows a more diverse set of providers to benefit from the collective model, making collectives a more viable option for content delivery services.