Timely daily activity recognition from headmost sensor events

Smart homes are designed to promote safe and comfortable living for inhabitants without any manual intervention. The performance of approaches for daily activity recognition is therefore crucial, but current real-time approaches have to wait until a daily activity ends before performing recognition. We present an approach for timely daily activity recognition from an incomplete stream of sensor events, by which the recognition process can start as soon as a daily activity begins. Activity features are generated from several headmost sensor events rather than from all sensor events that a daily activity activated. A public dataset was utilized to evaluate the presented method. Experimental findings show its effectiveness for timely daily activity recognition in terms of precision, recall, average saved time, and saved time proportion.     

Reducing children's exposure to environmental tobacco smoke in homes: issues and strategies

It is now well established that children's exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) results in substantial public health and economic impacts. Children are more likely than adults to suffer health effects from ETS exposure, and the home is the most important site of such exposure.
  Although the responsibility and authority of the community and health professionals to protect children from harm are entrenched in North American society, social, economic, legal, and political factors contribute to a lower level of support for ETS control measures in homes compared with workplaces and public places. It is now clear that ETS control in home environments must be a priority on the public health agenda. Programme and policy options and strategies for ETS control in home environments are outlined. We conclude that the current research base is inadequate to fully support programme and policy development in this area and priorities for research are identified.


Keywords: environmental tobacco smoke; homes; children     

Limited-water-supply sprinklers for manufactured (mobile) homes

A prototype limited-water-supply (LWS) sprinkler has been developed for manufactured (mobile) homes in a research program sponsored by the United States Fire Administration. The LWS sprinkler is designed to be installed at a 2.44 m (8-foot) spacing and to have a total water supply of 380 (100 gallons). The installation spacing was determined in a series of freeburn fire tests that indicated that the heat release rate at sprinkler actuation could be halved by reducing the sprinkler spacing from 3.66 m to 2.44 m (12 feet to 8 feet). A series of eight fullscale fire tests, including a corner living room scenario similar to that used in the Los Angeles Residential Test Program, was conducted to evaluate the performance of the prototype sprinkler. In five of the tests, room tenability was maintained during the 10-minute period following the actuation of a single sprinkler at a flow rate of 38 pm (10 gpm). In three tests, tenability was maintained with multiple sprinkler actuation (2 or 3 sprinklers) and a total system flow rate of 49 pm (13 gpm). The spray of the sprinkler was characterized in terms of its water flux distribution and drop size distribution. The thermal sensitivity requirements of the sprinkler are to be based upon RTI, C, and temperature rating, which would ensure that sprinkler actuation would occur at fire sizes comparable to those encountered using the prototype LWS sprinkler in this study.     

Householders co-managing energy systems: space for collaboration?

ABSTRACT

The potential role of households as ‘co-managers’ of energy in smart grids is widely discussed in the social science literature. Much remains uncertain about the social relations and practices emerging around novel smart grid technologies and their contribution to sustainability. Drawing on 14 ‘show-and-tell’ home tours with householders in a smart grid trial, an analysis is presented of how home energy management (HEM) is performed in everyday life. The focus is on three technologies: monitoring technologies, smart heat pumps and home batteries. How and why householders do (not) engage with energy management during the pilot project is described. When householders participate in HEM practices, they gain energy management understandings and an awareness of smart grid objectives. Since HEM practices are shared between householders and actors from the energy provision system, they display particular ways of distributing responsibilities, power and agency over technologies, experts and householders. The time and space granted to these three smart grid technologies are shown to depend on the trust relationships between householders and the more or less absent providers of technologies and services. These insights emphasize the need to develop smart grid solutions reflexively with respect to the different spaces and practices in households in which they operate.     

Child protection in Romania after the fall of communism: challenges for the development of community social services

The paper reviews policies established since the fall of communism (1989) to deal with the effects of abandonment of children as a result of Ceaucescu’s pro‐natalist policies.     

浅析王安忆小说中家园的多重意蕴

家园情结是一种独特的心理现象,当代女作家王安忆的家园情结给她带来孤独、漂泊的无根感的同时,也促使她不断地进行着精神之塔的构建。文章从地域家园、心灵家园、文化家园三个层面对王安忆的家园情结进行了阐释,勾勒了其文学创作的精神之旅。     

Case studies of IT sophistication in nursing homes: A mixed method approach to examine communication strategies about pressure ulcer prevention practices

Most nursing homes lack information technology (IT) for supporting clinical work in spite of its potential to improve the safety, quality, and efficiency of nursing home care in the United States. Increased attention to medical error and concern for patient safety have prompted general recommendations to develop sophisticated technologies to support clinical decision making at the point of care, to promote data standards in electronic records, and to develop systems that communicate with each other. However, little is known about what IT applications best support communication and risk assessment practices to improve resident outcomes in nursing homes. Thus, the overall aim of this study was to evaluate how differences in IT sophistication in nursing homes impact communication and use of technology related to skin care and pressure ulcers. We used a mixed method approach to conduct case studies on two nursing homes – one with high IT sophistication and one with low IT sophistication. Observational analysis and social network analysis were used to identify patterns in communication types and locations; also, focus groups were conducted to explore communication strategies used by Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) to support pressure ulcer prevention practices. Overall, results from social network analysis of observational data indicate that direct interactions between CNAs and registered nurses (RNs) or licensed practical nurses (LPNs) were more frequent in the low IT sophistication home and occurred in more centralized locations (e.g. the nursing station) compared to the high IT sophistication home. Moreover, these findings are supported by focus group results, which indicate that the high IT sophistication home had more robust and integrated communication strategies (both IT and non IT) that may allow for interactions throughout the facility and require less frequent face to face interactions between CNAs and RNs or LPNs to verify orders or report patient status. Results from this study provide insight into the design and assessment of different forms of communication to support clinical work in NHs.Relevance to industryNurses bear great burdens for nursing home care; yet, issues persist with poor quality, variable performance of caregiving, and lack of implementation of proven care interventions. One new hope for improvement in nursing home care is the introduction of IT to improve communication, clinical decision-making, and quality of care.     

Integration of discriminative and generative models for activity recognition in smart homes

Activity recognition in smart homes enables the remote monitoring of elderly and patients. In healthcare systems, reliability of a recognition model is of high importance. Limited amount of training data and imbalanced number of activity instances result in over-fitting thus making recognition models inconsistent. In this paper, we propose an activity recognition approach that integrates the distance minimization (DM) and probability estimation (PE) approaches to improve the reliability of recognitions. DM uses distances of instances from the mean representation of each activity class for label assignment. DM is useful in avoiding decision biasing towards the activity class with majority instances; however, DM can result in over-fitting. PE on the other hand has good generalization abilities. PE measures the probability of correct assignments from the obtained distances, while it requires a large amount of data for training. We apply data oversampling to improve the representation of classes with less number of instances. Support vector machine (SVM) is applied to combine the outputs of both DM and PE, since SVM performs better with imbalanced data and further improves the generalization ability of the approach. The proposed approach is evaluated using five publicly available smart home datasets. The results demonstrate better performance of the proposed approach compared to the state-of-the-art activity recognition approaches.     

老年人社区设计初探

我国已经慢慢步入老龄化社会,在面临这样转型期的社会阶段,如何设计出适合老年人居住和使用的公共设施、居民区和住宅,将成为我们这代建筑师设计工作的重点。虽然在20世纪90年代末,针对人口老龄化情况下的建筑设计展开了一系列的研究和探讨,但是由于对老年人居住建筑设计的认识深度不够,经验不足造成设计上有所偏颇。笔者希望通过本文能够起到一个抛砖引玉的作用,引起大家新的一轮对老年人居住模式的探讨和研究。     

Deterioration and disposal of fruit in the home: Consumer interviews and fruit quality assessments

BACKGROUND: Consumers often express concern about the quality of fruit available to buy and the rate at which it deteriorates in their homes. Despite this there are few studies on quality of fruit collected from consumers. This study considered three questions: (1) what was the quality of fruit in retail stores and how did it vary over the study period? (2) What was the extent that fruit quality deteriorated in consumers' homes? (3) Were there any consumer behaviours or attitudes that extenuated or mitigated the effects of fruit deterioration in the home? RESULTS: The quality of fruit purchased from the supermarkets was above what would be considered commercially acceptable, but varied in a non‐systematic fashion across the study period. The fruit in consumers' homes was of slightly lower physical quality than that purchased from the supermarkets, and the deterioration in quality was as would be expected as fruit ripens. Even so, 28% of consumers indicated that they dispose of fruit each week. This occurred despite many of them having strategies to minimise wastage. CONCLUSION: Despite the deterioration and wastage of fruit, the consumers in this study did not appear overly concerned and some even took ownership for the poor quality of fruit in their home. Copyright © 2008 Society of Chemical Industry