In the last 10 years many designs and trial implementations of holonic manufacturing systems have been reported in the literature. Few of these have resulted in any industrial take up of the approach and part of this lack of adoption might be attributed to a shortage of evaluations of the resulting designs and implementations and their comparison with more conventional approaches. This paper pr...

We present a self-learning singing pitch training tool on the smart-phone to evaluate the efficacy of the real-time interaction mechanism for improving users’ intonation and timing, which are the most essential techniques in singing. It consists of (1) an intonation level classifier, (2) a scoring mechanism to help the users know how well they perform, and (3) an interactive pitch training mech...

Currently wearable computing is still a technology of niches and in a laboratory stage. With wearIT@work a project dedicated to applications was launched by the European Commission (EC IP 004216). The first 18 months of the project are over and the first demonstrators and results were achieved. In this paper the concept of the project is introduced and results are presented. As the project stro...

On one hand, heuristic evaluation has been considered as a potential alternative for extensive user testing; on the other hand, some comparative studies showed that user testing could not be substituted by heuristic evaluation. In this basic usability study of some widely estimated electronic newspapers, we show that it is indeed the case, but moreover, that results from user testing can valida...

In this paper, we describe the shaping factors, which simplify and help us understand the multi-dimensional aspects of designing Wearable Expressions. These descriptive shaping factors contribute to both the design and user-experience evaluation of Wearable Expressions.

Policymakers in many countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia, have introduced programs to increase walking and biking to school through education, encouragement, and infrastructure improvements. The U.S. government has allocated over $1.1 billion to the federal Safe Routes to School program since 2005. However, there are few evaluations of the Safe Routes to School...

PURPOSE Exercises are described that were designed to provide practice in phonetic transcription for students taking an introductory phonetics course. The goal was to allow instructors to offload much of the drill that would otherwise need to be covered in class or handled with paper-and-pencil tasks using text rather than speech as input. METHOD The exercises were developed using Alvin, a ge...

The present study describes the technique of Flow Network Modeling (FNM) and its application for the design of an air-cooled server. The technique of FNM involves representation of the flow system as a network of flow paths and components for the prediction of system-wide flow and bulk temperature distribution. The FNM technique is very efficient in terms of the effort required for model defini...

An analysis of an asynchronous phase-coded spread-spectrum multiple-access communication system is presented. The results of this analysis reveal which code parameters have the greatest impact on communication performance and provide analytical tools for use in preliminary system design. Emphasis is placed on average performance rather than worst-case performance and on code parameters which ca...

This paper examines the outcomes for clinicians from their involvement in the development of an electronic clinical hand-over tool developed using principles of user-centered design. Conventional e-health post-implementation evaluations tend to emphasize technology-related (mostly positive) outcomes. More recently, unintended (mostly negative) consequences arising from the implementation of e-h...