Intelligent assistants on mobile devices, such as Siri, have recently gained considerable attention as novel applications of dialogue technologies. A tremendous amount of real users of intelligent assistants provide us with an opportunity to explore a novel task of predicting whether users will continually use their intelligent assistants in the future. We developed prediction models of prospec...

AIM This paper reports on a study examining the level of agreement between the pain perceptions of nursing assistants, older people without dementia and patients with Alzheimer's dementia. It was hypothesized that nursing assistants would overestimate the pain experience of patients with Alzheimer's dementia. BACKGROUND There is now increasing evidence that, in contrast to other subtypes of d...

BACKGROUND In Germany, the coverage of officially recommended vaccinations for the elderly is below a desirable level. It is known that advice provided by General Practitioners and Physician Assistants influences the uptake in patients ≥60 years. Therefore, the predictors of advice-giving behavior by these professions should be investigated to develop recommendations for possible actions for im...

INTRODUCTION Sexual assistance may have some aspects that resemble prostitution and others that might lead one to think of sexual assistants as similar to a group of subjects whose sexual object is disability (devotees). In this study, we investigate whether a rigorous selection and training process on the part of specialised organisations may reduce the risk of training subjects with an atypic...

Different users of a publication environment, e.g., authors, editors, layouters, typesetters, will together produce and distribute a publication. We consider three different kinds of components in such an environment: assistants, agents, and tools. Assistants provide users with homogeneous access to local tools, such as text editors, information bases etc. In addition, they support the cooperat...

Non-technical skills (NTS), which include communication, teamwork, leadership, decision-making, and situation awareness, are important in the maintenance of patient safety. NTS frameworks have been developed for anaesthetists, surgeons, and scrub practitioners. Most studies of NTS in operating theatres to date have focused on anaesthetists and surgeons. We have attempted to identify the NTS use...

Recent research and commercial developments have highlighted the importance of human involvement in user support for web information systems. In our earlier work a web assistant system has been introduced, which is a hybrid support system with human web assistants and computer-based support. An important issue with web assistant systems is how to make optimal use of these support resources. We ...

We are developing several exercise assistants which give very good feedback. To develop an exercise assistant, we need three components: a domain description, rules for reasoning about the domain, and one or more strategies for solving the exercises in the domain. To support the possibility to adapt the several components, to avoid code duplication and maximize code reuse, we have developed a g...

This article examines the influence of teacher assistants and other personnel on outcomes for elementary school students during a period recession-induced cutbacks in assistants. Using panel data from North Carolina, we exploit state’s unique system financing its local public schools to identify causal effects assistants, controlling staff, measures student achievement. We find consistent evide...