Many physical diseases have been reported to be associated with psychosocial factors. In these diseases, assessment relies mainly on subjective symptoms in natural settings. Therefore, it is important to assess symptoms and/or relationships between psychosocial factors and symptoms in natural settings. Symptoms are usually assessed by self-report when patients visit their doctors. However, self...

Ecological momentary assessment and/or experience sampling methods are increasingly used in health studies to study subjective experiences within changing environmental contexts. In these studies, up to 30 or 40 observations are often obtained for each subject. Because there are so many measurements per subject, one can characterize a subject's mean and variance and can specify models for both....

Planning in large partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) is challenging especially when a long planning horizon is required. A few recent algorithms successfully tackle this case but at the expense of a weaker information-gathering capacity. In this paper, we propose Information Gathering and Reward Exploitation of Subgoals (IGRES), a randomized POMDP planning algorithm that le...

AIM This research applied ecological thinking to develop a more integrated or ecological understanding of the needs and aspirations of communities of older people. METHODS A three-stage methodology was utilised. Stage one entailed the thematic analysis of resident satisfaction surveys collected from 1000 residents of aged living and care facilities to identify issues impacting upon their live...

Objectives: This research applied ecological thinking to develop a more integrated or ecological understanding of the needs and aspirations of communities of older people. Method: A three stage methodology was utilised. Stage one entailed the thematic analysis of resident satisfaction surveys collected from 1000 residents of aged living and care facilities to identify issues impacting upon thei...

Urban planning is the space expression of urban resource configuration. Its central goal is using the effective resource with the lowest ecological cost in exchange for the greatest economic benefits. The current city’s expansion which is dominated by the development, is too fast, which has overlooked the balance between planning and environmental protection. The contradiction between urban dev...

BACKGROUND One Health (OH) is an interdisciplinary collaborative approach to human and animal health that aims to break down conventional research and policy 'silos'. OH has been used to develop strategies for zoonotic Emerging Infectious Diseases (EID). However, the ethical case for OH as an alternative to more traditional public health approaches is largely absent from the discourse. To study...

In the best practices, planning of urban green spaces is managed in such a way that it follows the key principles such as meeting per capita standards and providing accessible and balanced distribution of these spaces all across the city. In the context of emerging economy, these principles are unfortunately not followed strictly all times. In this study, it is attempted to investigate Tabriz c...

An important indicator of sustainable land use, the ecological footprint measure has proved unsuitable for many planning applications because of the limited availability of impact data at the local level of cities and counties and because of an inability to estimate the ecological footprint of future development scenarios. In light of these limitations, this paper presents a methodology for mea...

Ecological engineering was defined as the practice of joining the economy of society to the environment symbiotically by fitting technological design with ecological self design. The boundary of ecological engineering systems includes the ecosystems that self organize to fit with technology, whereas environmental engineering designs normally stop at the end of the pipe. For example, the coastal...