Despite progress in air pollution control, concerns remain over the health impact of poor air quality. Governments increasingly issue air quality information to enable vulnerable groups to avoid exposure. Avoidance behaviour potentially biases estimates of the health effects of air pollutants. But avoidance behaviour imposes a cost on individuals and therefore may not be taken in all circumstan...

While physical and mental health benefits of regular physical activity are well known, increasing evidence suggests that limiting sedentary behaviour is also important for health. Evidence shows associations of physical activity and sedentary behaviour with health-related quality of life (HRQoL), however, these findings are based predominantly on duration measures of physical activity and seden...

The dominant conceptual framework for understanding reproductive behaviour is highly individualistic. In this article, it is demonstrated that such a conceptualization is flawed, as behaviour is shaped by social relations and institutions. Using ethnographic evidence, the value of a social analysis of the local contexts of reproductive health is highlighted. A framework is set out for conductin...

This paper extends the Function-Behaviour-Structure (FBS) framework, which proposed eight fundamental processes involved in designing. This framework did not explicitly account for the dynamic character of the context in which designing takes place, described by the notion of situatedness. This paper describes this concept as a recursive interrelationship between different environments, which, ...

This paper proposes a comprehensive schema to represent an agent’s social knowledge using the Function – Behaviour – Structure (FBS) schema. Although this schema has originally been developed to represent knowledge about design objects, it is sufficiently abstract to also describe knowledge about agents. This paper shows how such an FBS view can be useful to support the interaction of situated ...

This article outlines the contribution that ethnography could make to process evaluations for trials of complex health-behaviour interventions. Process evaluations are increasingly used to examine how health-behaviour interventions operate to produce outcomes and often employ qualitative methods to do this. Ethnography shares commonalities with the qualitative methods currently used in health-b...

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Positive health behaviour is critical to preventing illness and managing chronic conditions. A user-centred methodology was employed to design an online social network to motivate health behaviour change. The methodology was augmented by utilizing the Appeal, Belonging, Commitment (ABC) Framework, which is based on theoretical models for health behaviour change and use of online social networks...

This paper presents the beginnings of a formal framework to enhance our understanding of situated design agents. It builds on the function-behaviour-structure (FBS) schema to represent essential concepts of situated designing. Our framework covers different stages in the life-cycle of situated design agents, including their development, testing and usage.

Nowadays, t he bi otechnologically pr oduced p olymers, e .g. p oly(3hydroxyalkanoates) (PHAs), a re widely used for biomedical ap plications ( e.g. in t issue e ngineering), because of bi odegradation a nd high biocompatibility. PHAs are used for development of various medical devices. These biopolymers can be also used for development of experimental models, e.g. 3D cell culture model. To dev...