PLAIN ENGLISH SUMMARY In Australia, since 2009, the Consumer and Community Involvement Program (formerly the Consumer and Community Participation Program) has developed and run workshops to help people working in health and medical research involve more consumers (patients) and community members (the public) in their research. In 2012, workshop attendees were invited to do an online survey to f...

Introduction The effectiveness of emergency preparedness and response systems depends, in part, on the effectiveness of communication between agencies and individuals involved in emergency response, including health care providers who play a significant role in planning, event detection, response and communication with the public. Although much attention has been paid to the importance of commu...

This paper investigates the factors that affect users’ communication satisfaction within a virtual community, in particular, an online chat room. A research model consisting of 3 aspects—psychological, technological and environmental—is developed to examine effects of anonymity, media richness and activeness of chat room on social presence, privacy concern, and further communication satisfactio...

Place-based virtual community is the trend of recent researches on pervasive computing. The purpose is to enable users in a physical place to receive ubiquitous services from the environment while they communicate with each other unwittingly. The paper further promotes this idea by allowing remote users to join such a virtual community as well as to interact with members on site and calls this ...

BACKGROUND Adequate awareness of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) and their risk factors may help reduce the population's exposure to modifiable risk factors and thereby contribute to prevention and control strategies. There is limited data on knowledge among the general population in sub-Saharan Africa regarding CVD and risk factors. We aimed to assess the population awareness (and associated fac...