In people’s home the amount of on-line available digital content such as video, music, or pictures is rapidly increasing. First home server products are available. Efficient selection of content will be a problem for users. We developed a flexible multimodal dialog system to overcome this. A keycomponent is the user model, which learns very fast from user behaviour. All information like key-wor...

2012 was named as “the first year of Fresh Electronic Commerce” in China. Then the Electronic Commerce of fresh and fresh home delivery obtained rapid development. Although the development speed of fresh home delivery is fast, it still could not meet the demand of Fresh Electronic Commerce. The aim of this paper is to analyze the current situation of development of “the last mile” of Chinese fr...

Fast food consumption has increased dramatically over the past three decades in U.S., accounting for nearly 35.5% of total away-from-home expenditures in 1999 (USDA/ERS). Given dramatic changes in food consumption, and heightened public concern about health and obesity, there is a considerable need to understand better the factors affecting food consumption choices and the implications of these...

Development of low-cost and inter-operable home sensing products in recent years has motivated the development of consumerlevel energy and home monitoring software solutions to exploit these new streams of data available to end-users. In particular, this opens up the home energy space as an area of high potential for the use of consumerlevel energy optimisation with home-owners actively engaged...

OBJECTIVE To analyze the characteristics of out-of-home eating and spending on such consumption. METHODS A complex sample of 48,470 Brazilian households, selected from the 2002-2003 Household Budget Survey (HBS) was analyzed. Out-of-home eating was defined as the purchase of at least one type of food for consumption out of the home during seven days. Frequencies of out-of-home eating were est...

BACKGROUND Empiric studies find that contextual factors affect individual weight status over and above individual socioeconomic characteristics. Given increasing levels of obesity, researchers are examining how the food environment contributes to unhealthy weight status. An important change to this environment is the increasing availability of away-from-home eating establishments such as restau...

The Smart Grid is an evolution of the existing electricity grid. It comprises of a two-way communication where electricity and information is exchanged by the consumer and utility to maximize efficiency. Home automation is an important milestone in achieving smart grid and is ever exciting field that has exploded over the past few years. Advancement in technologies have made homes more convenie...

the objective of this study has been to examine the relationship between home and the hospital confinement in the treatment of serious illness and the impact of such phenomena on the pattern of the delivery of health care in the rural areas. in this study a total of 10,248 inhabitants of 11 villages in isphahan (mobarakeh area) were studied during a six months period between march and september...