This paper extends the connection between computers and theatre, first explored by Brenda Laurel in her research into human-computer interface. Applying a similar approach to the study of telepresence can present new perspectives and yield an interesting insight into the causes, effects and structure of telepresence. Working within a phenomenological tradition, the author establishes some point...

Conventional loose-weave cotton operating garments were compared with clothing of a non-woven fabric to test their efficacy in reducing the dispersal of skin bacteria into theatre air. When men wore operating suits made of the non-woven fabric dispersal of skin bacteria was reduced by 72%. When all the operating-theatre staff wore suits and dresses of this fabric air bacterial counts during ope...

The NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement has determined that a £7 million saving can be achieved per trust by improving theatre efficiency. The aim of this quality improvement project was to improve orthopaedic theatre turnaround without compromising the patient safety. We process mapped all the stages from application of dressing to knife to skin on the next patient in order to identif...

The Royal United Hospital, Bath, admits approximately 550 patients with neck of femur fractures per year. The risks from returning to theatre for this patient group are often life-threatening. Post-operative wound ooze was noted to cause a significant rate of return to theatre, with increased lengths of stay and patient morbidity. A wound closure protocol was agreed by the consultant body. This...

Readers of this article have probably seen, at least once, diagrams produced using the UML (Unified Modeling Language). Some of you have perhaps used UML for your own work and know that the UML can also be applied to a variety of analytic disciplines, ranging from economics to electronics, from mathematics to medicine, etc. However, you are less likely to have encountered UML in the strictly ar...

This paper describes an experience of porting the THEATRE agent architecture on top of the grid. The agent architecture consists of light-weight actors and computational theatres which have been proven to be well suited for modeling and simulation of complex systems. THEATRE nodes act as agencies that provide common services of message scheduling and dispatching to mobile actors. THEATRE is cur...

This paper proposes a component-based software architecture (Theatre) hosted by Java, which enables modelling and discrete-event simulation of complex and dynamically reconfigurable systems, possibly on top of a distributed computing context. At the “programming in-the-small” level, Theatre rests on light-weight reactive components (actors or agents) which interact to one another by asynchronou...