OBJECTIVE The goal of this project was to create an easy-to-administer and inexpensive tool that can help identify usability issues in a patient room bathroom during the design process so improvements can be made before the final product is constructed and put into operation. BACKGROUND The bathroom is an essential part of any hospital patient room, yet it is associated with nurse dissatisfac...

Given a heuristic estimate of the relative safety of a hybrid dynamical system trajectory, we transform the initial safety problem for dynamical systems into a global optimization problem. We introduce MLLO-IQ and MLLO-RIQ, two new information-based optimization algorithms. After demonstrating their strengths and weaknesses, we describe the class of problems for which diierent optimization meth...

Geometrical symmetries are commonly exploited to improve the efficiency of search algorithms. A new type of symmetry in permutation state spaces, duality, is introduced. Each state has a dual state. Both states share important attributes such as their distance to the goal. Given a state S, it is shown that an admissible heuristic of the dual state of S is an admissible heuristic for S. This pro...

This paper focuses on evaluation techniques for multimodal software. We suggest how multimodal educational systems can help us and give a proposal for how to evaluate these systems. Our goal is to come up with human-computer interaction (HCI) evaluation techniques for multimodal systems to support affective education and adapt usability evaluation taking into consideration the cognitive walkthr...

Usability evaluation tools in the form of heuristic lists can be very helpful in software development. In the field of video game design, researchers are continuously developing new heuristic tools aimed specifically at video game productions. However, through previous studies, the authors have found that even though these tools are frequent and common, design issues regularly appear in video g...

The task of balancing of assembly lines is well-known in mass production system but this problem is NP-hard even for the simple straight line. Therefore, utilizing heuristic methods for these problems is totally unquestionable. Furthermore, in line with balancing problems, heuristic methods are the foundation of the metaheuristic methods, thus it seems to be necessary to use more efficient heur...

Cost-effective methods for formative evaluation of educational multimedia are needed. Heuristic methods have been shown to be cost-effective in the area of user interface evaluation. This paper describes the use of heuristic methods to evaluate the user interface, educational design and content of an educational multimedia project.

Financial technology (FinTech) has swiftly revolutionized mobile money as one of the ways accessing financial services in developing countries. Numerous applications were developed to access but are hindered by severe authentication security challenges, thus, forcing researchers design a secure multi-factor (MFA) algorithm for applications. Three prototypes native (G-MoMo applications) confirm ...