In health care for older adults, patients with multimorbidity usually receive the same interventions as those patients without multimorbidity. However, standard curative or life-sustaining treatment options have to be considered carefully in view of the maximally attainable result in older and frail patients. To guide such complex medical decisions, we present a compact deliberation framework t...

The low mobility of seniors may be due in part to a history of auto-oriented transportation and land use policy decisions. More recently, land use policies that make it possible to drive less show promise of effectiveness for the population as a whole. However, little attention has been paid to the implications of such policies for older people. Using data collected from Northern California in ...

This paper presents a service robot architecture based on the principles of a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), whose modularity design maximizes the benefits of multidisciplinary contributions from researchers of different areas. The diagram of the proposed architecture is presented and discussed in terms of its development strategy, oriented towards the creation of societal and economical ...

The purpose of this note is to compute the probability of logrolling for three different probabilistic cultures. The primary finding is that the restriction of preferences to be in accord with the condition of separable preferences creates enough additional structure among voters’ preference rankings to create an increase in the likelihood that a Condorcet winner will exist with both IC and IAC...

This paper describes a method for planning with rich qualitative, temporally extended preferences (QTEPs) using lookahead heuristics inspired by those employed in state-of-the-art classical planners. Key to our approach is a transformation of the planning domain into an equivalent but simplified planning domain. First, compound preference formulae are transformed into simpler, equivalent prefer...

We consider voting over combinatorial domains, where alternatives are binary tuples. We assume that votes are specified as conditionally lexicographic preferences, or LP trees. We study aggregation problems of LP tree votes for several positional scoring rules. Our main goal is to demonstrate that answer-set programming can be effective in solving the winner and the evaluation problems for inst...

This article tries to explain the exceptional levels of knowledge creation in certain industrial clusters, levels that are seemingly higher than what is implied by the usual models of atomistic agents who do not internalize externalities. For this purpose, we introduce reference-dependent utility into an OLG model of an industrial cluster where agents allocate resources between consumption and ...

Core-selection is a crucial property of social choice functions, or rules, in social choice literature. It is also desirable to address the incentive of agents to cheat by misreporting their preferences. This paper investigates an exchange problem where each agent may have multiple indivisible goods, agents’ preferences over sets of goods are assumed to be lexicographic, and side payments are n...

BACKGROUND While psychosocial distress and supportive care needs of young adult cancer patients have been increasingly studied, little knowledge exists about preferences for communicating bad news. We aimed to analyze patients' communication preferences against their actual experiences with regard to doctor-patient interactions. PATIENTS AND METHODS We surveyed a total of 270 cancer patients ...

BACKGROUND Objective measurements can be used to identify people with risks of falls, but many frail elderly adults cannot complete physical performance tests. The study examined the relationship between a subjective risk rating of specific tasks (SRRST) to screen for fall risks and falls and fall-related fractures in frail elderly people. METHODS The SRRST was investigated in 5,062 individua...