Interface design and contemporary: human creating new guidelines for high-tech products

Contemporary electronic industry offers a wide range of products. Usually touch sensitive and with few buttons and a lot of functions these products not always have a friendly interface. The human x design interface based on electronics' ergonomics is the focus of this research. An evolutionary analysis of the electronics industry design within a contemporary context clarifies this relation and proposes new guidelines for a more conscious design.     

Automatic sleep stage classification based on easy to register signals as a validation tool for ergonomic steering in smart bedding systems

Ergonomic sleep studies benefit from long-term monitoring in the home environment to cope with daily variations and habituation effects. Polysomnography allows to asses sleep accurately, but is costly, time-consuming and possibly disturbing for the sleeper. Actigraphy is cheap and user friendly, but for many studies lacks accuracy and detailed information. This proof-of-concept study investigates Least-Squares Support Vector Machines as a tool for automatic sleep stage classification (Wake-N1-Rem to N2-N3 separation), using automatic trainingset-specific filtered features as derived from three easy to register signals, namely heart rate, breathing rate and movement. The algorithms are trained and validated using 20 nights out of a 600 night database from over 100 different healthy persons. Different training and test set strategies were analyzed leading to different results. The more person-specific the training nights to the test nights, the better the classification accuracy as validated against the hypnograms scored by experts from the full polysomnograms. In the limit of complete person-specific training, the accuracy of the algorithm on the test set reached 94%. This means that this algorithm could serve its use in long-term monitoring sleep studies in the home environment, especially when prior person-specific polysomnographic training is performed.     

When gender bumps into health and safety training: working conditions, readings and challenges drawn from a case study in an industrial chemicals company

Health, safety and environmental issues are at present a social concern and an increasingly referred topic in the so called gender studies. This paper focuses on the relations between training, gender and risk perception in an industrial chemicals company, in Portugal, characterized by a mainly male population and by the presence of high occupational and environmental hazards. After characterizing the company and the training project that started up this reflection, the paper presents the reasons for its focus on gender followed by the essential methodological explanations: 14 interviews were made with male and female workers from the company; their content was transcribed from the audio recordings and it was systematically analyzed. A gender-attentive socio demographic analysis was also undertaken. Although at the beginning the company did not consider the gender issues as a problem nor was it the central topic of the training, which focused on the prevention of occupational and environmental hazards, the results reveal that the gender factor brought to light some working conditions, which so far have not been properly discussed within the group meetings. As a consequence, there is now room for the transformation of the representations on those working conditions.     

Order-picking in deep cold--physiological responses of younger and older females. Part 1: heart rate

The sales figures of chilled and frozen food have been rising steadily over the years. Naturally, this has also led to an increase in the number of jobs related to these goods. While these workplaces are becoming more and more important there are, nevertheless, only a few investigations into the effects of working in deep cold on humans. Order-picking in a cold environment represents a high workload. Especially working at -24°C with wearing heavy cold protective clothing leads to explicitly higher strain. Since performance decreases with age, varying physical strain between younger and older employees can hypothetically be expected. In order to quantify the physiological responses to working in the cold, 15 subjects of two female age groups, each, (20- to 35-year-olds and 40- to 65-year-olds) were asked to carry out whole working day tasks in a chill room (+3°) and in a cold store (-24°C). Simultaneously, heart rate and other physiological relevant parameters were measured.     

Participative development of packages in the food industry--evaluation of ergonomics and productivity by objective measurements

Rationalizations generally have a negative effect on health and known risk factors for musculoskeletal disorders. These effects may be reduced by paying attention to modifiers as worker participation and a resonant management style. In this study a participatory approach was used in the food industry in order to improve ergonomics and productivity. The food industry shows a high prevalence of musculoskeletal disorders, and repetitive manual work occurs extensively. Prototypes of new packaging solutions were developed in three cases, and compared in a simulated production to the existing production system through direct measurements of working postures and muscle activity, ratings of physical load, and general productivity data. Measured and rated ergonomic exposures showed that workload was significantly lower for the prototypes, in all three cases. In two cases, the number of handling operations included in the packaging operations were greatly reduced with the prototype package, as were production costs. The impact on disorders of the obtained load reductions is difficult to assess, but we believe that in "critical" situations like this, even small improvements may have an effect. This study shows that workloads during manual handling of packages as well as production costs can be reduced by applying participative development of packages.     

Father-daughter incest: data from an anonymous computerized survey

Retrospective data were entered anonymously by 1,521 adult women using computer-assisted self-interview. Nineteen were classified as victims of father-daughter incest, and 241 were classified as victims of sexual abuse by an adult other than their father before reaching 18 years of age. The remaining 1,261 served as controls. Incest victims were more likely than controls to endorse feeling damaged, psychologically injured, estranged from one or both parents, and shamed by others when they tried to open up about their experience. They had been eroticized early on by the incest experience, and it interfered with their adult sexuality. Incest victims experienced coitus earlier than controls and after reaching age 18 had more sex partners and were more likely to have casual sex outside their primary relationship and engage in sex for money than controls. They also had worse scores on scales measuring depression, sexual satisfaction, and communication about sex than controls.     

Opening the black box of link formation: Social factors underlying the structure of the web

Links play a twofold role on the web: they open the channels through which users access information, and they determine the centrality of sites and their visibility. This paper adds two factors to the analysis of links that aim to draw a parallel between the web and other offline interorganisational networks: the resources that the organisations publishing online are able to mobilise, and the status or public recognition of those organisations. Exponential random graph models (ERGMs) are used to analyse a sample of the web of about one thousand sites, showing that both the economic resources of the producers of the sites (a proxy to their wider pool of resources) and their presence in traditional news media (a proxy to their status) significantly increase their probability of receiving more links, and therefore, their centrality. This adds a sociologically relevant dimension to the analysis of the web that has been disregarded so far but that is crucial to understand the way it distributes visibility.     

Representations of autism in Australian print media

The mass media provides a frame for discourse around important health issues, and it has been widely demonstrated that the development and reinforcement of stereotypes of minority groups are strongly influenced by the news and entertainment media. An extensive search of academic databases failed to locate any studies which examined the representation of autism in the news media, although there were a number of articles on the media role in the autism and MMR debate. This paper reports on an examination of the extent, and nature, of coverage of ‘autism spectrum disorders’ in the Australian print media between 1996 and 2005. Key findings include a relatively limited amount of factual information and a dual stereotype of people labeled as having autism as either dangerous and uncontrollable or unloved and poorly treated. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the nature and tone of this coverage of autism and its potential impact on individuals described as ‘autistic’, their families and carers and the community in general.     

Family-of-origin and service-member resilience

ABSTRACT

Military research on family resilience has not examined the contribution of family-of-origin to resilience of service-members. In this study, researchers investigated the extent to which predeployed service-members’ perception of resilience was related to characteristics of family-of-origin. The sample consisted of 344 U.S. Army soldiers within 6 months of deployment to Afghanistan, contacted through their units and invited to participate. Soldiers completed a survey of perceived resilience, family-of-origin and immediate family variables, and social support. Data were also collected on age, income, ethnicity, number of deployments, and relationship status. Regression analyses were conducted to explain variation in service-member resilience scores. Sample demographics were compared with the active duty soldier population and correlations among the key family-of-origin and social support variables were reported. Family-of-origin satisfaction was moderately related to service-member resilience for the full sample (β = .176, p = .001) and married sample (β = .260, p = .000). It was weakly related in the unmarried sample (β = .147, p = .226). Family social support explained the most variation in resilience across all samples. Study limitations and guidelines and resources for social work practice, education, and research to strengthen family-of-origin and service-member resilience are provided.