scholarly journals Navigation in Indoor Environments: Does the Type of Visual Learning Stimulus Matter?

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 251 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dajana Snopková ◽  
Hana Švedová ◽  
Petr Kubíček ◽  
Zdeněk Stachoň
Keyword(s):  
User Study ◽  
Visual Learning ◽  
Indoor Navigation ◽  
Spatial Representations ◽  
Indoor Environments ◽  
Floor Plan ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Virtual Tour ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Impact

This work addresses the impact of a geovisualization’s level of realism on a user’s experience in indoor navigation. The key part of the work is a user study in which participants navigated along a designated evacuation route previously learnt in a virtual tour or traditional 2D floor plan. The efficiency and effectiveness of completing the task was measured by the number of incorrect turns during navigation and completion time. The complexity of mental spatial representations that participants developed before and after navigating the route was also evaluated. The data was obtained using several qualitative and quantitative research methods (mobile eye tracking, structured interviews, sketching of cognitive maps, creation of navigation instructions, and additional questions to evaluate spatial orientation abilities). A total of 36 subjects (17 in the “floor plan” group and 19 in the “virtual tour” group) participated in the study. The results showed that the participants from both groups were able to finish the designated navigation route, but more detailed mental spatial representations were developed by the “virtual tour” group than the “floor plan” group. The participants in the virtual tour group created richer navigation instructions both before and after evacuation, mentioned more landmarks and could recall their characteristics. Visual landmark characteristics available in the virtual tour also seemed to support the correct decision-making.

scholarly journals Extraction of Structural and Semantic Data from 2D Floor Plans for Interactive and Immersive VR Real Estate Exploration

Technologies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 101 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georg Gerstweiler ◽  
Lukas Furlan ◽  
Mikhail Timofeev ◽  
Hannes Kaufmann
Keyword(s):  
Interior Design ◽  
User Study ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Indoor Navigation ◽  
Indoor Environments ◽  
Floor Plan ◽  
Semantic Data ◽  
Engineering Standards ◽  
Floor Plans ◽  
Definition Of

Three-dimensional reconstructions of indoor environments are useful in various augmented and virtual scenarios. Creating a realistic virtual apartment in 3D manually does not only take time, but also needs skilled people for implementation. Analyzing a floor plan is a complicated task. Due to the lack of engineering standards in creating these drawings, they can have multiple different appearances for the same building. This paper proposes multiple models and heuristics which enable fully automated 3D reconstructions out of only a 2D floor plan. Our study focuses on floor plan analysis and definition of special requirements for a 3D building model used in a Virtual Reality (VR) setup. The proposed method automatically analyzes floor plans with a pattern recognition approach, thereby extracting accurate metric information about important components of the building. An algorithm for mesh generation and extracting semantic information such as apartment separation and room type estimation is presented. A novel method for VR interaction with interior design completes the framework. The result of the presented system is intended to be used for presenting a large number of apartments to customers. It can also be used as a base for purposes such as furnishing apartments, realistic occlusions for AR (Augmented Reality) applications such as indoor navigation or analyzing purposes. Finally, a technical evaluation and an interactive user study prove the advantages of the presented system.

scholarly journals Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on Retail Structure in Barcelona: From Tourism-Phobia to the Desertification of City Center

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (15) ◽  
pp. 8215
Author(s):  
Lluís Frago Clols
Keyword(s):  
Multiple Scales ◽  
Real Estate Market ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
City Center ◽  
Urban Theory ◽  
The Real Estate ◽  
Tourist Flows ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

COVID-19 has meant major transformations for commercial fabric. These transformations have been motivated by the collapse of consumer mobility at multiple scales. We analyzed the impact of the collapse of global tourist flows on the commercial fabric of Barcelona city center, a city that has been a global reference in over-tourism and tourism-phobia. Fieldwork in the main commercial areas before and after the pandemic and complementary semi-structured interviews with the main agents involved highlight the relationship between global tourist flows and commercial fabric. The paper shows how the end of global tourism has meant an important commercial desertification. The end of the integration of the city center into global consumer flows has implications for urban theory. It means a downscaling of the city center and the questioning of traditional center-periphery dynamics. It has been shown that the tourist specialization of commerce has important effects on the real estate market and makes it particularly vulnerable. However, the touristic specialization of commercial activities as a strategy of resilience has also been presented. This adaptation faces the generalized commercial desertification that drives the growing concentration of consumption around the online channel.

scholarly journals Impact of the Paralympic Games on the Beliefs of Children with Physical Disabilities Engaging in Sports and Physical Activities: A Chinese Perspective

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (14) ◽  
pp. 7296
Author(s):  
Jing Qi ◽  
Jin-He Cai ◽  
Xun Meng
Keyword(s):  
Attitude Change ◽  
Physical Disabilities ◽  
Chinese Children ◽  
Physical Education Teachers ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Negative Attitudes ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Sports And Physical Activity ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Paralympic Games

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the beliefs of Chinese children with physical disabilities engaging in sports and physical activity (PA), and the impact of the Paralympic Games on these beliefs. Five Chinese children with physical disabilities (female = 2, male = 3) were recruited for participating in the workshops of the Paralympic Games and PA, and received individual semi-structured interviews before and after the workshop implementations. Interview transcripts were analysed and presented as descriptive summaries. Three themes emerged based on the analysis of the participants’ interview data: (1) shocked, knowledgeable, and useful; (2) willingness to try, and (3) hope to obtain support. Results indicated that children with physical disabilities in this study acknowledged the positive outcomes of participating in the workshops of the Paralympic Games on the sports and PA engagement attitude change. However, children with disabilities also expressed that they need more related knowledge and information. The results of the study revealed that impairment and contextual factors (i.e., lack of support from family and physical education teachers, unsafe environments, and negative attitudes of peers without disabilities) were barriers to sports and PA engagement among children with physical disabilities in this study.

Constructing Floor Plan through Smoke Using Ultra Wideband Radar

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Weiyan Chen ◽  
Fusang Zhang ◽  
Tao Gu ◽  
Kexing Zhou ◽  
Zixuan Huo ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Information ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Indoor Navigation ◽  
Location Based Services ◽  
Ultra Wideband ◽  
Indoor Environments ◽  
Floor Plan ◽  
Construction Methods ◽  
Median Error ◽  
Indoor Scenarios

Floor plan construction has been one of the key techniques in many important applications such as indoor navigation, location-based services, and emergency rescue. Existing floor plan construction methods require expensive dedicated hardware (e.g., Lidar or depth camera), and may not work in low-visibility environments (e.g., smoke, fog or dust). In this paper, we develop a low-cost Ultra Wideband (UWB)-based system (named UWBMap) that is mounted on a mobile robot platform to construct floor plan through smoke. UWBMap leverages on low-cost and off-the-shelf UWB radar, and it is able to construct an indoor map with an accuracy comparable to Lidar (i.e., the state-of-the-art). The underpinning technique is to take advantage of the mobility of radar to form virtual antennas and gather spatial information of a target. UWBMap also eliminates both robot motion noise and environmental noise to enhance weak reflection from small objects for the robust construction process. In addition, we overcome the limited view of single radar by combining multi-view from multiple radars. Extensive experiments in different indoor environments show that UWBMap achieves a map construction with a median error of 11 cm and a 90-percentile error of 26 cm, and it operates effectively in indoor scenarios with glass wall and dense smoke.

scholarly journals The social impact of the ‘Social solidarity income’ in Greece: A qualitative interpretation

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 5
Author(s):  
Theodoros Sakellaropoulos ◽  
Varvara Lalioti ◽  
Nikos Kourachanis
Keyword(s):  
Social Impact ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Survival Strategies ◽  
Social Solidarity ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Minimum Income ◽  
Positive Elements ◽  
The Social ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Impact

The present article sheds light on the implementation of the ‘Social Solidarity Income’ (SSI) in Greece, an example of a guaranteed minimum income (GMI). Drawing on the findings of 40 semi-structured interviews carried out in five selected municipalities, the article focuses on the ‘social impact’ of the SSI. More specifically, it investigates two inter-related themes: a) the social situation of beneficiaries and the survival strategies they used before and after receiving the SSI; and b) aspects of the SSI that should be improved at the implementation stage. It is argued that, despite certain positive elements of the SSI, such as the monetary allowance, which is a key component of the SSI and assists beneficiaries in covering their basic needs, the impact of the SSI on the lives of individuals is relatively small and a large proportion of the beneficiaries continue to rely on the survival strategies they used before implementation of the SSI

Assessing the enterprising tendencies of Arab female undergraduate engineering students in the Sultanate of Oman

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (6) ◽  
pp. 429-439
Author(s):  
Naveed Yasin ◽  
Zeinab Khansari ◽  
Taimur Sharif
Keyword(s):  
Risk Taking ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Chemical Engineering ◽  
Boot Camp ◽  
First Year ◽  
Need For Achievement ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Extended Duration ◽  
The Impact

This study assesses the enterprising characteristics of first-year undergraduate Omani female chemical engineering students in Muscat, Oman. Pre and post surveys were conducted with 27 respondents from an entrepreneurship boot camp module mandated by the Oman Ministry of Higher Education. The variables, measured on a 10-point Likert scale, included need for achievement, need for autonomy, creativity, risk-taking, and locus of control. Statistical analysis was performed on the integrated data to measure the impact of student learning using a t-test approach and comparing mean averages. This was followed by qualitative semi-structured interviews that were examined using thematic analysis. The comparison of students’ enterprise tendencies before and after the module indicates minor to moderate improvements in their entrepreneurial abilities and their understanding of entrepreneurial behavior. The most noticeable impact was on students’ risk-taking abilities, followed by their creativity, need for achievement, need for control, and, lastly, their need for autonomy. The findings illustrate that students perceived entrepreneurship positively but were concerned about the scheduling of the module and its integration into their core program of study. Students may have benefited further from a module of extended duration as opposed to the block delivery “boot camp” mode of learning. Due to the limited number of participants and the focus on female students only, the results of the study cannot be generalized. However, the article presents an initial exploration of and offers insights into enterprising characteristics among an empirically underexplored demographic and nonbusiness group.

scholarly journals Adjusting Sails: A Narrative Inquiry into the Transfer Experience of Three Secondary Teachers in the Maldives

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Aminath Nihan
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Inquiry ◽  
Secondary Teachers ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Professional Lives ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Negative Experience ◽  
Teacher Transfer ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Personal Perceptions ◽  
The Impact

<p>'Adjusting Sails' is a narrative inquiry which presents the stories of three secondary teachers who underwent transfer from one school to the other in the Maldives. This metaphoric journey also describes my journey as a narrative researcher, how I sailed into unknown waters with my participants, what I discovered, and the interpretations I drew from their experiences. Semi-structured interviews of teachers and transfer managers and the analysis of official correspondence of the transfer contributed to the richness of the data. The stories of the teachers were analyzed for common themes, partially corroborated by contrasting the data gathered from interviews with two transfer managers, and written in collaboration with the participant storytellers. Trustworthiness of findings was further enforced through member-checking and adhering to reflexive procedures. The findings of this study suggest that the three teachers found the transfer quite stressful and as having impacted negatively on their emotions and professional lives. Communication issues before and after the transfer, personal perceptions associated with the transfer as well as leadership practices in their new environments appeared to have given rise to de-motivation, stress and frustrations. Apart from contributing to existing literature on teacher transfer, this study highlighted factors that made the transfer a negative experience for teachers and provided evidence which may usefully inform school managements and future transfer policies on the impact a transfer can have on the emotional and professional well-being of teachers.</p>

scholarly journals Perceptions of home in long-term care settings: before and after institutional relocation

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (6) ◽  
pp. 1267-1290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mineko Wada ◽  
Sarah L. Canham ◽  
Lupin Battersby ◽  
Judith Sixsmith ◽  
Ryan Woolrych ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Physical Environment ◽  
Long Term Care ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Term Care ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Sense Of Home

AbstractAlthough moving from institutional to home-like long-term care (LTC) settings can promote and sustain the health and wellbeing of older adults, there has been little research examining how home is perceived by older adults when moving between care settings. A qualitative study was conducted over a two-year period during the relocation of residents and staff from an institutional LTC home to a purpose-built LTC home in Western Canada. The study explored perceptions of home amongst residents, family members and staff. Accordingly, 210 semi-structured interviews were conducted at five time-points with 35 residents, 23 family members and 81 staff. Thematic analyses generated four superordinate themes that are suggestive of how to create and enhance a sense of home in LTC settings: (a) physical environment features; (b) privacy and personalisation; (c) autonomy, choice and flexibility; and (d) connectedness and togetherness. The findings reveal that the physical environment features are foundational for the emergence of social and personal meanings associated with a sense of home, and highlight the impact of care practices on the sense of home when the workplace becomes a home. In addition, tension that arises between providing care and creating a home-like environment in LTC settings is discussed.

scholarly journals Adjusting Sails: A Narrative Inquiry into the Transfer Experience of Three Secondary Teachers in the Maldives

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Aminath Nihan
Keyword(s):  
Narrative Inquiry ◽  
Secondary Teachers ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Professional Lives ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Negative Experience ◽  
Teacher Transfer ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Personal Perceptions ◽  
The Impact

<p>'Adjusting Sails' is a narrative inquiry which presents the stories of three secondary teachers who underwent transfer from one school to the other in the Maldives. This metaphoric journey also describes my journey as a narrative researcher, how I sailed into unknown waters with my participants, what I discovered, and the interpretations I drew from their experiences. Semi-structured interviews of teachers and transfer managers and the analysis of official correspondence of the transfer contributed to the richness of the data. The stories of the teachers were analyzed for common themes, partially corroborated by contrasting the data gathered from interviews with two transfer managers, and written in collaboration with the participant storytellers. Trustworthiness of findings was further enforced through member-checking and adhering to reflexive procedures. The findings of this study suggest that the three teachers found the transfer quite stressful and as having impacted negatively on their emotions and professional lives. Communication issues before and after the transfer, personal perceptions associated with the transfer as well as leadership practices in their new environments appeared to have given rise to de-motivation, stress and frustrations. Apart from contributing to existing literature on teacher transfer, this study highlighted factors that made the transfer a negative experience for teachers and provided evidence which may usefully inform school managements and future transfer policies on the impact a transfer can have on the emotional and professional well-being of teachers.</p>

Clinician and patient perspectives of a new model of triage in a community rehabilitation program that reduced waiting time: a qualitative analysis

2013 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine E. Harding ◽  
Nicholas F. Taylor ◽  
Birgitte Bowers ◽  
Maree Stafford ◽  
Sandra G. Leggat
Keyword(s):  
Waiting Times ◽  
Rehabilitation Program ◽  
Rehabilitation Service ◽  
Wait List ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
New Model ◽  
Community Rehabilitation ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Impact

Background A trial of a new model of triage (Specific and Timely Appointments for Triage: STAT) at a community rehabilitation program (CRP) reduced the mean time to first appointment from 17.5 to 10.0 days. However, quantitative findings reveal little about the impact of the system on those who used it. We aimed to explore the experiences of patients and clinicians following the introduction of STAT. Method Qualitative study within a convergent mixed-methods design applied to a controlled before and after trial at a CRP. Semi-structured interviews (n = 32) were conducted with clinicians who experienced the change to STAT, patients admitted to the CRP using STAT and patients who attended rehabilitation via a triaged wait list at another site. Results Clinicians reported shorter waiting times, more flexibility and increased efficiency with STAT, and noted the importance of effective change management. Patients reported a more efficient and consistent pathway to rehabilitation with STAT. Waiting had negative consequences for some patients at the triaged wait list site. Conclusions The qualitative data provide context to the quantitative results by showing that the changes that reduced waiting times were also well accepted and perceived to be beneficial by both patients and clinicians. What is known about the topic? Triage systems are widely used but can contribute to inefficiencies in health care. An alternative method of triage (STAT) using early allocation to face-to-face appointments has been shown to reduce waiting times in a community rehabilitation service. What does this paper add? This paper explains and adds important context to the quantitative findings by exploring the perceptions of the staff and patients who experienced both the existing and alternative models of triage. What are the implications for practitioners? The STAT model was well received by staff and patients, suggesting that this simple intervention was a feasible and effective method of reducing waiting times for community rehabilitation, and may be applicable to other services that share similar features.

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