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Despite the general good intentions towards the environment, individuals tend to adopt traditional internal combustion vehicles. Drawing from technology research, this study focuses on the impact of society - in the form of subjective norm and image – on the behavioral intention to adopt a technology. More precisely, this study seeks to explore to which extent societal influences drive the behavioral intention to adopt battery electric vehicles (BEV) technology. A self-administered survey was used for this purpose. The analysis of the data from a sample of 111 respondents showed significant relationships between the predictors and the target behavioral outcome. The study also revealed that subjective norm and image are particularly significant factors for the segment of BEV owners. The findings suggest that marketers and practitioners incorporate social elements into their product communication strategies in order to encourage the uptake of environmentally-sound technologies.
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The UTAUT-2 offers the most comprehensive assessment of individual acceptance and use of technology to date. In particular, the theoretical additions of “hedonic motivation”, “price value”, and “habit”, made the model suitable for studying technology in a consumer context. However, a review of the literature revealed that the construct of habit has been dropped from a large number of studies. There are several reasons for this, including that the technologies examined were relatively new for the respondents to form a routine behavior. Therefore, this study aims to explore whether the construct can be used as a key predictor of future intention to use an innovation rather than an acquired practice among technology users. For this purpose, a conceptual model based on the theoretical additions to the UTAUT-2 is proposed and analyzed with structural equation modeling (SmartPLS). Our results showed significant relationships between the predictors and the behavioral intention to use battery electric vehicles (BEV) technology, and, in particular, depicted the construct of habit as the strongest factor in the decision to adopt the technology. In light of our findings, the construct of habit (HT) should be used in research together with the other UTAUT-2 predictors to assess individuals’ perceptions of possible future habitual behaviors.
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Contemporary urban environment is facing big changes caused by a series of synthetic factors on politics, economy, technology, society and culture. Its goals and design concepts have shifted from the fulfillment of the basic function of life into the improvement of whole qualities of cities. Forming the key part of city fabric, urban historical centre helps link scattered individual historical buildings, and retrieve urban fabric. It also takes important roles in preserving history and tradition, keeping social meanings of a place and city's sustainability. This paper briefly analyzed the historic background and current issues in Macao Historic Centre. Meanwhile, strategies and principles are proposed to improve and revitalize public spaces located in dilapidated or misused historical centre so as to provide new scientific and holistic ideas for the creation of a new sustainable environment in China.
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The COVID-19 pandemic has posed a significant public health challenge on a global scale. It is imperative that we continue to undertake research in order to identify early markers of disease progression, enhance patient care through prompt diagnosis, identification of high-risk patients, early prevention, and efficient allocation of medical resources. In this particular study, we obtained 100 5-min electrocardiograms (ECGs) from 50 COVID-19 volunteers in two different positions, namely upright and supine, who were categorized as either moderately or critically ill. We used classification algorithms to analyze heart rate variability (HRV) metrics derived from the ECGs of the volunteers with the goal of predicting the severity of illness. Our study choose a configuration pro SVC that achieved 76% of accuracy, and 0.84 on F1 Score in predicting the severity of Covid-19 based on HRV metrics.
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(Un)Directed Reading is an interactive installation (Edmonds, 2010) initially derived from the “Directed Reading” course, which all undergraduate students at the University must take during their final year. In this course, students are assigned different writing exercises and research assignments to open their creative and constructive minds in writing (EdwardsGroves, 2012; McVey, 2008). Every year, at the end of the course and after a selection process, a collection of stories is uploaded to a database of original stories. We then developed an open-source application to print a receipt ticket from a thermal printer with a randomly picked story every time a user pushes a button. An arcade game-style button is installed on a kiosk designed in collaboration with students and set on the university's campus (left photo). The printed receipt presents a short extract of one of the stories and a QR code that links to the full story decorated with illustrations. In a modern society where most of our interactions are audiovisual-based, young generations are less and less encouraged to read and even less to write. By offering a simple kiosk installation with short stories and graphical illustrations, we propose a new interactive interface that can easily engage passers-by to eventually stimulate their reading and creativity. By reading these stories, students, professors, staff, and visitors can be surprised by the talent of our students, as it stimulates students to write new pieces to be selected. The interactive kiosk was accessible to all for a period of 3 months with 23 stories during which we automatically collected some data to use in quantitative analysis. In this first run, we focused on data from the user's interactions such as story printed, story read, date and time. It allowed us to see the ratio between the printed receipt and the actual online reading of a story and more.
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People with intellectual disabilities need vocational training and support in order to be able to get into the work market and maintain their workplace. In Macau SAR, China, the vocational training ecosystem still operates in fully classic, in-person, fashion, which means it is susceptible to pandemic situations such as COVID-19. This causes a big disruption to the training when isolation measures are in place. Our goal is to study the introduction of serious games for vocational training of people with disabilities in Macau. This work presents a study to assess the training benefits of serious games and usability factors, understand the acceptability and adoption factors/benefits of serious games for vocational training for people with intellectual disabilities and associated stakeholders in Macau.