Search results

A new design of safety vests was developed for patients with uncontrollable behaviour or altered conscious level in this study. A comprehensive approach for designing functional textile and apparel products was adopted. The design request and exploration of the design situation and problem were identified. The settings in the general and psychiatric wards and the traditional ways of the use of safety vests on patients were examined. Problems of the traditional safety vests were identified, such as loose fitting design and large armholes, tight neckline which may result in unexpected accidents such as strangulation, difficulty of wearing, limited mobility, and obsolete functional design.

A new set of design criteria and specifications were then developed. An interaction matrix of design specification for safety vests was formulated since some of the design specifications are in conflict with each other. For instance, a tight fit design could optimize the level of restraint, but it may result in patients' psychological and physiological discomfort due to limited mobility. Supported by the evaluation of fabric materials and fastening systems, a new design of safety vests was then developed and evaluated.

Physical restraints have been commonly used in health care settings for people with challenging behaviours. The function performance of restraint garments in relation to their design attributes is evaluated so as to optimise the protection and safety of patients. In contrast to the traditional approach of evaluating fabric properties, this study proposes a practical and systematic approach in which the effects of the design attributes of restraint garments can be evaluated based on their unique functions of mobility control, safety and practical use of restraint in medical/healthcare settings. The design and performance of traditional restraint vests are assessed and compared against two new prototypes of restraint garments in terms of the amplitude of arm movement, garment interface pressures and displacements of 3D motion coordinates by using the Novel Pliance X pressure and motion capturing system. The results reveal that design attributes affect the performance of mobility restriction and safety of restraint garments. Necklines with collar piping and the use of reinforcement seams to withstand continuous stress during struggling may lead to extremely high interface pressures at the neckline and armholes, which result in ischemia injuries and even potential strangulation.

This chapter presents a systematic review of over 30 types of online marketing methods. It describes different methods like email marketing, social network marketing, in-game marketing and augmented reality marketing, among other approaches. The researchers discuss that the rationale for using these online marketing strategies is to increase brand awareness, customer-centric marketing and consumer loyalty. They shed light on various personalization methods including recommendation systems and user-generated content in their taxonomy of online marketing terms. Hence, they explain how these online marketing methods are related to each other. The researchers contend that the boundaries between online marketing methods have not been clarified enough within the academic literature. Therefore, this chapter provides a better understanding of different online marketing methods. A review of the literature suggests that the “oldest” online marketing methods including the email and the websites are still very relevant for today’s corporate communication. In conclusion, the researchers put forward their recommendations for future research about contemporary online marketing methods.

This study aims to explore the community strengths/ weaknesses and the opportunities/ threats of the Nepalese communities in Hong Kong that have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. The infection of COVID-19 among the ethnic minorities (EM) population in western democracies was reported higher, and it was wondered whether it was due to structural discrimination of the underprivileged.

This study is situated in Hong Kong during the peak of pandemic in 2020–2021. The authors followed the work of an EM service agency and interacted with their Nepalese clients to explore their reactions in coping with the sudden physical and economic adversities and examined their capacity amid the pandemic.

The authors noticed their effective self-mobilization that was strategically facilitated by veteran social workers and thus have strong resilience compared to other EM clusters in the territories.

The ways of their interactions offer useful insights for the authors to examine the prevailing strategy for achieving the mission of social inclusion in Hong Kong with 8% of the EM population.

This paper examines how lateral accountability mechanisms may be used to address the unity–diversity tension in a large not-for-profit (NFP) inter-organizational partnership governed under a lead organization model.

A case study was conducted in the New South Wales Settlement Partnership comprising 23 NFP organizations providing settlement services for migrants and humanitarian entrants. Multiple data sources included semi-structured interviews, proprietary and publicly available documents and observation.

The paper demonstrates (1) the usefulness of a strength-based approach that the lead organization adopts in enacting lateral accountability mechanisms, which enables a balance between unity and diversity in the partnership; and (2) the capability of the lead organization governance model to address the unity–diversity tension.

The paper (1) identifies the importance of a strength-based approach in implementing lateral accountability mechanisms to address the unity–diversity tension; and (2) challenges prior research that advocates the network administrative organization governance model in addressing the tension.

For practice, the paper identifies a suite of lateral accountability practices designed to address the unity–diversity tension. For policy, it provides confidence for government in promulgating the lead organization governance model in “purchasing” public services.

The paper demonstrates how lateral accountability mechanisms may be used to provide a balance between the objectives of preserving and leveraging the benefits of partner diversity and achieving unity. The strength-based approach (used in enacting the accountability mechanisms), while having a history in psychology and social work research, has not been recognized in prior partnership accountability and governance studies.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the customer satisfaction by offering online personalized recommendation system.

By employing an innovative associative classification method, this paper is able to predict a customer’s pleasure during the online while-recommending process. Consumers can make an active decision to recommended products. Based on customer’s characteristics, a product will be recommended to the potential buyer if the model predicts that he/she will click to view the product. That is, he/she is satisfied with the recommended product. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed recommendation system is validated through a Taobao shop.

The results of the experimental study clearly show that the online personalized recommendation system maximizes the customer’s satisfaction during the online while-recommending process based on an innovative associative classification method on the basis of consumer initiative decision.

Conventionally, customers are considered as passive recipients of the recommendation system. However, customers are tired of the recommendation system, and they can do nothing sometimes. This paper designs a new recommendation system on the basis of consumer initiative decision. The proposed recommendation system maximizes the customer’s satisfaction during the online while-recommending process.

Utilizing employee strengths contributes to humanizing organizations. However, the current concept of strengths has evolved from the domain of social work, advanced by personality and positive psychologists and adopted in management. The trait-like conceptualization of strengths conceptualized by psychologists is of lesser relevance to organizations as it discounts the significance of contextual factors for manifesting employee strengths. This study traces the evolution of strengths conceptualization, identifies gaps in its relevance to organizations, employs the concept relation method for developing a conceptualization of employee strengths at work and proposes a framework for management development that predicts improved employee engagement and performance.

The study utilizes the Cochrane method for carrying out a systematic conceptual review and shortlists 19 articles from an initial selection of 430 articles. Drawing insights from the 19 reviewed studies, the study deploys the concept relation method to conceptualize the concept of employees' strengths at work (ESAW) that has a higher relevance for management and organizational behavior. Thereafter, utilizing ESAW, the study proposes a conceptual framework that has huge implications for improving employee engagement and performance by carrying out effective management development. The conceptual framework additionally serves as a springboard for future empirical research.

The conceptualization of human strengths in extant literature favors a trait-based conceptualization advanced by personality psychologists. Concepts borrowed from other domains have lesser relevance than those indigenously developed in the field of management. Incorporating the recent empirical evidence highlighting the importance of factoring in key contextual attributes for the strengths to manifest at work, this study develops a new higher-order construct of ESAW that factors in personal as well as situational variables. Thereafter, the study suggests a conceptual framework for effectively carrying out management development by utilizing the new construct of ESAW.

Deployment of ESAW will contribute to humanize organizations, improve employee engagement and performance. The construct of ESAW is relevant to practice as it has evolved from the domain of organization science, unlike the earlier trait-based conceptualization of strength that emerged in personality psychology. The conceptual framework proposed in the study can be utilized by practitioners for carrying out effective management development.

Any contribution to increasing employee engagement predicts increasing social capital. If employees are happy at work, their productivity increases. Furthermore, higher engagement and productivity at work creates a spiral of positivity that transcends the working life of an employee. Hence, the study has huge social implications at times when the social fabric is stretched due to multiple demands on an employee.

Constructs developed in other fields and adopted in management have less relevance than those evolved indigenously in the domain of management. The systematic conceptual review of the concept of human strengths reveals a gap in its relevance to organizations. The study develops a new concept of ESAW that has higher relevance for organizational behavior and holds the promise of humanizing organizations. The next originality of the study lies in proposing a conceptual framework for carrying out effective management development that predicts higher employee engagement and performance. The methodological originality lies in utilizing the systematic conceptual review for developing a new concept.

The purpose of this paper is to make the mobile e-commerce shopping more convenient and avoid information overload by a mobile e-commerce recommendation system using an improved Apriori algorithm.

Combined with the characteristics of the mobile e-commerce, an improved Apriori algorithm was proposed and applied to the recommendation system. This paper makes products that are recommended to consumers valuable by improving the data mining efficiency. Finally, a Taobao online dress shop is used as an example to prove the effectiveness of an improved Apriori algorithm in the mobile e-commerce recommendation system.

The results of the experimental study clearly show that the mobile e-commerce recommendation system based on an improved Apriori algorithm increases the efficiency of data mining to achieve the unity of real time and recommendation accuracy.

The improved Apriori algorithm is applied in the mobile e-commerce recommendation system solving the limitation of the visual interface in a mobile terminal and the mass data that are continuously generated. The proposed recommendation system provides greater prediction accuracy than conventional systems in data mining.

Recommender systems are techniques that allow companies to develop sales and marketing and as a result, attract more customers. There are several different types of recommender systems which collaborative filtering (CF) method is more popular and is used in various fields. However, similar to other recommender systems, this system has its own limitations. Nowadays, recommender systems are combined with other systems to enhance the quality and precision. The purpose of this paper is to present a new method to increase the accuracy and quality of recommendations associated with filtering systems.

First, the recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) variables of the clients are extracted and variables’ weights are calculated. Then, using weighted RFM and expectation maximization clustering algorithms and their combination with the closest K-neighbors, recommendations for each cluster is independently extracted. Finally, the results are compared with the outcome of conventional CF techniques. Remarkably, sale transactions of a big distribution and sale of goods centers are used in this study.

The results indicated that the proposed method has higher accuracy compared to the conventional CF method. Likewise, the clusters which have higher values were received more accurate recommendations. Another point was that the proposed method was faster on obtaining the results than the conventional method as the recommendations were performed with respect to the customers of the same cluster, while all clients were assessed in the conventional method and as a result, the calculation speed is reduced as the number of customers increases in this method.

The results indicated that the proposed method has higher accuracy compared to the conventional CF method. Likewise, the clusters which have higher values were received more accurate recommendations. This is very important for businesses and trade centers as more than 80 percent of their profits come from valued customers and hence, recommendations with higher accuracy to these valued customers lead to more profits to sales centers. Since the valued customers were calculated in the proposed method and the value of each customer was distinguished for sales representatives, the accomplished recommendations can be coordinated with sales’ strategies to make it more targeted.

The relative bipolarisation literature features examples of indices which depend on the median of the distribution, including the renowned Foster–Wolfson index. This study shows that the use of the median in the design and computation of relative bipolarisation indices is both unnecessary and problematic. It is unnecessary because we can rely on existing well-behaved, median-independent indices. It is problematic because, as the study shows, median-dependent indices violate the basic transfer axioms of bipolarisation (defining spread and clustering properties), except when the median is unaffected by the transfers. The convenience of discarding the median from index computations is further illustrated with a numerical example in which median-independent indices rank distributions according to the basic transfer axioms while median-dependent indices do not.