Acting Under Secretary of Health requested that a working group be established to develop the Veterans Health Initiative (VHI). He envisioned this as a comprehensive program to recognize the connection between certain health effects and military service, to allow military history to be better documented, to prepare health care providers to better serve their veteran patients, and to establish a data base for further study. This was first discussed by the Acting Under Secretary in relation to the health of former prisoners of war. Development was really begun by the former Chief Academic Affairs Officer, Dr. David Stevens, with the Military Service History project. This involves a pocket card for medical residents detailing the important components of a military service history targeting the health risks associated with various periods of service and more generic issues of concern and a website containing references relevant to the issues. Educational modules in the Veterans Health Initiative VHA will assist health care providers in recognizing the connection between certain health effects and military service, prepare health care providers to better serve veteran patients, and will provide a data base for further study. This independent study is designed to provide primary care practitioners with an introduction to the pathologies that lead to sight loss, their functional implications, appropriate method of referrals, training programs, and special considerations for interactions with visually impaired individuals. After completing this independent study, participants would be able to: • Define legal blindness; • Describe the causes of sight loss; • Delineate the functional implications of vision loss • Delineate the psycho/social impact of vision loss on the veteran; • Outline the role of the Visual Impairment Services Team (VIST) in the treatment of legally blind veterans and the referral process; • Describe the special personal and environmental considerations needed for visually impaired patients; • Describe the special medical considerations needed for visually impaired patients; • Describe the primary care practitioner's role in assisting veterans in establishing well-grounded claims for disability related to the loss of vision; and • Describe compensation and pension benefits provided for veterans with eye disabilities. After completing this independent study, you should 1. be able to: state the definition of legal blindness; 2. be able to: associate eye diseases with their visual implications; 3. be able to: demonstrate insight into the functional and Psycho/Social implications of sight-loss; 4. know when referrals to VIST are indicated; 5. understand …

시력 손상과 시각 장애(Visual Impairment and Blindness)

Previous personalized DTV recommendation systems focus only on viewers' historical viewing records or demographic data. This study proposes a new recommending mechanism from a user oriented perspective. The recommending mechanism is based on user properties such as Activities, Interests, Moods, Experiences, and Demographic information--AIMED. The AIMED data is fed into a neural network model to predict TV viewers' program preferences. Evaluation results indicate that the AIMED model significantly increases recommendation accuracy and decreases prediction errors compared to the conventional model.

AIMED- A Personalized TV Recommendation System

The development of a single-item Food Choice Questionnaire

One-Sixth of the world population is suffering from vision impairment, as per WHO’s report. In the past decades, many efforts have been done in developing several devices to provide support to visually blind and enhance the quality of their lives by making them capable. Many of those devices are either heavy or costly for general purposes. In this paper, a detailed comparative study of all the relevant devices developed for them has been presented which are wearable and handheld. The focus was on the prominent features of those devices and analysis has also been performed based on few factors like power consumption, weight, economic and user-friendliness. The idea was to build a path for the researchers who are trying to work in this field by either developing a portable device or through some efficient algorithm to ensure independence, mobility, and safety for visually impaired persons.

A survey on Assistive Technology for visually impaired

Blind people are confronting a number of challenges in performing activities of daily life such as reading labels on a product, identification of currency notes, exploring unknown spaces, identifying the appearance of an object of interest, interacting with digital artifacts, operating a smartphone’s user interface and selecting non-visual items on a screen. The emergence of smartphone-based assistive technologies promotes independence, ease of use and usability resulting in improved quality of life yet poses several challenging opportunities. We have reviewed research avenues in smartphone-based assistive technologies for blind people, highlighted the need for technological advancements, accessibility-inclusive interface paradigm, and collaboration between medical specialists, computer professionals, usability experts and domain users to realize the potential of ICT-based interventions for blind people. This paper analyzes a comprehensive review of the issues and challenges for visually impaired and blind people with the aim to highlight the benefits and limitations of the existing techniques and technologies. Future research ventures are also highlighted as a contribution to the field.

An insight into smartphone-based assistive solutions for visually impaired and blind people: issues, challenges and opportunities

Smart TV has changed the legacy TV system by providing capabilities of processing and internet connectivity. The amalgamation of TV with processing and internet connectivity has not only attracted the viewers but opened new avenues for researchers as well. In contrast to legacy TV system, smart TV provides better environment for watching TV contents along with online clips, movies, games, browsing, and full support for web 2.0 features. However, connectivity with a public network (internet) brings further challenges and research opportunities, discussed herein. Smart TV is more interactive; however, maintaining smart TV as a lean back device is an issue that needs further research in the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). The hybrid nature of smart TV provides more contents for watching; however, this creates the problems of content and cognitive overload. The large Ultra High Definition (UHD) screen, full support for internal and external sensors, and growing operating systems make this device a central hub for smart homes. However, these capabilities make a smart TV more capable of capturing private data. In this paper, we have analyzed the smart TVs from both hardware and software perspectives. Moreover, this paper presents a study of issues and challenges faced by smart TV viewers, which includes the issues related to interactivity, content overloading, privacy, and security.

A review of smart TV: Past, present, and future

F resh, bias-free and valid data collected using different survey modes is considered an essential requirement for smooth functioning and evolution of an organization . Surveys play a major role in making in-time correct decisions and generating reports. The aim of this study is to compare and investigate state-of-the-art in different survey modes including print, email, online, mobile and SMS-based surveys. Results indicated that existing methods are neither complete nor sufficient to fulfil the overall requirements of an organization which primarily rely on surveys. Also, it shows that SMS is a dominant method for data collection due to its pervasiveness. However, existing SMS-based data collection has limitations like limited number of characters per SMS, single question per SMS and lake of multimedia support. Recent trends in data collection emphasis on data collection applications for smart phones. However, in developing countries low-end mobile devices are still extensively used which makes the data collection difficult from man in the street. The paper conclude that existing survey modes and methods should be improved to get maximum responses quickly in low cost manner. The study has contributed to the area of surveying and data collection by analysing different factors such as cost, time and response rate. The results of this study can help practitioners in creating a more successful surveying method for data collection that can be effectively used for low budget projects in developed as well as developing countries.

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Conducting Surveys and Data Collection: From Traditional to Mobile and SMS-based Surveys

A large number of blind people use smartphone-based assistive technology to perform their common activities In order to provide a better user experience the existing user interface paradigm needs to be revisited A new user interface model has been proposed in this paper A simplified, semantically consistent, and blind-friendly adaptive user interface is provided The proposed solution is evaluated through an empirical study on 63 blind people leveraging an improved user experience in performing common activities on a smartphone

/pdf/blindsense-an-accessibility-inclusive-universal-user-50jy2jxonj.pdf

BlindSense: An Accessibility-inclusive Universal User Interface for Blind People

This paper provides the reader from the base to the state of art in Linked Open Data (LOD), with issues and challenges. In addition, reader will be motivated by reading the projects analysed in the information space of five major computer science areas (Intelligence, Multimedia, Sensors, File System and Library), future trends and directions in LOD.

Iftikhar Alam

Papers

A review of smart TV: Past, present, and future

Conducting Surveys and Data Collection: From Traditional to Mobile and SMS-based Surveys

BlindSense: An Accessibility-inclusive Universal User Interface for Blind People

Linked Open Data: Towards the Realization of Semantic Web - A review

Personalized content recommendations on smart TV: Challenges, opportunities, and future research directions