Journal of Integrated Design and Process Science

Exam stress is a common predicament faced by students of all age groups and cultures. If improperly managed, it can lead to insomnia, depression, suicide and many other negative health implications for students at all levels of education. However, exam stress management gained relatively low attention from the society and academia. Stress in optimal level can stimulate students to achieve their personal best in their exams. However, excessive stress can be devastating for their well-being. Consequently, it is highly imperative that timely counselling services are made available, particularly during their exam period when there is a bursting demand to access these resources. In this study, we propose that a virtual intelligent university student advisor would be highly useful and effective in meeting this demand. We have developed an embodied conversational agent, ESCAP that simulates the facial animations and advice of a professional psychologist to support undergraduate students in stress management during their exams. In this paper, we discuss the system architecture of ESCAP as well as the practical and theoretical implications of the system. We conducted a number of pilot tests with 25 students to design the affective system and found in 200 samples that in general the voices of male advisors are considered as more pleasant and credible than female advisors'; on the other hand, the voices of female advisors are considered as more clear, dynamic and competent than male advisors by most users. These findings have important implications on the design of virtual psychologists, especially regarding the gender of the virtual advisor. System developers should consider the gender of virtual advisors carefully to maximize their effect on users. The next stage of the project involves large scale experiments testing ESCAP's impact on students. In these experiments, we plan to measure the stress level of students using both qualitative and quantitative measures such as heart beat and skin conductivity before and after their interactions with ESCAP.

Health care software applications deal with several standards that allow institutes to transmit clinical data and images from patients' electronic folders to different hospital sites for diagnosis, medical studies and treatment. Interoperability of these applications is crucial to exchange data and use information over the time, but what actions are required to achieve it in practice are not completely clear. In this paper, we describe a multi-node mechanism that is able to configure an operational scenario of presumable interoperable services, to automatically deploy, install and execute a given scenario and to make adjustments over time as new versions of existing components become available. We show how this mechanism can address interoperability for a specific health care environment, to communicate measures or criteria on the interoperability status amongst services in the domain by generating ad-hoc reports. We detail how a system called ETICS can be extended to support the proposed mechanism in order to run tests for DCMTK and dgate-server amongst different combinations of computers. This provides us with a system to verify interoperability of software applications that belong to different domains.

Pervasive computing (PerC) is leading the way in a fast-growing trend of integrating transparently physical heterogeneous computational devices into our private and professional lives. The ubiquity of these devices and advances in developing software solutions in PerC across domains, have raised hopes for the creation of true wide-spread pervasive computing environments (PCE). In this paper we explore the possibility of applying semantics of PCEs in the healthcare domain, and in Self Care Homes (SeCH) in particular, in order to define and comment on its computationally significant semantics. Our aim is to illustrate that we can manipulate the computationally significant semantics of SeCH through OWL/SWRL enabled ontologies, as candidate technologies for achieving effective and automated decision making in SeCH. The possibility of reasoning upon OWL/SWRL enabled concepts and creating computations from them, and enables the delivery of healthcare services to SeCH residents. They are automatically supported by software applications generated from the Assistive Self Care Systems (ASeCS) software architecture, which hosts our OWL/SWRL enabled ontology and its reasoning.