Search

This chapter describes the evolution, design and operation of an integrated health alerting and notification system. Although modern information and communication technologies have evolved rapidly in the last decade and significantly improved the technical foundation for health alerting and notification, published literature to communicate lessons learned, best practices, system design, development and operation from real-world experiences is still limited. In this chapter, we outline the functional and technical requirements as well as architecture and components of the New York State (NYS) Integrated Health Alerting and Notification System (IHANS), address issues that affect the effectiveness and timeliness of health alerting, discuss the concept of unified messaging and the current standard alert message distribution framework, and present case studies of health alerting in emergency events and exercises. Experience from development and operation of this system has shown the important role of an integrated health alert system in public health arising from both changes in information and telecommunication technologies and new demands on the public health and healthcare systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many tools in software engineering projects support the visualization and collaborative modification of custom sets of artifacts. This includes tools for requirements engineering, UML tools for design, project management tools, developer tools and many more. A key factor for success in software engineering projects is the collective understanding of changes applied to these artifacts. To support this, there are several strategies to automatically notify project participants about relevant changes. Known strategies are limited to a fixed set of artifacts and/or make no use of traceability information to supply change notifications. This paper proposes a change notification approach based on traceability in a unified model and building upon operation-based change tracking. The unified model explicitly combines system specification models and project management models into one fully traceable model. To show the benefit of our approach we compare it to related approaches in a case study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To optimally distribute tasks within police teams during mobile surveillance, a context-aware task allocation system is designed and evaluated with end-users. This system selects and notifies appropriate team members of current incidents, based on context information (officer availability, officer proximity to the incident and incident priority) and decision rules. Eight teams of three experienced police officers evaluated this system in a surveillance task through a virtual environment, comparing it to a non-adaptive system. Task performance, communication, workload and preferences were measured. Results show that team communication, decision making and response times improve using the adaptive system and that this system is preferred. We conclude that context-aware task allocation helps police teams to coordinate incidents efficiently. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional e-mail notification applications, which notify the user of newly arrived messages, are frequently insufficient because users daily receive a vast number of messages. Hence, we propose an e-mail notification application that peripherally displays summaries of messages in the form of kinetic typography. In addition, it infers the possibility of a message being read to control notification levels and conceals parts of words to avoid exposing excessive personal information. We have qualitatively confirmed the effects of the application through trial use; it can strongly attract users΄ attention and motivate the user to check significant messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]