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Identification of requirements and needs of the consumers and satisfying these needs defines the concept of marketing. This explanation of marketing is true only when the preference and taste of a consumer are not dominated by any internal or external factor. There is no doubt that the environment of businesses today is changing rapidly, with the involvement of media, and communication technologies changing the way of interaction and persuading the consumers to buy their products or to change the choices of the customers. With time and such advances, many researchers have attempted to study the many behaviors the customers show while buying products or services online to find out what are the factors that have an influence on the behavior of purchasing. The most common aspect linked with this is the motivating factors, which are linked with the changes in the purchasing decisions of the consumers when buying online. Following are the findings of many theories of motivating factors, the consumers can clearly know what aspects might result in higher purchases. Knowing the many motivating factors associated with online shopping helps in boosting the selling confidence of the online sellers hence making them have a strong believe in E-commerce. The research is carried out to analyze the many motivating factors of online shopping in the Ambala district of Haryana. Data was gathered by a survey involving filling up of questionnaires by respondents and the questions aimed to collect information regarding factors that increased online buying.

This research focuses on the adoption and acceptance of social assistive technologies (ATs) in the aged care context where carers provide care services to older adults. This research develops and v...

Purpose By developing a conceptual model, the purpose of this paper is to improve the understanding of the role of social assistive technologies in facilitating the process of service innovation in care providing organisations to adopt the principles of the consumer-directed care strategy and reduce perceived consumer vulnerability. Design/methodology/approach Using a cross-sectional survey method, the authors collected data through a survey questionnaire distributed among 335 aged caregivers and specialists. The conceptual model and its 11 research hypotheses were examined using confirmatory factor analysis in structural equation modelling. The rival and mediation models were also estimated. Findings The conceptual model was validated and eight of eleven hypotheses were supported. It was found that dynamic capabilities are crucial to developing service innovation concept in care providing organisations. In this way, social assistive technologies play a facilitating role to promote the consumer-directed care strategy throughout care providing organisations and allow care providers to enhance wellbeing of vulnerable older people based on their socio-economic status. From the lens of aged care providers, it was also found that the consumer-directed care strategy implemented in aged care facilities may help reduce consumer vulnerability among older people especially when they use social assistive technologies in their service settings. Practical implications This study suggests aged care service providers should boost dynamic service innovation capabilities to improve the need for social assistive technologies in aged care facilities with respect to the importance of the consumer-directed care strategy. Originality/value This study contributes to the development and validation of a conceptual model for the use of social assistive technologies to sustain service innovation in aged care business models and enhance the consumer-directed care strategy’s performance to better understand consumer vulnerability among older people.

This paper aims to explore the main factors of social vulnerability among older people and the improvements in social life after engaging with social robots. This paper also examines the influence of these factors on each other. Study 1 helped develop a conceptual model and research hypotheses by interviewing 17 specialists in both aged care and social robotics, using grounded theory methodology (GTM). To validate the conceptual model in general and its constructs and hypotheses in particular, Study 2 employed a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) based on the survey distributed among 335 aged care specialists in Australia. The results of study 2 support the indirect effects of social robot enablement and robot mediation on reduction of social vulnerability (socioeconomic accessibility and community ties) through aged care service innovation. It also supports direct impact of robot mediation on augmentation of community ties among older people. Both qualitative and quantitative results measuring the research constructs and hypotheses provide valuable information to managers of aged care facilities and social robotics scholars to improve the quality of life for older people. The implementation of meaningful advances in merging people oriented robotic technology and social vulnerability in older people has demonstrated effective initiatives, including bridging the gap by synthesizing multi-disciplinary interventions to ease social vulnerability.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to propose a new approach that enables service innovation models to incorporate a holographic perspective into their innovation-centric business models. The essence of the holographic approach to service innovation might provide us with an innovative organization that is enclosed in its components; a knowledge-centric approach that adapts each person as a vital component of a whole; and the ability of value co-creation by each part of the organization in ways that benefit the organization as a whole. Design/methodology/approach This paper uses a narrative synthesis framework combining existing literature (by textual narrative technique) with expert opinion, based on search of Science-Direct and ProQuest academic databases. Findings A total of 114 top-cited and high relevant references were deeply reviewed. Nine principle dimensions were evolved from the final review to construct a comprehensive definition of service innovation. Then, the narrative synthesis helped us to bring forward a new approach to service innovation and applied it in the form of a conceptual model, as the literature was previously established on certain approaches. In the final stage, a comprehensive model of service innovation was designed to introduce the holographic approach to the existing literature. Research limitations/implications This paper reviewed top-cited and high relevant references published in English that were indexed in Science-Direct and ProQuest. The authors did not search any grey literature and other language publications, and hand-search any journals. Practical implications This research highlights how managers must consider service innovation as a whole. Originality/value This is the first critical review published in the peer-reviewed literature that explores the principle dimensions of service innovation and provide a new approach to the literature.

Assistive technologies, such as robots, have proven to be useful in a social context and to improve the quality of life for people with dementia (PwD). This study aims to show how the engagement between two social robots and PwD in Australian residential care facilities can improve care quality. An observational method is adopted in the research methodology to discover behavioural patterns during interactions between the robots and PwD. This observational study has undertaken to explore the improvement arising from: (1) approaching social baby-face robots (AR), (2) experiencing pleasure engaging with the robots (P), (3) interacting with the robots (IR), and (4) interacting with others (IO). The findings show that social robots can improve diversion therapy service value to PwD through sensory enrichment, positive social engagement, and entertainment. More than 11,635 behavioral reactions, such as facial expressions and gestures, from 139 PwD over 5 years were coded, in order to identify the engagement effectiveness between PwD and two social robots named Sophie and Jack. The results suggest that these innovative social robots can improve the quality of care for people suffering from dementia.

Banks are the foundation of any nation as they are inescapable for the monetary advancement of a nation. Investors are the absolute entirety of any business. Banks are delegates between the investors and borrowers. This connection separates when the borrower neglect to reimburse the vital and premium sum; subsequently the banking segment concentrate on the issue of Non-Performing Assets. So far as India is worried, before 2002 banks have no alternative other than implementing the security through a court/tribunal, to recoup its duty. On the suggestion of Narasimham Committee –II SARFAESI Act 2002 came as a sigh of relief for the banking sector. This demonstration enabled the banks and budgetary organizations for the procurement of the secured resources of the borrowers held with the bankers at the time of availing loans. This paper endeavors to concentrate the execution and effect of SARFAESI Act 2002 for the administration of NPA in Indian Banking. The articles and papers published in different business journals, magazines, newspapers, periodicals were studied and data available on NPAs recovery have been used for analysis. Statistical tools like percentages used for analysis. At first DRTs performed well, however their advance was endured when they get overburdened with the vast number of cases alluded to them. Keywords: Economic Development, Inevitable, Narasimham Committee-II, SARFAESI ACT 2002, Secured Assets.

The need for computer-based intelligent techniques for recruitment and retention of employees in a highly competitive global market has grown significantly in the last decade. Salesperson recruitment is a critical task for most organisations. Existing approaches for salesperson recruitment primarily rely on filtering of applications based on selection criteria followed by interviews. Some organisations also include personality testing based on psychometric techniques. The high turnover of salesperson in the industry suggests limited success of these procedures. Additionally, existing approaches lack benchmarking methods. In this paper we describe design and development of an intelligent sales recruitment and benchmarking system (ISRBS) for recruitment and benchmarking of salespersons. ISRBS design represents operation of the findings and outcomes based on actual field studies and random surveys of salespersons as well as development of models for measuring independent and dependent variables related to selling behaviour. The main contributions of the paper are (i) Developing an on line selling behaviour profiling technique based on integration of intelligent system techniques like expert systems and fuzzy sets, psychology based selling behaviour model, and AHP techniques, and (ii) an objective and novel selling behaviour benchmarking technique to facilitate modelling of organisation based benchmarks and cultural fits. An earlier version of this system has been commercially used in the industry in Australia. ISRBS integrates psychology based selling behaviour model with artificial intelligence techniques and soft computing methods for selling behaviour profiling and benchmarking.

Research indicates that the environment has had a definite impact on consumer behaviour whereby suggesting to target consumers according to their environmental beliefs. This study investigated the consumers' green purchase behaviour using price and quality attributes as contributors to the formation of purchase intention. It attempts to construct a model that may facilitate the better understanding of green consumers' market segments through the use of an intelligent soft computing model. The model is designed to incorporate knowledge, beliefs, demographic profiles and situational variables. This potentially provides a more direct method for companies to gauge consumers' intention to purchase green products. The results showed strong preference for companies to place higher priority on reducing pollution than on increasing profitability. It highlighted different clusters that demonstrate various levels of the strength of intention to purchase and market segment profiles.

This study presents a model inspired from a grounded theory methodology based on the successful performance of socially assistive robots in aged-care facilities. Conducting 17 in-depth interviews with nurses and scientists who worked with these robots, we investigated how social robot engagement can lead to the quality of life for aged people. The qualitative findings show 4 categories including socially assistive robots, robot mediation, service enablement and aged-care service innovation. The findings support modelling and implementing aged-care service innovation by social assistive robots.

ObjectivesSocially-assistive robots have been used with older adults with cognitive impairment in residential care, and found to improve mood and well-being. However, there is little known about the potential benefits in adults with other neuropsychiatric symptoms.AimsThe aim of this project was explore the utility and acceptability of a socially-assistive robot in engaging adults with a variety of neuropsychiatric symptoms.MethodsBetty, a socially-assistive robot was installed in a unit which specialises in the assessment and diagnosis of adults presenting with neuropsychiatric symptoms. She is 39 cm tall, has a baby-face appearance and has the ability to engage individuals through personalised services which can be programmed according to individuals’ preferences. These include singing songs and playing games. Training for the nursing staff who were responsible for incorporating Betty into the unit activities was provided. The frequency, duration and type of activity which Betty was involved in was recorded. Patients admitted who could provide informed consent were able to be included in the project. These participants completed pre- and post-questionnaires.ResultsEight patients (mean age 54.4 years, SD 13.6) who had diagnoses ranging from depression and schizophrenia participated. Types of activities included singing songs, playing Bingo and reading the news. Participants reported that they were comfortable with Betty and did not feel concerned in her presence. They enjoyed interacting with her.ConclusionsThis pilot project demonstrated that participants found Betty to be acceptable and she was useful in engaging them in activities. Future directions would involve larger sample sizes and different settings.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

This paper describes the design of multimodal robotic system, embodiment of multimodal interaction (voice, gestures, emotion, touch panel and dance) in assistive social robot (Matilda) for modeling group based and one-to-one interactions with technology adverse elderly in nursing homes. It describes the human-centered evaluation of Matilda based on quality, naturalness, user satisfaction and predictive accuracy based on first ever field trials in Australia. The multimodal social robots have facilitated breaking the technology barriers with the elderly leading to several aged care facilities and community centers showing interest in future trials.

Service innovation has been a serious debate in the literature on service management, especially when it is compared with new service development (NSD). While service innovation is defined based upon certain approaches, there is no specific definition that differentiates service innovation from NSD, especially in a certain technological context such as social assistive robots. Therefore, bringing a new approach that encompasses all features of service innovation is a topic of interest. This paper aims to introduce the holographic approach to service innovation in the condition of uncertainty by a critical narrative synthesis methodology on high quality and top-cited publications in the last three decades. The qualitative findings show that service innovation can be established in a social assistive robot as a certain technological context, based on the holographic approach in which each single component of the innovation process enfolds service innovation as a smaller whole.

Emotions form an important component of human behaviour and decision making and thus are an essential part of context-aware web-based decision support systems. In this paper a conceptual model based on sensemaking, affective and situational feedback is outlined for design of context-aware web-based decision support systems. An application of the model is illustrated in the area of web-based behaviour profiling and recruitment of salespeople. In this application cognitive responses of a sales candidate to behavioural questions from a e-Sales Recruitment and Benchmarking System (e-SRBS) are mediated with their real-time emotional or affective responses to facilitate context-aware decision support in e-recruitment applications. . The work reported has implications in not only e-recruitment but also in knowledge management, data mining, web personalisation and context-aware web-based decision support systems in general.

In this paper the authors model green behaviour by predicting consumers' purchase intention using Kohonen's LVQ technique. It is envisaged that such a model may facilitate better understanding of green consumers' market segments. The model employs cognitive, affective, and situational attributes of consumers to predict their purchase intention. The model can, potentially, provide a more direct method for companies to gauge consumers' intention to purchase green products. The results indicate that consumers are more strongly resistant to lower quality than higher prices of green products in comparison to other alternative non-green products.

Soft computing agents today are being applied in a range of areas including image processing, engineering, process control, data mining, internet and others. In the process of applying soft computing agents to complex real world problems three phenomena have emerged. Firstly, the application of soft computing agents in distributed environments has resulted in merger of techniques from soft computing area with those in distributed artificial intelligence. Secondly, in order to facilitate better understanding and frequent use of the soft computing agent technology, humanization of these agents has become an important design issue (Takagi, 2001). Thirdly, given the approximate and imprecise nature of the solutions provided by soft computing agents, optimization has become an important design issue in an effort to improve the quality of solution provided by soft computing agents. Finally, from a user’s perspective, as the soft computing agent technologies have moved out of laboratories into the internet and the real world the need to model and express these technologies in the problem solving context of user. In this chapter we model these four phenomenons as part of multi-layered multi-agent architecture. The layered architec­ture is also motivated by the human-centered approach and criteria outlined in the 1997 NSF workshop on human-centered systems.

E-recruitment area has emerged as an important e-business function in the past few years. We describe a novel e-recruitment multiagent application for recruitment and benchmarking of salespersons. Most existing approaches to recruitment rely on the interview process or on psychometric techniques. Both these approaches have had limited success. We describe a multiagent e-sales recruitment system (e-SRS), which integrates a selling behavioral model with expert systems and soft computing techniques like fuzzy-K-means for predicting the selling behavior profile of a sales candidate.

Nowadays, recommendation systems in e-commerce are booming because of their potential and applicability for personalized services to customers. However, recommendation is not always what customers are expecting. Odd pitches and poor matches in the system have led to outpouring of anecdotes. It means that quality control doesn't apply to the recommendation here. To cope with this problem, this paper proposes a new way to improve both the quality of rating and recommendation itself for e-recommendation system. The concepts will integrate to the implementation of our on-going e-recommendation system and the second concept is illustrated in a financial domain.

Achievement of organizational goals primarily calls for an effective utilization of human resources besides other resources. Pertinently, organizational goals can be achieved by taking into consideration the nature, abilities, and limitations of the manpower, enabling them to actualize their full potential, utilizing them fully for the growth of the organization, maintaining their quality, and integrating them with other resources. The performance appraisal system is a system of eliciting feedback, benchmarking it, communicating the same to the employees to bring holistic development in them besides evaluating the potential of employees. The present study aimed to analyze the performance appraisal system being practiced in industries of Punjab besides identifying the factors affecting the same.

In the last three chapters we have described applications of HCVM in medical informatics, image processing, internet games and sales recruitment. In these applications we have looked at multimedia artifacts in terms of how they can be used for improving the representational efficiency, effectiveness and interpretation of computer-based artifacts and also to some extent how they can be used for perceptual problem solving. However, there are interesting research issues and problems associated with management and retrieval of text, image, video, audio artifacts from single and multimedia databases. The area of multimedia information management and retrieval has in recent times become important due to the advent of the internet and World Wide Web (WWW). The solution to a number of issues in this area today lies with traditional solutions used for conventional databases. Recently, intelligent agents and human-centered information retrieval models are being proposed by researchers to address the problems in this area. In order to gain a proper understanding of the various problems and issues involved, we start this chapter by outlining the three evolution stages of this time honored area. We then describe these evolution stages in some detail. We include in this description applications and solutions proposed for multimedia information management and retrieval. We conclude the chapter by outlining open research problems in this area.

In recent years, programs have been developed which allow robots to engage in simple dialogues with hospital and aged-care patients in order to provide information on and give healthrelated advice. To enable the robot to be persuasive and be accepted by the patient, it must not only understand their responses, but also understand their emotional state [1]. This information can then be used to modify the robot's responses. In an example dialogue, the robot asks whether the patient believes they overeat, to which the patient might respond "I don't overeat". If the patient has responded in a negative emotional tone, this may indicate a refusal to acknowledge the problem rather than the absence of it. In addition, the robot needs to learn to avoid responses which may provoke the patient. At that stage the goal of the robot is to convince the patient to acknowledge the problem before developing ways to solve it. One method of collecting data about patients' emotional state is to analyze prosodic features of their speech. Prosodic features are the patterns of frequency, energy (volume), and rate of speech. Prosodic features have been known for a long time to reflect the speaker's emotional state, as was first documented by Charles Darwin in The Descent of Man [2], which also showed that, even in other animals whose vocalizations contain no linguistic properties, feelings can be expressed. The main motivation for the development of this software is to improve upon a diet-suggestion dialogue system currently being developed and tested in aged-care homes.1 The elderly subject engages in dialogue with a health care robot, which provides suggestions to that person's diet, whilst also raising their motivation levels, and improve their perception of the robotic agent.