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© AHHA 2017. Objective The aim of the present study was to examine stakeholder perspectives on how the operation of the mental health system affects the use of involuntary community treatment orders (CTOs). Methods A qualitative study was performed, consisting of semi-structured interviews about CTO experiences with 38 purposively selected participants in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. Participants included mental health consumers (n≤5), carers (n≤6), clinicians (n≤15) and members of the Mental Health Review Tribunal of NSW (n≤12). Data were analysed using established qualitative methodologies. Results Analysis of participant accounts about CTOs and their role within the mental health system identified two key themes, namely that: (1) CTOs are used to increase access to services; and (2) CTOs cannot remedy non-existent or inadequate services. Conclusion The findings of the present study indicate that deficiencies in health service structures and resourcing are a significant factor in CTO use. This raises questions about policy accountability for mental health services (both voluntary and involuntary), as well as about the usefulness of CTOs, justifications for CTO use and the legal criteria regulating CTO implementation. What is known about this topic? Following the deinstitutionalisation of psychiatric services over recent decades, community settings are increasingly the focus for the delivery of mental health services to people living with severe and persistent mental illnesses. The rates of use of involuntary treatment in Australian community settings (under CTOs) vary between state and territory jurisdictions and are high by world standards; however, the reasons for variation in rates of CTO use are not well understood. What does this paper add? This paper provides an empirical basis for a link between the politics of mental health and the uptake and usefulness of CTOs. What are the implications for practitioners? This paper makes explicit the real-world dema

Folksonomies - networks of users, resources, and tags allow users to easily retrieve, organize and browse web contents. However, their advantages are still limited according to the noisiness of user provided tags. To overcome this problem, we propose an approach for identifying related tags in folksonomies. The approach uses tag co-occurrence statistics and Laplacian score feature selection to create probability distribution for each tag. Consequently, related tags are determined according to the distance between their distributions. In this regards, we propose a distance metric based on Jensen-Shannon Divergence. The new metric named AJSD deals with the noise in the measurements due to statistical fluctuations in tag co-occurrences. We experimentally evaluated our approach using WordNet and compared it to a common tag relatedness approach based on the cosine similarity. The results show the effectiveness of our approach and its advantage over the adversary method.

Just as readers feel immersed when the story line adheres to their experiences, users will more easily feel immersed in a virtual environment if the behavior of the characters in that environment adheres to their expectations, based on their life-long observations in the real world. This paper introduces a framework that allows authors to establish natural, human-like behavior, physical interaction and emotional engagement of characters living in a virtual environment. Represented by realistic virtual characters, this framework allows people to feel immersed in an Internet based virtual world in which they can meet and share experiences in a natural way as they can meet and share experiences in real life. Rather than just being visualized in a 3D space, the virtual characters (autonomous agents as well as avatars representing users) in the immersive environment facilitate social interaction and multi-party collaboration, mixing virtual with real.

Meeting, socializing and conversing online with a group of people using teleconferencing systems is still quite different from the experience of meeting face to face. We are abruptly aware that we are online and that the people we are engaging with are not in close proximity. Analogous to how talking on the telephone does not replicate the experience of talking in person. Several causes for these differences have been identied and we propose inspiring and innovative solutions to these hurdles in attempt to provide a more realistic, believable and engaging online conversational experience. We present the distributed and scalable framework REVERIE that provides a balanced mix of these solutions. Applications build on top of the REVERIE framework will be able to provide interactive, immersive, photo-realistic experiences to a multitude of users that for them will feel much more similar to having face to face meetings than the experience offered by conventional teleconferencing systems.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women living in Australia, accounting for 27% of all diagnoses in 2007. It was also the leading cause of burden of disease for females in 2010. Previous research has highlighted the utility of cancer rehabilitation programs for a range of tumour streams including breast cancer. The aim of cancer rehabilitation is to improve physical, social and psychological outcomes during and after treatment. Based on the end of treatment program for early stage breast cancer 'Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow' conducted at Cabrini Health, a private hospital in Melbourne, a pilot breast cancer rehabilitation program has been developed to address the rehabilitation needs of women with early stage breast cancer. The program will function as an adjunct to the existing rehabilitation service and has a physical reconditioning and psycho-education component. In this paper the establishment of the program will be described and data on the outcomes of the first three months presented.

A paradigm shift in sensing methods and principles is required to meet the legislative demands for detecting hazardous substances in the molecular world. This will encompass the development of new sensing technologies capable of performing very selective and sensitive measurements at an acceptable cost, developed by multidisciplinary teams of chemists, engineers and computer scientists to harvest information from a multitude of molecular targets in health, food and within the environment. In this study we present the successful implementation of a low-cost, wireless chemical sensing system that employs a minimum set of components for effective operation. Specifically, our efforts resulted in a wireless, tri-electrode, ISE pH sensor for use in environmental monitoring. Sensor calibration and validated in situ field trials have been carried out and are presented in this paper. C 2006 IEEE.