Judith Symonds

Why I.T. Doesn't Appeal to Young Women

Much is written about the glass ceiling encountered by female IT professionals and associated strategies to remove such barriers. But what is the worth of such efforts when many women don’t find IT appealing? This study uses an exploratory research design to discover why young women don’t choose careers in IT. The young women in this study were aware of the benefits of a career in IT. However, the perception that a career in IT involves little communication and social skill steers young women away from a professional IT career.

Human Activity Inference for Ubiquitous RFID-Based Applications

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is an important enabling technology for context-awareness in ubiquitous computing. RFID technology with complementary sensors is widely considered as a very promising approach to realizing the vision of ambient assisted living (AAL), which is an emerging application class in the domain of ubiquitous healthcare services. At the core of any assisted living systems is the important function of human activity inference, which is what enables such systems to be intelligently perceptive and responsive to the humans under their care. In this paper, we review the current state-of-the-art in activity inference for RFID-based applications, and present our ongoing work on a RFID-based assisted living prototype for ‘goal training’ or brain rehabilitation of patients with cognitive impairment in their home environments, with a discussion on the potential design issues involved.

Mobile marketing evolution: Systematic literature review on multi-channel communication and multi-characteristics campaign

Mobile technologies have become a significant part of marketing operations. Since most of the traditional marketing campaigns are integrated onto mobile handhelds, mobile services are considered as powerful and innovative tools for delivering marketing messages. In this paper, we follow a three step review protocol and conduct a systematic literature review covering 230 academic journal papers in the mobile marketing area. We explore three specific characteristics for mobile services and discuss theories applied to mobile marketing research. We also use a meta-analysis approach to evaluate the relationship between mobile technology generation and mobile marketing evolution. Our work provides a roadmap of current trends and gaps in the literature in the field of mobile marketing.

Leading knowledge management strategies in Australia and New Zealand: a comparative study of public and private sector organisations

This paper draws on preliminary empirical quantitative research into an understanding of the status of knowledge management in the Australian and New Zealand environments. The relevant literature is surveyed on the role of leadership in knowledge management strategies and techniques. This is set against research findings on the roles allocated to lead the knowledge management task. In particular findings within the government sector and the non-government sectors are compared. The paper concludes by presenting a preliminary evaluation of the role of knowledge management leadership within the organisation and suggests that the external influences also play a role

Palming the Future: E-Government Strategy Development for a Tertiary Education Organisation

Trans Training is a tertiary education organisation concerned with the provision of quality driving training for the commercial road transport, logistics, distribution, warehousing, port and stevedoring industry sectors. At present much of their service delivery to agents, clients and trainees is administered manually. This process is slow, inefficient and allows many opportunities for errors to creep into the enrolment process. eGovernment offers the Industry Training Organisation the potential for improved service delivery and client and trainee satisfaction as well as several interesting value-adding opportunities. However, there are several challenges to adopting an eGovernment strategy including security concerns, privacy concerns and acceptance of coordination of technological investments. Many of the challenges for eGovernment strategy occur at the point where theory is applied by individual organisations and this is not covered by the literature. Readers are given the opportunity to explore some of the realities of eGoverment strategy in this case study.

The RFID tag pictorial glossary project

This research explores and proposes designs and development of helping both amateur and professional RFID system users in determining the right tags and RFID system to use or buy. Although there have been various literatures on RFID tags classification, this research looks beyond general tags classification. The paper proposes detailed pictorial classification and tags database schema development design. We report the protocol for the RFID tag pictures to share with the educational research community our experiences.

Mobile phone user interface design for patients with traumatic brain injury

The objective of this study was to determine the kind of mobile phone that would be most acceptable for use by people with traumatic brain injury (TBI). In order to explore the specific requirements of the said population, the qualitative interviewing method was employed guided by a literature review. Four participants with moderate to severe TBI from an in-patient and community rehabilitation facility in West Auckland, NZ took part for this study. Three mobile phones, obtained off-the-shelf based on the menu functionality they represented, were used as prototypes during interviewing. Interview data was analyzed using content analysis techniques to group issues raised by the participants into emerging themes. Based on the findings from this study, it is recommended that a mobile phone interface developed for therapeutic use with TBI patients should incorporate the following features: a) soft finger touch; b) large buttons; c) icons supported by titles; and d) a single level menu structure.

An Evaluation of the RFID Security Benefits of the APF System: Hospital Patient Data Protection

The main features of RFID are the ability to identify objects without a line of sight between reader and tag, read/write capability and ability of readers to read many tags at the same time. The read/write capability allows information to be stored in the tags embedded in the objects as it travels through a system. Some applications require information to be stored in the tag and be retrieved by the readers. This paper discusses the security and privacy challenges involve in such applications and how the proposed and implemented prototype system Authentication Processing Framework (APF) would be a solution to protect hospital patient data. The deployment of the APF provides mutual authentication for both tags and readers and the mutual authentication process in the APF provides security for the information stored in the tags. A prototype solution for hospital patient data protection for information stored on RFID bracelets is offered.

Social and economic benefit in public regional internet facilities

The differences between urban and rural Internet capability have emerged as a very important issue in recent years. In Australia, the problem has been addressed partly, through providing support for public regional Internet Facilities such as Internet Cafes. The economic merits of public Internet facilities in regional and rural areas are well promoted. This study explores these economic benefits, as well as some very valuable social benefits not often recognised. An exploratory research design is employed and data from in‐depth interviews with four public Internet facilities is analysed. The study draws conclusions about the balance between economic and social issues in managing the Internet. These findings have implications for the future development of public regional Internet facilities.