Yu Hsiu Hung

Use of attitude congruence to identify safety interventions for small residential builders

The construction industry has experienced high numbers of occupational injuries and fatalities over the years. To address this issue, differences in safety attitudes and behaviours were explored among construction workers, first‐line supervisors, and project managers in small residential construction companies with respect to recommendations for safety interventions. A triangulation design consisting of observation (shadowing), subjective quantitative (questionnaire), and subjective qualitative (interview) methods was used to obtain different but complementary data on the same safety challenges. Shadowing was utilized to explore onsite safety problems and/or risky behaviours resulting from safety attitudinal discrepancies among the three groups. Questionnaires were administered to identify salient themes for the observed practices. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted to explore the causes of the observed safety problems. Results revealed that first‐line supervisors did not enforce safety rules strictly or consistently, and that significant differences in safety attitudes and risk perceptions were observed among the three groups. Results also support a tendency among subcontractors to practise risky behaviours, even though they generally articulated a desire to avoid injuries. The recommended interventions include holding regular safety meetings between managers and workers, implementing informal training to supplement formal training, and closely examining and reviewing the appropriateness of health and safety policies.

Preferences of young children regarding interface layouts in child community web sites

Abstract This study investigates the child preferences regarding interface layouts in child community web sites. The objective of studying this area is to identify ways of making web sites more usable for children. Two experiments are conducted: interface layout experiment and layout evaluation. In the interface layout experiment, researchers recruited eight fifth-grade students with approximately one-year of Internet experience to arrange interface components and make research interfaces. During the layout evaluation, 16 students with some computer background are divided into two groups and asked to manipulate research interfaces and experimental interfaces, a sample of child community websites on Yahoo. Every movement of the tested students is recorded and the experiment is followed by retrospective interviews with the students. Four criteria of manipulative performance, degree of manipulation, recognition, remembrance and satisfaction, are then shown and discussed. The findings of the layout evaluation indicate that the research interfaces are superior to the experimental interfaces. In addition, this study proposes some interface layout guidelines for child community websites.

Safety Critical Incidents Among Small Construction Contractors: A Prospective Case Study

According to a 2006 Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report, approximately 90% of construction companies employ 20 or fewer workers; of these, 30% specialize in residential construction. Contractors with 10 or fewer employees are exempt from OSHA reporting requirements, unless a fatality occurs or an injury/illness leads to lost workdays for three or more employees (29 CFR 1904.1, Subpart B). This qualitative case study was conducted to understand character- istics and work patterns to develop a clearer understanding of the natural context of work, especially given the underre- porting of safety information by small construction companies. A prospective study was conducted in which construction workers logged critical incidents for four weeks. Definitions and examples of critical incidents were given to workers, along with a data logging notebook with structured questions. Workers could report the events immediately upon occur- rence or after the workday ended. A total of 102 critical incidents were reported. Content (axial coding) and cluster analy- ses were used to analyze the logs and to extract important descriptors and patterns. Results were used to characterize in- jury types, antecedents, time-of-day, and family-work involvement. Descriptions regarding the training-, resource-, and planning-related practices of small construction workers focused on the unique challenges that impose barriers and con- straints on safety climate.

Building trust in hospitality and culture exchange travel sites: Lessons from heuristic evaluation of CouchSurfing

Travel is gaining popularity among people and around the world. The number of people relying on social networking resources and hospitality/culture exchange travel websites is also increasing. However, there have been voices criticizing hospitality/culture exchange websites for deception, violations of privacy, and lack of dispute resolution process, etc. To address this problem and to glean design insight, our study performed Heuristic Evaluation (with six subject matter experts) on the features and interfaces of CouchSurfing (one of the most popular hospitality exchange websites). The purpose was to understand if current features and interfaces of hospitality travel websites support trust-building among users. Results of the study showed barriers in differing stages of the trust-building process. Results also revealed that the establishment of trust was challenged by the current graphic design, the structure design, as well as the social cue design of CouchSurfing. Design recommendations were made from this study for hospitality/culture exchange travel websites.

Effects of Facebook Like and Conflicting Aggregate Rating and Customer Comment on Purchase Intentions

The conflict between an aggregate rating and a customer’s comment oftentimes cause consumers’ negative feelings on the quality of a product. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether such conflict influenced an individual’s purchase intentions. Particularly, this study looked at how social influence mediated the effects of a conflicting aggregate rating and a customer’s comment on purchase intention. To achieve the goal, an online mixed factorial experiment was conducted with one hundred and eighty-four student volunteers. The independent variables of interest were: consistency of aggregate rating and customer comment and number of Facebook likes. The dependent variable was purchase intention. In this study, participants were mainly recruited through the social groups on Facebook. Participants were instructed to provide their degrees of purchase intentions to snack food on our experimental website (containing pages reflecting differing treatment conditions under the independent variables). Results of the experiment showed that the conflict between a aggregate rating and a customer’s comment, as well as the number of Facebook likes respectively had significant impacts on purchase intentions. Results of this study have implications on the design of social interfaces on social commerce websites.

Study of multi-sensory stimulation for the design of hand rehabilitation equipment for stroke patients

Stroke has long been a critical health issue in adults, affecting their physical, cognitive, and emotional functioning. The purpose of this study was to develop hand rehabilitation equipment based on multi-sensory stimulation therapy for stroke patients. An experiment was conducted with seventeen professional occupational therapists (each having more than five years of work experience) who individually evaluated the effectiveness of hand rehabilitation using seven hand gestures with two treatment approaches (top-down and bottom-up) and their corresponding six rehabilitation techniques (top-down: mirror therapy and auditory stimulation; bottom-up: tactile stimulation, thermal stimulation, electrical stimulation, and vibration stimulation). Our study used a within-subject partial hierarchical design, where rehabilitation techniques were partially nested within treatment approaches and crossed with hand gestures. Analyses of the three-way factorial analysis of variance showed that rehabilitation technique had a significant effect and that vibration stimulation and mirror therapy were most effective. Based on the findings of this study, multi-sensory stimulation equipment (combining vibration stimulation and mirror therapy) was designed to improve the sensorimotor ability of stroke patients.

An orange social platform for young people

The high unemployment rate, decreasing salary, and housing pressure, etc. in Taiwan have led to unhappiness and frustration among people. To address this problem, the question our team proposes for exploring a possible technological solution is: “Is every one able to possess eudemonic well-being?” This study expects to identify a web/mobile-based Orange Technology application that enables the sense of eudemonic well-being of its users. Because happiness (i.e., a subjective measure of eudemonic well-being) is shown to be resulted from being socially connected, such application could be a “social communication and interactive tool” that handles interactions between a pair or group of users. The targeted users are those whose ages fall between the generations X and Y (twenties to forties). The adopted technologies include those for developing web platforms (e.g., web-based programming languages and protocols) and analyzing real time data (e.g., Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition, Cross-Correlation, and Relaxed Variable Kernel Density Estimation).

Integration of Characteristics of Culture into Product Design: A Perspective from Symbolic Interactions

Cultural insight has become essential for improving designs for global and regional markets. However, little work is done on how to dissect culture and incorporate culture characteristics into design activities to create emotional engagements between products and users. This study, therefore, developed a cultural design model to address this problem. The cultural design model was built based on the notion that meaning evolves from social interactions with objects/symbols in the environment and with people. In the model, the theoretical components of Symbolic Interactions and O’Brien’s and Toms’ user engagement attributes were adopted and were used to analyze culture and transform cultural characteristics into product design features, as well as to “enable user experience.” The effectiveness of the cultural design model was verified through a case study with two groups of Industrial Design students on designing tea cups for Taiwanese tea culture. Results of the study provided evidence of the proposed cultural design model in assisting with cultural design activities.

Assessing Patient Needs for the Enhancement of Stroke Rehabilitation Services: A Customer Value Perspective

Continuous participation in stroke rehabilitation programs enables function recovery and quality of life. However, research showed that stroke rehabilitation services do not necessarily meet the needs and the expectations of stroke patients. To address this issue, in this study, patient needs was assessed from the perspective of customer value. Customer value was defined using the service dimensions in SERVQUAL. Contextual Inquiry (CI) was conducted with three stroke patients and their therapists. Critical incidents (i.e., service gaps) were identified and categorized by the service dimensions. A follow-up survey was conducted with 11 stroke patients and 11 therapists to obtain subjective ratings on the critical incidents to provide quantitative insight that corroborated the findings from the CI in improving current stroke rehabilitation services. Results of the CI revealed that most occurred critical incident was related with reliability when therapists provided instructions on the rehabilitation activities. Results of the survey showed that (1) for stroke patients, all service dimensions were equally important; responsiveness was the least satisfied dimension; (2) Therapists believed that all service dimensions were addressed by their services; assurance was the most important dimension. The perceptual differences of the two groups on customer value led to recommendations on the current rehabilitation services. The outcomes of the study provided insight on critical stroke patient needs and contributed to the design of stroke rehabilitation therapy services.

Design factors and opportunities of rehabilitation robots in upper-limb training after stroke

The occurrence of strokes has been progressively increasing. Upper limb recovery after stroke is more difficult than lower limb. One of the rapidly expanding technologies in post-stroke rehabilitation is robot-aided therapy. The advantage of robots is that they are able to deliver highly repetitive therapeutic tasks with minimal supervision of a therapist. However, from the literature, the focus of robotic design in stroke rehabilitation has been technology-driven. Clinical and therapeutic requirements were not seriously considered in the design of rehabilitation robots. The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) demonstrate the missing elements of current robot-aided therapy; (2) identify design factors and opportunities of rehabilitation robots (in upper-limb training after stroke). In this study, we performed a literature review on articles relevant to rehabilitation robots in upper-limb training after stroke. We identified the design foci of current rehabilitation robots for upper limb stroke recovery. Using the therapeutic framework for stroke rehabilitation in occupational therapy, we highlighted design factors and opportunities of rehabilitation robots. The outcomes of this study benefit the robotics design community in the design of rehabilitation robots.