Perceived Safety Influencing Active Travel to School-A Built Environment Perspective.

Despite the many research studies on active school travel (AST), the number of children walking/cycling to school is decreasing as there is a lack of implementable research evidence. This review through database searches from 2000 to 2020 aims to identify research gaps and explore new perspectives. The articles are selected and screened methodically for systematic presentation of the review. An existing active school travel framework is used to structure and discuss this review paper on mediating factors influencing children's active travel to school, that is the perceived traffic safety, neighborhood safety, and distance to school. Perception of traffic safety could be ameliorated through lateral separation from the traffic, and this could be a new area of research. The neighborhood safety perception may require more research to validate the previous findings. Schools should be located within high-density residential development so that many children can walk to school.

Informing Streetscape Design with Citizen Perceptions of Safety and Place: An Immersive Virtual Environment E-Participation Method.

As our cities grow, it is important to develop policies and streetscape designs that provide pedestrians with safe comfortable walking conditions and acknowledge the challenges involved in making urban places feel liveable and safe while understanding the critical role of streets around busy destinations. To understand these challenges at a nuanced, human level, new methods of citizen engagement are needed. This paper outlines the development and application of a new citizen perception collection method, using immersive virtual environments (IVE), coupled with an interactive emoji affective activation-pleasure grid and digital slider elements, embedded within an online e-participation survey to quantify, and rank the impact of individual (single-variable) urban design elements and safe system treatments on pedestrians' perceptions of safety and place. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of this method for providing detailed, interrogable, scalable citizen perception data of a variety of urban street design elements and safe system treatments, which allows a statistical analysis of responses and prioritization of the most effective pedestrian-oriented interventions for maintaining or enhancing street vibrancy and liveability. Our IVE e-participation approach is an important contribution to forming a better understanding of streetscapes and provides a valuable method for urban designers and transport planners to prioritise different streetscape place and safety approaches.

User-centred iterative design of a smartwatch system supporting spontaneous reminiscence therapy for people living with dementia.

Reminiscence therapy is beneficial for improving the quality of life for older adults living with dementia. However, it is difficult for caregivers in care homes to make this part of their daily practice because remembering a resident's individual stories is difficult. Proximity-aware technologies can make rapid connections between residents, their histories, and nearby artefacts. Through a user-centred iterative design approach, we designed Memento, a prototype technology system that makes it easy and convenient for caregivers to connect residents with real stories from their past and engage them in meaningful conversations. Memento displays connections between a resident's stories and their surroundings on a caregiver smartphone. Caregivers can then subtly use this information to start spontaneous reminiscences with residents, as they go about their everyday activities. Remembering their histories was highly enjoyable for residents, giving them a renewed sense of self-confidence and well-being.

User-Centered Value Specifications for Technologies Supporting Chronic Low-Back Pain Management.

Low-back pain (LBP) is a leading cause of disability globally. It is complex and multifactorial, with a miriad of factors interwining and interacting to burden healthcare and individuals. Self-management support is central as part of best-practice to improve outcomes. In recent years, informatics has increasingly been considered to support care; however, due to its complex nature, several factors need to be unpacked in order to consider how technologies might support LBP. The present study utilised semi-structured interviews involving N = 20 participants (n = 10 practicing clinicains and n = 10 indidivuals living with chronic LBP (cLBP)) to collect user-centered perceptions and considerations for key factors central to technology succeeding in supporting cLBP. Six themes were identified: tracking, alterts, user-experience, communication, feedback, and content. Findings lay groundwork for future research aimed at developing technologies that can encourage shared-decision making in supporting cLBP management in a particpatory health paradigm.