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The purpose of this paper is to improve the general operationalization of an “active patient,” by examining the specific activities and skills expected of active patients.

Expected activities and necessary skills were studied through a qualitative case study into the development and use of an assistive technology (i.e. web site) aimed at stimulating active patient-ship. Interviews, observations and document analysis were used to capture and explore designers’ inscribing practices and their consequences regarding expected competences and activities of patients using the web site.

Designers inscribed two “co-design roles” that active patients were expected to perform on the web site (co-designing their own healthcare and co-designing the healthcare of peers), for which at least eight different competencies were needed. The absence of skills or facilities to apply these skills resulted in incomplete use, a different use than intended by designers and non-use of the web site.

Technological choices and inscribing processes determine who is able or facilitated to become active and who is not. Due to inscribed co-design roles, it also influences the extent to which already active peers are able to perform health-related activities. Different users with different conditions should be taken into account in the design as specific group characteristics can influence level of individual activity.

This study is, as far as the authors know, the first that examines the “active patient” concept by studying an assistive technology and using scripting literature, resulting in an improved understanding of what it means to become “active” in terms of skills and activities.

This chapter outlines potential steps to take in designing active learning experiences based on several theories underlying the learning process. The chapter examines theories of learning and instruction including information processing, schema acquisition, and cognitive load theory. Next follows an explanation of how these theories support problem-centered learning as well as a rationale for the need to help learners develop domain-general, flexible problem-solving skills that will transfer to future needs and contexts. The second half of the chapter focuses on designing active learning experiences based on the selection of real-world problems as the foundation for learning, activating prior knowledge, demonstration of the process or concept, multiple opportunities for practice with relevant scaffolding, and the chance to integrate that knowledge into the learners’ own context based on M. D. Merrill’s (2002) First Principles of Instruction. Examples of assessments, strategies, and activities to foster active, problem-centered learning drawn from the literature are also provided.

From poor indoor environmental quality conditions to musculoskeletal discomfort, the interior design of workspaces has the potential to negatively affect human health. One of the key responses from industry has been the rise of health-related guidelines, certification and rating tools. Despite the rapid adoption of such tools by the Australian high-end corporate real estate, there is a scarcity of empirical evidence arising from such premises. This study aims to compare results from certified premises against other open-plan offices to understand differences arising from occupants’ satisfaction, perceived productivity and health.

A total of 1,121 post-occupancy evaluation (POE) surveys conducted in 9 offices were analyzed. All these premises hold a certification from the Green Building Council of Australia and two achieved a WELL rating. The analysis is performed in three parts: comparing WELL-certified (2 cases) and non-WELL certified (7 cases) offices along with comparison with a benchmark of 9,794 POE surveys from the BOSSA database, comparing activity-based working (ABW) (5 cases) and traditional (4 cases) offices along with comparison with BOSSA database and qualitative study of the similar design features in all 9 offices accompanied with an in-depth analysis of the health-related issues that might have occurred because of poor ergonomic design. For the first two parts, several t-tests are performed.

Highest scores for overall satisfaction, workability, perceived productivity and health were reported on WELL-rated premises. Offices incorporating active design principles outperformed others on workability, satisfaction with work area, collaboration, unwanted interruptions, perceived productivity and health. ABW environments outperformed the traditional offices on spatial comfort, thermal comfort, noise and privacy, personal control, comfort of furnishing, adjustability of the work area and space to collaborate. People using sit–stand workstations reported spending significantly less time seated and female workers were more prone to reporting pain over the past 12 months. The best-performing offices implemented active and biophilic design, prioritized overall ergonomics and different spaces designed to support a variety of work-related activities.

This research conducts a comparison between certified premises against other offices in terms of occupants’ satisfaction, perceived productivity and health. A qualitative analysis is also conducted to investigate personal and physical environmental aspects. The way of working (ABW or traditional), implementation of active design features, self-reported musculoskeletal discomfort and physical activity were also investigated. The study has taken a holistic approach to investigate many health-related physical, environmental and emotional aspects in certified workspaces.

This chapter describes and analyzes the result of an active, cooperative learning design adopted in “Change Management,” an elective course at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC), which is a fully online university. The paper describes the context and foundations that support the learning design, outlines the learning activities and their evolution, and presents the results of a student survey to assess the design’s effectiveness in reaching its main goals. The results of the survey suggest that students perceived this design as enhancing their teamwork abilities, while being interesting and motivating, as well as useful in learning the course’s content. Therefore, the desired goals were attained and the design was kept, with minor changes, in subsequent editions of the course. In addition, students without prior teamwork experience valued the collaborative activities more than students who had previously worked in teams in other subjects of their degrees. In contrast, no differences were found for individual learning activities. This suggests that the design can be useful in introductory courses where students are asked to learn in virtual teams for the first time.

The aim of this study is to understand classroom settings desired by high school students and teachers in an active learning classroom. The research question is whether students and teachers will differ from each other when designing an active learning classroom.

In an effort to design a learning environment for an advanced placement programme, action research methodology was followed by conducting a participatory workshop in a real active learning classroom with future users. Working in isolation from one another, students and teachers designed their own classrooms by forming different learning centres. During the study, two groups, made up of ten high school students and seven teachers, respectively, were asked to arrange the furniture in an active learning classroom. The groups were free to form as many furniture arrangement configurations as they wished and were asked to write about their workshop experiences afterwards. Once they had completed both tasks, their plan layouts were examined.

All of the plan layouts were found to fall into one of three categories: a traditional layout, a small group layout or a single large group layout. The written texts were also analysed, which revealed different perspectives of each participating group. As students and teachers explore different learning opportunities, they appear to be driven by different kinds of experiences when they endeavour to organize their classrooms.

Never before has an active learning classroom been the site for a participatory furniture arrangement workshop that employs teachers and students.

This paper aims to synthesize the published literature regarding the impact of environmental design on the improvement of elderly residents’ physical activity.

To provide convergent evidence about the association between facility design/management and physical activity of elderly population, searches were conducted in the PubMed and Google Scholar databases, as well as in specific active living design journals such as Applied Gerontology, Aging and Physical Activity, Housing for the Elderly and Sports Sciences. The inclusion criteria for the final list were the articles that were qualitative, quantitative and mixed-methods studies as well as systematic reviews; written in English; related to the built environmental design; wholly or partially focused on physical activity in elderly population; and published in peer-reviewed journals between 1984 and 2019.

Overall, 30 studies were included in the final list. The results of this review demonstrate that design interventions can raise physical functioning inside and outside of long-term residential facilities. Increasing opportunities for walkable spaces and reducing physical barriers can result in higher levels of physical activity for the elderly population.

This systematic review discloses the design strategies to enhance the level of physical activity by the elderly population based on the findings of the published literature. Overall space layout and accessibility to outdoor walkable spaces were addressed to generally promote the moderate levels of physical activity in elderly population.

Increasing opportunities for walkable spaces and reducing physical barriers result in higher level of activity for the elderly population. Corridor design and interior design ergonomic considerations were highlighted in the literature. Space layout and accessibility to outdoor walkable spaces promote the moderate levels of physical activity.

Environmental design considerations are unique aspects of enhancement of activity level in the elderly population.

This systematic review discloses the design strategies to enhance the level of physical activity by the elderly population based on the findings of the published literature. Overall space layout and accessibility to outdoor walkable spaces were addressed to generally promote the moderate levels of physical activity in elderly population.

The design and testing of clothing for activewear requires complex assessments of the suitability of the clothing when the body is in motion. The purpose of this paper is to investigate full body 3D scanning of active body poses in order to develop “watertight” digital models and half-scale dress forms to facilitate design, pattern making and fit analyses. Issues around creating a size set of scans in order to facilitate fit testing of activewear across a size range were also explored.

Researchers experimented to discover effective methods for 3D body capture in the cycling position and reconstruction of the body in a reliable way. In total, 25 cyclists were scanned and size representatives were selected from these participants. Methods of creating half-scale forms were developed that make optimum use of modern materials and technologies. Half-scale dress forms were created in two active positions in a range of sizes for fit testing and design. A set of half-scale and full-scale bike shorts in two styles were manufactured and fit tested on the half-scale forms compared to fit testing on the scan participants to test validity of this method of assessing fit.

Issues in capturing and reconstructing areas occluded in the scanning process, and reconstructing the interface with the bicycle seat were addressed. Active digital forms were developed across the size range, from which both digital avatars and physical mannequins were developed for pattern development and fit testing. The production and use of precisely half-scaled tools for garment testing was achieved and validated by comparing fit test results in active positions on the half-scale forms and on participants who were scanned to create these forms.

Design modifications for active positions to date are based on linear measurements alone, which do not define the 3D body adequately. Despite much research using body scanners, only limited data exist on the body in active poses, and the concept of creating half-scale forms by scanning fit models throughout the size range in active body positions is a novel concept. The progress made in resolving material and process experiments in creating the actual half-scale forms, and testing their suitability for fit testing provides a basis for further research aimed at developing similar dress forms for other activewear garments.

This paper aims to design an active shock absorber scheme for use in conjunction with a passive shock absorber to suppress the horizontal vibration of elevator cars in a smaller range and shorter time. The developed active shock absorber will also improve the safety and comfort of passengers driving in ultra-high-speed elevators.

A six-degree of freedom dynamic model is established according to the position and condition of the car. Then the active shock absorber and disturbance compensation-based adaptive control scheme are designed and simulated in MATLAB/Simulink. The results are analysed and compared with the traditional shock absorber.

The results show that, compared with traditional spring-based passive damping systems, the designed active shock absorber can reduce vibration displacement by 60%, peak acceleration by 50% and oscillation time by 2/3 and is more robust to different spring stiffness, damping coefficient and load.

The developed active shock absorber and its control algorithm can significantly reduce vibration amplitude and converged time. It can also adjust the damping strength according to the actual load of the elevator car, which is more suitable for high-speed elevators.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of an accounting education pedagogy incorporating active learning approaches designed to engage first-year undergraduate business students and to aspire them to continue accounting as their academic major and entry into the accounting profession.

Data were collected from a questionnaire with a pre-/post-test design of 24 undergraduate business students enrolled in a course titled Accounting Active Learning Seminar (AALS) (test group) and 33 students who did not participate in the AALS (control group). The AALS incorporates various types of active learning methods designed by the authors to inspire students to continue with accounting as a career choice.

The findings show that participation in the AALS improved student’s motivation in accounting education and the likelihood of choosing accounting as their academic major. The active learning methods implemented in the AALS were effective in improving students’ confidence, of which degree contributed to students’ stronger works aspiration towards accounting professions. Further it was found that students who did not participate in the AALS tended to have lower attention dimensions of motivation, which was also significantly associated with lower percentage of students’ choice of academic major in accounting.

This is one of the few studies to empirically examine active learning on student engagement and performance with a focus on accounting. While the evidence shows that active learning has pedagogical benefits, the full potential of active learning is more likely to be realized when accounting educators design active learning carefully to address the “attention” and “confidence” attributes.

The Kinect sensor released by Microsoft is well-known for its effectiveness on human gesture recognition. Gesture recognition by Kinect has been proved to be an efficient command operation and provides an additional human-computer interface in addition to the traditional speech recognition. For Kinect gesture recognition in the application of gesture command operations, recognition of the active user making the gesture command to Kinect will be an extremely crucial problem. The purpose of this paper is to propose a recognition method for recognizing the person identity of an active user using combined eigenspace and Gaussian mixture model (GMM) with Kinect-extracted action gesture features.

Several Kinect-derived gesture features will be explored for determining the effective pattern features in the active user recognition task. In this work, a separate Kinect-derived feature design for eigenspace recognition and GMM classification is presented for achieving the optimal performance of each individual classifier. In addition to Kinect-extracted feature designs for active user recognition, this study will further develop a combined recognition method, called combined eigenspace-GMM, which properly hybridizes the decision information of both the eigenspace and the GMM for making a more reliable user recognition result.

Active user recognition using an effective combination of eigenspace and GMM with well-developed active gesture features in Kinect-based active user recognition will have an outstanding performance on the recognition accuracy. The presented Kinect-based user recognition system using the presented approach will further have the competitive benefits of recognition on both gesture commands and providing users of gesture commands.

A hybridized scheme of eigenspace and GMM performs better than eigenspace-alone or GMM-alone on recognition accuracy of active user recognition; a separate Kinect-derived feature design for eigenspace recognition and GMM classification is presented for achieving the optimal performance of the individual classifier; combined eigenspace-GMM active user recognition belonging to model-based active user recognition design has a fine extension on increasing the recognition rate by adjusting recognition models.