Güneş Koru receives a research grant from Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality to investigate effective and efficient Health IT adoption in Home Health Care.

Higher quality of care, improved health outcomes, and reduced costs become important targets in home health care due its necessity and importance. Successful and effective adoption of health information technology (IT) by Home Health Agencies (HHAs) is a critical tool for achieving those targets. However, currently, the level of health IT adoption is limited in HHAs for various reasons including the issues with eligibility to receive incentives for electronic health records systems purchase from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. Therefore, the major problem for advancing health IT in the home health care industry is to leverage health IT to effectively respond to HHAs' important challenges and opportunities about improving the quality of care and health outcomes as well as reducing costs; this should be done in an efficient manner by considering the contextual determinants of health IT adoption. So far, the pressing challenges and opportunities of HHAs have not been sufficiently studied from an information systems analysis perspective. In addition, the determinants of health IT adoption in HHAs have not been studied by collecting rich contextual data from HHAs. To address this gap, this research project will: (i) Assess the challenges experienced by HHAs in delivering home care, including the privacy and security challenges, and the opportunities to improve quality of care and health outcomes, to reduce costs, and to improve access (ii) Assess the current health IT adoption activities and investigate the issues that can be addressed for successful and more efficient health IT adoption (iii) Iteratively refine, organize, and report the evidence about health IT adoption in HHAs in an evidence base and make recommendations about key solutions and strategies that can be implemented by HHAs as well as other parties such as vendors and government agencies.

AVAILABLE POSITIONS:

UMBC STEM Initiative (USI) is an out-of-school time program for 1st-4th graders at Lakeland Elementary Middle School, created with two things in mind:  students' academic and personal growth. 

USI has four Fellows positions to fill:

• 2 Fellows serve on Mondays & Wednesdays, 2:30-6:30 pm
• 2 Fellows serve on Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2:30-6:30 pm.
  

Ideally, applicants would be available on BOTH days.  Lakeland Elementary Middle School is located in South Baltimore, 15 minutes from UMBC.  Preference is given to applicants who can commit to the full 27-week program calendar:  September 30-December 12, 2013 and January 6-May 16, 2014.

STIPENDS:

A stipend of $2200 is offered for fulfillment of the total commitment, 8 hours per week for 27 weeks.  Fellows will be enrolled in The Shriver Center's 096 Community Service & Learning Leadership Practicum.  All majors are welcomed, those with STEM majors are strongly encouraged.  This is also a great opportunity for aspiring elementary teachers who could strengthen their science and math skills by being paired with Fellows who have STEM backgrounds.  Graduate students are welcomed to apply!

1) Co-facilitating all aspects of the program (homework help, academic and enrichment activities, community meeting, transitions between activities);

 2) Collaborating with Lakeland teachers in the planning and delivery of academic activities;

3) Leading one enrichment activity per week (i.e. sport; robotics; chess; performance arts);

4) Supervising volunteers (UMBC students), who will also support USI activities;

5) Serving as a “real” model to USI Scholars.

HOW TO APPLY:

Interested students should fill out the attached application and submit it to Lori Hardesty, Assistant Director, Service-Learning, K-16 Partnerships via email at lhardesty@umbc.edu or in-person to The Shriver Center by Wednesday, September 18th, NO LATER THAN 5 pm. The Shriver Center is located on the 1st Floor of the Public Policy Building, just past the elevators.  Interviews will be scheduled starting Monday, September 23rd and Tuesday, September 24th - see application for more information.   The program begins the week of September 30th. 

QUESTIONS:
You can contact Rehana Shafi, Director, Sherman Scholars Program at rshafi@umbc.edu with any questions.  See application for additional information. 

Research Assistantship Available

Smart Plug-based Appliance Energy Profiling and

Prediction Portal for Green Buildings

New emerging “smart plugs” embed a micro-controller and low-power communication device that allows you to monitor the power consumption of individual devices (e.g., microwave, coffee machine, laptop) plugged into power sockets, and communicate such power consumption information over a wireless network to a central monitoring station. Such devices could lead to substantial savings of energy and money by enabling Internet-based monitoring and real-time control of the behavior of individual appliances. This project will use real-life microcontroller kits (ACME Plugs from Moteware) and real-life building measurement data to explore whether such measurement-based monitoring can be used to:

• Develop Smart Circuit Breaker — i.e., to lessen the burden of the user of plugging each and every appliance/device in the building with a smart plug; we will investigate connecting multiple devices together with an individual smart plug/smart circuit breaker and design a smart circuit breaker using energy metering chip (ADE7753), AC/DC power supply, Microcontroller with radio (TI MSP430F16 and CC2420 radio supported by TinyOS) and solid state AC relay (Sharp S216SE1) etc.
• Profile individual devices — i.e., use NILM (non-intrusive load monitoring) data analytics algorithm on the time-series of power consumption traces to infer the type of plugged-in device (e.g., distinguish between a laptop & a coffeemaker), thereby building a dynamic catalog of the types & number of devices connected by a consumer.
• Predict the power consumption of individual rooms — i.e., using the past history of the power consumption of individual devices to create predictive inferences of the usage patterns for individual devices (e.g., learn that the individual switches on a dehumidifier for ~3 hrs every Thursday).

Expertise: Technical knowledge of standard time-series & statistical mining techniques (e.g., regression, support vector machines) is needed. Significant programming knowledge of Java & ability to create simple Web Applications is a must. Knowledge of TinyOS, Embedded System and Networking protocols is a plus, although not essential. The project will utilize real ACME plugs, which are programmed using TinyOS & which communicate using a ZigBee radio.

Please contact Dr. Nirmalya Roy at Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. for research assistantship for this project.

Research Assistantship Available

Smart Plug-based Appliance Energy Profiling and

Prediction Portal for Green Buildings

New emerging “smart plugs” embed a micro-controller and low-power communication device that allows you to monitor the power consumption of individual devices (e.g., microwave, coffee machine, laptop) plugged into power sockets, and communicate such power consumption information over a wireless network to a central monitoring station. Such devices could lead to substantial savings of energy and money by enabling Internet-based monitoring and real-time control of the behavior of individual appliances. This project will use real-life microcontroller kits (ACME Plugs from Moteware) and real-life building measurement data to explore whether such measurement-based monitoring can be used to:

• Develop Smart Circuit Breaker — i.e., to lessen the burden of the user of plugging each and every appliance/device in the building with a smart plug; we will investigate connecting multiple devices together with an individual smart plug/smart circuit breaker and design a smart circuit breaker using energy metering chip (ADE7753), AC/DC power supply, Microcontroller with radio (TI MSP430F16 and CC2420 radio supported by TinyOS) and solid state AC relay (Sharp S216SE1) etc.
• Profile individual devices — i.e., use NILM (non-intrusive load monitoring) data analytics algorithm on the time-series of power consumption traces to infer the type of plugged-in device (e.g., distinguish between a laptop & a coffeemaker), thereby building a dynamic catalog of the types & number of devices connected by a consumer.
• Predict the power consumption of individual rooms — i.e., using the past history of the power consumption of individual devices to create predictive inferences of the usage patterns for individual devices (e.g., learn that the individual switches on a dehumidifier for ~3 hrs every Thursday).

Expertise: Technical knowledge of standard time-series & statistical mining techniques (e.g., regression, support vector machines) is needed. Significant programming knowledge of Java & ability to create simple Web Applications is a must. Knowledge of TinyOS, Embedded System and Networking protocols is a plus, although not essential. The project will utilize real ACME plugs, which are programmed using TinyOS & which communicate using a ZigBee radio.

Please contact Dr. Nirmalya Roy at Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. for research assistantship for this project.

The results are in! Nearly 5,000 voters weighed in on the last poll to decide if the off-screen "drawer" navigation style that has swept mobile design is appropriate for larger screen ("desktop") designs. You could answer:

• It's not good on any site.
• It can be good on any site.
• It's good for mobile sites, but not desktop sites.

Only 10% of you were of the opinion that the off-screen nav isn't a good idea on any design. So the vast majority approve of it at least on small screens. The remaining 90% were fairly evenly split. By a nose, at 46%, you voted that off-screen nav can work on any design, making it the most popular choice. 44% said it's only appropriate on mobile sites.

Here's a visual breakdown:

See the Pen GtCqp by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen

Personally I'd lean toward the pragmatic. I know I asked for you to vote without any context of a particular design. That's just to get a general gut instinct and sense of the community vibe around this idea. But I'm sure most of us make real life decisions, especially design decisions, based on the real facts in front of us. If a drawer made a ton of sense on a large screen desktop site design, we'd probably go for it. But of course this idea was born from the reality that small screens are small and moving navigation away from the primary screen gives us more real estate to work with and bigger tap areas in both places. So to put it on a large screen design where that isn't as much of an issue, might be weird. But then again, possibly less and less weird over time as mobile designs dominate what people interact with.

Poll in the sidebar another day or so before the next one goes up. Check out the polls archive for full, real time results for this and all past polls.

Poll Results: Off Screen Navigation Use on Mobile/Desktop is a post from CSS-Tricks