Assessing daily change in pain and related symptoms help in diagnosis, prognosis, and monitoring response to treatment. However, such changes are infrequently assessed, and usually reviewed weeks or months after the start of treatment. We therefore developed a smartphone application (Keele Pain Recorder) to record information on the severity and impact of pain on daily life. Specifically, the study goal was to assess face, content and construct validity of data collection using the Pain Recorder in primary care patients receiving new analgesic prescriptions for musculoskeletal pain, as well as to assess its acceptability and clinical utility. The app was developed with Keele’s Research User Group (RUG), a clinical advisory group (CAG) and software developer for use on Android devices. The app recorded pain levels, interference, sleep disturbance, analgesic use, mood and side effects. In a feasibility study, patients aged > 18 attending their general practitioner (GP) with a painful musculoskeletal condition were recruited to use the app twice per day for 28 days. Face and construct validity were assessed through baseline and post-study questionnaires (Spearman’s rank correlation coefficient). Usability and acceptability were determined through post-study questionnaires, and patient, GP, RUG and CAG interviews. An app was developed which was liked by both patients and GPs. It was felt that it offered the opportunity for GPs to discuss pain control with their patients in a new way. All participants found the app easy to use (it did not interfere with their activities) and results easy to interpret. Strong associations existed between the first 3 days (Spearman r = 0.79) and last 3 days (r = 0.60) of pain levels and intensity scores on the app with the validated questionnaires. Collaborating with patient representatives and clinical stakeholders, we developed an app which can be used to help clinicians and patients monitor painful musculoskeletal conditions in response to analgesic prescribing. Recordings were accurate and valid, especially, for pain intensity ratings, and it was easy to use. Future work needs to examine how pain trajectories can help manage changes in a patient’s condition, ultimately assisting in self-management.

With a rise in the use Virtual Reality (VR) applications in museums and exhibition displays, digital heritage has still shown limitations in what a visitor can experience from the intersection of technology and history. Traditionally, interpretative narrative within the museum has been communicated through text panels offering limited context from a largely connoisseurly perspective. In addition to these interactive digital resources are often data base orientated via touch screen technologies with no multisensory immersion. This paper addresses the digital changes in these educational landscapes and the way it is being handled to co-create digital tools for exhibitions to educate and entertain museum visitors. This paper explores the use of haptic technology in conjunction with virtual reality to facilitate multi-faceted modes of interpretation, that offer novel access to an artefact's history from a range of perspectives. It also provides evidence of increased visitor engagement with a ceramic display through these immersive methods to communicate a narrative. This research bridges the gap between history and technology to offer an immersive experience of visiting a museum virtually and providing an intimate one-one experience to interact with artefacts and learn about history. As its focus, this research digitally reconstructs a collection of East-Asian ceramics bequeathed by Ernest Thornhill in 1944 to North Staffordshire Technical College (Now known as Staffordshire University). The digital prototype was developed to replicate the museum environment without the restrictions to access artefacts and handle them. This experience offers visual insights to contextualise the history of a ceramic to be utlised as an education tool to enhance learning within a museum setting. Evidence showed a significantly positive response to this prototype in museum and gallery settings, responses revealed these methods of interaction did assist in learning about ceramics, with a distinct majority of participants confirming these installations would encourage future visits, shaping the possibilities of how history can be combined with technology to create new and innovative solutions to learn about an artefact.

With the rapid expansion of technology and hardware availability within the field of Augmented Reality, building and deploying Augmented Reality learning environments has become more logistically viable than ever before. In this paper, we focus on the development of a new mobile learning experience for a museum by combining multiple technologies to provide additional Human–computer interaction possibilities. This is both to reduce barriers to entry for end-users as well as provide natural interaction methods. Using our method, we implemented a new approach to gesture-based interactions for Augmented Reality interactions by combining two devices, a Leap Motion and a Microsoft HoloLens (1st Generation), via an intermediary device with the use of local-area networking. This was carried out with the intention of comparing this method against alternative forms of Augmented Reality to determine which implementation has the largest impact on adult learners’ ability to retain information. A control group has been used to establish data on memory retention without the use of Augmented Reality technology, along with three focus groups to explore the different methods and locations. Results found that adult learners retain the most overall information when being educated through a traditional lecture, with a statistically significant difference between the methods; however, the use of Augmented Reality resulted in a slower rate of knowledge decay between testing intervals. This contrasts with existing research as adult learners did not respond to the technology in the same way that child and teenage audiences previously have, which suggests that prior research may not be generalisable to all audiences.

Organizations nowadays invest heavily in business intelligence (BI) systems to get insights from their increasingly large volumes of complex data, support decision making and achieve competitive advantages. The visualization capability of a BI system in terms of developing effective visualizations for addressing business problems is crucial to the success of BI. With the rapid advances achieved in the domain of information visualization, many existing visualization techniques/applications can provide reasonable support for particular paradigms, problem domains, and data types. However, they are still weak for supporting multi-paradigm, multi-domain problems and maintaining visualization effectiveness under dynamic contexts. BI systems need to include visualization subsystems or be used together with separate visualization systems that offer flexible support for creating, manipulating and transforming visualization solutions. In this paper, we discuss business visualization context and propose and implement a context adaptive visualization framework. Furthermore, we demonstrate the framework implementation through a sequence of context-driven illustrations.