Evaluating the economic impact of smart care platforms : qualitative and quantitative results of a case study

Background: In response to the increasing pressure of the societal challenge because of a graying society, a gulf of new Information and Communication Technology (ICT) supported care services (eCare) can now be noticed. Their common goal is to increase the quality of care while decreasing its costs. Smart Care Platforms (SCPs), installed in the homes of care-dependent people, foster the interoperability of these services and offer a set of eCare services that are complementary on one platform. These eCare services could not only result in more quality care for care receivers, but they also offer opportunities to care providers to optimize their processes. Objective: The objective of the study was to identify and describe the expected added values and impacts of integrating SCPs in current home care delivery processes for all actors. In addition, the potential economic impact of SCP deployment is quantified from the perspective of home care organizations. Methods: Semistructured and informal interviews and focus groups and cocreation workshops with service providers, managers of home care organizations, and formal and informal care providers led to the identification of added values of SCP integration. In a second step, process breakdown analyses of home care provisioning allowed defining the operational impact for home care organization. Impacts on 2 different process steps of providing home care were quantified. After modeling the investment, an economic evaluation compared the business as usual (BAU) scenario versus the integrated SCP scenario. Results: The added value of SCP integration for all actors involved in home care was identified. Most impacts were qualitative such as increase in peace of mind, better quality of care, strengthened involvement in care provisioning, and more transparent care communication. For home care organizations, integrating SCPs could lead to a decrease of 38% of the current annual expenses for two administrative process steps namely, care rescheduling and the billing for care provisioning. Conclusions: Although integrating SCP in home care processes could affect both the quality of life of the care receiver and informal care giver, only scarce and weak evidence was found that supports this assumption. In contrast, there exists evidence that indicates the lack of the impact on quality of life of the care receiver while it increases the cost of care provisioning. However, our cost-benefit quantification model shows that integrating SCPs in home care provisioning could lead to a considerable decrease of costs for care administrative tasks. Because of this cost decreasing impact, we believe that the integration of SCPs will be driven by home care organizations instead of the care receivers themselves

Social Welfare Systems in East Asia: A Comparative Analysis including Private Welfare

This paper is an overview of the social welfare systems of five East Asian countries, namely Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. It analyses the overall costs of welfare as well as income distribution aspects, based on both aggregate data and a programme-by-programme review of their welfare states (presented in annex). Private welfare is introduced in the analysis in two ways. First, it is argued that sometimes welfare programmes are characterised by a mix of public and private interventions, along the three dimensions of provision, finance and decision. Second, this study explores the welfare roles played by private actors alone, namely enterprises and families. The main conclusions are that (I) that Hong Kong and Singapore's public welfare expenditures will remain very low as long as they continue to rely mainly upon privately financed welfare programmes; (ii) Korea and Taiwan's public welfare expenditures will grow significantly in the coming years as their populations age, their old age pension programmes mature and their various insurance schemes are extended to marginal occupational groups; (iii) Japan's ageing problem is compounded by the weakening of the family as a provider of welfare, which will put an extra burden on her welfare state; (iv) Japan and Korea's enterprises are challenged in their chief welfare role, namely securing employment, which will also put an extra burden on their welfare states, and (v) the main income equalising factor in East Asia is the very equal distribution of work across households, which is also threatened by the weakening of enterprise and family welfare (i.e. respectively rising unemployment and decreasing income pooling inside the family).East Asia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, welfare, private welfare, social security, income distribution, enterprise welfare, familiy welfare, public expenditure

Low Inequality with Low Redistribution? An analysis of income distribution in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan compared to Britain

This article is a comparative analysis of the sources of income inequality in four countries, namely Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the United Kingdom. It relies upon decompositions of inequality measures by population groups and income sources (except for Japan because of data limitations). According to national family income and expenditure surveys, income inequality in the three Asian countries is about average among industrialised countries, and less severe than in Britain. The factors influencing income inequality are very different between the three Asian countries on the one hand, and Britain on the other. While they do not differ very much in terms of inequality of earnings, the most equalising factor in the former countries is the favourable distribution of work across households, compared to social security in the latter. Public transfers are still very underdeveloped in Korea and Taiwan, although recent legislation will dramatically change that in the coming decades, while the Japanese social security system does not generate much vertical redistribution. However, income redistribution takes place within the family cell between people with and without work. Compared to the British situation, there are very few workless households in the three Asian countries, thanks to their different co-residence and labour participation patterns.Income distribution, inequality, decomposition, East Asia, Japan, Republic of South Korea, Republic of China (Taiwan), United Kingdom, social welfare, social security, family welfare

Науково-теоретична конференція «Гармонізація науки і вищої освіти в інформаційному суспільстві»

У Києві 30−31 березня 2011 року в Національному авіаційному університеті відбулася науково-теоретична конференція «Гармонізація науки і вищої освіти в інформаційному суспільстві»

Cracking in asphalt materials

This chapter provides a comprehensive review of both laboratory characterization and modelling of bulk material fracture in asphalt mixtures. For the purpose of organization, this chapter is divided into a section on laboratory tests and a section on models. The laboratory characterization section is further subdivided on the basis of predominant loading conditions (monotonic vs. cyclic). The section on constitutive models is subdivided into two sections, the first one containing fracture mechanics based models for crack initiation and propagation that do not include material degradation due to cyclic loading conditions. The second section discusses phenomenological models that have been developed for crack growth through the use of dissipated energy and damage accumulation concepts. These latter models have the capability to simulate degradation of material capacity upon exceeding a threshold number of loading cycles.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Development of railway contracting for the national passenger rail services in the Netherlands

This article mainly gives an overview of the policy developments in the Dutch railway sector over the past decade. The sector has come a long way and the outlook now looks positive. Customer satisfaction and performance have improved and the number of people that travel by train is rising. The development of a more long-term policy window for the sector seems to have brought rest and stability and room for continuous growth of passenger numbers. The combination of a policy making and negotiation regulatory style seems to have worked out very well on the performance of the sector. In a second section the paper also considers a theoretical framework on regulation schemes and develops a first tentative attempt to apply these schemes on an analysis of the Dutch railway sector by giving some statements for discussion.Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies. Faculty of Economics and Business. The University of Sydne

The Promises and Pitfalls of the European Citizens' Initiative

Throughout the world, the idea of "democracy", the idea that the people should be governed by the people, remains a popular idea, enthusiastically embraced in many places by the opponents of autocratic regimes and safely protected in other places by the norms of political correctness. Nonetheless, the actual functioning of democratic regimes, based as it is in our country and elsewhere on the electoral process, seems to experience, if not a crisis, at least a deep malaise. And this malaise prompts a questioning of its foundations and a search for alternatives.Two such alternatives are provided by deliberative assemblies of randomly chosen citizens on the pattern of the G1000 experiment that took place in Brussels in 2011 and by the European Citizens' Initiatives launched in 2012. The 7th Re-Bel event organized on 24 May 2012 took these two interesting new experiments as the starting point of a reflection on the malaise of democracy and what to do about it.The present e-book includes a much enriched version of the two main presentations made on that occasion, respectively by Didier Caluwaerts (VUB) and Min Reuchamps (UCL) and by Kristof Jacobs (University of Nijmegen). These two pieces are preceded by a set of aphorisms on democracy by the historian and writer David Van Reybrouck, the mastermind of the G1000 and author of Tegen verkiezingen (De Bezige Bij, 2013, translated as Contre les élections, Actes Sud, 2014). They are followed by a commentary by Philippe Van Parijs, which benefited greatly from the discussion at the Re-Bel event and in particular from the contributions by Henri Monceau (Notre Europe), Charlotte Rive (European Commission), Jean-Pierre Rondas (ex VRT) and Daniel Van Lerberghe (Euractiv). And this commentary is in turn followed by an epilogue in the form of a letter in which David Van Reybrouck responds to Philippe Van Parijs's commentary

Approximate Predictive Control Barrier Functions using Neural Networks: A Computationally Cheap and Permissive Safety Filter

A predictive control barrier function (PCBF) based safety filter allows for verifying arbitrary control inputs with respect to future constraint satisfaction. The approach relies on the solution of two optimization problems computing the minimal constraint relaxations given the current state, and then computing the minimal deviation from a proposed input such that the relaxed constraints are satisfied. This paper presents an approximation procedure that uses a neural network to approximate the optimal value function of the first optimization problem from samples, such that the computation becomes independent of the prediction horizon. It is shown that this approximation guarantees that states converge to a neighborhood of the implicitly defined safe set of the original problem, where system constraints can be satisfied for all times forward. The convergence result relies on a novel class $\mathcal{K}$ lower bound on the PCBF decrease and depends on the approximation error of the neural network. Lastly, we demonstrate our approach in simulation for an autonomous driving example and show that the proposed approximation leads to a significant decrease in computation time compared to the original approach.Comment: Submitted to ECC2

Quantum dynamics of simultaneously measured non-commuting observables.

In quantum mechanics, measurements cause wavefunction collapse that yields precise outcomes, whereas for non-commuting observables such as position and momentum Heisenberg's uncertainty principle limits the intrinsic precision of a state. Although theoretical work has demonstrated that it should be possible to perform simultaneous non-commuting measurements and has revealed the limits on measurement outcomes, only recently has the dynamics of the quantum state been discussed. To realize this unexplored regime, we simultaneously apply two continuous quantum non-demolition probes of non-commuting observables to a superconducting qubit. We implement multiple readout channels by coupling the qubit to multiple modes of a cavity. To control the measurement observables, we implement a 'single quadrature' measurement by driving the qubit and applying cavity sidebands with a relative phase that sets the observable. Here, we use this approach to show that the uncertainty principle governs the dynamics of the wavefunction by enforcing a lower bound on the measurement-induced disturbance. Consequently, as we transition from measuring identical to measuring non-commuting observables, the dynamics make a smooth transition from standard wavefunction collapse to localized persistent diffusion and then to isotropic persistent diffusion. Although the evolution of the state differs markedly from that of a conventional measurement, information about both non-commuting observables is extracted by keeping track of the time ordering of the measurement record, enabling quantum state tomography without alternating measurements. Our work creates novel capabilities for quantum control, including rapid state purification, adaptive measurement, measurement-based state steering and continuous quantum error correction. As physical systems often interact continuously with their environment via non-commuting degrees of freedom, our work offers a way to study how notions of contemporary quantum foundations arise in such settings

Smart home care platforms: where is the added value?

Due to changes in the demographic situation of most Western European countries, interest in ICT supported care services grows fast. eCare services that foster a better care information exchange, social involvement, lifestyle monitoring services, etc., offered via smart care platforms integrated in the homes of the elderly are believed to be cost-effective and could lead to an increased quality of life of both care receiver and (in)formal care giver. Currently adoption and integration of these smart care platforms is slowed down by several barriers such as an unclear added value, a lack of regulations or a sustainable financial model. In this work the added value of smart home care platforms is identified for the several involved key-actors such as the care receiver, the (in)formal care providers and the care organizations. In a second step several go to market strategies are formulated and are supported by the quantification of the potential impact on current care processes in terms of time and financial resources. Because the gap between the current way of providing home care and providing home care supported by a fully integrated smart care platform seems too big to bridge in one effort, a migration path is provided for stepwise adoption and integration of smart care platforms in the current way of home care provisioning