Twitch Users' Motivations and Practices During Community Mental Health Discussions

Live streaming is a form of media that allows streamers to directly interact with their audience. Previous research has explored mental health, Twitch.tv and live streaming platforms, and users' social motivations behind watching live streams separately. However, few have explored how these all intertwine in conversations involving intimate, self-disclosing topics, such as mental health. Live streams are unique in that they are largely masspersonal in nature; streamers broadcast themselves to mostly unknown viewers, but may choose to interact with them in a personal way. This study aims to understand users' motivations, preferences, and habits behind participating in mental health discussions on live streams. We interviewed 25 Twitch viewers about the streamers they watch, how they interact in mental health discussions, and how they believe streamers should discuss mental health on live streams. Our findings are contextualized in the dynamics in which these discussions occur. Overall, we found that the innate design of the Twitch platform promotes a user-hierarchy in the ecosystem of streamers and their communities, which may affect how mental health is discussed.

Design Process for a Birthing Bed, Based on User Hierarchy: Promoting Improvement in User Satisfaction

The medical device design process has a responsibility to define the characteristics of the object to ensure its correct interaction with users. This study presents a proposal to improve medical device design processes in order to increase user acceptance by considering two key factors: the user hierarchy and the relationship with the patient’s health status. The goal of this study is to address this research gap and to increase design factors with practical suggestions for the design of new medical devices. The results obtained here will help medical device designers make more informed decisions about the functions and features required in the final product during the development stage. In addition, we aim to help researchers with design process didactics that demonstrate the importance of the correct execution of the process and how the factors considered can have an impact on the final product. An experiment was conducted with 40 design engineering students who designed birthing beds via two design processes: the traditional product design process and the new design process based on hierarchies (proposed in this study). The results showed a significant increase in the user acceptance of the new birthing bed developed with the hierarchical-based design process.

American Complete Streets and Australian SmartRoads: What Can We Learn from Each Other?

Road management in both Australasia and America has historically focused on facilitating vehicle movement and reducing congestion. More recently, however, there has been a shift to acknowledge the wider role that roads play in society. Road safety, equity impacts, considerations of “place” and the needs of different road users (including transit, pedestrians, and cyclists) are all gaining prominence. Two relatively new approaches to road design and management—Complete Streets in the United States and SmartRoads network operations planning in Australia—embody the spirit of this change. This paper summarizes the development of the Complete Streets movement in America and introduces the SmartRoads management framework, which was developed in the state of Victoria, Australia. In the SmartRoads process, roads within a network are classified in a multimodal Road User Hierarchy, network issues are identified using multimodal level of service measures, and possible operational or design solutions are compared using decision-making Network Fit Assessment software. We compare the scope, emphasis, and approach of the two frameworks; although they were developed at around the same time, the two approaches differ in significant ways. Yet the two approaches can learn from each other in order to significantly improve the management and design of roads in both Australia and the United States.

Decentralized weather monitoring system for smart cities

Internet of things involves monitoring as one of its major applications. It mostly includes condition-based decisions without human intervention. Monitoring systems continuously read the data from sensors, upload the data to a database and take appropriate decisions when they encounter an abnormal data. This provides a good basis for the IoT control systems which now are mostly common. This paper explains the solution to replace the single server system which means a centralized system with an individual server system which is a decentralized system. A decentralized system provides high security to the data and ensures data privacy which centralized systems fail to do. This decentralized system involves maintaining own server but ensuring the availability of data & communication without loss of privacy, ensuring minimization of security threats. This application involves building of a collective application on an android platform to present the data to the users based on the user hierarchy defined. The app provides high security through authentication based on the rights that user possesses. This app is designed to continuously monitor the air pollution in the areas across the city and give alerts or notifications whenever the pollution level reaches to a threshold. Additionally, the app monitors temperature and humidity level. Analytics are performed on the data from sensors and a graph is plotted as the value of a parameter across time. Separate graphs are plotted for each parameter. A user with administrator privilege can view the data of all the areas whereas a user from a single location or a user with general privilege gets the data of his own location.