Tobacco 21: Retailer Perceptions, Experiences, and Challenges Before and After a New Minimum Legal Sales Age Law in Maryland

Objectives: By raising the legal age of sale from 18 to 21 years old, Tobacco 21 laws (T21) are reshaping the tobacco landscape in the United States. In 2019, Maryland became the 13th state to adopt T21. This study is among the first to examine the perception, awareness, and ease of compliance of T21 among tobacco retailers through a two-wave survey conducted pre-T21 and post-T21. Design: Surveys were conducted among the states more than 6,000 registered retailers prior to the states T21 law going into effect and eight months later after T21 had been enacted. The pre-T21 and post-T21 survey instruments measured retailer awareness, support, and perceived ability to comply with T21, current tobacco practices, revenue from tobacco products, and challenges faced in compliance. 414 retailers completed the pre-T21 survey and 360 completed the post-T21 survey. The final survey data was weighted to reflect the geographic distributions of licensed tobacco retailers in Maryland. Results: There was no significant difference in retailer awareness, support and challenges comparing pre and post T21. One notable caveat is lack of consumer knowledge about T21, resulting in retailers being responsible for educating customers. Conclusions: The evaluation of T21 and impact to retailers is a valuable tool in determining the laws success and barriers to implementation. Results support the idea that T21 laws have had a minor impact on how retailers conduct their business. As a result of the communication and materials provided by the state, retailers largely understand the law and how to adhere to guidelines.

Increasing the Situation Awareness and Response Time of K9 Units Using a Smart Integrated Vest for the Canine Companion

First responders are tasked to intervene in small-scale emergencies and major natural or human-made disasters under unknown environments. They are required to operate around the clock, in situations that are life-threatening and potentially hazardous, with limited awareness of the operational situation, mission progress, and time sensitivity. They more often than not risk their own personal safety and well-being in order to keep civilians safe. During the most demanding and extended incidents, first responders operate under complex response operation plans that involve the collaboration of multiple disciplines and teams including K9 units. Within the context of the INGENIOUS project, a K9 vest for the canine of the unit is developed, aiming to improve their response time, enhance their situational awareness, support the collaboration between agencies, and most importantly, increase their safety during missions.

HEURISTICS FOR AWARENESS SUPPORT IN GROUPWARE SYSTEMS

ABSTRACT: Groupware Systems (GS) or collaborative systems are software systems that support the development of activities in which a group of users interacts to combine their skills, abilities, and work to achieve a common goal. In this area, an important concept is awareness, which is the information that helps people be aware of events beyond their current tasks. This information makes smoother the use of a collaborative system, so it is a fundamental element in this kind of software. In the design and construction of these types of systems, heuristics are used as design guidelines that serve as a useful evaluation tool for product designers and usability professionals. The current heuristics and guidelines for the design of awareness support focus on supporting the awareness of the team in the shared workspace, without considering elements to support the information needs of the user's own and individual interaction within the workspace. To address this problem and to facilitate the design and integration of awareness support, we developed 13 heuristics that integrate principles of Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Supported Cooperative Work to help groupware designers meet individual and team awareness needs. For evaluating the validity of the proposed heuristics, a structured and iterative consultation process was carried out with experts in Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. The proposed heuristics can help software engineers develop collaborative systems that integrate awareness information and satisfy users' contextual information needs. Keywords: Awareness, virtual groups, collaborative work, heuristics.

Social Media Data in an Augmented Reality System for Situation Awareness Support in Emergency Control Rooms

During crisis situations, emergency operators require fast information access to achieve situation awareness and make the best possible decisions. Augmented reality could be used to visualize the wealth of user-generated content available on social media and enable context-adaptive functions for emergency operators. Although emergency operators agree that social media analytics will be important for their future work, it poses a challenge to filter and visualize large amounts of social media data. We conducted a goal-directed task analysis to identify the situation awareness requirements of emergency operators. By collecting tweets during two storms in Germany we evaluated the usefulness of Twitter data for achieving situation awareness and conducted interviews with emergency operators to derive filter strategies for social media data. We synthesized the results by discussing how the unique interface of augmented reality can be used to integrate social media data into emergency control rooms for situation awareness support.

Mitigating design fixation: A visualization tool for enhancing situation awareness

External stimuli can stimulate a designer's creativity and improve the outcome of design ideation for product/service concept generation. A psychological phenomenon that may occur during such utilization of external stimuli is design fixation, which is widely believed to adversely affect the ideation outcome. One of the difficulties in preventing or alleviating design fixation is that the designer may not easily detect or predict its occurrence during the mentally demanding task of ideation. In an effort to address the problem of design fixation, the current study develops a situation awareness support system, which helps the designer perceive and predict the occurrences of design fixation. The situation awareness support system is empirically evaluated in its utility in mitigating design fixation. The study result shows that the situation awareness support system can help the designer to mitigate design fixation while not influencing significant impact on the ideation performance.

Appropriation of the Front-of-Pack Nutrition Label Nutri-Score across the French Population: Evolution of Awareness, Support, and Purchasing Behaviors between 2018 and 2019

Since the implementation of the Nutri-Score on a voluntary basis in 2017 in France, very few studies have evaluated how the label was recognized and used by consumers. The goal of this study was to assess the evolution of awareness, support, and perceived impact on purchasing behaviors of the Nutri-Score in France. Between April 2018 and May 2019, a total of 4006 participants were recruited across three successive waves and answered questions regarding awareness of the Nutri-Score, support of the measure, and change of behavior following the implementation of the Nutri-Score via an online survey. Descriptive analyses to assess the evolution over time were performed, as well as logistic regression models to evaluate associations between the different outcomes and individual characteristics. From April 2018 to May 2019, the awareness of the Nutri-Score increased considerably, reaching 81.5% in May 2019. Since April 2018, a steady proportion of participants—9 out of 10—showed strong support toward the measure and a similar proportion, 87.2%, declared being in favor of making the Nutri-Score mandatory. The impact on purchasing behaviors appeared promising given the limited implementation of the label, with 42.9% of the participants reporting they modified their purchasing behaviors thanks to the measure. Multivariate analyses showed that the impact on purchasing behaviors of the Nutri-Score was greater over time, on younger populations and on frequent labeling readers. Our results suggested that the labeling system was well received and used by all socioeconomic groups, including subgroups who are more likely to have a lower-quality diet.