Tuwhera Research Repository

The Tuwhera Research Repository provides sustainable open access and archiving to a broad range of AUT produced research - theses, research outputs and datasets.

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Recent Submissions

Access status: Open Access ,
Identifying the Potential of RFID in Disaster Healthcare: An International Delphi Study
(MDPI AG, 2021-10-27) Madanian, Samaneh; Parry, Dave
Mainstream healthcare has been facing numerous challenges, and it is expected to see that these challenges become more severe and frequent when healthcare is dealing with disasters. This points to the necessity of utilising technologies to support healthcare and disaster managers in making quality decisions during chaotic and rapidly changing conditions in disaster situations. Therefore, in this research, the objective is to identify the role of RFID technology in healthcare-related activities before, during, and after disasters in terms of application areas and phases of the disaster management cycle (DMC). A Delphi approach was used in this research. Two rounds of questionnaires were administered to a panel of experts to evaluate the actual and potential use of RFID applications for healthcare within DMC. The Delphi participants were the field experts in the areas of disaster management, disaster medicine, and information systems. Based on the Delphi results, RFID applications were seen to be most useful in the response and recovery phases of disasters. RFID was seen as being most helpful for health-related supply management and casualty information. There were concerns that privacy and security may be barriers to adoption and use. Other applications identified by this study include identifying and tracking medical resources (including clinicians and first responders) and their accurate coordination in the response missions, determining idle resources, and maximising their utilisation during response activities. In this research, 35 potential scenarios of RFID applications for healthcare purposes within DMC and Disaster e-Health (DEH) were evaluated with the Delphi participants. RFID technologies could play an important role in DMC and DEH to provide more reliable and timely information to support healthcare during disasters. Based on the research results, managing the supply chain emerged as a major RFID application for supporting disaster healthcare.
Access status: Open Access ,
Skill Deficits Impact Cloud Business Returns
(IBIMA Publishing, 2021-06-16) Cusack, Brian; Adedokun, Adekemi
Cloud computing (Cloud) presents an opportunity to businesses for cost reduction in IT services, however, it also requires new skills to optimize the effective management and realization of the business benefits. The skills gap is described as a deficit because many previous management methods and strategies fail to adequately cover the new requirements and fully grasp the value opportunity. Businesses are offered the opportunity to purchase IT services (computing, storage, software, etc.) as required rather than retaining traditional IT assets and infrastructures. Management must disentangle from former IT services supply arrangements, and effectively engage with new contractual and trust requirements. This research proposes the next question: What are the impacts of Cloud computing on the required business IT skill sets? A sample of 20 industry consultants was analyzed through interviews and the data was thematically analyzed in NVIVO to answer the research question. It was found that some skill sets have become irrelevant to business performance and other new ones are in demand. Skills deficits were particularly apparent in the security area where privacy and data protection are a concern. The implications are for new Cloud management knowledge and techniques, education and training, and for implementing effective utilization.
Access status: Open Access ,
Foraging Space: Embodied Assemblages Resituating Land-Body Relations
(Auckland University of Technology, 2026) Zhang, Jessica; Douglas, Carl; Wu, Jack
Foraging Space is creative practice-led research that utilises spatial dialogues of materiality, slow experiences, and embodied foraging to demonstrate how we might reconnect with nature humbly. It works to redefine relationships between non-human and human agencies as one of collaborative resilience in the face of the Anthropocene. The inquiry draws attention to spatial design as embodying foraging practices to question how situating within natural spaces can build a bridge between mind, body and land. An embodied foraging methodology re-examines widely shared perceptions of the invasive, debris and waste through rebirth in spatial objects and temporal injections of built foraging spaces. The project manifests as the spatial design of a Forager’s Hut, an encampment for a nomadic urban forager who teaches others how to gather both physically and socially, cultivating an embodied understanding of foraging while learning to use materials and wild harvest from their surrounding environment. The scope of the research includes the design of temporary, flexible architecture for the encampment, the development of prototypical ceramic artefacts that could be used by the forager and a temporal mapping of how the forager inhabits the city, beginning with Barry Curtis Park in Manukau as the initial site for the encampment.
Access status: Open Access ,
Direct Extrusion 3D Printing for a Softer PLA-based Bio-polymer Composite in Pellet Form
(Elsevier BV, 2021-08-14) Singamneni, Sarat; Behera, Malaya Prasad; Truong, Derryn; Le Guen, Marie Joo; Macrae, Elspeth; Pickering, Kim
Fused deposition modelling is the most popular method of 3D printing with a variety of polymers, but the raw materials are commonly in the filament form. Research has demonstrated the ability to use pellets for this process, which are easier to produce than filaments. Apart from the savings on the pre-processing, the approach also combines the good attributes of both injection moulding and 3D printing and referred to as extrusion 3D printing. Direct printing of pellets is especially suited for thermosensitive polymers, with which, repeated or excessive heating may lead to degeneration. Also, polymers that are too soft do not qualify for filament-based extrusion. PLA is a popular choice for fused deposition modelling in the filament form but is often too brittle. A softer version of PLA composite based on PBAT and cellulose fibres is proposed here for 3D printing. Considering the lack of stiffness of the filaments, direct extrusion from pellet form is evaluated. Regardless of form, the polymer material system satisfied the stringent conditions of consolidation as dictated by the dynamic combination of extrusion and rasterised material deposition. Experimental evaluation based on meso-structural and mechanical property analyses indicate the new pellet-based material system to be suitable and to perform well. The novelty of the material and process combination is that the printed samples were actually comparable mechanically to the injection moulded counterparts, which is an extraordinary achievement, considering the shortcomings typical of material consolidation in additive manufacturing.
Access status: Open Access ,
Multispectral Image Change Detection Based on Single-band Slow Feature Analysis
(MDPI AG, 2021-07-28) He, Youxi; Jia, Zhenhong; Yang, Jie; Kasabov, Nikola K.
Due to differences in external imaging conditions, multispectral images taken at different periods are subject to radiation differences, which severely affect the detection accuracy. To solve this problem, a modified algorithm based on slow feature analysis is proposed for multispectral image change detection. First, single-band slow feature analysis is performed to process bitemporal multispectral images band by band. In this way, the differences between unchanged pixels in each pair of single-band images can be sufficiently suppressed to obtain multiple feature-difference images containing real change information. Then, the feature-difference images of each band are fused into a grayscale distance image using the Euclidean distance. After Gaussian filtering of the grayscale distance image, false detection points can be further reduced. Finally, the k-means clustering method is performed on the filtered grayscale distance image to obtain the binary change map. Experiments reveal that our proposed algorithm is less affected by radiation differences and has obvious advantages in time complexity and detection accuracy.