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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Access status: Open Access ,
Weight Class Management in Powerlifting: An Evidence-informed Practical Review
(SAGE Publications, 2026-08-27) Renner, Alexander; Amdi, Christian Houmann
Weight class management in powerlifting is often guided by the heuristic that athletes should progressively move up in weight classes throughout their careers to accommodate hypertrophy, yet longitudinal competition data indicate that weight class change patterns are not meaningfully associated with peak career relative strength. This review integrates mechanistic and sport-specific evidence to translate this apparent mismatch into applied recommendations. Across observational studies, fat-free mass is consistently positively associated with squat, bench press, deadlift, and total performance, supporting contractile tissue as a key long-term contributor to strength once technical skill is established. However, accumulating functionally relevant mass does not require frequent or permanent weight class changes, because athletes can improve functional-to-nonfunctional mass via recomposition. Accordingly, weight class selection is framed as a conditional, athlete-specific planning decision, with weight class changes indicated primarily when the current weight class constrains sustainable lean mass accretion, training quality, recovery, health, or psychological sustainability. Practical guidance emphasizes conservative body mass changes, modest nutritional surpluses to support muscle mass gain, high protein intake, and slow fat-mass loss when moving down while maintaining heavy, skill-specific training exposures. Predefined stop rules, defined as criteria for slowing, pausing, or abandoning a weight class strategy, are recommended to reduce psychological load and avoid escalation of low energy availability and disordered eating risk, with referral to qualified support when indicated.
Access status: Open Access ,
Trends in WHOQOL-BREF and EUROHIS-QOL-8 Health-related Quality of Life Scores Among the Thai Population From the 1990s to 2023: An Application of Rasch Analysis
(BMC, 2026-08-26) Kangwanrattanakul, Krittaphas; Medvedev, Oleg N; Krägeloh, Christian U
Background: The World Health Organization Quality of Life-brief (WHOQOL-BREF) and the EUROHIS-QOL-8, an abridged version of WHOQOL-BREF, tools have been used widely in Thailand to assess health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in the general population. The availability of data spanning multiple time points now presents an opportunity to explore long-term trends in HRQoL scores and examine whether Thai respondents’ interpretations of questionnaire items have changed over time. Therefore, the primary objective of this study was to examine long-term trends of WHOQOL-BREF scores collected at three time points. Analyses of differential item functioning (DIF) were also performed to investigate whether Thai individuals interpreted and endorsed WHOQOL-BREF domains/items and EUROHIS-QOL-8 items consistently across time to support the validity of these comparisons. Methods: This study conducted Rasch analysis on small, randomly selected Bangkok-only subsamples (n = 150 per time point) from three datasets (n = 300 in 1990s, n = 1200 in pre-COVID 2019, and n = 2000 in post-COVID 2023) using the WHOQOL-BREF and EUROHIS-QOL-8 instruments. DIF explored temporal changes in item interpretation across age, sex, and dataset. Results: Mean HRQOL scores derived from four WHOQOL-BREF domains and EUROHIS-QOL-8 increased across the three time points; however, social and environmental domains did not show any statistically significant difference (p > 0.05). DIF revealed that physical and psychological domains were more difficult to score high for the samples from the 1990s compared to those from the two time periods, whereas social and environmental domains displayed an opposite effect. Conclusions: Although these findings highlight the increasing HRQoL trends in Bangkok and suggest the importance of considering societal changes when interpreting long-term HRQoL data, an investigation with a nationally representative sample of Thai population is warranted for future studies to confirm these findings.
Access status: Open Access ,
Ten Questions Concerning the Future of Intelligent Buildings
(Elsevier BV, 2026-09-01) Ghaffarianhoseini, Amirhosein; Omrany, Hossein; Ghaffarianhoseini, Ali; Cooper, Ian; Baghaei Daemei, Abdollah; Rahimian, Farzad; Chang, Seongju; Powell, Kody Merlin; El Haouzi, Hind Bril; AlWaer, Husam; Berardi, Umberto
Buildings face growing pressure to reduce energy use and carbon emissions while maintaining healthy, resilient indoor environments. Conventional automation often optimises isolated functions and cannot coordinate environmental, operational, and occupant requirements across building systems and lifecycles. Intelligent buildings (IBs) can address these limitations through integrated sensing, analytics, adaptive controls, and responsive materials, but effective implementation remains essential. This paper examines how IBs address these pressures and identifies the conditions required for responsible building intelligence. The ten questions are organised into four thematic clusters covering foundations, technologies, performance, and ethical and social implications. The paper examines these questions across building information modelling and digital twins, ubiquitous technologies, smart materials, operational systems, grid flexibility, Industry 5.0, and data responsibility. The discussion demonstrates that these technologies can improve coordination, energy flexibility, maintenance, indoor environmental quality, and lifecycle decision-making. However, technology alone does not make a building intelligent or guarantee measurable environmental and human outcomes. Effective IBs require interoperable systems, reliable data, clear performance objectives, cybersecurity, maintainability, accountable governance, and meaningful occupant participation. Neighbourhood coordination is important because shared energy assets, local grid constraints, and environmental exposures cannot always be managed by individual dwellings. Accordingly, IBs should be assessed through measurable outcomes, including comfort, health, safety, energy flexibility, resilience, privacy, and long-term value. The resulting research agenda supports human-centred, low-carbon, grid-responsive, resilient, and ethically governed intelligent residential buildings.
Access status: Open Access ,
Towards Acoustic Bioindicator Integration in AI-based Wildfire Monitoring: A Systematic Review
(MDPI AG, 2026-09-15) Mustafa, Saba; Mohaghegh, Mahsa; Ardekani, Iman; Sarrafzadeh, Abdolhossein
Wildfires are becoming more frequent, severe, and long-lasting, driving rapid growth in sensor-based and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled systems for early detection and risk assessment. This article presents a systematic literature review, based on 169 studies screened from 7511 records, of wildfire monitoring approaches using satellite and aerial remote sensing, fixed cameras, wireless sensor networks, and Internet of Things (IoT) platforms combined with machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models for ignition detection, fire-weather indices, spread prediction, and burned-area mapping. The review organizes existing work by sensing modality, spatial and temporal scale, learning task, model type, and deployment architecture, and identifies the environmental drivers most commonly used across systems, including temperature, humidity, vegetation state, drought indices, and smoke or air quality. Based on this analysis, the review summarizes key technical challenges, including data sparsity in remote regions, high false-alarm rates, limited edge resources, and difficulty fusing heterogeneous data streams in real time. As an exploratory future direction, the review discusses bioindicator signals from wildlife and managed species, using honeybee colonies as a case example. Current bee bioacoustic studies support the detection of colony states and environmental stress proxies, but they do not yet validate wildfire or smoke detection. Therefore, this review proposes bee bioacoustics only as a potential complementary contextual signal for future hybrid wildfire monitoring systems.
Access status: Open Access ,
An Appreciative Inquiry to Identify Project and Policy Opportunities for Tauranga City Council to Improve Social Wellbeing for Youth
(Auckland University of Technology, 2026) Vujnovich, Michael; Waring, Marilyn; Wenster, Karen
The purpose of a council in New Zealand is to “play a broad role promoting … social wellbeing” (LGA, 2002, 2019 amendment, 3d). This research asked, “what project or policy opportunities are there for Tauranga City Council to improve social wellbeing for youth in Tauranga?”. A group of 16–20-year-olds from Merivale, Tauranga, were the participants. The research paradigm to investigate this question used a social constructionist epistemology (Gergen, 2004), Sen’s (2010) capabilities approach as its theoretical basis, Appreciative Inquiry methodology (Cooperrider et al., 2008) and interview, focus group (Patton, 2002, 2015) and Photovoice (Blackman, 2007) methods. Reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022b) was used to analyse the data. The findings reflect the participants’ values of social wellbeing in thematic terms: 1) ‘Pride of place and belonging - a love of Merivale’ where the participants valued social cohesion; shared pro-social norms, values, identity and history; and love of the people and place around them; 2) ‘Youth development – self-aware and taking steps to adulthood’ shows the participants valued the “right direction” for their development. Important personal development included social skills, confidence and decision making, and support and skills for parenting. The participants acted directly and valued support, especially when parenting, to develop skills, knowledge and formal certifications for employment. Young women participants valued gender separated opportunities for gendered knowledge transfer; 3) ‘Aunties, mentors and role models – an ecology of support and expectations’ shows the participants valued access to this group of seniors who supported them and had high expectations of them and provided a safe and positive social ecology for coaching, navigation and opportunities for personal and career development. Aunties were especially valued by the young women participants; 4) ‘The Merivale community centre – a social wellbeing superpower enhancing beings and doings’. The participants valued the Merivale community centre as a safe accessible place with pro-social norms, positive welcoming people, food and activities, and to access developmental and wellbeing support. The participants valued the difference the centre made for their own development and for the wellbeing of the community, that is, its high conversion value for social cohesion and human capability. The findings identified project opportunities for Tauranga City Council (TCC) to improve social wellbeing for youth in Tauranga (see Appendix A). The discussion examines policy opportunities for a council to improve social wellbeing for youth and recommended promoting local access; pro-social norms, practices and methods; and public reasoning and co-construction with youth and their communities so that policy and the actions of a council can better reflect and generate social wellbeing.