Academic literature on the topic 'Mobile body'

The paper is concerned with mobile technology and its interventions on the perception of the body and the space, demanding new behavioural codes and evoking other communication patterns. This technology enables users to be always connected, creating other practices of sociability and composing the urban landscape and the body space with digital contexts. Thus, the space occupied by mobile users is no longer physical or virtual, but hybrid. Hybrid spaces are introduced, and theoretical references configure the idea that mobile technology determines specific modes of interaction, emphasising a ritual dimension. Mobile users have started to perform the same body gestures and bounded intimacies in a social context that configure a specific new bodily spatiality. The authors present artistic projects that examine aspects of significant social mobile uses, transforming users bodily states and spatial domains.

A simple model of a capsule robot is studied. The device moves upon a rough horizontal plane and consists of a capsule with an embedded motor and an internal moving mass. The motor generates a harmonic force acting on the bodies. Capsule propulsion is achieved by collisions of the inner body with the right wall of the shell. There is Coulomb friction between the capsule and the support, it prevents a possibility of reversal motion. A periodic motion is constructed such that the robot gains the maximal average velocity.

In this paper, we propose a new mobile robot architecture with a body force sensor. The body force sensor is the force/torque sensor, which is located between the drive mechanism and the body of the mobile robot. The use of the body force sensor almost realizes the collocation of sensor and actuators, and makes the whole body of the mobile robot sensitive to external force/moment. Decentralized motion control algorithm for handling a single object by multiple mobile robots in coordination is implemented in each omni-dirctional mobile robot and multiple mobile robots with the body force sensor realize stable handling of an object. Experimental results illustrate the validity of the proposed architecture.

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2004.
Includes bibliographical references.
Novel methods to convert waste metabolic heat into useful and useable amounts of electricity were studied. Thermoelectric, magneto hydrodynamic, and piezo-electric energy conversions at the desired scope were evaluated to understand their role and utility in the efficient conversion of waste body heat. The piezo-electric generator holds the most promise for the efficient conversion of waste body heat into electricity. In the future, this same device could be easily extended into a combustion based power plant. An experimental apparatus investigating the use of magneto hydrodynamics was designed, built, and tested. A room temperature liquid inetal was propelled through a magneto hydrodynamic channel of 4 inches by 0.1875 inches at a rate of 10 mL/s. A 2 T induction field was applied within the channel. However, the results of the analysis did not find the magneto hydrodynamic device to be an effective electric generator at the scale tested.
by Jonathan S. Gibbons and Stephen V. Samouhos.
S.B.

The purpose of this project was to construct a holonomic mobile robot driven with omni wheels. That would enable movement in all degrees of freedom. The finished product was a robot platform within a spherical shell body controlled by input commands defining speed and direction from a wireless communication medium. The platform was iteratively designed and constructed with parts made out of laser cut acrylic plastic. By using omni wheels powered by Direct Current (DC) motors, which will be described further, the holonomic drive could be realized as the wheel hubs were placed on the platform with calculated angles.
Syftet med detta projekt var att konstruera en holonomisk robot, vilket kan uppfyllas med hjälp av omnihjul som kan drivas i samtliga riktningar i planet. Den färdiga produkten blev en robot som placerats i en sfärisk kropp som tar in hastighet- och riktningssignaler från en trådlös kommunikationsmodul. Plattformen, som iterativt designades, laserskärdes ur akrylplast. På den placerades omni-hjul drivna av DC-motorer, vilka möjliggjorde den holonomiska rörelsen

Wearable and mobile devices are an important part of our daily life. Most of those devices are powered by batteries. The limited life span of batteries constitutes a limitation, especially in a multiple-day expedition, where electrical power can not access conveniently. At the same time, there is a huge amount of energy stored in the human body. While walking, there is a large amount of power dissipated in the human body as negative muscle work and the energy loss by impact. By sourcing locally and using locally, human body energy harvesting is a promising solution. This dissertation focuses on harvesting energy from the human body to power wearable and mobile devices while poses a minimum burden on the human body. Three topics related to the human body energy harvesting are explored, i.e, energy harvesting backpack, negative muscle work harvester, and energy harvesting tile/paver. The energy harvesting backpack was invented in 2006. Extensive work was done to improve the performance of backpack energy harvester. The backpack is modeled as a spring-mass-damper system. Mechanical Motion Rectifier was added to the spring-mass-damper system to increase the frequency bandwidth. A spring is added to the spring-mass-damper system, between the harvester and the backpack mass, and a inerter-based 2DOF (degree-of-freedom) backpack is created. The inerter-based 2DOF backpack improves the power output, frequency bandwidth, and power stroke ratio performance. MMR was added to the inerter-based 2DOF backpack to reduce the peak stroke. Compared with the conventional spring-mass-damper backpack, the MMR and inerter-based 2DOF backpack can harvest more power with large bandwidth at a small sacrifice of stroke. The electric damping was also tuned to increase the power output and bandwidth for the energy harvesting backpack. The negative work harvester mounts on the human ankle and harvests energy in the terminal stance phase in human walking, when the calf muscle is doing negative muscle work. This harvester is an analogy to regenerative brake in vehicles. The energy harvesting paver/tile harvests energy when the heel contacts with ground and energy are dissipated by impact.
Doctor of Philosophy
Wearable and mobile devices are an important part of our daily life. Most of those devices are powered by batteries. The limited life span of batteries constitutes a limitation, especially in a multiple-day expedition, where electrical power can not access conveniently. At the same time, there is a huge amount of energy stored in the human body. While walking, there is a large amount of power dissipated in the human body as negative muscle work and the energy loss by impact. By sourcing locally and using locally, human body energy harvesting is a promising solution. This dissertation focuses on harvesting energy from the human body to power wearable and mobile devices while poses a minimum burden on the human body. Three topics related to the human body energy harvesting are explored, i.e, energy harvesting backpack, negative muscle work harvester, and energy harvesting tile/paver. The energy harvesting backpack was invented in 2006. Extensive work was done to improve the performance of backpack energy harvester. The backpack is modeled as a spring-mass-damper system. Extensive work have been done to make the energy harvesting backpack broad frequency bandwidth. The negative work harvester mounts on the human ankle and harvests energy in the terminal stance phase in human walking. This harvester is an analogy to regenerative brake in vehicles. The energy harvesting paver/tile harvests energy when the heel contacts with ground and energy are dissipated by impact.

This thesis has been divided into two essential parts, the purpose of the first part is to investigate and explore a three-tier architecture for remote health monitoring system capable to collect, store and forward the physiological data, which has been collected by a mobile device via a bluetooth connection from body sensors, to an internet data base server.

During the second part, we have tried to take a deep look into a heart beat modeling method. We have studied and investigated on extended integral pulse frequency modulation model which is used for the presence of ectopic beats and heart rate turbulence.

In the thesis, the user body effect on antennas in a mobile terminal is discussed. In order to overcome the degradation of Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) performance due to the user body effect, a quad-elements MIMO antenna array which can mitigate the body effect through an adaptive antenna switching method is introduced for 4G mobile terminals. In addition, various bezel MIMO antennas that are robust to the impedance mismatching caused by the user effect have also been presented. The study of user body effect is later extended to frequency bands at 15 GHz and 28 GHz for future 5G communication systems. The results reveal that a human body will cause a significant shadowing loss, which will be a critical loss in 5G cellular networks. The electromagnetic field (EMF) exposure of a mobile terminal is also studied in this thesis. Below 6 GHz, the simultaneous transmission specific absorption rate (SAR) for MIMO antennas is the primary concern due to its complicated assessment procedures. Above 6 GHz, the free space power density is adopted as the basic parameter of exposure limits globally, and preliminary studies have been presented to address major challenges in EMF exposure assessment for 5G mobile terminals.

QC 20171005

As human dependence on electronic devices grows, there is an emerging need on finding sustainable power sources for low power electronics and sensors. One of the promising possibilities in this space is the human body itself. Harvesting significant power from daily human activities will have a transformative effect on wearables and implantables. One of the main challenges in harvesting mechanical energy from human actions is to ensure that there is no effect on the body itself. For this reason, any intrusive mechanism will not have practical relevance. In this dissertation, novel non-intrusive energy harvesting technologies are investigated that can capture available energy from body, motion, and surroundings. Energy harvesting from the body is explored by developing a wrist-based thermoelectric harvester that can operate at low-temperature gradients. Energy harvesting from motion is investigated by creating a backpack and shoe sole. These devices passively store kinetic energy in a spring that is later released to a generator when it is not intrusive to the user kinematics. Lastly, energy harvesting from immediate surroundings is investigated by designing a two degree of freedom vibration absorber that is excited by electromagnetic fields found in common household appliances. These novel solutions are shown to provide consistent electrical power from wasted energy. Harvester designs are extensively modeled and optimized device architectures are manufactured and tested to quantify the relevant parameters such as output voltage and power density.
Doctor of Philosophy

Provision of efficient services to the user anywhere at anytime is being a centre of research and development in Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN) and Wireless Body Area Networks (WBAN). Antenna is the essential part of WPAN/WBAN applications that got affected by two major factors: human body presence and nature of the surrounding environment. The presence of the human body in the proximity of the antenna causes electromagnetic (EM) reflections from the body surface and absorptions in the lossy body tissues resulting in antenna detuning, radiation pattern degradations and impedance mismatch. On the other hand, incident radio waves undergo reflections, difractions and scattering from the surrounding environment objects including buildings, trees, vehicles and ground, causing multipath fading. The thesis gives an overview of the main investigations, results and analyses accomplished in a study concerning the commercially available Bluetooth and GPS antennas working in the vicinity of the human body. Detailed numerical modelling process is adopted followed by measurements for validation. The thesis highlights the role of surface waves as a potential transmission medium in an on-body Bluetooth wireless communication link taking into account the effects of antenna-body separations and presence of the surrounding objects blocking the direct communication path. The thesis also presents a novel statistical model to evaluate the performance of GPS mobile terminal antennas in the multipath environment. This model characterises the antenna performance and identifies the key factors that can be used to enhance it, in a real working environment outside an anechoic chamber. The study also deals with presence of the human body in the multipath environment and its effects on the operation of the GPS antennas.

Background: PostureScreen Mobile® is an app created to quickly screen posture using front and side-view photographs. There is currently a lack of evidence that establishes PostureScreen Mobile® (PSM) as a valid measure of posture. Therefore, the purpose of this preliminary study was to document the validity and reliability of PostureScreen Mobile® in assessing static standing posture. Methods: This study was an experimental trial in which the posture of 50 male participants was assessed a total of six times using two different methods: PostureScreen Mobile® and Vicon 3D motion analysis system (VIC). Postural deviations, as measured during six trials of PSM assessments (3 trials with and 3 trials without anatomical markers), were compared to the postural deviations as measured using the VIC as the criterion measure. Measurement of lateral displacement on the x-axis (shift) and rotation on the y-axis (tilt) were made of the head, shoulders, and hips in the frontal plane. Measurement of forward/rearward displacement on the Z-axis (shift) of the head, shoulders, hips, and knees were made in the sagittal plane. Validity was evaluated by comparing the PSM measurements of shift and tilt of each body part to that of the VIC. Reliability was evaluated by comparing the variance of PSM measurements to the variance of VIC measurements. The statistical model employed the Bayesian framework and consisted of the scaled product of the likelihood of the data given the parameters and prior probability densities for each of the parameters. Results: PSM tended to overestimate VIC postural tilt and shift measurements in the frontal plane and underestimate VIC postural shift measurements in the sagittal plane. Use of anatomical markers did not universally improve postural measurements with PSM, and in most cases, the variance of postural measurements using PSM exceeded that of VIC. The patterns in the intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) suggest high trial-to-trial variation in posture. Conclusions: We conclude that until research further establishes the validity and reliability of the PSM app, it should not be used in research or clinical applications when accurate postural assessments are necessary or when serial measurements of posture will be performed. We suggest that the PSM be used by health and fitness professionals as a screening tool, as described by the manufacturer. Due to the suspected trial-to-trial variation in posture, we question the usefulness of a single postural assessment.

The Aesthetics and Politics of Cinematic Pedestrianism: Walking in Films offers a rich exploration of the cinematic aesthetics that filmmakers devised to reflect the corporeal and affective experience of walking in the city. Drawing from literature in urban studies, film theory, and aesthetic philosophy, it is the first monograph to approach the history of cinema from the perspective of walking. A series of case studies providing nuanced analyses of widely referenced figures, such as the flaneur/flâneuse, vagabond, and nomad, reveal how filmmakers articulated their objection to repressive structures through depictions of walking: a common, everyday act yet transgressive, bold, and indomitable. Through the lens of Henri Lefebvre’s theory of space, Michel de Certeau’s concept of pedestrian acts, and Jacques Rancière’s treatment of the politics of aesthetics, Walking in Films traces how cinema evolved in conversation with the mobile body and the new images, styles, and techniques that emerged with it.

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are increasingly seen as an enabler to improve and promote efficiencies in global food market systems, and the high penetration rate of mobile phones is playing a catalytic role in developing countries. Mobile-based agriculture-value-added services (agri-VAS) aim to mitigate the information, financial and market access gaps faced by smallholder farmers and agribusinesses in developing countries. Over the last two decades, the number and variety of agri-VAS has been continuously increasing, and their landscape has been evolving. However, many agri-VAS never reach financial sustainability or scale and are discontinued after a few years. Increasing efforts are being made to map the landscape of agri-VAS targeted at smallholder farmers across Africa and Asia. However, insufficient attention has been paid to exploring successful agri-VAS that have small and medium (SME) agribusinesses as their main clients and that source from smallholder farmers. Areas with potential for further study include the following: (a) agribusinesses operating in value chains that are digitized by others (e.g. mobile network operators); (b) agribusinesses that are developing and deploying agri-VAS in-house; (c) agribusinesses using services provided by third-party agri-VAS providers within their value chains; and (d) agribusinesses that develop partnerships with agri-VAS providers to co-develop solutions. This study aims to address the following question: What are the factors behind successful deployment of mobile technologies to improve agribusiness productivity and investment readiness? It aims to analyse agri-VAS that have SME agribusinesses as their main clients, as they are more likely to positively impact the investment readiness of SME agribusinesses than agri-VAS with smallholder farmers as their only clients, which are also the most evaluated type of agri-VAS. The study consists of a combination of secondary and primary research, resulting in: (a) a set of investment-policy and service-design recommendations, based on high-impact, sustainable agribusiness-focused VAS; (b) recommendations on how to improve the body of impact evidence; and (c) the identification of investment opportunities at the agribusiness and agri-VAS levels.

The objective of the research is development a mobile application (on the Android platform) designed for visualization of the Solar System with the AR technology and the alphabet study, applying the astronomic definitions, which can be used by the teacher and the students for an effective training for studying the subjects of the astronomic cycle in primary school. Augmented Reality cards with the images of the Solar System planets and other celestial bodies were developed, as well as the “Space alphabet” was created. In the developed alphabet every letter of the alphabet becomes a certain celestial body or a different astronomic definition. Augmented Reality gives the opportunity to visualize images of the Solar System as much as possible, in other words to convert 2D images into 3D, as well as “make them alive”. Applying this tool of ICT while studying new data gives the ability to develop and improve the pupils’ spatial thinking, “to see” the invisible and to understand the perceived information in a deeper way, which will be beneficial for its better memorizing and development of computer skills. Studying the alphabet in the offered mobile app will definitely help nail the achieved knowledge and get interesting information about celestial bodies that are invisible and superior for kids; to make a journey into the space, prepare a project on “The Space Mysteries” subject; to stimulate the development of curiosity, cognitive motivation and learning activity; the development of imagination, creative initiative, including speaking out.

Robert Duncan Milne (1844-99), from Cupar, Fife, was a pioneering author of science fiction stories, most of which appeared in San Francisco’s Argonaut magazine in the 1880s and ’90s. SF historian Sam Moskowitz credits Milne with being the first full-time SF writer, and his contribution to the genre is arguably greater than anyone else including Stevenson and Conan Doyle, yet it has all but disappeared into oblivion. Milne was fascinated by science. He drew on the work of Scottish physicists and inventors such as James Clark Maxwell and Alexander Graham Bell into the possibilities of electromagnetic forces and new communications media to overcome distances in space and time. Milne wrote about visual time-travelling long before H.G. Wells. He foresaw virtual ‘tele-presencing’, remote surveillance, mobile phones and worldwide satellite communications – not to mention climate change, scientific terrorism and drone warfare, cryogenics and molecular reengineering. Milne also wrote on alien life forms, artificial immortality, identity theft and personality exchange, lost worlds and the rediscovery of extinct species. ‘A New Palingenesis’, originally published in The Argonaut on July 7th 1883, and adapted in this comic, is a secular version of the resurrection myth. Mary Shelley was the first scientiser of the occult to rework the supernatural idea of reanimating the dead through the mysterious powers of electricity in Frankenstein (1818). In Milne’s story, in which Doctor S- dissolves his terminally ill wife’s body in order to bring her back to life in restored health, is a striking, further modernisation of Frankenstein, to reflect late-nineteenth century interest in electromagnetic science and spiritualism. In particular, it is a retelling of Shelley’s narrative strand about Frankenstein’s aborted attempt to shape a female mate for his creature, but also his misogynistic ambition to bypass the sexual principle in reproducing life altogether. By doing so, Milne interfused Shelley’s updating of the Promethean myth with others. ‘A New Palingenesis’ is also a version of Pygmalion and his male-ordered, wish-fulfilling desire to animate his idealised female sculpture, Galatea from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, perhaps giving a positive twist to Orpheus’s attempt to bring his corpse-bride Eurydice back from the underworld as well? With its basis in spiritualist ideas about the soul as a kind of electrical intelligence, detachable from the body but a material entity nonetheless, Doctor S- treats his wife as an ‘intelligent battery’. He is thus able to preserve her personality after death and renew her body simultaneously because that captured electrical intelligence also carries a DNA-like code for rebuilding the individual organism itself from its chemical constituents. The descriptions of the experiment and the body’s gradual re-materialisation are among Milne’s most visually impressive, anticipating the X-raylike anatomisation and reversal of Griffin’s disappearance process in Wells’s The Invisible Man (1897). In the context of the 1880s, it must have been a compelling scientisation of the paranormal, combining highly technical descriptions of the Doctor’s system of electrically linked glass coffins with ghostly imagery. It is both dramatic and highly visual, even cinematic in its descriptions, and is here brought to life in the form of a comic.

Background: This review and exploratory data analysis focuses on everyday mobility at older age; that is, travel outside the house for routine activities. Everyday mobility is an important determinant of health and wellbeing. Although there can be physiological reasons for declines in an individual’s capacity for mobility, trajectories are uneven. A social model of mobility at older age assumes that impairments due to bodily ageing do not inevitably lead to reduced mobility, and that policy and environmental interventions (such as transport provision, quality of built environment) can and should support mobile later lives. We scope the potential for a study of the conditions which foster trajectories of maintained or increased mobility over time, in an equitable way. Aims: With a focus on corporeal mobility in the UK (in particular England), and on social and environmental, rather than physiological factors, our aims were to: 1) scope the existing evidence on trajectories of mobility at older age; 2) assess the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA) as a possible source of data on changes in mobility over time; 3) outline the potential for further research through identifying candidate analytical approaches and; draft an initial logic model to inform a study. Literature review findings: Literature on mobility at older age documents physiological, lifecourse, social, and environmental factors that shape trajectories of declining mobility, and the health and wellbeing consequences. There are complex and bidirectional relationships between determinants and consequences of mobility. Points of disruption in the lifecourse are points where mobility practices may change and are therefore potential points for interventions to promote greater mobility. A body of research demonstrates this through the case of concessionary bus travel for older adults in the UK, which both promotes greater mobility and appears to improve health status. There is a more mixed body of research on the environmental factors that can foster greater mobility: more research is needed on how to support mobility in place in the UK, particularly in settings outside urban centres. Compared to research on physiological factors, there is a relative dearth of evidence on population level interventions, with the exception of free bus travel. ELSA summary: The main strength of using the ELSA for understanding what influences trajectories of everyday mobility is that it is an eighteen-year longitudinal study with data collection every two years, focussing on those aged 50 and over. The sample is drawn from across England, detailed contextual information is available via linked geographical identifiers, and longitudinal and cross-sectional weights enable adjustment of the sample for non-response and attrition. The weaknesses (for studies of mobility) are the lack of fine-grained measures of ‘ability’ for many mobility indicators and the potential for reporting biases that intersect with measures of social and cultural capital. In this descriptive analysis, we document six separate measures of everyday mobility that can be derived from ELSA data, and map these to our logic model. Implications: The review identified the potential for studying the conditions for mobility at older age that could help identify and develop population level interventions. Focusing on points of disruption in the lifecourse is a potentially fruitful and tractable area of investigation. We have mapped indicators available from ELSA as a foundation for future study, and as a resource for other researchers. ELSA has some disadvantages for a study, but also many strengths. Given the complexity of causal pathways linking different conditions for maintained or increased mobility, an analysis approach directed specifically at multiple pathways (such as Qualitative Comparative Analysis) could well be fruitful."

Over many decades it has been accepted that the most economical way to produce a pipeline is to join together the standard lengths of pipe as quickly as possible, using a highly mobile task force of welders and other technicians, leaving tie-ins, crossings, etc. to smaller specialist crews. The work pattern which evolved almost invariably involved several crews of welders strung out along the pipelines, progress being controlled by the rate at which the leading pair could complete the weld root. The spread from this first crew to final inspection could be a considerable distance, acceptable on land but not acceptable offshore (a rapidly increasing need which reached a peak in the 1970's). This operation, involving costly lay barges, demanded even higher throughput rates to be achieved from a more compact working spread. In common with most manufacturing technologies, there was an increasing dissatisfaction with a system which relied entirely on the skill of a limited number of highly paid men who had little incentive to change their working practices. Increasingly there came reports of the development of new approaches to joining line-pipe, ranging from the mechanization of arc welding to entirely different forms of joining, for example, electron beam welding or mechanical joining. The investment in some of these developments is reported to be several million dollars. The review of present pipelining practice shows that only a handful has been put to practical use, and in the western world, probably only one, an arc welding variant, has been used to produce more than a few hundred miles of pipeline. The information available on these developments is sparse and is scattered amongst a range of companies and research agencies. A literature review and research study to collect together as much of this information as is available, assemble it into a coherent and useable form and identify those developments which show the most promise to fulfill future needs. The main body of the report, which reviews development of the welding processes has been divided into three main joining categories, Fusion Welding, Forge Welding and Mechanical Interference Joining. Within each category each process is considered separately in terms of process principles, general applications, application to pipeline welding, equipment for pipe welding, consumables, process tolerance and skill requirements, weld quality and inspection, process economics, limitations and future developments. This study and comprehensive report compares the economics of the various alternatives. For each process an estimate has been made of the procedural and development costs involved as well as personnel needs and likely production rates.

Executive Summary This report describes a series of experiments carried out by PRICE Lab, a research programme at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) jointly funded by the Central Bank of Ireland, the Commission for Energy Regulation, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission and the Commission for Communications Regulation. The experiments were conducted with samples of Irish consumers aged 18-70 years and were designed to answer the following general research question: At what point do products become too complex for consumers to choose accurately between the good ones and the bad ones? BACKGROUND AND METHODS PRICE Lab represents a departure from traditional methods employed for economic research in Ireland. It belongs to the rapidly expanding area of ‘behavioural economics’, which is the application of psychological insights to economic analysis. In recent years, behavioural economics has developed novel methods and generated many new findings, especially in relation to the choices made by consumers. These scientific advances have implications both for economics and for policy. They suggest that consumers often do not make decisions in the way that economists have traditionally assumed. The findings show that consumers have limited capacity for attending to and processing information and that they are prone to systematic biases, all of which may lead to disadvantageous choices. In short, consumers may make costly mistakes. Research has indeed documented that in several key consumer markets, including financial services, utilities and telecommunications, many consumers struggle to choose the best products for themselves. It is often argued that these markets involve ‘complex’ products. The obvious question that arises is whether consumer policy can be used to help them to make better choices when faced with complex products. Policies are more likely to be successful where they are informed by an accurate understanding of how real consumers make decisions between products. To provide evidence for consumer policy, PRICE Lab has developed a method for measuring the accuracy with which consumers make choices, using techniques adapted from the scientific study of human perception. The method allows researchers to measure how reliably consumers can distinguish a good deal from a bad one. A good deal is defined here as one where the product is more valuable than the price paid. In other words, it offers good value for money or, in the jargon of economics, offers the consumer a ‘surplus’. Conversely, a bad deal offers poor value for money, providing no (or a negative) surplus. PRICE Lab’s main experimental method, which we call the ‘Surplus Identification’ (S-ID) task, allows researchers to measure how accurately consumers can spot a surplus and whether they are prone to systematic biases. Most importantly, the S-ID task can be used to study how the accuracy of consumers’ decisions changes as the type of product changes. For the experiments we report here, samples of consumers arrived at the ESRI one at a time and spent approximately one hour doing the S-ID task with different kinds of products, which were displayed on a computer screen. They had to learn to judge the value of one or more products against prices and were then tested for accuracy. As well as people’s intrinsic motivation to do well when their performance on a task like this is tested, we provided an incentive: one in every ten consumers who attended PRICE Lab won a prize, based on their performance. Across a series of these experiments, we were able to test how the accuracy of consumers’ decisions was affected by the number and nature of the product’s characteristics, or ‘attributes’, which they had to take into account in order to distinguish good deals from bad ones. In other words, we were able to study what exactly makes for a ‘complex’ product, in the sense that consumers find it difficult to choose good deals. FINDINGS Overall, across all ten experiments described in this report, we found that consumers’ judgements of the value of products against prices were surprisingly inaccurate. Even when the product was simple, meaning that it consisted of just one clearly perceptible attribute (e.g. the product was worth more when it was larger), consumers required a surplus of around 16-26 per cent of the total price range in order to be able to judge accurately that a deal was a good one rather than a bad one. Put another way, when most people have to map a characteristic of a product onto a range of prices, they are able to distinguish at best between five and seven levels of value (e.g. five levels might be thought of as equivalent to ‘very bad’, ‘bad’, ‘average’, ‘good’, ‘very good’). Furthermore, we found that judgements of products against prices were not only imprecise, but systematically biased. Consumers generally overestimated what products at the top end of the range were worth and underestimated what products at the bottom end of the range were worth, typically by as much as 10-15 per cent and sometimes more. We then systematically increased the complexity of the products, first by adding more attributes, so that the consumers had to take into account, two, three, then four different characteristics of the product simultaneously. One product might be good on attribute A, not so good on attribute B and available at just above the xii | PRICE Lab: An Investigation of Consumers’ Capabilities with Complex Products average price; another might be very good on A, middling on B, but relatively expensive. Each time the consumer’s task was to judge whether the deal was good or bad. We would then add complexity by introducing attribute C, then attribute D, and so on. Thus, consumers had to negotiate multiple trade-offs. Performance deteriorated quite rapidly once multiple attributes were in play. Even the best performers could not integrate all of the product information efficiently – they became substantially more likely to make mistakes. Once people had to consider four product characteristics simultaneously, all of which contributed equally to the monetary value of the product, a surplus of more than half the price range was required for them to identify a good deal reliably. This was a fundamental finding of the present experiments: once consumers had to take into account more than two or three different factors simultaneously their ability to distinguish good and bad deals became strikingly imprecise. This finding therefore offered a clear answer to our primary research question: a product might be considered ‘complex’ once consumers must take into account more than two or three factors simultaneously in order to judge whether a deal is good or bad. Most of the experiments conducted after we obtained these strong initial findings were designed to test whether consumers could improve on this level of performance, perhaps for certain types of products or with sufficient practice, or whether the performance limits uncovered were likely to apply across many different types of product. An examination of individual differences revealed that some people were significantly better than others at judging good deals from bad ones. However the differences were not large in comparison to the overall effects recorded; everyone tested struggled once there were more than two or three product attributes to contend with. People with high levels of numeracy and educational attainment performed slightly better than those without, but the improvement was small. We also found that both the high level of imprecision and systematic bias were not reduced substantially by giving people substantial practice and opportunities to learn – any improvements were slow and incremental. A series of experiments was also designed to test whether consumers’ capability was different depending on the type of product attribute. In our initial experiments the characteristics of the products were all visual (e.g., size, fineness of texture, etc.). We then performed similar experiments where the relevant product information was supplied as numbers (e.g., percentages, amounts) or in categories (e.g., Type A, Rating D, Brand X), to see whether performance might improve. This question is important, as most financial and contractual information is supplied to consumers in a numeric or categorical form. The results showed clearly that the type of product information did not matter for the level of imprecision and bias in consumers’ decisions – the results were essentially the same whether the product attributes were visual, numeric or categorical. What continued to drive performance was how many characteristics the consumer had to judge simultaneously. Thus, our findings were not the result of people failing to perceive or take in information accurately. Rather, the limiting factor in consumers’ capability was how many different factors they had to weigh against each other at the same time. In most of our experiments the characteristics of the product and its monetary value were related by a one-to-one mapping; each extra unit of an attribute added the same amount of monetary value. In other words, the relationships were all linear. Because other findings in behavioural economics suggest that consumers might struggle more with non-linear relationships, we designed experiments to test them. For example, the monetary value of a product might increase more when the amount of one attribute moves from very low to low, than when it moves from high to very high. We found that this made no difference to either the imprecision or bias in consumers’ decisions provided that the relationship was monotonic (i.e. the direction of the relationship was consistent, so that more or less of the attribute always meant more or less monetary value respectively). When the relationship involved a turning point (i.e. more of the attribute meant higher monetary value but only up to a certain point, after which more of the attribute meant less value) consumers’ judgements were more imprecise still. Finally, we tested whether familiarity with the type of product improved performance. In most of the experiments we intentionally used products that were new to the experimental participants. This was done to ensure experimental control and so that we could monitor learning. In the final experiment reported here, we used two familiar products (Dublin houses and residential broadband packages) and tested whether consumers could distinguish good deals from bad deals any better among these familiar products than they could among products that they had never seen before, but which had the same number and type of attributes and price range. We found that consumers’ performance was the same for these familiar products as for unfamiliar ones. Again, what primarily determined the amount of imprecision and bias in consumers’ judgments was the number of attributes that they had to balance against each other, regardless of whether these were familiar or novel. POLICY IMPLICATIONS There is a menu of consumer polices designed to assist consumers in negotiating complex products. A review, including international examples, is given in the main body of the report. The primary aim is often to simplify the consumer’s task. Potential policies, versions of which already exist in various forms and which cover a spectrum of interventionist strength, might include: the provision and endorsement of independent, transparent price comparison websites and other choice engines (e.g. mobile applications, decision software); the provision of high quality independent consumer advice; ‘mandated simplification’, whereby regulations stipulate that providers must present product information in a simplified and standardised format specifically determined by regulation; and more strident interventions such as devising and enforcing prescriptive rules and regulations in relation to permissible product descriptions, product features or price structures. The present findings have implications for such policies. However, while the experimental findings have implications for policy, it needs to be borne in mind that the evidence supplied here is only one factor in determining whether any given intervention in markets is likely to be beneficial. The findings imply that consumers are likely to struggle to choose well in markets with products consisting of multiple important attributes that must all be factored in when making a choice. Interventions that reduce this kind of complexity for consumers may therefore be beneficial, but nothing in the present research addresses the potential costs of such interventions, or how providers are likely to respond to them. The findings are also general in nature and are intended to give insights into consumer choices across markets. There are likely to be additional factors specific to certain markets that need to be considered in any analysis of the costs and benefits of a potential policy change. Most importantly, the policy implications discussed here are not specific to Ireland or to any particular product market. Furthermore, they should not be read as criticisms of existing regulatory regimes, which already go to some lengths in assisting consumers to deal with complex products. Ireland currently has extensive regulations designed to protect consumers, both in general and in specific markets, descriptions of which can be found in Section 9.1 of the main report. Nevertheless, the experiments described here do offer relevant guidance for future policy designs. For instance, they imply that while policies that make it easier for consumers to switch providers may be necessary to encourage active consumers, they may not be sufficient, especially in markets where products are complex. In order for consumers to benefit, policies that help them to identify better deals reliably may also be required, given the scale of inaccuracy in consumers’ decisions that we record in this report when products have multiple important attributes. Where policies are designed to assist consumer decisions, the present findings imply quite severe limits in relation to the volume of information consumers can simultaneously take into account. Good impartial Executive Summary | xv consumer advice may limit the volume of information and focus on ensuring that the most important product attributes are recognised by consumers. The findings also have implications for the role of competition. While consumers may obtain substantial potential benefits from competition, their capabilities when faced with more complex products are likely to reduce such benefits. Pressure from competition requires sufficient numbers of consumers to spot and exploit better value offerings. Given our results, providers with larger market shares may face incentives to increase the complexity of products in an effort to dampen competitive pressure and generate more market power. Where marketing or pricing practices result in prices or attributes with multiple components, our findings imply that consumer choices are likely to become less accurate. Policymakers must of course be careful in determining whether such practices amount to legitimate innovations with potential consumer benefit. Yet there is a genuine danger that spurious complexity can be generated that confuses consumers and protects market power. The results described here provide backing for the promotion and/or provision by policymakers of high-quality independent choice engines, including but not limited to price comparison sites, especially in circumstances where the number of relevant product attributes is high. A longer discussion of the potential benefits and caveats associated with such policies is contained in the main body of the report. Mandated simplification policies are gaining in popularity internationally. Examples include limiting the number of tariffs a single energy company can offer or standardising health insurance products, both of which are designed to simplify the comparisons between prices and/or product attributes. The present research has some implications for what might make a good mandate. Consumer decisions are likely to be improved where a mandate brings to the consumer’s attention the most important product attributes at the point of decision. The present results offer guidance with respect to how many key attributes consumers are able simultaneously to trade off, with implications for the design of standardised disclosures. While bearing in mind the potential for imposing costs, the results also suggest benefits to compulsory ‘meta-attributes’ (such as APRs, energy ratings, total costs, etc.), which may help consumers to integrate otherwise separate sources of information. FUTURE RESEARCH The experiments described here were designed to produce findings that generalise across multiple product markets. However, in addition to the results outlined in this report, the work has resulted in new experimental methods that can be applied to more specific consumer policy issues. This is possible because the methods generate experimental measures of the accuracy of consumers’ decision-making. As such, they can be adapted to assess the quality of consumers’ decisions in relation to specific products, pricing and marketing practices. Work is underway in PRICE Lab that applies these methods to issues in specific markets, including those for personal loans, energy and mobile phones.

Upwardly mobile Peruvians who want to invest in their children's education have few choices of private elementary and secondary schools that provide solid and modern academic grounding at reasonable rates. Finding topnotch yet affordable private schools in emerging neighborhoods where they live is even harder.The Inter-American Development Bank's Opportunities for the Majority Initiative (OMJ) is supporting a sustainable and market-based solution for Peru's emerging social classes. Colegios Peruanos is a private company whose schools will help children obtain an education on par with international standards and give them competencies to be citizens and employees in modern economies. OMJ is lending Colegios Peruanos up to $15 million to grow its network of private "Innova Schools from five to 26, and increase its student body by 23,000 by expanding two existing schools and building 21 new ones in upwardly mobile neighborhoods in Lima and other Peruvian cities.

This publication presents a series of measures that allow for the protection of physical devices, such as desktop computers and mobile devices, that connect to an organizations network system, commonly referred to as “endpoints” of the network, by establishing security protocols based on physical security and access prevention, permission management, information protection, and software implementation. The document refers to a wide range of endpoints, irrespective of their operating system, terminal type, or where they connect from within the organization, with readers being able to implement the recommendations regardless of whether they deal with internal fixed or mobile stations or when connecting other devices that are not the property of the organization to the intranet. This publication is part of the "Cybersecurity Best Practices" collection, a compendium of practices, methodologies, and recommendations in cybersecurity oriented to organizations, developed by the Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD), and adapted in this series by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), with the objective of facilitating access to this body of knowledge throughout the Latin American and Caribbean region.