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From Home to Hospital: Digitisation of Healthcare.

Microsoft with RingMD, Oneview Healthcare, Vital Images, Aruba, and Clinic to Cloud: The Ecosystem of Healthcare Solutions Providers in Asia.

Data Helps in Improving Nursing Practice, Making Better Decisions.

Launch of Asian Branch for QuintilesIMS Institute.

Skype is one of the most popular video call services in the current Internet world. One of its strengths is the use of an adaptive mechanism to match the constraints of the underlying network. This work is focused on how this mechanism can maximize the video quality as perceived by the viewers using objective assessment methods. We built a testbed to stream certain video sequences through Skype between two clients over impaired communication channels. Original and recorded videos were compared to assess the achieved quality. Extensive experimentation has shown that Skype has problems when transmitting high motion videos and especially complex videos with frequent interchange between frames of low and high temporal information. The results suggest that random packet loss intensifies quality degradation for those videos more than packet loss bursts or jitter.

We conducted a randomized experiment targeting 322 Japanese high school students to examine the impacts of a newly developed English-language learning program. The treated students were offered an opportunity to communicate for 25 minutes with English-speaking Filipino teachers via Skype several times a week over a 5-month period as an extracurricular activity. The results show that the Skype program increased the interest of the treated students in an international vocation and in foreign affairs. However, the students did not improve their English communication abilities, as measured by standardized tests, probably because of the program's low utilization rate. Further investigation showed that the utilization rate was particularly low among students demonstrating a tendency to procrastinate. These results suggest the importance of maintaining students’ motivation to keep using such information and communication technology-assisted learning programs if they are not already incorporated into the existing curriculum. Having procrastinators self-regulate may be especially crucial.