Azrul Hazri Jantan

Wavelet packet entropy for heart murmurs classification.

Heart murmurs are the first signs of cardiac valve disorders. Several studies have been conducted in recent years to automatically differentiate normal heart sounds, from heart sounds with murmurs using various types of audio features. Entropy was successfully used as a feature to distinguish different heart sounds. In this paper, new entropy was introduced to analyze heart sounds and the feasibility of using this entropy in classification of five types of heart sounds and murmurs was shown. The entropy was previously introduced to analyze mammograms. Four common murmurs were considered including aortic regurgitation, mitral regurgitation, aortic stenosis, and mitral stenosis. Wavelet packet transform was employed for heart sound analysis, and the entropy was calculated for deriving feature vectors. Five types of classification were performed to evaluate the discriminatory power of the generated features. The best results were achieved by BayesNet with 96.94% accuracy. The promising results substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed wavelet packet entropy for heart sounds classification.

Diagnosis of heart valve disorders through trapezoidal features and hybrid classifier.

Numerous studies are being conducted in recent years focusing on phonocardiographic (PCG) signals due to their capability to characterize heart sounds. These characteristics can be exploited in developing computer-aided auscultation system as a complementary tool for clinicians in diagnosis of cardiovascular disorders. This study proposes a new type of features to distinguish five categories of heart sounds, including normal, mitral stenosis, mitral regurgitation,aortic stenosis, and aortic regurgitation. PCG signals were collected from online resources and training CDs. Wavelet packet transform was utilized for heart sound analysis as opposed to discrete wavelet transform that has been extensively used in the previous studies. Then, trapezoidal function was calculated for deriving feature vectors. A hybrid classifier was designed composing of three types of classifiers, multilayer perceptron (MLP) artificial neural network, k-nearest neighbor (KNN), and support vector machine (SVM), to classify feature vectors.The promising results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed trapezoidal features and hybrid classifier for heart sound classification.

A User-Defined Gesture Set for Music Interaction in Immersive Virtual Environment

In recent years, hand-tracking technologies had been implemented in Virtual Reality application, allowing users to use natural hand gesture for interaction within the environment. However, little efforts have been conducted in understanding users preference when they use their hands to interact with the VR world. In this paper, the result of a guessability test for hand gestures in order to operate musical tasks to support music interaction within immersive Virtual Environment. A total number of 750 gestures have been elicited from 15 participants for 50 selected tasks, including 10 musical tasks. Our result enables a smaller size of gesture set to be elicited from the users. The implications of this work can be relevant in hand gesture design, gesture interaction, and gestural interfaces design for music interaction, all of which are highlighted in this study.

Effective keyword query structuring using NER for XML retrieval

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose and evaluate XKQSS, a query structuring method that relegates the task of generating structured queries from a user to a search engine while retaining the simple keyword search query interface. A more effective way for searching XML database is to use structured queries. However, using query languages to express queries prove to be difficult for most users since this requires learning a query language and knowledge of the underlying data schema. On the other hand, the success of Web search engines has made many users to be familiar with keyword search and, therefore, they prefer to use a keyword search query interface to search XML data. Design/methodology/approach – Existing query structuring approaches require users to provide structural hints in their input keyword queries even though their interface is keyword base. Other problems with existing systems include their inability to put keyword query ambiguities into consideration during query structuring ...

A Comparison of Gestural and Touch-Based Interface for Designing a Virtual Percussion Instrument

The paper presents an exploratory study to design a new virtual musical instrument for Kompang, using the natural hand for interaction purpose. The study first explores the potential technologies that are low-cost, easy to access and most importantly, these technologies use hand-based interaction. Two input devices that fulfil these requirements are selected, and then developed as low-fidelity interfaces. A study was conducted to identify which interface was preferable by the user for future development. A set of design criteria was also identified at the end of study for development of a virtual Kompang instrument.

Designing a Natural Musical Interface for a Virtual Musical Kompang using User-Centered Approach

A plethora of music related application can be found on mobile device platform. Therefore, the development of appropriate application using proper system design approach becomes crucial. The paper presents a study to design natural musical interface for the Kompang instrument, which use hand touch as interaction input. Based on User-Centered Design (UCD) approach, a low-fidelity prototype with four interface designs was developed for users to choose the most suitable one according to their preference. High-fidelity prototype was developed based on opinion captured during test on low-fidelity prototype. Result showed that the developed application gained good responses from users in terms of effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction.

A preliminary framework of measuring music attractiveness based on facial beauty theory

Music is a performing art that put varieties of sound together to form a sequence of sound that people will find it interesting. In past, only those with certain level of musical knowledge were able to compose music as it is very time consuming to learn and practice musical instruments. Since the advent of modern computing, various methods were introduced to help music composition, such as Markov Chain (MC), Genetic Algorithm, Knowledge-Based system, and Cellular Automata. However, previous studies were paying less effort on evaluating the quality of music from human perception. The proposed system will apply a hybrid concept by combining few composition techniques to generate music with musical patterns. A framework on determining characteristics of a good music will be proposed in this paper as well.

UML Stereotypes for the Development of Process Interaction-Driven Web Applications

Web applications have been developed rapidly as to support a variety of online processes and transactional workflows involved in the web domain. Although there are several numbers of design modeling concepts existing in web application nowadays, new issues such as interrelated process flow, navigational interaction and graphical user interface still become the biggest attention among researchers. This paper presents UML stereotype extensions, which focus on the process interaction-driven design in the proposed design approach called UEWDM. The uniqueness relies on UML stereotypes usability in the design pattern modeling approach. The new design approach is validated through a case study implementation and verified by web designers. Future works of the design model will be explained and briefly summarized at the end of the paper.

The impact of visual design principles on classical aesthetic design for a web-based educational platform

Studies have been done to investigate the influence of visual aesthetics on web-based educational platform, but little research has been conducted respecting which aspect of aesthetics, namely classical aesthetics, affects learning positively. We discussed the favourable effects of classical aesthetics on learning and proposed that classical aesthetics can be achieved by employing visual design principles to the design. The goal of this paper is thus to set up a classical aesthetic educational website based on visual design principles and studies the relationships among visual design principles and classical aesthetics. A survey was conducted with 213 undergraduates who learn about computer science. The results show that visual design principles have a positive impact on classical aesthetics. This implies that a web-based educational platform with classical aesthetics can be created by applying visual design principles.

USING HEURISTIC EVALUATION TO IMPROVE THE USABILITY OF ELECTRONIC MEDICAL RECORD (EMR) MOBILE INTERFACE OF THE CARDIOTHORACIC SURGERY AND ANESTHESIA SYSTEM (CSAS)

This paper presents initial work on mobile user-interface for electronic medical record for cardio experts. The current problem exits when the existing system is left unused by the users, in our case the cardio surgeons due to bad user interface design which involve a heavy cognitive loads and navigation problems. Medical records contain treatment history and relevant experiences related to the patient care. In order to avoid paper based medical record (PMR) drawbacks, most industrialized nations have implemented electronic medical record (EMR). This research aims to evaluate the existing CSAS system usability using heuristic evaluation and then develop an EMR system that overcomes the interface usability problems by designing an effective user interface that is acceptable to healthcare professionals with tablets as the device. Hence, proposing a new user interface prototype taking into account the findings from the evaluation process.