Kevin C. Tseng

Designing an Intelligent Health Monitoring System and Exploring User Acceptance for the Elderly

Recently, many healthcare or health monitoring systems are proposed to improve life quality of the elderly in the aging process. The elderly are generally with poor health and low information literacy. Low information literacy might be an obstacle of using such systems. This research considered the characteristics and the needs of the elderly and developed an intelligent health monitoring system for the elderly with low information literacy living in the nursing home. The system is intelligent since it can monitor the health status of the elderly based on clinical and medical knowledge, provide an easy-to-understand and easy-to-use user interface for the elderly, and automatically send important or emergency feedback to caregivers. Finally, we explored the user acceptance for the elderly using our proposed system based on the unified theory of acceptance and user of technology model. The experimental results indicate the developed system is highly accepted by the elderly in terms of performance expectation, endeavor expectation, social influence, and facilitating condition.

One-Step QFD based 3D morphological charts for concept generation of product variant design

This paper proposes a novel methodology, QFD based 3D morphological charts, to support variant design of simple and technically mature products. Customers requirements are incorporated in developing the morphological charts through a holistic approach, One-Step QFD. In contrast to the traditional cascading deployment, members from marketing, design, and manufacturing teams concurrently derive the requirements from three different aspects. The charts driven by the deployment results produce design concepts of high feasibility through query by function, specification, and module of a product. They are presented in 3D assembly for better visual stimuli rather than clutter of 2D sketches. A computer-aided conceptual design system is implemented to realize the proposed ideas with computer mice as an example product. A design experiment is conducted to compare the quantity and quality of the concepts generated with and without the aid of the system. The results show that it promotes quick generation of innovative concepts while maintaining their manufacturability.

Development of a Wearable Mobile Electrocardiogram Monitoring System by Using Novel Dry Foam Electrodes

The development of many telemedicine systems focus on the utility of communication techniques. However, the comfort of long-term Electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring in daily life is necessary and is also an important unresolved issue. A wearable mobile electrocardiogram monitoring system (WMEMS) is proposed to monitor ECG in this study. It mainly consists of a wearable ECG acquisition device, a mobile phone platform, and a healthcare server. A novel dry foam electrode is also designed and embedded in the wearable ECG acquisition device. The novel dry foam electrode can provide good conductivity to acquire ECG effectively without conduction gels. By using the adapting property of the dry foam electrode, the skin-electrode impedance and the motion artifacts under movement can also be reduced by adapting to irregular skin surface. Moreover, by using the mobile phone as the system platform, the proposed WMEMS can monitor the users ECG state continuously and anywhere in the globe if they are under the coverage of Global System for Mobile communications (GSM) cellular network. Finally, WMEMS is tested for detecting atrial fibrillation in the hospital. It really provides a good performance and is a good prototype for ECG telemedicine applications.

A novel approach to collaborative product design and development environment.

Abstract This paper presents a new approach to collaborative product design and development environment from a holistic perspective that facilitates virtual multidisciplinary activities. The approach accomplishes integration of a distributed collaborative product development strategy and user-centred environment. It embraces product development representation, a novel systematic framework to manage a collaborative product development (CPD) system, and a novel human-centred system. The advantage of the developed system is that it encompasses a marketing information system (MIS), a human resources management (HRM) system, a supply chain management (SCM) system, communication media, an integrated product design studio, user-centred interfaces, and databases. The developed system has been tested, with results showing major benefits such as reduced product development lead time and cost. The tangible benefit of implementing this system is that the complex product developing process is organized in a systematic, consistent, and concurrent manner to enable collaboration among team members throughout the development process. It accomplishes a guiding sequence that assists inexperienced users to follow the complex process. Therefore, an efficient product development process is generated. One of the advantageous features of this system is that the barriers between people and incompatible computer systems, resulting from non-standardization, have been eliminated.

Motor impairments screened by the Movement Assessment Battery for Children-2 are related to the visual-perceptual deficits in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder

This study was to examine to what extent the motor deficits of children with Developmental Coordination Disorder (DCD) verified by the Movement Assessment Battery for Children-2 (MABC-2) are linked to their visual-perceptual abilities. Seventeen children with DCD and seventeen typically developing children (TD) aged 5-10 years screened from a total of 250 children were recruited. The assessments included MABC-2, traditional test of visual perceptual skills (TVPS-R), and computerized test for sequential coupling of eye and hand as well as motion coherence. The results indicated that children with DCD scored lower than TD in MABC-2, and their total scores were highly correlated with manual dexterity component scores. DCD group also showed poor visual-perceptual abilities in various aspects. The visual discrimination and visual sequential memory from the TVPS-R, the sequential coupling of eye and hand, and the motion coherence demonstrated a moderate or strong correlation with the MABC-2 in the DCD rather than the TD group. It was concluded that the motor problems screened by MABC-2 were significantly related to the visual-perceptual deficits of children with DCD. MABC-2 is suggested to be a prescreening tool to identify the visual-perceptual related motor deficits.

Research on a Community-based Platform for Promoting Health and Physical Fitness in the Elderly Community

This study aims to assess the acceptability of a fitness testing platform (iFit) for installation in an assisted living community with the aim of promoting fitness and slowing the onset of frailty. The iFit platform develops a means of testing Bureau of Health Promotion mandated health assessment items for the elderly (including flexibility tests, grip strength tests, balance tests, and reaction time tests) and integrates wireless remote sensors in a game-like environment to capture and store subject response data, thus providing individuals in elderly care contexts with a greater awareness of their own physical condition. In this study, we specifically evaluated the users’ intention of using the iFit using a technology acceptance model (TAM). A total of 101 elderly subjects (27 males and 74 females) were recruited. A survey was conducted to measure technology acceptance, to verify that the platform could be used as intended to promote fitness among the elderly. Results indicate that perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use and usage attitude positively impact behavioral intention to use the platform. The iFit platform can offer user-friendly solutions for a community-based fitness care and monitoring of elderly subjects. In summary, iFit was determined by three key drivers and discussed as follows: risk factors among the frail elderly, mechanism for slowing the advance frailty, and technology acceptance and support for promoting physical fitness.

Human cognitive application by using Wearable Mobile Brain Computer Interface

In this study, we demonstrated a Wearable Mobile Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based Brain Computer Interface System (WMEBCIS) with foam-based dry electrodes embedded. According to the previous studies, many kinds of BCI systems have been proposed and target the applications on sensors and information techniques. For daily life EEG monitoring by using the BCI systems, the sensors have employ a key technique for ensuring the data quality. In view of this, a novel dry foam electrode was designed and applied for the wearable EEG acquisition device in our WMEBCIS. The developed dry electrodes can achieve the quick-placement and high signals quality under no skin preparation and without gels applied. Most importantly, due to its softness advantage, the developed electrodes can fit properly on the skin surface to maintain low skin-electrode impedance and reduce motion artifacts under movement. By using the specific mechanism of our wearable EEG acquisition device, it can be worn conveniently and can maintain the electrode-scalp contact area to acquire good EEG signal quality effectively. Therefore, the wearable EEG acquisition device is suitable for long-term EEG monitoring in daily life. In words, our WMEBCIS was also demonstrated for a cognitive application on drowsiness detection.

Design of a mobile brain computer interface-based smart multimedia controller.

Music is a way of expressing our feelings and emotions. Suitable music can positively affect people. However, current multimedia control methods, such as manual selection or automatic random mechanisms, which are now applied broadly in MP3 and CD players, cannot adaptively select suitable music according to the user’s physiological state. In this study, a brain computer interface-based smart multimedia controller was proposed to select music in different situations according to the user’s physiological state. Here, a commercial mobile tablet was used as the multimedia platform, and a wireless multi-channel electroencephalograph (EEG) acquisition module was designed for real-time EEG monitoring. A smart multimedia control program built in the multimedia platform was developed to analyze the user’s EEG feature and select music according his/her state. The relationship between the user’s state and music sorted by listener’s preference was also examined in this study. The experimental results show that real-time music biofeedback according a user’s EEG feature may positively improve the user’s attention state.

Community-Based ECG Monitoring System for Patients with Cardiovascular Diseases

This study aims to develop a community-based electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring system for cardiac outpatients to wirelessly detect heart rate, provide personalized healthcare, and enhance interactive social contact because of the prevalence of deaths from cardiovascular disease and the growing problem of aging in the world. The system not only strengthens the performance of the ECG monitoring system but also emphasizes the ergonomic design of wearable devices and user interfaces. In addition, it enables medical professionals to diagnose cardiac symptoms remotely and electronically manage medical reports and suggestions. The experimental result shows high performance of the dry electrode, even in dynamic conditions. The comparison result with different ECG healthcare systems shows the essential factors that the system should possess and the capability of the proposed system. Finally, a user survey was conducted based on the unified theory of acceptance and users of technology (UTAUT) model.

Integration of Non-networked Software Agents for Collaborative Product Development

AbstractRecent advances in web technologies have led to the concept of collaborative product design and development. This includes geographically separated teams, co-located over wide area networks for the marketing, design and manufacturing. In this paper a practice of implementing a nonnetworked knowledge-based system for product development over a networked environment. The integration enabled designers to collaborate in the product design process rather than just relaying on the knowledge stored in their own systems. This integration gives the product development more flexibility and provides early collaboration between the different product design phases.