An Android Launcher with Hand Tremor Filter Capabilities for the Elderly

[[abstract]]This paper proposes an easy-to-use smartphone launcher for senior citizens. The launcher has two goals. This first goal is to extend the elder’s connection to his or her family members and friends by cloud services. The second goal, influenced by reminiscence therapy, is to provide photo album. Thus, four major functions are supported in a single view: phonebook, album, calendar, and short message. The former three functions are cloudbased. In addition, tremor filtering is supported. This research first adopted a heuristic evaluation method to find potential problems. Second, 20 volunteers, aged over 65 years, tested the proposed new interface. Third, we refined the launcher and then invited 36 senior volunteers. The time required for making a phone call was improved by 5.6 seconds. The t value obtained using a paired t-test for the dialing time was 10.388 (p < .01). This result implies that there are significant differences between standard launchers and the proposed launcher.[[notice]]補正完

DISCOVERING DISASTER EVENTS FROM SOCIAL MEDIA STREAMS

Natural and man-made disasters can both cause severe loss of lives and economic damages. Examples include earthquakes, floods, and road crashes. Nevertheless, to rapidly and accurately identify the latest status of a disaster event is undoubtedly one of the most difficult tasks for agencies in crisis management. In this work, we thus propose to monitor online data streams in social media for detecting and tracking real world events. Unlike conventional media, social media is advantageous because of its immediateness, huge data scale, and worldwide availability. Nevertheless, the messages generated by netizens could be incomplete, subjective, or even error prone. Only with an appropriately designated scheme, invaluable clues embedded in huge amounts of online messages can be discovered when carefully exploiting the information over content, temporal, and social dimensions. Specifically, we collect data from multiple social networks, conduct real-time analysis, and present interactive visualization. Experimental studies show that the proposed scheme is demonstrated to be feasible for agencies in practice