Emergency medical support system for visualizing locations and vital signs of patients in Mass Casualty Incident

PerNEM 2012 : Pervasive Networks for Emergency Management , Mar 23, 2012 , Lugano, SwitzerlandThe triage tag is used in Mass Casualty Incident (MCI) to check the priority of patients treatments and conditions. However, it is difficult to grasp a change in the patient's information since it is a paper tag. In this paper, we propose a system using the electronic triage tag (eTriage) that facilitates emergency medical technicians to grasp patients locations and conditions through visualization. This system provides the following three views of the patients information: (1) Inter-site view which shows on a map an overview of the latest status in multiple first-aid stations including the number of technicians and patients of each triage category; (2) Intra-site view which shows detailed status of each first-aid station including the location, triage category, and vital signs of each patient on a 3D map created based on the environment mapping technique; and (3) Individual view which shows vital information of patients on a tablet PC according to its orientation using the augmented reality technique. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of the proposed system with some preliminary evaluation results

Comparison of the effects of indoor and outdoor exercise on creativity: an analysis of EEG alpha power

Previous research finds that natural environments and exercise enhance creativity. In this within-subjects design study, we examined the influence of outdoor exercise that combined a natural environment with exercise on creativity compared to an indoor exercise control condition by analyzing cognitive activities related to creativity. The participants performed an Alternative Uses Test (AUT), in which ordinary objects are presented to the participants (e.g., a brick), to prompt as many ideas for alternative uses as possible, which are transformed into a creativity score, after indoor running and outdoor running. During the test, brain activity was recorded using electroencephalography (EEG) and a short version flow state scale (FSS) was completed after the experiment. Results showed that while AUT scores did not significantly differ between conditions, alpha band activity at the parietal occipital region involved in divergent creativity increased during the AUT after outdoor exercise while it did not during the AUT after indoor exercise. In addition, FSS scores for positive emotional experience and absorption were higher after outdoor exercise than after indoor exercise. Our results from the FSS suggest that exercise in a natural environment is perceived subjectively differently from indoor exercise, participants report greater experiences of flow compared to indoor exercise, and the EEG measures objectively indicate enhanced cognitive activity in a creativity task after outdoor exercise. This study suggests that outdoor exercise increases neuronal activity in brain regions related to creativity. Further research is needed to understand how this can lead to increased creativity

PATROL: Participatory Activity Tracking and Risk Assessment for Anonymous Elderly Monitoring

There has been a subsequent increase in the number of elderly people living alone, with contribution from advancement in medicine and technology. However, hospitals and nursing homes are crowded, expensive, and uncomfortable, while personal caretakers are expensive and few in number. Home monitoring technologies are therefore on the rise. In this study, we propose an anonymous elderly monitoring system to track potential risks in everyday activities such as sleep, medication, shower, and food intake using a smartphone application. We design and implement an activity visualization and notification strategy method to identify risks easily and quickly. For evaluation, we added risky situations in an activity dataset from a real-life experiment with the elderly and conducted a user study using the proposed method and two other methods varying in visualization and notification techniques. With our proposed method, 75.2% of the risks were successfully identified, while 68.5% and 65.8% were identified with other methods. The average time taken to respond to notification was 176.46 min with the proposed method, compared to 201.42 and 176.9 min with other methods. Moreover, the interface analyzing and reporting time was also lower (28 s) in the proposed method compared to 38 and 54 s in other methods

Optimal Cooking Procedure Presentation System for Multiple Recipes and Investigating Its Effect

As the number of users who cook their own food increases, there is increasing demand for an optimal cooking procedure for multiple dishes, but the optimal cooking procedure varies from user to user due to the difference of each user’s cooking skill and environment. In this paper, we propose a system of presenting optimal cooking procedures that enables parallel cooking of multiple recipes. We formulate the problem of deciding optimal cooking procedures as a task scheduling problem by creating a task graph for each recipe. To reduce execution time, we propose two extensions to the preprocessing and bounding operation of PDF/IHS, a sequential optimization algorithm for the task scheduling problem, each taking into account the cooking characteristics. We confirmed that the proposed algorithm can reduce execution time by up to 44% compared to the base PDF/IHS, and increase execution time by about 900 times even when the number of required searches increases by 10,000 times. In addition, through the experiment with three recipes for 10 participants each, it was confirmed that by following the optimal cooking procedure for a certain menu, the actual cooking time was reduced by up to 13 min (14.8% of the time when users cooked freely) compared to the time when users cooked freely