Web based Data visualization for an Immersive 3D Therapy Game for Treating Hemispatial Neglect

Neglect affects an estimated one in four individuals who experience a stroke. Because of its association with overall stroke severity, individuals with neglect tend to have poorer prognosis for recovery. Treatment of neglect in acute stroke can yield greater recovery of a person’s ability to successfully perform activities of daily living. However, most individuals have insufficient access to effective treatments. Hemi-spatial neglect is a type of brain problem after stroke that people with this problem is living in a one-side world, which means they can only recognize one side of the object they see in their eyes, and automatically ignored the other side. Current existed treatment which is called Constraint Induced Movement Therapy (CI therapy) is to Hemi-spatial neglect is having the patient staying at hospital and repeat being forced to look at the side they tend to ignore by a doctor. This traditional treatment for hemi-spatial neglect is very tedious and a repetition of a motor practice thus has little effect on patients. Recently, game-based treatments for neglect have shown some important progress. We, as a team, designed an immersive 3D video game, which has very user-friendly interface and driven by eye gaze, in order to train them to look at the other side so that they may get a better chance to recover as normal people. This will provide direct, intensive, and implicit training of visual attention, while enabling real-time assessment of performance and feedback. The game is calibrated with The Eye Tribe Eye Tracker as a monitor to the movement of eyeballs and based on 3D modeling technology: Autodesk Maya with the assistance of Adobe Photoshop for creating game assets, and imported them to the Unreal Game Engine 4.0 and program the game with C++ and BluePrint visualized language.No embargoAcademic Major: Electrical and Computer Engineerin

From Holy German Art to Degenerate Art: Nazi Ideology and Opera

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard Colleg

Air Pollution and Mental Health of Older Adults in China

In this paper, we explore the association between air pollution and the mental health and depression of older adults in China. Along with the rapid economic development, concerns about air pollution and recognition of the importance of mental health have risen remarkably in China. Although no firm evidence of an association between air pollution and overall mental health has been found, the results show significant evidence of a positive relationship between air pollution and depression. Moreover, we observe the presence of concerns about environmental inequality, as people are more sensitive to contaminations caused by pollutants with high variation in densities across counties, such as PM2.5, PM10, and SO2. Although O3 has a high average absolute density, the impact on mental health is low due to the limited variations nationwide. Physical fitness, gender, relative income, marital status, and social contacts are also found to be related to mental health and depression of older adults

Biomechanical Risk Assessment of Non-Contact Anterior Cruciate Ligament Injury in Taekwondo Athletes

Non-contact anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury can occur in many sports. It is interrelated with gender, anatomy, biomechanics, and neuromuscular control. Taekwondo athletes have a higher incidence of ACL injury than athletes from other sports. Objective: This study aimed to determine the biomechanical gender differences and mechanism of taekwondo athletes with ACL injury. Methods: A total of 28 taekwondo athletes (aged 14–19 years) were randomly selected and grouped by gender. Feet high floor, one foot high floor, and single leg squat were analyzed by a Vicon motion analysis system and Kistler 3D force platform for action. The knee joint angle and ground force were evaluated. Results: Results demonstrated biomechanical differences in knee joint between male and female athletes. Conclusion: ACL injury in taekwondo female athletes indicated the biomechanical mechanism of the knee joint, and it can be prevented by neuromuscular control training

An Analysis of the Allergy Comments on Twitter Using Data Mining Approach

Allergies are one of the most common chronic illnesses in the world. The prevalence of social media allows people to express their opinions and exchange information including symptoms of personal health. Mining those publicly accessible health-related data on social media, such as Twitter, offers a unique approach to get valuable healthcare insights. In this paper, a multi-component data mining framework was developed to collect Twitter data, detect time series patterns, discover topics of interest about allergies, and analyze the contents of tweets. From the extracted 2.2 million tweets in 2019, my experimental results show that allergy-related tweet volume is strongly correlated to the pollen data (r = .699, p < .01). Also, 152 unique topics are identified with a -28.36 perplexity score and a .67 coherence score. Furthermore, many linguistic dimensions such as the sentiment are analyzed to learn about the tweet contents. I consider this to be one of the many studies examining a large-scale social media stream to deeply analyze allergy activities. And with the growing social media, publicly available data such as Twitter posts can be used to support healthcare practitioners and social scientists in better understanding common public opinions, not just allergies.Master of Scienc

Indoor navigation map design based on the analysis of space characteristics

The application scope of geographical information science is gradually evolving from large-scale to small-scale environments (Afyouni et al., 2010). The space that we are dealing with is no longer limited to outdoor spaces but is extended to indoor spaces. Facing the indoor structure of complex buildings, the demand for indoor location services such as navigation and emergency evacuation services is increasing. Indoor navigation maps are an important tool for people to arrive at their destination in large public buildings. There are a lot of indoor navigation services to help mobile users but there are still some gaps between map design and the navigation process, such as how to model the path of the multi-dimensional structure of indoor environments, quantify the visibility condition of indoor areas, and compensate for the lack of semantic annotation of indoor corridors (e.g., there are typically no road signs as in the outdoor case). Most existing application studies focus on indoor maps that visualize the basic indoor spatial structures, while few take into account the navigation process in buildings. From the scientific perspective, there are a lot of aspects for designing indoor navigation maps (e.g., 2D/3D, visibility, and semantics). However, it is unclear which type of design is most effective for aiding pedestrians in indoor wayfinding. There has been some research on the design and representation of indoor maps. Nossum (2011) proposed a "Tubes" map representation method, which overlays the access information of different floors on the same plane, allowing users to understand the structure of each floor inside a building with the help of only one map. Li et al. (2013) studied indoor maps with multiple modes of representation on mobile terminals. They pointed out that both 2D and 3D maps significantly improved pointing and vertical navigation accuracy compared to the control condition with no map assistance, and argued that better visualization of the layered structure of the building could facilitate multi-level cognitive map development. The indoor space has special characteristics as the building space is divided by numerous walls and rooms, which limit the user's visual reach and hinder the overall perception of the space. In the process of indoor navigation, relevant studies have provided auxiliary guidance information for turns and specific decision points, adding guidance images, text, and symbols to convey information to users (De et al., 2019). It is also necessary to provide good navigational aids for areas with poor visibility. For example, Pang et al. (2021) generated an indoor visibility map based on a navigation network in corridor space. There are no names for the passages in an indoor space, but there are some landmarks, which are important elements for people to communicate route information, either verbally or graphically, and can assist pedestrians in making route decisions when they are at a fork along a path (May et al., 2003). In both outdoor and indoor environments, landmarks are generally selected considering the visual, semantic, and structural salience of the objects (Zhu et al., 2021; Zhou et al., 2022). Different from outdoor landforms, residential areas, water systems, vegetation, and other elements, indoor spaces are mainly artificially constructed entities. Indoor space elements refer to all the physical elements existing in the actual space, which describe the frame structure and local details of the indoor space. In map visualization, some elements are generally selected for mapping according to the map form, the specific purpose of the map, or the specific users (Ryder, 2015). According to the importance of the elements to the visualization of an indoor navigation map, the elements that are not salient enough for user attention and that have little or even interfering effects on reflecting the indoor navigation should be discarded