● The Monitoring System of Respiration Information for Lying Sleepers

    臥床睡眠者呼吸健康資訊監測系統

    From the patient’s viewpoint, an ideal contact-free respiration monitoring system is able to accurately record respiration magnitude and frequency, and correctly distinguish body movements from regular breathing activity without constraining the sleeper in any way. Based on these considerations, we propose a new visual contact-free respiration measurement system that uses a near-infrared camera and lighting. more

● Sweet Home for Patients with Alzheimer’s Disease

    基於失智症老人之三安(安全、安心、安康)的照護環境系統

    With the coming of aging society, dementia disease and Alzheimer’s disease (AD) have been the major diseases of the elderly. For treatment of AD, it is very important to detect the disease in an early stage. With age and patients’ condition, gait disorders, cognitive frailty, and memory impairments will be becoming increasingly. Clinical reports generally indicate that AD is usually revealed from the patients’ behavior and daily activities. The physicianscan provide appropriatediagnosis and treatment for the AD patients according to the abovementioned phenomena, which may be observed in an early stage of AD. 

     The objective of this study is to detect the disease in an early stage of AD via assessing the behavior of the AD patients. We combine cameras and inertial sensors with conventional clinical tests (the balance test, the speed of walk test, the repeated chair stands test, the up and go test), half supervised activities test, free activities test, and outdoor activities test, to collect information of activities from the AD patients. more

● Intelligent device development for early cancer detection system

  經濟智慧型癌症早期偵測預警儀器系統

    In recent years, Near-Infrared (NIR) are used to measure optical properties of tissue because it is non-invasive and safe for human body. Among these methods, Continued Wave method is used frequently because it is easier to realize than others. Some scholars had used continued wave method to measure optical scattering and absorption coefficients of biological tissue and also employed this method to diagnose cutaneous malignancy. In these researches, we found those measurements were focusing on the skin or epidermis but actually we know the NIR can propagate to hypoderm or deeper. Therefore, we try to use NIR to detect breast tumor.

When we use continued wave technique to detect tumor, we hope we can detect the tumor which is locating at deeper layer. To this end, we increase the source-detector (SD) separation intuitively to make the photons travel deeper. But according to Monte Carlo simulation, we found that most photons were transmitted at shallow layer so that the change of signal caused by the tumor at deeper layer is unobvious.

We use multi-sensors to solve this problem. The sensor with short SD distance gives us the information of shallow layer. Based on the information, we can moderately reduce the effect of shallow layer and make the difference at deeper layer more obvious when we use sensor with long SD distance. more

● The research of healthcare for new born infants by fluorescence application 

  新生兒健康照護之研究

    Newborn infants, especially premature infants, have only 1/3 to 1/4 of oxygen content or saturation of healthy adults before birth. Insufficient oxygen supply results in hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, which results in functional impairment of organs or even death. In contrast, when exposed to rich oxygen environment, the high concentration of oxidized metabolites may also damage the organs. Therefore, monitoring cellular oxygenation status of newborn infants is necessary. However, direct monitoring of intracellular oxygen demand remains a challenge. In stead, pulse oximeter or blood gas analysis has been used to measure arterial blood oxygenation to reflect cellular oxygenation status. An objective measurement to monitor the function of tissues and cells for the purpose of prognosis is necessary. We will explore the possibility of using a bi-wavelength LED as an excitation light source to determine the fluorescence of NADH/Flavoprotein to monitor its metabolism of the mitochondria under different oxygen concentration. more

● Physiological signals based emotion detection

Computer analysis of human behavior has been receiving a lot of attention in the past few years. One of potential abilities for computer is to understand people’s emotion and offer suggestions in appropriate courses. For instance, machine can give some advices or to help users overcome their emotions and prevent them suffering from extremely depressed or overly excited emotions. In health-care purpose, automatic risk alarm system could aid people away dangerous situation. more