With advances in technology, wireless and sensor technologies represent a method for continuously recording people's biomedical signals, which may enhance the diagnosis and treatment of users' ...everyday health conditions. These technologies mostly target older adults. In this study, we examine a smart clothing system targeting clinically high-risk patients, including older adults with cardiovascular disease (31 outpatients) and older adults in general (81 participants), to obtain an understanding of the patients' perception of using wearable healthcare technologies. Given that technology anxiety has been shown to affect users' resistance to using new technology and that perceived ubiquity is considered a characteristic of wearable devices and other mobile wireless technologies, we included three external variables: i.e., technology anxiety, perceived ubiquity, and resistance to change, in addition to the traditional components of the technology acceptance model (TAM). The results of the hypothesized model showed that among older adults in general, technology anxiety had a negative effect on the perceived ease of use and perceived ubiquity. The perceived ubiquity construct affects both user groups' perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of wearing smart clothes. Most relationships among the original constructs of the TAM were validated in older adults in general. Interestingly, we found that perceived usefulness had an indirect effect on behavioral intention through attitude. These results further confirm the validity of the extended TAM in determining older users' technology acceptance behavior.
For promoting the successful aging of elderly residents of Chang Gung Silver Village in Taiwan, five interactive exergames were developed to promote the well-being of the elderly. The exergames ...included both physical games and cognitive games, and were implemented using various computer-based technologies in the Chang Gung Silver Village. The exergames were trialed by 39 elderly residents (15 male, 24 female; mean age 79.5 ± 17.5 years) of Chang Gung Silver Village. Following the trials, the participants were requested to complete a Technology Acceptance Model 2 (TAM2) questionnaire. The results showed that the perceived playfulness and perceived usefulness of the exergames were significantly related to the users' usage behavior and intention to use for both the physical games and the cognitive games. However, a relationship between the output quality of the game and the usage behavior was apparent only in the case of the cognitive exergames. Finally, the impact of social influence on the intention to use and the usage behavior was more pronounced for the physical exergames. Overall, the results revealed that the acceptance of exergames by the elderly depends not so much on the awareness of fun in using the game, but the perceived usefulness of the related physical and cognitive abilities.
Abstract
The dbPTM (http://dbPTM.mbc.nctu.edu.tw/) has been maintained for over 10 years with the aim to provide functional and structural analyses for post-translational modifications (PTMs). In ...this update, dbPTM not only integrates more experimentally validated PTMs from available databases and through manual curation of literature but also provides PTM-disease associations based on non-synonymous single nucleotide polymorphisms (nsSNPs). The high-throughput deep sequencing technology has led to a surge in the data generated through analysis of association between SNPs and diseases, both in terms of growth amount and scope. This update thus integrated disease-associated nsSNPs from dbSNP based on genome-wide association studies. The PTM substrate sites located at a specified distance in terms of the amino acids encoded from nsSNPs were deemed to have an association with the involved diseases. In recent years, increasing evidence for crosstalk between PTMs has been reported. Although mass spectrometry-based proteomics has substantially improved our knowledge about substrate site specificity of single PTMs, the fact that the crosstalk of combinatorial PTMs may act in concert with the regulation of protein function and activity is neglected. Because of the relatively limited information about concurrent frequency and functional relevance of PTM crosstalk, in this update, the PTM sites neighboring other PTM sites in a specified window length were subjected to motif discovery and functional enrichment analysis. This update highlights the current challenges in PTM crosstalk investigation and breaks the bottleneck of how proteomics may contribute to understanding PTM codes, revealing the next level of data complexity and proteomic limitation in prospective PTM research.
Running is one of the most popular physical activities. With the development of technologies, there have been mobile applications (e.g., Nike + Running) designed to track exercisers' running data ...(duration, distance, and heart rate). To increase exercisers' and potential exercise group users' (spectators) motivation to run, this study designed a mobile running application, Gatherun, based on self-determination theory. Gatherun is a real-time, interactive mobile application for 2 groups of users: exercisers and spectators. Exercisers can create a new race event or participate in an existing race. When exercisers are running, which is virtualized as an avatar in the system, spectators can watch exercisers' running performance and provide audio feedback. The objective of the study was to investigate how intrinsic motivations (autonomy, competence, and relatedness) affect exercisers and spectators' perceptions using real-time interactive mobile running applications. The technology acceptance model was adopted to assess both user groups' attitude and behavioral intention using the system. The results found that the social interaction between exercisers and spectators increased both groups of users' relatedness, thus indicating that the system is useful. The relatedness of using Gatherun also increased users' autonomy motivation. Perceived usefulness and attitude had positive relationships with behavioral intention for both user groups. Result differences were also found between the 2 user groups. The study can have implications on the future development of persuasive technologies to improve users' exercising habits.
•Technology acceptance model and self-determination theory explained two user groups' exercising behavior and motivation.•Perceived usefulness and attitude had positive relationships with behavioral intention for exercisers and spectators.•For exercisers, relatedness and perceived playfulness had a positive impact on attitude.•For spectators, autonomy and relatedness had a positive impact on perceived playfulness.
Protein therapy holds great promise for treating a variety of diseases. To act on intracellular targets, therapeutic proteins must cross the plasma membrane. This has previously been achieved by ...covalent attachment to a variety of cell-penetrating peptides (CPPs). However, there is limited information on the relative performance of CPPs in delivering proteins to cells, specifically the cytosol and other intracellular locations. Here we use green fluorescent protein (GFP) as a model cargo to compare delivery capacity of five CPP sequences (Penetratin, R8, TAT, Transportan, Xentry) and cyclic derivatives in different human cell lines (HeLa, HEK, 10T1/2, HepG2) representing different tissues. Confocal microscopy analysis indicates that most fusion proteins when incubated with cells at 10 µM localise to endosomes. Quantification of cellular uptake by flow cytometry reveals that uptake depends on both cell type (10T1/2 > HepG2 > HeLa > HEK), and CPP sequence (Transportan > R8 > Penetratin≈TAT > Xentry). CPP sequence cyclisation or addition of a HA-sequence increased cellular uptake, but fluorescence was still contained in vesicles with no evidence of endosomal escape. Our results provide a guide to select CPP for endosomal/lysosomal delivery and a basis for developing more efficient CPPs in the future.
In this work, a wearable smart clothing system for cardiac health monitoring with a multi-channel mechanocardiogram (MCG) has been developed to predict the myo-cardiac left ventricular ejection ...fraction (LVEF) function and to provide early risk warnings to the subjects. In this paper, the realization of the core of this system, i.e., the Cardiac Health Assessment and Monitoring Platform (CHAMP), with respect to its hardware, firmware, and wireless design features, is presented. The feature values from the CHAMP system have been correlated with myo-cardiac functions obtained from actual heart failure (HF) patients. The usability of this MCG-based cardiac health monitoring smart clothing system has also been evaluated with technology acceptance model (TAM) analysis and the results indicate that the subject shows a positive attitude toward using this wearable MCG-based cardiac health monitoring and early warning system.
Deep Image Harmonization Yi-Hsuan Tsai; Xiaohui Shen; Zhe Lin ...
2017 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR),
2017-July
Conference Proceeding
Compositing is one of the most common operations in photo editing. To generate realistic composites, the appearances of foreground and background need to be adjusted to make them compatible. Previous ...approaches to harmonize composites have focused on learning statistical relationships between hand-crafted appearance features of the foreground and background, which is unreliable especially when the contents in the two layers are vastly different. In this work, we propose an end-to-end deep convolutional neural network for image harmonization, which can capture both the context and semantic information of the composite images during harmonization. We also introduce an efficient way to collect large-scale and high-quality training data that can facilitate the training process. Experiments on the synthesized dataset and real composite images show that the proposed network outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.
Body posture and activity are important indices for assessing health and quality of life, especially for elderly people. Therefore, an easily wearable device or instrumented garment would be valuable ...for monitoring elderly people's postures and activities to facilitate healthy aging. In particular, such devices should be accepted by elderly people so that they are willing to wear it all the time. This paper presents the design and development of a novel, textile-based, intelligent wearable vest for real-time posture monitoring and emergency warnings. The vest provides a highly portable and low-cost solution that can be used both indoors and outdoors in order to provide long-term care at home, including health promotion, healthy aging assessments, and health abnormality alerts. The usability of the system was verified using a technology acceptance model-based study of 50 elderly people. The results indicated that although elderly people are anxious about some newly developed wearable technologies, they look forward to wearing this instrumented posture-monitoring vest in the future.
A series of Y‐shaped sensitizers incorporating quinoxaline or quinoxalinoid moieties were prepared and applied in dye‐sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). By the introduction of quinoxalinoid ...functionalities, the absorption extinction coefficients could be enhanced. The molecular structures were modified by introducing an extra acceptor group (A) between a donor (D) and a π‐bridge (D–A–π–A) and also by incorporating electron‐donating substituents at various positions of the quinoxalinoid moiety. Some of the dyes and mixtures thereof were found to exhibit good light‐harvesting efficiencies under both sunlight and indoor light, with efficiencies up to 7.92 % under one sun (AM 1.5G). When operated under indoor light, the efficiency could be boosted to 27.76, 28.74, and 30.45 % under 600, 1000, 2500 lux illumination, respectively. The best performance could be ascribed partly to an improved dye coverage on the TiO2 surface.
Indoor energy: Dyes with quinoxaline or quinoxalinoid moieties are prepared for dye‐sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). By combining two of these dyes for co‐sensitization, DSSCs exhibiting efficiencies of 7.92 % under one sun (AM 1.5G) illumination and 27.76 %, 28.74 %, and 30.45 % under 600, 1000, and 2500 lux indoor light can be assembled.
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