Journal of Healthcare Engineering

Soltic, Snjezana;Chalmers, Andrew

2019 Journal of Healthcare Engineering

doi: 10.1155/2019/5016013pmid: 31534645

The advent of the LED light source has promoted the concept of human-centric lighting (HCL). The LED has also been responsible for increases in the electrical efficiency of lighting systems, coupled with recent improvements in their colour properties. We have found that it is also possible to create a lit environment with enhanced clinical attributes by providing a source spectrum that meets the requirements of the Cyanosis Observation Index (COI). This paper describes the use of a differential evolution (DE) algorithm for the spectral design of a mixed LED light source capable of meeting COI recommendations as well as HCL performance criteria.

Shen, Zhengru;van Krimpen, Hugo;Spruit, Marco

2019 Journal of Healthcare Engineering

doi: 10.1155/2019/3435609pmid: 31511785

Natural language processing (NLP) has become essential for secondary use of clinical data. Over the last two decades, many clinical NLP systems were developed in both academia and industry. However, nearly all existing systems are restricted to specific clinical settings mainly because they were developed for and tested with specific datasets, and they often fail to scale up. Therefore, using existing NLP systems for one&#x2019;s own clinical purposes requires substantial resources and long-term time commitments for customization and testing. Moreover, the maintenance is also troublesome and time-consuming. This research presents a lightweight approach for building clinical NLP systems with limited resources. Following the design science research approach, we propose a lightweight architecture which is designed to be composable, extensible, and configurable. It takes NLP as an external component which can be accessed independently and orchestrated in a pipeline via web APIs. To validate its feasibility, we developed a web-based prototype for clinical concept extraction with six well-known NLP APIs and evaluated it on three clinical datasets. In comparison with available benchmarks for the datasets, three high <i>F</i>1 scores (0.861, 0.724, and 0.805) were obtained from the evaluation. It also gained a low <i>F</i>1 score (0.373) on one of the tests, which probably is due to the small size of the test dataset. The development and evaluation of the prototype demonstrates that our approach has a great potential for building effective clinical NLP systems with limited resources.

Tan, Mingying;Gan, Junwei;Ren, Qunrong

2019 Journal of Healthcare Engineering

doi: 10.1155/2019/5647078pmid: 31534646

In China, emergency room residents (EMRs) generally face high working intensity. It is particularly important to arrange the working shifts of EMRs in a scientific way to balance their work and rest time. However, in existing studies, most of the scheduling models are based on the individual doctor or nurse as a unit, less considering the actuality of operation and management of emergency department (ED) in large public hospitals in China. Besides, the depiction of the hard and soft constraints of EMR scheduling in China is insufficient. So in order to obtain the scientific and reasonable scheduling shifts, this paper considers various management rules in a hospital, physicians&#x2019; personal preferences, and the time requirements of their personal learning and living and takes the minimum deviation variables from the soft constraints as the objective function to construct a mixed integer programming model with the doctor group as the scheduling unit. The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used to determine the weights of deviation variables. Then, IBM ILOG CPLEX 12.8 is used to solve the model. The feasibility and effectiveness of the scheduling method are verified by the actual case from West China Hospital of Sichuan University. The scheduling results can meet the EMRs&#x2019; flexible work plans and the preferences of the doctor teams for the shifts and rest days. Compared with the current manual scheduling, the proposed method can greatly improve the efficiency and rationality of shift scheduling. In addition, the proposed scheduling method also provides a reference for EMR scheduling in other China&#x2019;s high-grade large public hospitals.

Weng, Chien-Lun;Kau, Lih-Jen

2019 Journal of Healthcare Engineering

doi: 10.1155/2019/3858560pmid: 31534644

About 7&#x0025; of people&#x2019;s daily time is spent in taking vehicles between office and home. Besides, with the improvement of the living standard in today&#x2019;s society, people&#x2019;s requirements for a comfortable environment inside the car are constantly increasing and this must rely on an effective vehicle air conditioner to maintain the comfort of the cabin environment. In general, a vehicle air conditioner uses the air-mixing mode to regulate the temperature control system. In this mode of operation, the compressor needs to work continuously, which is extremely energy consuming. The vehicle&#x2019;s air conditioner is greatly affected by the inner and outer heat load, which are generated therein. Furthermore, the heat load is instantly changeable. Therefore, only when the controller can adapt to the feature of heat load, then we can find the optimal control method, thus enabling the vehicle&#x2019;s air conditioner to interact with the actual heat load to supply the balanced cooling capacity and, as a result, create the most comfortable environment inside the cabin with minimum energy consumption. For this purpose, we bring up in this paper a low-energy-consumption smart vehicle air-conditioning control system to detect total heat load, which can change the vehicle&#x2019;s air-conditioning capacity mode to maintain the average temperature at 25.2&#xb0;C&#x223c;26.2&#xb0;C and the average humidity at 46.6&#x0025;&#x223c;54.4&#x0025; in the cabin. When the inner heat load is stable, the rest times of the compressor can reach 16&#x223c;23 times per hour, which attains a rate of fuel saving around 21&#x0025;&#x223c;28&#x0025;. With the proposed architecture, the purpose of the low-energy-consumption vehicle air-conditioning system can be achieved, which, at the same time, creates a comfortable environment inside the cabin.

Esiyok, Cagdas;Albayrak, Sahin

2019 Journal of Healthcare Engineering

doi: 10.1155/2019/5075163pmid: 31531218

Evaluation process of a switch-based interaction technique (SIT) requires an interdisciplinary team effort and takes a considerable amount of time. Collecting subjective evaluation data from the users is a very common approach, but the subjective evaluation data alone might be manipulated and unreliable for comparing performances in many cases. Thus, therapists generally cannot succeed in determining the optimum SIT setup (i.e., determining the most appropriate combination of setup variables such as the switch type or switch site) at first attempts since it is hard to evaluate the measurable performance by collecting subjective data instead of objective data. Inevitably, each unsuccessful attempt to reach the optimum SIT setup results in a loss of serious time and effort. On the contrary, a benchmark application is also required to make performance evaluation of SITs by using a number of standard tests and empirical attributes. It is obvious that a quicker and more accurate SIT evaluation process provides a better cost and schedule management considering the increasing number of SIT users in the world. Therefore, we propose a novel benchmark for performance evaluation called SITbench that provides a quicker and more accurate switch evaluation process by collecting and saving the objective data automatically. We conducted a user study with eight participants and demonstrated that the objective data collected via the SITbench helped to determine the optimum SIT setup accurately. Result of a questionnaire applied to evaluate the SITbench itself was also satisfactory. SITbench is expected to help researchers and therapists to make a better evaluation according to any change done in SIT setup variables (switch type, activation method, etc.) with the aim of reaching the optimum SIT setup, which leads to a better cost and schedule management. As the first benchmark application compatible with all SITs, which can emulate keyboard characters or mouse clicks, it can be utilized by assistive technology professionals to make comparisons and evaluations automatically via standardized tests.

Rahman, Md Mizanur;Liang, Chang Yong;Gu, Dongxiao;Ding, Yong;Akter, Monira

2019 Journal of Healthcare Engineering

doi: 10.1155/2019/9828241pmid: 31534647

<i>Objective</i>. Middle-aged and older Chinese adults (35 to 75) failed to meet the recommendations of physical activity guidelines for health promotion, because of a lack of understanding of their perspective on physical activity. This study considers the physical activity levels and motivation among middle-aged and older Chinese adults partitioned into three different participation groups (sports, exercise, and recreational and cultural activities). <i>Methods</i>. A cross-sectional analysis was performed on 633 participants, based on two different levels of physical activity levels. The International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) and the Exercise Motivation Inventory (EMI-2) with 14 subscales were used to measure the participant&#x2019;s physical activity levels and physical activity motivation for the three different group activities. <i>Results</i>. Results indicate those participants&#x2019; physical activity levels and motivation varied significantly among the different groups. The participants who engage in recreational and cultural activities have a higher motivation for physical activity, as compared with those whose primary form of physical activity is sports and exercise, and a higher probability to fulfill the global recommendations concerning physical activity. Participants who used recreational and cultural activities as their major type of physical activities were more motivated by &#x201c;intrinsic&#x201d; aspects. In contrast, those who participate in sports and exercise as their main type of physical activity are more motivated by &#x201c;extrinsic&#x201d; aspects. <i>Conclusion</i>. Close friends and family members of one&#x2019;s home and community have potential influence in physical activity and recreational and cultural activity participants are highly motivated and luckier than others to fulfill the goal of physical activity levels.

Savignano, R.;Valentino, R.;Razionale, A. V.;Michelotti, A.;Barone, S.;D’Antò, V.

2019 Journal of Healthcare Engineering

doi: 10.1155/2019/9687127pmid: 31485303

<i>Aim</i>. To evaluate the biomechanical effects of four different auxiliary-aligner combinations for the extrusion of a maxillary central incisor and to define the most effective design through finite element analysis (FEA). <i>Materials and Methods</i>. A full maxillary arch (14 teeth) was modelled by combining two different imaging techniques: cone beam computed tomography and surface-structured light scan. The appliance and auxiliary element geometries were created by exploiting computer-aided design (CAD) procedures. The reconstructed digital models were imported within the finite element solver (Ansys&#xae; 17). For the extrusion movement, the authors compared the aligner without an attachment with three auxiliary-aligner designs: a rectangular palatal attachment, a rectangular buccal attachment, and an ellipsoid buccal attachment. The resulting force-moment (MF) system delivered by the aligner to the target tooth and the tooth displacement were calculated for each scenario. <i>Results</i>. The maximum tooth displacement along the <i>z-</i>axis (0.07&#x2009;mm) was obtained with the rectangular palatal attachment, while the minimum (0.02&#x2009;mm) was obtained without any attachments. With the ellipsoid attachment, the highest undesired moments <i>M</i>_<i>x</i> and <i>M</i>_<i>y</i> were found. The rectangular palatal attachment showed the highest <i>F</i>_<i>z</i> (2.0&#x2009;N) with the lowest undesired forces (<i>F</i>_<i>x</i>&#x2009;&#x3d;&#x2009;0.4&#x2009;N; <i>F</i>_<i>y</i>&#x2009;&#x3d;&#x2009;&#x2212;0.2&#x2009;N). <i>Conclusions</i>. FEA demonstrated that the rectangular palatal attachment can improve the effectiveness of the appliance for the extrusion of an upper central incisor.

Li, Chong;Jia, Tianyu;Xu, Quan;Ji, Linhong;Pan, Yu

2019 Journal of Healthcare Engineering

doi: 10.1155/2019/3817124pmid: 31559004

<?tex id="Q1" staff-cmt="&#x201C;<?tlsb -0.25pt>It is very important for the corresponding author to have a linked ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) account on MTS. To register a linked ORCID account, please go to the Account Update page (http://mts.hindawi.com/update/) in our Manuscript Tracking System and after you have logged in click on the ORCID link at the top of the page. This link will take you to the ORCID website where you will be able to create an account for yourself. Once you have done so, your new ORCID will be saved in our Manuscript Tracking System automatically.&#x201D;"?>In the last decade, technology-assisted stroke rehabilitation has been the focus of research. Electroencephalogram- (EEG-) based brain-computer interface (BCI) has a great potential for motor rehabilitation in stroke patients since the closed loop between motor intention and the actual movement established by BCI can stimulate the neural pathways of motor control. Due to the deficits in the brain, motor intention expression may shift to other brain regions during and even after neural reorganization. The objective of this paper was to study the event-related desynchronization (ERD) topography during motor attempt tasks of the paretic hand in stroke patients and compare the classification performance using different channel-selection strategies in EEG-based BCI. Fifteen stroke patients were recruited in this study. A cue-based experimental paradigm was applied in the experiment, in which each patient was required to open the palm of the paretic or the unaffected hand. EEG was recorded and analyzed to measure the motor intention and indicate the activated brain regions. Support vector machine (SVM) combined with common spatial pattern (CSP) algorithm was used to calculate the offline classification accuracy between the motor attempt of the paretic hand and the resting state applying different channel-selection strategies. Results showed individualized ERD topography during the motor attempt of the paretic hand due to the deficits caused by stroke. Statistical analysis showed a significant increase in the classification accuracy by analyzing the channels showing ERD than analyzing the channels from the contralateral sensorimotor cortex (SM1). The results indicated that for stroke patients whose affected motor cortex is extensively damaged, the compensated brain regions should be considered for implementing EEG-based BCI for motor rehabilitation as the closed loop between the altered activated brain regions and the paretic hand can be stimulated more accurately using the individualized channel-selection strategy.