BACKGROUND Written asthma action plans based on personal best peak expiratory flow (PEF) consistently improve health outcomes, whereas those based on predicted PEF do not. Guidelines state that personal best PEF should be assessed over 2-3 weeks during good asthma control, but it is unclear how long to wait after commencing or changing treatment. METHODS Electronically recorded spirometric da...

The current paper presents low-power analog integrated circuits (ICs) for wireless electrocardiogram (ECG) detection in personal health monitoring. Considering the power-efficient communication in the body sensor network (BSN), the required low-power analog ICs are developed for a healthcare system through miniaturization and system integration. The proposed system comprises the design and impl...

Social networking services (SNSs) such as Twitter and Facebook can be considered as new forms of media. Information spreads much faster through social media than any other forms of traditional news media because people can upload information with no time and location constraints. For this reason, people have embraced SNSs and allowed them to become an integral part of their everyday lives. Peop...

Human capacities to track and identify peers, products and activities have benefited from the wide proliferation of networked electronic devices; developments in smart-materials, near-field communication and computervision technology further advance these capabilities. During this investigation into The Internet of Things (IoT) a new taxonomy was created together with a set of prototype applica...

Environmental pollution in the urban areas of Hong Kong has become a serious public issue but most urban inhabitants have no means of judging their own living environment in terms of dangerous threshold and overall livability. Currently there exist many low-cost sensors such as ultra-violet, temperature and air quality sensors that provide reasonably accurate data quality. In this paper, the de...

Japanese cedar pollinosis (JCP) is an important illness caused by the inhalation of airborne allergenic cedar pollens, which are dispersed in the early spring throughout the Japanese islands. However, associations between pollen exposures and the prevalence or severity of allergic symptoms are largely unknown, due to a lack of understanding regarding personal pollen exposures in relation to ind...

With more and more services relying on the Web to communicate with their users, the amount of information exchanged daily by an individual through various Web channels has become difficult to control. Not only have Web 2.0 applications participated to this increase from within the browser, but many other tools now rely on the Web as their basic communication infrastructure, including RSS aggreg...