For older people who live alone, we previously designed a system that enabled family members at distant locations to monitor television (TV) usage and other activities of the people, has been used for over 10 years. This comprises personal computers (PCs) run on Microsoft Windows® operating (OS) few sensors. The forwards TV data person through free e-mail. To operate PCs safely longer period, r...

Nobody can predict with 100% accuracy what the future will bring for us, so we won't pretend we have all of the answers. However, we do know that technology use in the living room is closely related to the future of the Internet, affecting how we consume media, how we communicate with friends, how we play games, and how we shop. In this context, it is a given fact that platforms that bring the ...

beta(1-->3)-Glucans are potent proinflammatory agents that have been suggested to play a role in indoor-related respiratory health effects. The aim of this study was to assess whether beta(1-->3)-glucan concentrations in house dust are correlated with levels of endotoxins, allergens, and culturable mold spore counts in house dust. Further, the associations of beta(1-->3)-glucan with housing cha...

The advent of room-temperature single-molecule imaging and spectroscopy in the early 1990s made it possible to follow biochemical reactions and conformational dynamics of an individual enzyme molecule in real time, yielding new information about the working of enzymes in vitro. This eventually led to the recent success of probing single-molecule biochemical reactions in a living cell with high ...

In this paper, we apply visual surveillance techniques to in-house abnormal event detection, where (elderly) persons are monitored in order to assure their well-being. By means of a camera installed in a living room, we are able to spot not only if the person falls, but also other, more subtle abnormal events. We summarize two existing methods and compare them on two video sequences. The approa...

There were insufficient data regarding radiation exposure to the household environment from patients with thyroid cancer who received radioactive iodine (RAI) therapy in Asia; we therefore performed the present study at the Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Keelung, Taiwan.Patients with papillary or follicular thyroid cancer who received 3.7 GBq (100 mCi) RAI were enrolled in this prospective hos...

STUDY OBJECTIVE The aim was to investigate the relationship between social factors and stroke mortality in men and women aged between 45 and 74 years using census and mortality data from 32 London boroughs in 1971 and 1981. DESIGN Census data from 1971 and 1981 on type of accommodation, density of room occupation, male unemployment rate, and proportion of households without a car were linked ...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to measure dynamic lung hyperinflation and its influence on dyspnea perception in moderate and severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients after performing activities of daily living. METHODS We measured inspiratory capacity, sensation of dyspnea, peripheral oxygen saturation, heart rate and respiratory rate in 19 chronic obstructive pulmonary dis...

We reported a first successful and life-saving two-staged living-related liver transplantation for a patient with imminent brain death due to fulminant hepatic failure that otherwise had to be performed after a pre-treated and scheduled blood-type incompatible liver transplantation. The patient was anhepatic for 6 hr 34 min, and continuous hemodiafiltration was given throughout the operation. T...