Evidence provided by Weir and Smith, particularly the findings from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), leads us to conclude that an increase in arthritis prevalence during the 1990s in the United States is probable, but the trend is likely overstated in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). We show that a mistake in our earlier method does not change substantively o...

Simulation is the process that allows the study of a physical system, replacing it by another, more suitable for measure or observation. Some simulations work better using Virtual Reality (VR) techniques [1][2][3] where virtual worlds exist only in the memory of a computer. The user interacts with these virtual worlds by means of different types of devices (from 3D mouses to haptic devices), th...

These data highlights are based on analysis of the 2001 National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) public use data (http://www.cdc. gov/nchs/nhis.htm). NHIS is a multi-purpose survey conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. NHIS has been conducted continuously since 1957.

Recently, people emerge as a contents provider with increasing usage of Internet in our daily life. People produces large portion of multimedia contents served on the Web. With this trend the personal broadcasting is being focused as a new application area of the Internet services. In this paper, we proposed VR@Home, a personal VR studio platform for personal broadcasting at home. VR@Home platf...

We explored the use of the World Wide Web to collect health status information for medical outcomes research. The RAND 36-Item Health Survey 1.0 (RAND-36), which contains the 36 multiple-choice questions of the Medical Outcomes Study SF-36 "Short Form" and differs only in its simplified scoring scheme, was made available for anonymous use on the Internet. Participation in the survey was invited...

Usability testing, commonly conducted for commercial software to ensure that it meets the needs of the end user, is likewise vital to creating effective training software employing VR technologies. However, developers often limit software testing to expert evaluation (by other developers or subject matter experts [SMEs]) to identify potential problems that might impede the usability or acceptab...

the 21st century is an era of great challenge for humankind; we are combating terrorism, climate change, poverty, human rights issues and last but not least non-communicable diseases (ncds). the burden of the latter has become so large that it is being recognized by world leaders globally as an area that it is in need of much greater attention. in light of this concern, the world health organiz...