Sleep disorder is a medical disease of the sleep patterns, which commonly suffered by the elderly. Sleep disorders diagnosis and treatment are considered to be challenging due to a time-consuming and inconvenient process for the patient. Moreover, the use of Polysomnography (PSG) in sleep disorder diagnosis is a high-cost process. Therefore, we propose an efficient classification method of sleep disorder by merely using electrocardiography (ECG) signals to simplify the sleep disorders diagnosis process. Different from many current related studies that applied a five-minute epoch to observe the main frequency band of the ECG signal, we perform a pre-processing technique that suitable for the 30-seconds epoch of the ECG signal. By this simplification, the proposed method has a low computational cost so that suitable to be implemented in an embedded hardware device. Structurally, the proposed method consists of five stages: (1) pre-processing, (2) spectral features extraction, (3) sleep stage detection using the Decision-Tree-Based Support Vector Machine (DTB-SVM), (4) assess the sleep quality features, and (5) sleep disorders classification using ensemble of bagged tree classifiers. We evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method in the task of classifying the sleep disorders into four classes (insomnia, Sleep-Disordered Breathing (SDB), REM Behavior Disorder (RBD), and healthy subjects) from the 51 patients of the Cyclic Alternating Pattern (CAP) sleep data. Based on experimental results, the proposed method presents 84.01% of sensitivity, 94.17% of specificity, 86.27% of overall accuracy, and 0.70 of Cohen’s kappa. This result indicates that the proposed method able to reliably classify the sleep disorders merely using the 30-seconds epoch ECG in order to address the issue of a multichannel signal such as the PSG.
Abstract. In hand-washing practice, people tend to forget to use soap and scrub for 20 seconds as stated in the standard. This paper attempts to develop an automatic faucet that is user-friendly and easy to plug in regular water pipe for standard hand-washing routine. An Interaction Design Process that aims to maximize product usability was applied during the development. The faucet utilized IR proximity sensor to detect presence of hands that would automatically commence the hand-washing process. First, it exited water and soap simultaneously to force users to use soap. The scrubbing duration was marked by buzzer's sound and LED's light. The validation test showed health practitioner agreed the faucet facilitates a standard handwashing. The user test in 30 participants showed users used soap and scrubbed in the exact duration. The usability questionnaire filled by participants showed they were strongly agreed for its usefulness and agreed for its satisfaction and easiness.
Inner-canthus localization has played an essential role in measuring human body temperature. This is due to the theory that human core body temperature can be measured in the inner-canthus. Such measurement is useful for mass screening since it is non-contact, non-invasive and fast. This paper presents an algorithm that has been developed to locate the inner-canthus. The algorithm proposed a robust method in various face-view, i.e., frontal, sided and tilted. The algorithm consisted of: face segmentation, determining face-orientation, rotating face into straight view, eye localization, and inner-canthus localization. The face segmentation used human temperature threshold of 34°C-the face orientation used trend line of a middle point between each most-bottom and most-top coordinates. The face rotation was based on the gradient of the trend line. Once the face is rotated, the eye location was determined using facial proportion. The inner-canthus location was determined as the highest intensities in the eye-frame. The test on 15 thermal images of faces with various view showed localization accuracy of 80% for eye-frame determination and 100% for innercanthus localization.
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