Effects of Visual Communication Design Accessibility (VCDA) Guidelines for Low Vision on Public and Open Government Health Data.

Since 2019, the Korean government's investments in making data more accessible to the public have grown by 337%. However, open government data, which should be accessible to everyone, are not entirely accessible to people with low vision, who represent an information-vulnerable class. Emergencies, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, decrease face-to-face encounters and inevitably increase untact encounters. Thus, the information gap experienced by low-vision people, who are underprivileged in terms of information, will be further widened, and they may consequently face various disadvantages. This study proposed visual communication design accessibility (VCDA) guidelines for people with low vision. Introduced screens enhanced by accessibility guidelines were presented to 16 people with low vision and 16 people with normal vision and the speed of visual information recognition was analyzed. No statistically significant difference (p > 0.05) was found due to the small sample size; however, this study's results approached significance with improved visual recognition speed for people with low vision after adopting VCDA. As a result of the intervention, the visual information recognition speed of both normal and low-vision people improved. Thus, our results can help improve information recognition speed among people with normal and low vision.

Compound-level identification of sasang constitution type-specific personalized herbal medicine using data science approach.

Introduction: Sasang Constitutional Medicine (SCM) is a type of traditional Korean medicine where patients are classified as one of four Sasang constitution types (Sasang type) and medications consisting of medicinal herbs are prescribed according to the Sasang type. Despite the importance of personalized medicine, the operation mechanism is largely unknown. To gain a better understanding, we investigated the compound information that composes Sasang type-specific personalized herbal medicines on both multivariate and univariate levels. Methods: Five machine learning classifiers including extremely randomized trees (ERT) were trained to investigate whether the Sasang type can be explained by compound information at the multivariate level. Hierarchical clustering was conducted to determine whether compounds are processed distributedly or specifically. Taxonomic and biosynthetic analyses were conducted on these compounds. A univariate level statistical test was conducted to provide more robust Sasang type-specific compound information. Results: Using the trained ERT classifier, sixty important compounds were extracted. The sixty compounds were clustered into three groups, corresponding to each Sasang type-prominent compounds, suggesting that most compounds have specific preference for the Sasang type. Structural and biosynthetic characteristics of these Sasang type-prominent compounds were determined based on taxonomy and pathway analyses. Fourteen compounds showed statistically significant relevance with the Sasang type. Additionally, we predicted the Sasang type of unknown herbs, which were confirmed by their biological effects in functional assays. Conclusion: This study investigated the personalized herbal medicines of the SCM using compound information. This study provided information on the chemical characteristics of the compounds that are essential for classifying the Sasang type of medicinal herbs, as well as predictions regarding the Sasang type of the commonly used but unidentified medicinal herbs.

The synergic effect of regular exercise and resveratrol on kainate-induced oxidative stress and seizure activity in mice.

The synergic effect of regular exercise and resveratrol, a polyphenolic compound with potent antioxidant activity, was investigated against kainate-induced seizures and oxidative stress in mice. After 6 weeks of swimming training, the total body weight decreased and the blood concentration of lactate stabilized statistically in comparison with the sedentary mice, indicate that the training program increased the aerobic resistance of mice. Kainate (30 mg/kg) evoked seizure activity 5 min after injection, and seizure activity was measured seizure rating scores every 5 min up to 2 h. As previously well known experiments, regular exercise and resveratrol (40 mg/kg, daily supplementation for 6 weeks) have an inhibitory effect on kainate-induced seizure activity and oxidative stress. In particularly, a synergistic cooperation of regular exercise and resveratrol was observed in seizure activity, mortality and oxidative stress especially in SOD activity. These results suggest that regular exercise along with an anti-convulsant agent such as resveratrol could be a more efficient method for the prevention of seizure development than exercise alone.

Development tool for generating optimized HL7 libraries for embedded medical devices.

Embedded medical devices with constraints on the CPU power and memory capacity must communicate with HIS only in a few HL7 messages. Therefore, it is not desirable to deploy one big library that processes all HL7 messages to all types of devices. We present a development tool that automatically generates an optimized library with a small memory footprint that only processes a subset of HL7 messages for each target device type.