Apply Context-Awareness to Design and Implement an E-Health APP for Patients with Spinal Cord Injury

According to the Spinal Cord Injury Association of R.O.C, for each year, over 1,000 people are in spinal cord injury due to accidental injury or illness resulting. 92 percent of the injured need to use a wheelchair in everyday life. And, most of the injured still have the upper limb function. They need to avoid excessive use of the manual wheelchair, which might cause secondary damage of the upper extremity. Although some APPs were proposed to improve the quality of life for people with spinal cord injury, most of them provide only the health information, such as rehabilitation videos. They lack interactive community features. As everyone has his/her own unique habits, a customized interface should be provided to reduce the number of clicks and to lighten the injured for the burden of using APP. According to the above purpose, this thesis develops an intelligent assistance system, called the SmartChair APP, which bases on the context-awareness of mobile devices. Through this device, we can collect information for different situations to provide appropriate services. In this paper, we use a collaborative filtering mechanism with the wisdom of context-aware recommendation engine, called iCASE (intelligence Context Awareness-based Suggestion Engine). The iCASE will adopt xAPI for storing records of users'' habits, and then we add context-awareness information for analysis. Finally, we can dynamically determine the optimal interface layout, providing the better user experience. The collected data and analysis can be applied for patients’ relatives, medical team, and even the medical-related software/hardware developers in the future.