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Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is limited by the long reaction time for point-of-care. Currently, commercial benchtop rapid PCR requires 30–40 min, and this time is limited by the absence of rapid and stable heating and cooling platforms rather than the biochemical reaction kinetics. This study develops an ultrafast PCR (<3 min) platform using flow-through microchannel chips. An actin gene amplicon with a length of 151 base-pairs in the whole genome was used to verify the ultrafast PCR microfluidic chip. The results demonstrated that the channel of 56 μm height can provide fast heat conduction and the channel length should not be short. Under certain denaturation and annealing/extension times, a short channel design will cause the sample to drive slowly in the microchannel with insufficient pressure in the channel, causing the fluid to generate bubbles in the high-temperature zone and subsequently destabilizing the flow. The chips used in the experiment can complete 40 thermal cycles within 160 s through a design with the 56 µm channel height and with each thermal circle measuring 4 cm long. The calculation shows that the DNA extension speed is ~60 base-pairs/s, which is consistent with the theoretical speed of the Klen Taq extension used, and the detection limit can reach 67 copies. The heat transfer time of the reagent on this platform is very short. The simple chip design and fabrication are suitable for the development of commercial ultrafast PCR chips.

Background This study establishes norms for the Box and Block Test (BBT) in healthy Taiwanese adults between 15 and 75 years of age. Methods 621 right-handed healthy adults (296 males and 325 females) completed the study. All participants performed the BBT following the standard protocol. An age by gender by testing hand analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed to determine differences for the variables of interest. Results On average, females performed better on the BBT than males by approximately 2 points ( p < 0.001). Across all participants, dominant hand performance was 2.8 points higher than non-dominant hand performance ( p < 0.001). Significant changes of BBT scores across life span were observed at the ages of 30, 45 and 60 years old. Average scores across all age groups are at least one standard deviation below the previously established American norms for each corresponding age group. Conclusion When using the BBT test with adult Taiwanese clients, clinical practitioners should strongly consider using right-handed normative data from Taiwanese individuals as the norms for this population differ from the previously established norms from American adult participants.

Based on analysis of mobile tourism users' multi-dimensional feature, the concept of context is introduced into user model modeling of mobile tourism. From the perspective of user and context, context theory and machine learning is used to accomplish user modeling in terms of tourism activities recommendation. The dimension of this model includes history behavior, current context, historical context and demographic factor. The problems of new user and similar recommendation and lack of weight are settled in this paper. According to the impact of multi dimension to user preference, user preference interfering is used to acquire user preference to accomplish multi-dimensional user model based on context model to contribute to improvement of traditional e-tourism recommendation and personalization and adaptability of platform.