Lin J‐P, Chang T‐F, Huang C‐H. Intergenerational relations and life satisfaction among older women in Taiwan Int J Soc Welfare 2011: 20: S47–S58 © 2011 The Author(s), International Journal of Social Welfare © 2011 Blackwell Publishing Ltd and the International Journal of Social Welfare. This study examined the relationship between intergenerational relations and life satisfaction among older women (aged 55 years and older) in Taiwan. According to intergenerational solidarity theory, intergenerational relations are dictated by various components: living arrangements, intergenerational support exchange, intergenerational affection, and intergenerational norms. Data were obtained from the 2006 Taiwan Social Change Survey (N= 281). The main results show that intergenerational relations have a significant effect on the life satisfaction of older women. Western studies have found that playing the giver's role increases the life satisfaction of older people. However, the present study found that being mainly a recipient of support from adult children is related to a higher level of life satisfaction among older Taiwanese women. This study also underscores the importance of the emotional component in intergenerational relations to the well‐being of older people. In Taiwan, stronger emotional bonds with adult children increases older women's life satisfaction.

Background: Feature extraction from photoplethysmography (PPG) signals is an essential step to analyze vascular and hemodynamic information. Different morphologies of PPG waveforms from different measurement sites appear. Various phenomena of missing or ambiguous features exist, which limit subsequent signal processing. Methods: The reasons that cause missing or ambiguous features of finger and wrist PPG pulses are analyzed based on the concept of component waves from pulse decomposition. Then, a systematic approach for missing-feature imputation and ambiguous-feature resolution is proposed. Results: From the experimental results, with the imputation and ambiguity resolution technique, features from 35,036 (98.7%) of 35,502 finger PPG cycles and 36307 (99.1%) of 36,652 wrist PPG cycles can be successfully identified. The extracted features became more stable and the standard deviations of their distributions were reduced. Furthermore, significant correlations up to 0.92 were shown between the finger and wrist PPG waveforms regarding the positions and widths of the third to fifth component waves. Conclusion: The proposed missing-feature imputation and ambiguous-feature resolution solve the problems encountered during PPG feature extraction and expand the feature availability for further processing. More intrinsic properties of finger and wrist PPG are revealed. The coherence between the finger and wrist PPG waveforms enhances the applicability of the wrist PPG.

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