Clean intermittent catheterization (CIC) is one of the methods currently used to prevent overdistention of the bladder in patients with neurogenic bladder dysfunction (NBD). It is also helpful in preventing urinary tract infection and retaining the function of the bladder. Voiding diary and social behavior are necessary for the patients to maintain their physical and mental health, nevertheless there are currently no good assistant systems to help them achieve these goals. In this study, we propose a CIC assistant system with the functions of recording and tracking the voided volume and accessible lavatory. The aim of this study is to assess the effects from the 12 patients who joined the proposed system. Information collected from participants included their demographics, past medicals, injury characteristics, current and past bladder managements, and any NBD related complications. The results indicate that most patients felt relieved that they could know the voided volume and track their history easily. Moreover, the accessible lavatory function of the proposed system could reduce time consumption by 43.1% in finding the suitable lavatory, thus the desire and willingness of patients to travel increased from 25% to 75% after using the system. The proposed system could help doctors with clinical diagnoses, and help patients to understand more about the history of their catheterization volume and time period. This study provided essential information and design for future investigation.

In this work, transmissive spectral characteristics of fiber Bragg gratings ͑FBGs͒ are applied to construct a circulator-free scheme of an optical code-division multiple-access ͑OCDMA͒ network coder/ decoder ͑codec͒. The unnecessary spectra would accompany the coding chips to arrive at the photodetectors ͑PDs͒ to induce higher phaseinduced intensity noise ͑PIIN͒ and multiple-access interference ͑MAI͒. A residual-spectra eliminator ͑RSE͒ between OCDMA encoder and decoder modules is employed to remove the unnecessary spectral parts of data so that the PIIN and MAI can be reduced. A simple experiment performed on the basis of transmissive spectral characteristics of FBGs together with RSE is demonstrated to verify the capability of suppressing residual-spectra noise at the PDs. Performance evaluations indicate that using RSE between network codecs can remarkably lower the PIIN effects in the receiver PDs.

This work investigates a power line communication (PLC) in a DC power management system comprising master-slave control networks. Microcontroller-based master and slave units are designed with serial ports for communication with a controller and a transmission port to couple the signal to modems at both ends. However, coupling data signals to power line through modulation interfacing circuits is a challenging task. In this work, we used time-division multiplexing (TDM) technique to divide into two timings, Powering Time and Communication Time, on the DC power line and can reduce the complexity of the master-slave network and noise effect on the power line.

Chip-on-film (COF) is a new technology after tape-automated-bonding (TAB) and chip-on-glass (COG) in the interconnection of liquid crystal module (LCM). The thickness of the film, which is more flexible than TAB, can be as thin as 44 gim. It has pre-test capability, while COG hasn't. It possesses great potential in many product fabrication applications.In this study, we used anisotropic conductive film (ACF) as the adhesive to bind the desired IC chip and polyimide (PI) film. The electric path was formed by connecting the bump on the IC and the electrode on the PI film via the conductive particles in the ACF. In the COF bonding process experimental-design-method was applied basing on the parameters, such as bonding temperature, bonding pressure and bonding time. After reliability tests of(l) 60°C/95%RH/I00Hr and (2) -20°C -70°C/ 30 cycles, contact resistance was measured and used as the quality inspection parameter. Correlation between the contact resistance and the three parameters was established and optimal processing condition was obtained. The COF samples analyzed were fabricated accordingly. The contact resistance of the COF samples was measured at varying temperature using the 4 points test method. The result helped us to realize the relationship between the contact resistance and the operation temperature of the COF technology. This yielded important information for circuit design.

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