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Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to develop an Internet of medical things (IoMT)-based geriatric care management system (I-GCMS), integrating IoMT and case-based reasoning (CBR) in order to deal with the global concerns of the increasing demand for elderly care service in nursing homes. Design/methodology/approach: The I-GCMS is developed under the IoMT environment to collect real-time biometric data for total health monitoring. When the health of an elderly deteriorates, the CBR is used to revise and generate the customized care plan, and hence support and improve the geriatric care management (GCM) service in nursing homes. Findings: A case study is conducted in a nursing home in Taiwan to evaluate the performance of the I-GCMS. Under the IoMT environment, the time saving in executing total health monitoring helps improve the daily operation effectiveness and efficiency. In addition, the proposed system helps leverage a proactive approach in modifying the content of a care plan in response to the change of health status of elderly. Originality/value: Considering the needs for demanding and accurate healthcare services, this is the first time that IoMT and CBR technologies have been integrated in the field of GCM. This paper illustrates how to seamlessly connect various sensors to capture real-time biometric data to the I-GCMS platform for responsively supporting decision making in the care plan modification processes. With the aid of I-GCMS, the efficiency in executing the daily routine processes and the quality of healthcare services can be improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Objectives: Liver disease, the most common disease in Taiwan, is not easily discovered in its initial stage; early diagnosis of this leading cause of mortality is therefore highly important. The design of an effective diagnosis model is therefore an important issue in liver disease treatment. This study accordingly employs classification and regression tree (CART) and case-based reasoning (CBR) techniques to structure an intelligent diagnosis model aiming to provide a comprehensive analytic framework to raise the accuracy of liver disease diagnosis. Methods: Based on the advice and assistance of doctors and medical specialists of liver conditions, 510 outpatient visitors using ICD-9 (International Classification of Diseases, 9th Revision) codes at a medical center in Taiwan from 2005 to 2006 were selected as the cases in the data set for liver disease diagnosis. Data on 340 patients was utilized for the development of the model and on 170 patients utilized to perform comparative analysis of the models. This paper accordingly suggests an intelligent model for the diagnosis of liver diseases which integrates CART and CBR. The major steps in applying the model include: (1) adopting CART to diagnose whether a patient suffers from liver disease; (2) for patients diagnosed with liver disease in the first step, employing CBR to diagnose the types of liver diseases. Results: In the first phase, CART is used to extract rules from health examination data to show whether the patient suffers from liver disease. The results indicate that the CART rate of accuracy is 92.94%. In the second phase, CBR is developed to diagnose the type of liver disease, and the new case triggers the CBR system to retrieve the most similar case from the case base in order to support the treatment of liver disease. The new case is supported by a similarity ratio, and the CBR diagnostic accuracy rate is 90.00%. Actual implementation shows that the intelligent diagnosis model is capable of integrating CART and CBR techniques to examine liver diseases with considerable accuracy. The model can be used as a supporting system in making decisions regarding liver disease diagnosis and treatment. The rules extracted from CART are helpful to physicians in diagnosing liver diseases. CBR can retrieve the most similar case from the case base in order to solve a new liver disease problem and can be of great assistance to physicians in identifying the type of liver disease, reducing diagnostic errors and improving the quality and effectiveness of medical treatment. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: With the growth of transportation networks in developing countries, the cost-efficacy control of maintenance operations has become critical to the infrastructure asset management after highway construction. To effectively manage numerous projects annually with limited resources, it is necessary to accurately estimate costs and leave a trail of project information during the process of making maintenance project selection decisions. This paper outlines the development of a case-based reasoning (CBR) expert prototype system that compares historical data at the work item-level across the case library. This study attempts to determine preliminary project cost with readily available information rapidly based on previous experience of pavement maintenance related construction to assist decision makers in project screening and budget allocation. Various CBR modeling approaches were presented and assessed in terms of their mean absolute prediction error rates. Design and implementation of a web-based CBR system is demonstrated in this study to efficiently handle the attribute and case similarity computation and the results are displayed using browsers. Furthermore, weighting attributes employed in the CBR system were compared via eigenvector and equal weighting methods for estimating aggregate cost and component costs. Historical generic pavement maintenance projects were gathered from the Taiwan transportation agencies and used for model training and testing. Furthermore, k-fold cross-validation was employed to verify the CBR estimating system. The analytical results demonstrate the ability of the system to estimate the item-level cost of pavement maintenance projects with the satisfactory precision during the conceptual project phase. The developed prototype web-based CBR system can efficiently provide timely and accurate information in an efficient way and provide an alternative estimation tool that can be combined with other evaluation criteria, such as indexes of pavement serviceability and structure strength, to improve the decision making in relation to budget allocation. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The mobile phone manufacturers in Taiwan have made great efforts in proposing the rational quotations to the international phone companies with the ambition to win the bids by out beating other phone manufacturers. However, there are a lot of uncertainties and issues to be resolved in estimating the manufacturing costs for mobile phone manufacturers. As far as we know, there is no existing model which can be applied directly in forecasting the manufacturing costs. This research makes the first attempt to develop a hybrid system by integrated Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) and Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) as a Product Unit Cost (PUC) forecasting model for Mobile Phone Company. According to the cost formula of the mobile phone and experts' opinions, a set of qualitative and quantitative factors are analyzed and determined. Qualitative factors are applied in CBR to retrieve a similar case from the case bases for a new phone product and ANN is used to find the relationship between the quantitative factors and the predicted PUC. Finally, intensive experiments are conducted to test the effectiveness of six different forecasting models. The model proposed in this research is compared with the other five models and the MAPE value of the proposed model is the smallest. This research provides a new prediction model with high accuracy for mobile phone manufacturing companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]