Academic achievements

With the increasing elderly population, the number of individuals afflicted with dementia is also rising year by year. Apart from causing cognitive impairments, dementia also leads to a decline in hand grip strength, thereby impacting the daily lives of patients. Hence, this study endeavors to design and develop a novel wearable sensing device that integrates sEMG technology. It aims to accurately detect and train hand grip strength in the elderly population with dementia, with the ultimate goal of effectively preventing the onset of dementia.

The prevalence of degenerative diseases among older adults has been increasing, leading to a decline in their ability to perform daily activities. Frailty and dementia are associated, and hand strength training plays a crucial role in dementia prevention. Existing training products do not consider the hand size of older adults. Thus, this study focuses on developing a wearable hand strength training device specifically for older adults. The design incorporates universal design principles to enhance usability. Through subjective feedback obtained using the System Usability Scale (SUS) and interviews, the results show that the glove assistive device designed for older adults significantly improves comfort during training. Participants expressed a willingness to use this device for extended periods. Future designs should integrate diverse muscle strength training movements based on older adults' hand size, offering more options for independent home-based training, and indirectly reducing the occurrence of dementia.

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Services of personalized TTS systems for the Mandarin-speaking speech impaired are rarely mentioned. Taiwan started the VoiceBanking project in 2020, aiming to build a complete set of services to deliver personalized Mandarin TTS systems to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients. This paper reports the corpus design, corpus recording, data purging and correction for the corpus, and evaluations of the developed personalized TTS systems, for the VoiceBanking project. The developed corpus is named after the VoiceBank-2023 speech corpus because of its release year. The corpus contains 29.78 hours of utterances with prompts of short paragraphs and common phrases spoken by 111 native Mandarin speakers. The corpus is labeled with information about gender, degree of speech impairment, types of users, transcription, SNRs, and speaking rates. The VoiceBank-2023 is available by request for non-commercial use and welcomes all parties to join the VoiceBanking project to improve the services for the speech impaired.

Speech-to-speech translation (S2ST), particularly in the context of low-resource languages, plays a vital role in facilitating global communication. However, comprehensive research in this emerging field is lacking, especially concerning translation without the use of text. The objective of this study is to bridge the gap by conducting a systematic review of existing literature on S2ST for low-resource languages. We discovered 455 articles by searching the Scopus, IEEE Xplore, and ACM Digital Library databases, focusing on identifying research trends. The results highlight significant topics covered in the literature, marking a transition from traditional neural network methodologies to advanced transformer-based models. Our findings provide a robust overview of the S2ST landscape, identifying challenges and potential solutions for future research, particularly regarding the application of this technology in low-resource settings. The research contribution of this study is the insights gleaned will benefit academics and professionals seeking a comprehensive understanding of S2ST for low-resource languages.

對高齡者與身心障礙者來說，要取得每日營養膳食以維持基本的身體健康，是一件不容易且有風險的事。研究指出，高齡者與身心障礙者的營養攝取、健康狀況和社會連結間存在明顯的關係。經濟困難或獨自居住的高齡者與身心障礙者，有較高機率難以獲取足夠的食物與營養來維持健康的生活，而營養不良也增加了受傷、生病和提早入院的風險；在這樣的狀況下，高齡者與身心障礙者更容易被社會孤立，及面臨經濟惡性循環的困境，連帶心理健康亦會受到影響（Wright et al., 2015）。

我國內政部於 1993 年起，輔導各縣市地方政府辦理送餐服務，以協助高齡者克服烹煮食物及購物之不便，享有營養均衡的食物（何道珍等人，2003）。送餐服務兼顧健康照顧與社會服務，在提供均衡飲食的同時，也提供訪視問安、資源連結、觀察生活條件、日常問題解決、關懷網絡媒合等服務（潘承揚，2013；Thomas et al., 2020）。研究發現，居家送餐服務（Home-delivered Meal Services）是協助高齡者與身心障礙者能成功在地安老、保持獨立、減少孤獨與住院率、提升心理健康與幸福感的重要措施（Thomas et al., 2020; Westcott et al., 2022; Wright et al., 2015; Yanagisawa & Sakakibara, 2008）。

不同於 Ubereats 或者 Foodpanda 等商業送餐，居家送餐服務至少需整合營養膳食、交通運輸與社會工作（陳燕禎等人， 2005），是一項高複雜度與高整合度的任務。其涉及的相關工作細項繁多，包括：採購、倉儲、膳食烹調、送餐交通與接駁、財務與收支規劃管理、資訊系統維護……等。參與其中的工作角色也不少，包括：採購人員、送餐員、社工、廚工、財會人員、管理人員、客服人員……等等。此外，需維運管理的資源設施亦相當多，包括：大宗食材、中央廚房、車輛、工作地點、接駁據點、辦公環境……等等。送餐服務除需接受一般營運的要求，例如，勞動基準、食品安全、環境保護、消防、交通、建築等規範外，還需符合各式法令規章的檢視，例如，《老人福利法》、《身心障礙者權益保障法》、《長期照顧十年計畫》、社會工作倫理、志工倫理等等。因此，投入服務之服務機構需具備管理資源設施、整合工作任務與服務人員、以及符合各項法令規定等能力才能達成送餐任務。

參與居家送餐服務的機構多為民間社福組織或社區型單位，服務的地區擴及路程遙遠的偏鄉，加以複雜度高、整合度高，需投入的個案管理、訂餐與製餐、及相關行政業務的人力成本也高，因此如何透過數位化或數位優化來提升服務效能，是近年來參與送餐服務的社福組織或民間機構思考的重點。

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