Virtual Reality (VR) sickness occurs when exposure to a virtual environment causes symptoms that are similar to motion sickness, and has been one of the major user experience barriers of VR. To reduce VR sickness, prior work has explored dynamic field-of-view modification and galvanic vestibular stimulation (GVS) that recou-ples the visual and vestibular systems. We propose a new approach to reduce VR sickness, called PhantomLegs, that applies alternating haptic cues that are synchronized to users' footsteps in VR. Our prototype consists of two servos with padded swing arms, one set on each side of the head, that lightly taps the head as users walk in VR. We conducted a three-session, multi-day user study with 30 participants to evaluate its effects as users navigate through a VR environment while physically being seated. Results show that our approach significantly reduces VR sickness during the initial exposure while remaining comfortable to users.

The objective of prehospital emergency medical services (EMSs) is to have a short response time. By increasing the operational efficiency, the survival rate of patients could potentially be increased. The geographic information system (GIS) is introduced in this study to manage and visualize the spatial distribution of demand data and forecasting results. A flexible model is implemented in GIS, through which training data are prepared with user-desired sizes for the spatial grid and discretized temporal steps. We applied moving average, artificial neural network, sinusoidal regression, and support vector regression for the forecasting of prehospital emergency medical demand. The results from these approaches, as a reference, could be used for the preallocation of ambulances. A case study is conducted for the EMS in New Taipei City, where prehospital EMS data have been collected for three years. The model selection process has chosen different models with different input features for the forecast of different areas. The best daily mean absolute percentage error during testing of the EMS demand forecast is 23.01%, which is a reasonable forecast based on Lewis' definition. With the acceptable prediction performance, the proposed approach has its potential to be applied to the current practice.

In recent years, the rapid development of trade and traffic in our country has resulted in the increasing occurrence of various types of disasters and emergency injuries. According to the statistics from Fire Departments of Taiwan, medical emergency dispatch frequencies have exceeded 300,000, and the frequency of medical emergency dispatches has increased each year. These figures reflect the phenomenon that, despite the continual growth and progression of the community, various accidents and unforeseen situations are becoming increasingly common. Therefore, fire units have established a medical emergency care system with the objective of minimizing injuries, patient suffering, and the risk of mortality, reducing social medical costs, and alleviating the financial burden of medical emergencies on families. Many countries have special medical emergency dispatch systems, but these do not meet Taiwan's rules and emergency procedures. Thus, our research has focused on compiling a symptom-based medical emergency dispatch guide designed to match Taiwan's medical emergency dispatch system. We collate national medical emergency dispatch guides and present a medical emergency dispatch system to support medical staff and to educate these staff on the correct methodology in a short time. This system achieves the following objectives: (1) to enhance the quality of medical emergency services in Taiwan, (2) to reduce the response time of medical emergency dispatch, (3) to reduce the unnecessary waste of medical resources.