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Aim: Chronic diseases are influential components of stroke, one of the dominant reasons for dementia and premature mortality. Environmental risks are risk factors for transitioning from stroke to dementia. This study addresses the transition behaviors in stroke and dementia development associated with chronic diseases and environmental risks. Methods: This study is an integrated survey of medical and environmental informatics concerning stroke patients' quality of life. A total of 10 627 stroke patients diagnosed in Taiwan were surveyed in this study. A covariate model and subgroup analysis were used to evaluate the influence of chronic diseases and environmental risk factors (i.e., divorce rate, unemployment rate, solitariness rate, temperature, and air pollution rate) on stroke and the corresponding dementia transition behaviors. Results: This study constructed a total of 98 covariate analysis models, consisting of 14 transition types [10 transitions from chronic diseases to stroke (5 metabolic risk states × 2 stroke states) and 4 transitions from stroke to dementia (2 stroke states × 2 dementia states)] by 7 covariates (i.e., sex, age, divorce rate, unemployment rate, temperature, air pollution, and solitariness rate). Among the 98 transitions, 26 were statistically significant. Conclusions: Sex, age, divorce rate, unemployment rate, temperature, and air pollution rate exerted a partially significant influence on the transition from chronic diseases to stroke. Sex, age, unemployment rate, and temperature partially influenced the transition from stroke to dementia. This study also considered high‐risk sub‐populations of stroke patients, particularly males aged 65 years and below. Geriatr Gerontol Int 2024; 24: 766–772. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Innovation is vital for sustainable competitiveness and a process that can be trained and managed. Design thinking is an effective approach that helps create innovative solutions and contributes to new product development (NPD). When applied to NPD, how the involvement and intensity of design thinking offers benefits to firms with distinct organisational cultures remained unclear. This study investigates the effect of the use of design thinking in NPD. A hybrid method approach is adopted. First, 35 senior managers from diverse industries in Taiwan are participated in a set of design thinking workshops hosted by the present study. The participants were interviewed after the workshops to investigate design thinking's influences on organisational creativity capacity. This study highlights two key successful factors to enable an effective NPD by design thinking: 1) clarifying bottlenecks against innovation and 2) establishing an open cooperate culture of innovation. Further, a quantitative study was conducted to validate the proposition, stating that by adopting design thinking, firms can improve their innovation in NPD. The correlation between design thinking and organisational culture by industrial types is examined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the quality control of the photolithography process in the semiconductor industry. Overlay errors in the process seriously affect the wafer yield, and cause the wafer to be forced to rework and affect the production efficiency of the equipment. We examine the current state of its process control, develop a novel overlay predict model, and verify the prediction results. This study proposes a Global Attention Generative Adversarial Networks (GAGAN) model to precisely predict the overlay error for the feed-forward data of the front layer, which is used as the important information and process parameters for the advanced process control of the current layer. Experiment results on a semiconductor shop-floor confirms that our proposed method achieves high predictive performance while maintaining extensibility and visual quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The investment in a smart manufacturing factory with corresponding management information systems is strategic, complex, and costly. This paper aims to develop a cost estimation framework for a smart factory management information system (SFMIS). This paper proposed a fuzzy activity-based costing (FABC) model for the evaluation of the SFMIS under conditions of uncertainty. The model presented a multi-step procedure to do the identification, estimation, determination, calculation, and computation of the resource costs, activity costs, and systems as cost objects. The fuzzy Delphi method is adopted, and seventeen experts are surveyed in two rounds of a questionnaire assessing the importance of resources, activities, systems, and industry type and company size. The proposed FABC cost estimation model is illustrated by a case study. This model can identify and allocate resources and estimate SFMIS costs accurately and efficiently. By using this FABC cost evaluation framework, policymakers facilitate smart factory implementation for its management information system under uncertainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]