Associate Professor Hsieh Ruei-chien from the Department of Information Management at Yuan Ze University led four mainland students in jointly developing the mobile application “Mountain Buddy” APP to reduce the life-threatening risks of acute mountain sickness. They participated in the “third National Mobile Internet Innovation Competition” hosted in mainland China. With over 2,000 teams registering for the competition and 215 advancing to the finals after preliminary review, their team won first prize with the “Mountain Buddy” mobile application.
The students led by Hsieh Ruei-chien—Ye Shuling, Lu Mengsi, Lin Yuandong, and Chen Kunqing—from Yuan Ze University’s Medical Informatics and Telemedicine Laboratory, all mainland students, jointly developed the mobile application “Mountain Buddy” APP to reduce the life-threatening risks of acute mountain sickness. They participated in the national-level third National Mobile Internet Innovation Competition hosted in mainland China. With over 2,000 teams registering for the competition and 215 advancing to the finals after preliminary review, their team won first prize with the “Mountain Buddy” mobile application.
Hsieh Ruei-chien said that by combining a wearable bracelet with a mobile phone application, the system can instantly output data on blood oxygen concentration and pulse rate. Using Bluetooth technology, this data is transmitted in real time to the mobile APP, where it is compared with safe predicted blood oxygen values. This creates an innovative form of smart healthcare, allowing users to monitor their blood oxygen levels in specific altitudes in real time. It enables mountaineers to understand safe and unsafe blood oxygen concentration levels at certain heights and take timely precautions against altitude sickness.
Hsieh Ruei-chien also mentioned that currently there are no devices on the market that can instantly detect and predict altitude sickness. Even if such devices exist, they only measure the user’s blood oxygen concentration and pulse rate. However, the average person does not know whether the measured blood oxygen concentration indicates a tendency toward altitude sickness at their current altitude. Therefore, by using a wearable bracelet and Bluetooth technology to measure blood oxygen concentration and pulse data, and then transmitting this data to a mobile APP to compare it with safe predicted blood oxygen values, the risk can be assessed.
Yuan Ze University stated that the “third National Mobile Internet Innovation Competition” was held in Beijing. The event was guided by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of China, the China Association for Science and Technology, and the Silk Road Planning Research Center, and jointly organized by the China Institute of Communications, the National Mobile Internet Industry Incubation Center, and the China Television Science & Culture Industry Development Center. It attracted over 2,000 teams from both domestic and international regions, with 215 teams advancing to the finals after the preliminary review. Professors from Tsinghua University and Beijing Jiaotong University in Beijing were invited to serve as judges.