The Taiwan Textile Research Institute (TTRI) on Wednesday donated 960 pairs of slippers made of fiber materials that glow in the dark as gifts to help the elderly when they need to move about at night.
The slippers were presented to the Taipei Veterans Home in New Taipei City (新北市), which provides care to retired military servicemen.
Taipei Veterans Home deputy director Lee Hsing-chu (李興竹) said many retired military servicemen are getting older and need more attentive personal care.
Photo: Tsai Ming-lun, Taipei Times
“After the lights go out at night, elderly people sometimes need to get up to go to the bathroom. When searching for footwear, the glow-in-the-dark slippers can help prevent falls and injuries. The slippers are good news for our residents,” Lee said.
Bai Chi-chung (白志中) said the slippers are made from photoluminescent fiber, which absorbs and stores photonic energy from indoor lighting and does not harm the wearer’s health.
“From the stored energy, the fiber can produce light for up to six hours,” he said during an explanation of the process, which does not require electricity or batteries.
Besides slippers, TTRI produces dolls with photoluminescent fibers as companions for young children at bedtime, Bai said.
“With this new fiber material, we are also developing window curtains, table mats, foot pads and other home decorative products. We aim to help create safer and more energy-efficient homes,” he said.
He said the institute’s long-term aim is to help small and medium-sized enterprises in the textile industry apply this new technology to make higher-value commercial products and strengthen local textile companies so they can be more competitive internationally.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater