# Applications of Medical Informatics and Data Analysis Methods
## 3 Data-Oriented Practical Approaches  
Advances in health information technology are enabling a transformation in health research that could facilitate studies that were not feasible in the past, and thus, lead to new insights regarding health and disease. The extent to which new procedures are adopted will depend on their usefulness. It is important that new methods are applied on real data that arise in medical research. Special attention should be given to the practical aspects of analysis and the presentation of the results.  
[PERSON] [6] contributes to the Special Issue with applications of modelling life expectancy and population dynamics. The title of this nice piece of work is _Stretched Exponential Survival Analysis for South Korean Females_. The paper focuses on studying current trends of lifespan among South Korean females using modified survival curves. The study shows the quantitative and comparative evidence for a remarkable rapid increase in female lifespan in South Korea during three recent decades, from 1987 to 2016.  
Long-term care (LTC) involves a variety of services designed to meet people's health or personal care needs during a short or long period of time. A paper authored by [PERSON], [PERSON], and [PERSON] [7] includes an interesting review of different models and methods to examine long-term care service demands and satisfaction improvement. Using data from the older adult population in Taiwan (\(n=292\)), this study demonstrates how two methods can be integrated to serve as a basis for decision makers to adjust LTC service quality design and improve care for older adults. The reproducibility of the proposed integration is easy.  
Vocal fatigue may be experienced by any individuals during their lifetime, but it is more frequently encountered by professional voice users in occupational settings. Vocal fatigue increases vocal effort and decreases speaking stamina. [PERSON] and co-authors [8] give in their contribution an extensive examination of the effect of vocal loading on a large number of voice measures and ratings in a small group of vocally normal young women. The novel aspect of the work is the use of vocal dosing as a criterion for performance. Their paper is rich with data, which provides relevant evidence about the acoustic and perceptual manifestations of vocal fatigue.  
The paper _Classification Maps in Studies on the Retirement Threshold_ by [PERSON] and collaborators [9] is an example of a study about retirement age in Poland. The aim of this work is to present new classification maps in health research and to show that they are useful in data analysis. Groups of individuals and their answers to questions of expectations and worries related to the retirement threshold are analyzed. A statistical method, correspondence analysis, is applied for obtaining these maps. With the classification maps, it is possible to find subgroups of these individuals who answer in a similar way to the specific questions. In addition, the authors compare structures of the maps searching for factors such as gender, marital status, kind of work, and economic situation, which are essential at the retirement threshold.