- (30 points) Your company needs to design an ethylene oxide sterilization process for a new
product. You would like to explore the effects of relative humidity, temperature, gas
concentration, and exposure time on the sterility level of products after treatment. Each factor
should be tested at 2 levels.
a.) You plan to run a full factorial design for this study. Create and show an experimental
matrix (in the form of a table) showing the parameters for each run (10 points)
b.) Experimental runs are conducted back-to-back over a period of 2 days on the same
equipment. You would like to determine if there is any time effect on the data that were
obtained (i.e., is there any relationship between the sterility level of the product after
treatment and the order in which the samples were run?). What could you do to examine
this relationship? (5 points)
c.) Describe a type of model that you could construct to determine which factors are most
significant in achieving a high sterility level after ethylene oxide treatment. (5 points)
d.) Once the model is constructed, describe how you would evaluate the quality of the model
and if necessary, how you would improve the quality of the model. (10 points) - (20 points) Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a debilitating neurological disorder that results in
progressive worsening of smooth motor movement. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to
quantitatively evaluate deterioration of motor movement over the course of disease. To tackle
this problem, your research group plans to collect motor movement data using inertial sensors
(which measure tilt and acceleration) from two different groups of patients—a healthy control
group (without PD) and a group of people who have been diagnosed with PD. From this inertial
sensor data, many different biomechanical features can be extracted.
a.) What might you formulate as a hypothesis for this research study? (5 points)
b.) Motor movement data is recorded and features extracted from the raw sensor data. A
regression model is constructed, and the results are shown in the table below. Suppose
you wanted to reduce the complexity of the model by including only 5 terms. Which 5
features from the table below would you choose? Briefly explain why you chose those 5
features. (5 points) What are some potential sources for error in the subject pool recruited to participate in
this experiment? Please list at least two sources of error. For each source of error, please
explain how this source of error might affect the results. (10 points)