Volume 3, Issue 4

The data transmitted over wireless communication systems are affected by various elements as noise, interference or distortion, and to be able to combat these factors the paper propose the utilization of Redundant Residue Number System (RR NS) coding as a Forward Error Correction (FEC) technique to enhance the performance of MIMO-OFDM communication system compared to other conventional coding and equalization techniques.
The system Bit Error Rate (BER) and Peak-to-Average Power Ratio (PAPR) were measured through a MATLAB programs for different simulated channel conditions, including the effect of signal amplitude reduction and multipath delay spreading. The simulation results had shown that RRNS coding scheme provides an enhancement BER performance and reduced PAPR in comparison to conventional error detection and correction schemes through using the distinct features of Residue Number System (RNS).

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Moderate exercise has been implemented in spaceflight programs to prevent muscle and joint damage under extreme circumstances such as microgravity. Although the physical effects of exercise have been investigated experimentally, advanced modeling and simulation techniques are powerful tools that could provide insight into the physical limitations, optimal conditions, and mechanisms that might lead to muscle and joint damage. Ergometers are safe for patients and elderly individuals because exercise intensity can be easily regulated. Moreover, ergometer exercise that removes the load imposed by body weight on leg joints would better reflect training conditions in locations such as the International Space Station or on the surfaces of the Moon and Mars, where the force of gravity is lower than that on the Earth. A hybrid training system (HTS) that combines the electrical stimulation of antagonist muscles and volitional contraction of agonist muscles is an effective training method. Co-contractile motions in the HTS can counteract the reduced effect of gravitational force on leg joints during ergometer exercise. The present study aimed to validate the ability of an ergometer exercise model to measure oxygen uptake and joint reaction forces by comparison with experimental results and create strategies for electrically stimulating leg joint muscles for modulation under altered gravity. The simulation results suggested that the HTS could easily control the magnitude of oxygen uptake and joint reaction forces. Optimal cycling conditions to achieve desirable values for oxygen uptake and joint reaction forces would help to maintain the health of astronauts and appropriate exercise programs could be implemented in constrained space facilities.

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The torch relay for the 2017 Taipei Summer Universiade started June. The innovative torch design was altered and tested, follow-up production successfully. For preventing weather effect, the head of the torch embedded with a unique airflow structure that allowed the sacred flame to pass the wind and rain tests. The safety lantern displays a 3D spiral flash. Safety lantern uses biofuel so that the mother flame can transport by air. The scientific principles are Stack effect, Coanda effect, Bernoulli’s principle, and Capillary phenomenon. Product design refers to principles and a series of work from the specifications to determine the product structure. Cross-discipline collaboration is needed to increase the integrity.

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Stream cipher can be used in constrained environments to provide information security and reduce energy expense at data transmission. In this paper, it is shown that Reed-Solomon (RS) code can be used to implement stream cipher, which is widely used for error corrections of data in transmission and storages. The proposed stream cipher combines the keys with the messages and conceals the cipher within the erroneous RS code. Then at the receiving part the cipher can be checked out by RS decoding, leaving the information unchanged. There are several advantages with this scheme: First, compared with the usual stream cipher including wo engines, only one engine is required, making the synchronization of the stream cipher and messages easily. In the situation, the stream cipher and the messages are held as a whole while the alignment of stream cipher is not needed. Thus, the usual power consumptions for synchronization and key generation at the receiving part can be saved. Second, the stream cipher increases the security level by adding the difficulty of decoding a random linear RS code, which stores the key streams like public key cryptography. Since the RS encoding and decoding modules are already included in many computer systems or devices, the new scheme may be implemented by reconfiguration rather than extra hardware units. Compared with generalized RS code for code-based public-key cryptography like McEliece system, it uses systematic encoding instead of nonsystematic encoding, which decreases the power overhead. Unlike the encryption by public keys and decryption by private keys of McEliece system, it encrypts messages by private keys from stream cipher and decrypts texts by public keys implemented in the RS decoder.

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Doubly fed asynchronous machines have an outstanding property: they can be operated up to twice rated speed delivering full rated torque. This paper presents, for the first time in the literature, a control system for multiphase asynchronous machines fed by Voltage Source Inverters (VSIs) both in stator and rotor that incorporates the harmonic torques. The system has three main and distinctive features: the independent control of the fundamental and harmonic torques, a very fast dynamic response for each one of these torques and a powerful method for selecting the best suited inverter state to achieve the evolution of the fundamental and harmonics flux linkage space phasors prescribed by the external control loops. The first feature is achieved through the decoupling of the multiphase machine provided by the Space Phasor Theory (SPhTh). The second one comes from the application of the General Approach for a very Fast TOrque Control (GAFTOC) principle. The third feature relies on using for multi-phase VSIs a simple but powerful switching-table based mode of operation that overcomes the limitations of the switching-table based modes of operation developed up to now, that only enable for the inverter to feed machines with no harmonic torques contribution.

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The object of this paper is to identify the unknown electrical parameters of solar photovoltaic generators in real time, through the application of a novel suggested hybrid method. The identification process is discussed with details, about the four steps of identification. In this issue, the first step describes the experimental data acquisition work done to obtain data from a real photovoltaic system. For the second step, a model of a cell’s corresponding electrical circuit is selected. In the third step, the estimation of the parameters ‘values is done using two combined optimization approaches, such as Levenberg-Marquardt combined with Particle Swarm Optimization. The fourth step describes the validation of the selected model. The benefit of this work compared to those before, is in the use of real data, in the use of smart optimization technics and the hybridization between two methods, which provides best results.

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The following work introduces the use of the available Redundant switching states introduced by the double star four level converter topology, for its application in a medium voltage variable speed drive under a wide range of operation loads. Redundant switching states are obtained using multi-carrier phase-shifted pulse width modulation (PWM) strategy. The converter performance is evaluated in terms of the dc-voltage drift and the torque ripple on the load side, when compared with a classical level-shifted PWM modulation.

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This paper presents a resource-friendly dynamic digital beamformer for a portable ultrasound imaging system based on a single field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The core of the ultrasound imaging system is a 128- channel receive beamformer with fully dynamic focusing embedded in a single FPGA chip, which operates at a frequency of 40 MHz. The Rx beamformer is composed of a midend processing module, a backend processing module, and a control block. The midend processing module is established using the implementation of the delay summation through coarse delays and fine delays, with which delays could vary continuously to support dynamic beamforming. In order to enhance spatial and contrast resolution, the Rx beamformer is further accommodated by employing a polyphase filter, which improves the effective beamforming frequency to 240 MHz. The control block generates control signals based on a memory management block, which doubles the data transfer rate. The processed data is wirelessly sent to a commercial Android device. The low cost ultrasound imaging system supports real-time images with a frame rate of 40 fps, due to the limitation imposed by the wireless backhaul process. To reduce power consumption, a dynamic power management technique is used, with which the power consumption is reduced by 25%. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of the implementation of a high performance power-efficient dynamic beamformer in a single FPGA-based portable ultrasound system.

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Virtual Reality (VR) technology has become one of the most advanced techniques that is used currently in many fields. The role of education is extremely important in every society; therefore, it should always be updated to be in line with new technologies and lifestyles. Applying technology in education enhances the way of teaching and learning. This paper clarifies a virtual reality application for educational resolutions. The application demonstrates a virtual educational environment that is seen through a Virtual Reality headset, and it is controlled by a motion controller. It allows the user to perform scientific experiments, attend online live 360° lectures, watch pre-recorded lectures, have a campus tour, and visit informative labs virtually. The application helps to overcome many educational issues including hazardous experiments, lack of equipment, and limited mobility of students with special needs.

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Reverse logistics activities are widely used application to preserve the environment in many developed countries from e-waste problem. Due to lack of public awareness in many emerging countries, implementation of reverse logistics program must be initiated by government. Besides that, reverse logistics practices often fail to balance among profit target achievement, the environmental conservation, and social harmony. Moreover, in the recent years, triple bottom line is not enough since many parties are only focused on their reputation due to they are afraid to be blame as the source of problems. Therefore, this research aims to build sustainable reverse logistics theory for emerging countries through quattro bottom line approach from government perspectives. Theory building process consists of systematic literature review, triangulation of data collection, major part of theory description, conceptualization and operationalization of theory. The result indicates a number of obligation that must be regulated by government for all parties that was divided into four categories, i.e. infrastructures and facilities provision, human resource commitment, regulation establishment, and managerial orientation. This theory can be adopted to measure performance of SRL Implementation.

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Game-based learning has been introduced as an interactive tool to facilitate learning and training processes in various fields, including supply chain management (SCM). Most of these games are specifically designed to focus on certain scenarios and concepts. For example, the original beer distribution game focuses on a single product supply chain without considering capacity and process reliability into account. This creates challenges for extending the games to cover other concepts in SCM. To tackle this problem, we propose a board game, titled ThinkLog, as a face-to-face extendable framework to facilitate learning in SCM. It can be extended to generate different scenarios for various concepts in SCM without changing the basic game structure. Using this principle, we have extended the basic version of ThinkLog to two other scenarios, namely: humanitarian logistics and urban logistics, by simply modifying the rule of the game. Each scenario would have different learning objectives embedded in the gameplay. The game is also complemented with a computer-based application (digital application) to enhance the overall learning experience and collect relevant data (data gathering) during a game session. These three scenarios have been evaluated on four-interactive sessions with government officials and policy- makers in Indonesia. Each session has been consistent in its acceptance of the game as a tool to facilitate learning in SCM, regardless of the scenarios that we played. Our learning objective evaluation also shows that the game is effective in deepening the players’ understanding of SCM concepts.

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Game-based learning has been introduced as an interactive tool to facilitate learning and training processes in various fields, including supply chain management (SCM). Most of these games are specifically designed to focus on certain scenarios and concepts. For example, the original beer distribution game focuses on a single product supply chain without considering capacity and process reliability into account. This creates challenges for extending the games to cover other concepts in SCM. To tackle this problem, we propose a board game, titled ThinkLog, as a face-to-face extendable framework to facilitate learning in SCM. It can be extended to generate different scenarios for various concepts in SCM without changing the basic game structure. Using this principle, we have extended the basic version of ThinkLog to two other scenarios, namely: humanitarian logistics and urban logistics, by simply modifying the rule of the game. Each scenario would have different learning objectives embedded in the gameplay. The game is also complemented with a computer-based application (digital application) to enhance the overall learning experience and collect relevant data (data gathering) during a game session. These three scenarios have been evaluated on four-interactive sessions with government officials and policy- makers in Indonesia. Each session has been consistent in its acceptance of the game as a tool to facilitate learning in SCM, regardless of the scenarios that we played. Our learning objective evaluation also shows that the game is effective in deepening the players’ understanding of SCM concepts.

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Hydrogen is the lightest of gases and possesses the lowest density. However at ambient temperature and pressure it occupies a large volume. This necessitates compressing it at high pressures up to 800 Bars to minimize the volume. The immense interest generated by hydrogen comes from the fact that it has the best energy per weight ratio of all fuels and the ecological nature of the combustion product. From the pedagogical point of view, it is also the most taught and involved in research, in particular in quantum mechanics. This aspect is treated in this article in order to solve the problem of storage of the hydrogen by minimizing losses. The solutions envisaged are, first, the improvement of the theory to understand the physical phenomena that occur in the physical system, especially the resolution of the transcendental equation, and then the means of perfecting the materials constituting the cavity.
Quantum scale investigations began with solving the Schrodinger equation at three-dimensional spherical symmetry, taking into account the boundary conditions of Victor Gustave Robin on the inner walls of the envelope. The clean energies that are stored in a spherical-shaped cavity have been modeled theoretically by solving the transcendental equation. The last part of the article is devoted to the thermodynamic properties of the hydrogen gas, particularly the dependence of the energy with the pressure and the temperature.

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Noise defined as ‘a sensation of unwanted intensity of a wave’, is perception of a pollutant and a type of environmental stressor. The unwanted intensity of a wave is a propagation of noise due to transmission of waves (viz. physical agents) such as light, sound, heat, electricity, fluid and fire. The characterization of noise interference, due to power difference of two intensities in a wave is presented. Noise interference characterization in a wave is obtained depending on type of wave. Standard definitions of noise sources, their measurement equations, their units and their origins under limiting reference conditions are derived. All types of wave form one positive power cycle and one negative power cycle. The positive and negative noise scales and their units are devised depending on speed of noise interference in a wave. A numerical and experimental study was conducted for supporting the noise characterization theory via ascertainment of energy conversion characteristics of a pair of photovoltaic (PV) modules integrated with solar wall of an outdoor test-room. A pre-fabricated outdoor room was setup for conducting outdoor experiments on a PV solar wall with ventilation through the outdoor room. Acoustic signal processing is supported with some experimental and numerical results of a parallel plate PV solar wall device installed in an outdoor test-room to authenticate the noise interference equations. Detailed discussions on noise characterization theory along with some examples of noise filter systems as per noise sources are also presented. The noise characterization theory is also exemplified with some noise unit calculations using presented noise measurement equations.

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The number of smart devices inside the living environments grows more and more every day, and with it the need to interface them in order to share data and activate functions. Each day, new scenarios and new applications emerge to make our lives easier in many different contexts. The AAL SOCIALIZE project aims to create a new reference platform for active ageing by applying technological solutions to care for the health of the elderly, facilitate their daily activities, simplify their access to dedicated services.
The work presented herein describes the “Elderly Monitoring service” ? an IoT module of the SOCIALIZE platform, whose aim is to monitor elderly people’s activities and physiological parameters and to combine smart device functions. This modeling process can actively contribute to anticipating, and thereby preventing, emergency situations, increasing elderly autonomy and making them feel “protected” and “safe”.
In this regard, the system implements a practicable, scalable solution that allows heterogeneous devices belonging to different domotic systems using diverse protocols to interact with each other, share data and services and bind together through ‘friendship’, thereby creating an infrastructure suitable for the creation of a true Social IoT (SIoT).

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A Digital Terrain Model (DTM) is a digital model representing the earth ‘s surface topography in three dimensions (3D) while a Digital Surface Model (DSM) represents the whole terrain including the objects on it such as trees and buildings. DTMs can be created through stereo-plotting. The advantage of this method is that the 3D data can be obtained with a high level of accuracy, but the data is limited in cloudy areas. This problem can be solved by using DSM, which can be created using TerraSAR-X and TanDEM-X Satellites with Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) system. This research aims to analyze the accuracy of DSMs from TerraSAR-X alongside DTMs extracted from aerial photogrammetry. The accuracy assessment of vertical height was completed by choosing 121 check points spread systematically on a paddy field in Karawang Regency, West Java. As paddy field was chosen to minimize errors between the DSM and DTM. The average, minimum, and maximum value of height differences between the DSM and DTM was calculated to obtain the standard deviation. The result showed that the average height difference between the DSM and DTM was 3.4 m with a minimum and maximum difference as 0.2 m and 10.808 m respectively. The standard deviation obtained was 4.9 m.

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The abilities of human brain to discover solutions for many problems is a great gift that motivate the scientists to develop the revolution of the artificial intelligence and using it in many areas. This paper proposed an intelligent chessboard which works in a way that similar to the human brain that predicts the next positions for any piece of the chess. MATLAB is used in the training of the artificial neural networks of the chessboard and implemented on FPGA as a hardware part; the proposed system has many advantages such as the low cost of production with a high efficiency in the prediction of the position of any piece on the chessboard and the similarities to the human brain.

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In this research human gait database is collected using different possible methods such as Wearable sensors, Smartphone and Cameras. For a gait recognition accelerometer data from wearable shimmer modules and smartphone are used. Data from different sensors location is compared to know which sensor location have better recognition rate. Different walking scenarios like slow, normal and fast walk were investigated. Wearable sensors and smartphone data are compared to know whether mobile phones can be used for gait recognition or not. Also effects of age, height, weight on gait recognition are also studied. The obtained results of gait biometric matrices like Genuine Recognition Rate (GRR), Total Recognition Rate (TRR) and Equal Error Rate (EER) showed better results. EER in different walking scenarios ranged from 0.17% to 2.27% for the five wearable sensors at different locations, whereas EER results of smartphone data ranged from 1.23% to 4.07%. For sensors located at leg, pocket and hand the average GRR value falls with increase in age group, while for sensors located at upper pocket and bag, the GRR value doesn’t follow any trend. Moreover GRR results on all sensors show no significance regarding height or weight variations.

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Four different soundscapes with different loudness and spectral distributions were recorded in Zagreb (capital of Croatia) and reproduced to two groups of listeners while they were performing a concentration demanding task – a simplified variation of the memory game. These two groups of test subjects listened to the same soundscapes but with different loudness distribution. The game results versus time were recorded, analyzed and compared to questionnaire answers, along with loudness and property changes of each soundscape. The goal was to determine which of the sound events causes the largest distraction and to establish a connection between these results and the annoyance level of each soundscape. As expected, the loudest soundscape resulted in the lowest score and caused the largest annoyance. However, other factors proved to cause listeners’ distraction, mainly unexpected sounds that differ from the main sound print. In that sense, this paper also deals with a concept of creating enjoyable sound environment in urban places.

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Early detection and treatment of cervical cancer is crucial to patients’ recovery with a reported success rate of nearly 100%. Presently, Pap smear test which is a visual inspection of cells collected from the ectocervix is the screening tool mainly used in cancer prevention programs. The Pap smear is relatively easy to handle however, it is time-consuming and requires wet fixation of the cytological material. Thus, there is great demand for an automated-screening system that exhibits high sensitivity, high specificity and high-throughput. Hence, a textural based cervical cancer classification system has been developed in this research work. The wavelet transform was used to denoise 120 Pap smear images to enhance its visual quality while the images were segmented using the morphological operations. Eight textural features of GLCM that serve as inputs into the k-NN and SVM classifiers were extracted from each of the images and the performance was evaluated using accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. The result of the developed system shows that clustering shade SVM classifier out-performs entropy k-NN classifier in terms of classification accuracy of 90.0% and 88.3% respectively and vice visa in terms of sensitivity and specificity.

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A dual-band 90-degree SiGe HBT active phase shifter based on band-pass and band-stop designs using dual-band resonators is presented in this paper. The active phase shifter employs differential configuration and has band-pass and band-stop filters in the load circuit. By switching two output ports of the differential amplifier, 90-degree phase shifting has been realized at dual bands. The implemented dual-band active phase shifter using 0.35 micron SiGe HBT has achieved a gain of 9.3 dB and a phase shift of 95 degrees at 0.74 GHz as well as a gain of 8.9 dB and a phase shift of 98 degrees at 0.88 GHz. This is the first paper to present a dual-band active phase shifter based on band-pass and band-stop designs using dual-band resonators.

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This paper introduces a design process for developing a humanoid mobile robot, namely VieBot. Stemming from the design process, it is easy to adjust the design and extent robot behaviors to meet customer needs. Our key solution is to split the design into three modules related to robot behavior, kinematic computation and motion control. Base on the results from testbed module under comprehensive testing, the design is gradually improved to satisfy sophisticated requirement of assisting disabled people.

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This paper refers to a novel mixed-mode universal biquad employing plus current output differential voltage current conveyors with grounded passive components. The circuit performs mixed-mode operation with the selection of the input and output terminals, and it enables low-pass, band-pass, high-pass, band-stop and all-pass responses choosing suitable input signals. The circuit needs no component matching constraints for obtaining five basic circuit responses above, and can adjust orthogonally the characteristic parameters by the circuit component. Additionally, the circuit has extremely low sensitivities with respect to the circuit components. A circuit design is performed with PSPICE simulation in order to verify the workability of the circuit.

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Requirement for pole-changing motors emerged at the very early times of asynchronous motor design. Different solutions have been elaborated and some of them are generally used. One of these solutions in use is the so called pole phase modulation method. The so called 3 Y / 3 Y pole-changing winding being subject of this paper belongs to this group. This paper presents a new approach to this method. A new, complete and comprehensive study is introduced, including features and, moreover, detailed design guidelines. The method is applicable for any pole combination for the so called close ratio without any further particular consideration. As the target of the paper is to provide solution for high power application, it does not deal with balancing methods, but as a novelty, calculates the effect of those disadvantageous phenomena (asymmetries, even harmonics) in order to enable the designer for evaluation and decision. The study also reveals as a novelty that the same method is suitable for wide ratio as well, moreover, a new solution for theoretically infinite ratio expressed in 1:N, with supply voltage system of N phase is proposed. Using this motor, a new and complete drive system has been proposed with subject pole changing motor as core element as the most appropriate arrangement of high power main marine propulsion drive.

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The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), a typical use case of the Internet of Things, has been a great prospect for development in the near future. In the developing fifth generation mobile communications, the IIoT is an extremely important application case. In this paper, the channel propagation properties are researched and modeled based on the measurement data in an automobile welding factory. The results of the path loss exponent values are around 2.5 and 3.3 in line of sight propagation (LOS) and obstructed line of sight (OLOS) propagation scenarios, respectively. In LOS and OLOS propagation scenarios, K factor values are around 5 dB and 4 dB, respectively. Meanwhile, in these two propagation environment, the amount of multipath components (MPCs) and the root mean squared (RMS) delay are extracted and compared. Particularly, a special case is considered that the sensor/actuator is placed inside the metallic body of a machine, which affects the path loss exponent values and K factor values. These measurement results are of great significance to the development of IIoT.

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In this article, a new method to extract the RLC parameters from the structure of a Rotating Traveling Wave Oscillator (RTWO) is described. The use of a 3D simulator (EMPRO) allow us to develop a precise analysis of the impact of the topology, the geometrical discontinuities, and the dimensions of the transmission lines, on the performance parameters of the RTWO, i.e. frequency of oscillation and power consumption. The results show that a right angle discontinuity compensation can reduce the power consumption up to 3.34% and, for RTWOs with a frequency range between 11.4 GHz and 11.5 GHZ, narrow transmission lines (as the technology is able) can reduce the power consumption up to 98%. Additionally, it was observed that the topology used affects the performance parameters, as there are more folds and overlaps between metal levels in the RTWO structure, and the frequency increases by 2.9% while the power consumption increases by 10.52%.

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In this article, a new method to extract the RLC parameters from the structure of a Rotating Traveling Wave Oscillator (RTWO) is described. The use of a In this study, the authors propose a modified design of sequential card activities to recollect experience for the elderly with Dementia. The cards and App were designed to complement each other for Nostalgia-based support. Image and text are utilized to trigger memories that bring out shared experience from the patient. By using suitable trigger elements, group sharing, and physical objects, one can enhance the memory recall. The procedure of rice dumpling preparation and making were listed in a sequential step and printed on cards. Cards are shuffled, and the elderly are asked to sort these cards to right sequence with the help of QR scanner. In multiple theme scenarios, different groups of object making steps were mixed, and the player needs to select cards that related to a specific group. Using actual items and activities, the triggered of elder’s experience was confirmed. The qualitative testing results showed that the elderly enjoyed the activities. Those events verified the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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This paper presents analytical methods for optimum allocation of distribution generators in a radial distribution network. The aim is to increase power efficiency and reduce loss of power. The ideal size of each distribution generator unit at the identified locations has been carefully selected by making adjustments to loss saving equations and the voltage on a radial feeder. The experimental system is located in the governorate of Bethlehem specifically within the district served by the Jerusalem Distribution Electricity Company (JDECO). The NEPLAN simulator has been utilized in the verification process of the aforementioned experimental system. It entails of several nodes and 400 V-buses that feed up to five household loads. The size and location of each has been carefully chosen. Consequently, significant loss saving, and voltage profile improvement have been reported.
Hence, the use of Renewable Distribution Generators (DGs) systems is highly desirable for various reasons including increased system reliability, decreased loss of power, and enhanced voltage profile. Notably, cutting back on the use of conventional fuel will in turn reduce the negative environmental impacts.

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This paper is an extension of work originally presented at the Convention of Central America and Panama XXX VII- The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers -2017. We have extended our previous work by presenting the initial results of how social technologies in particular wikis has the potential for Information Technology support of a cooperative community knowledge generation.
This paper outlines an experience in the implementation of a multidisciplinary research project – AGILe busIness PrOcess (AGILIPO), applied to an important organization in Nicaragua. In addition, it focused on improving key process by describing through collaborative tools which foster end user collaboration and organization knowledge.
We gathered evidence that blogs and podcasts couldn’t afford to allow users on collaborative tasks of AGILIPO. The principal contributions of this work are the lessons learned from the experience of applying AGILIPO to an organization in Nicaragua, the key elements in achieving success in the application, the conditions that were brought together in order to use AGILIPO, the drawbacks during the experience and the relevant limitations of AGILIPO and how we can improve process by agile Business Process Management.

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The increasing demand for advanced services in wireless networks raises the problem for quality of service (QoS) provisioning with proper resource management. In this research work, such a provisioning technique for wireless networks is performed by Call Admission Control (CAC). A new approach in CAC named by Defined Limited Fractional Channel (DLFC) is proposed in this work for the wireless networks in order to provide proper priority between the new calls and handover calls. This DLFC scheme is basically a new style of handover priority scheme. Handover priority is provided by two stages in this scheme which helps the network to utilize more resources. The first priority stage is a fractional priority and the second stage is an integral priority. Fractional priority is provided by the uniform fractional acceptance factor that accepts new calls with the predefined acceptance ratio throughout the fractional priority stage. The two significant parameters of QoS: new call blocking probability and handover call dropping probability of single service wireless network have been analyzed under this DLFC scheme. Besides, the results of the proposed scheme have been compared with the conventional new thinning scheme and cut-off priority scheme and we found that our proposed scheme outperforms than the conventional schemes. Integral priority is given to the handover calls by reserving some channels only for handover calls. In this work, it is shown that DLFC scheme proves itself as optimal call admission controlling technique which is concerned about not only the QoS but also the proper channel utilization with respect to conventional thinning scheme and fractional channel schemes. The handover call rate estimation and its impact on QoS provisioning is discussed widely to attain the optimum QoS in the proposed handover priority scheme. We hope this proposed DLFC scheme will contribute to design high performance CAC in the wireless cellular network.

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Currently, synchronous digital circuits (SDC) may require certain design conditions, such as power consumption, robustness, performance, etc. These design conditions are more difficult to satisfy when SDC are implemented in VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) technology and in the deep-sub-micron MOS (DSM-MOS) technology. The asynchronous design style has properties that serve as an alternative to design DSM-MOS technology circuits and it can satisfy these design conditions. Quasi Delay-Insensitive (QDI) circuits is a class of asynchronous circuits, they have properties where the DSM-MOS technology design is applied, because they are robust to noise, temperature and voltage variations, as well as low electromagnetic emissions, and they are tolerant to certain faults. An interesting style of QDI combinational circuits are NCL (NULL Convention Logic) circuits, because they accept conventional Boolean functions and it can achieve a better optimization. This paper presents an approach and an architecture based in basic gates for the synthesis of NCL gates, therefore its implementation uses only standard libraries and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The proposed QDI combinational circuits are implemented in the approach that uses only NCL gates.

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The aim of the present work is to guarantee the trajectory tracking of a nonlinear biological process and compare two control approaches. The main objective of this work is to elaborate a fuzzy model and build a fuzzy controllers for a biological process by using the fuzzy Takagi-Sugeno. Two controllers are synthesized, the parallel distributed compensation control and optimal fuzzy linear quadratic integral control. In both cases, the physical constraints on the manipulated inputs are respected. In addition, the case with and without the observer is presented, where a fuzzy observer based control is used with unmeasurable premise variables. Finally, the performances and the effectiveness of both the modeling and the control are demonstrated via simulations.

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In this research we address the problem of routing information across dynamic temporal sensor networks. The goal is to determine which information, generated by sensors on resources at various times, is able to be routed to other resources, consumer resources, within the given information time window, while being constrained by temporally dynamic bandwidth limitations across the sensor network, and storage limitations on the resources. A mathematical model of the problem is derived, and used to find solutions to the problem. In addition, a heuristic is developed to efficiently find good quality solutions. Monte-Carlo simulations are performed comparing solutions found by commercial software with the heuristic.

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Ship pilotage risk decision-making problems, which is an important issue affecting the safety of navigation. Before the study on the risk decision of ship pilotage, all use direct analysis of fault tree methods. In this paper, through the process analysis of ship pilotage fault tree, the model of fault tree is standardized and simplified. The traditional method solves the fault tree directly, obtains the ship pilotage risk analysis result, in this paper, use modular decomposition fault tree. Combined with the characteristics of no recurrence events in ship pilotage risk fault tree, the Modular Fault Tree (MFT) method is used to decompose the fault tree into static sub module and dynamic sub module. It solves the fault tree for computation reduction difficulty. Solve static fault tree with Binary Decision Diagram (BDD) method, solve dynamic fault tree with Markov Model Method, and make qualitative and quantitative analysis separately. Then synthesize the result, get the critical path and key event that cause the ship pilotage risk. The results can be used in the design of ship pilotage scheme, post training of ship pilots, or be provided recommendations to ship pilotage and maritime safety authorities for risk reduction.

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Screening the abnormal development of the zebrafish embryos before and after being hatched for a large number of samples is always carried out manually. The manual process is presented as a tedious work and low-throughput. The single female fish produce hundreds of eggs in every single mating process, the samples of the zebrafish embryos should be studied and analyzed within a short time according to the fast response of their bodies and the ethical regulations. The limited number of the automatic screening systems for aquaculture experiments encourage researchers to find out a high-throughput screening systems with a fast prediction results according to the large number of experimental samples. This work aims to design an automatic segmentation, classification system for zebrafish eggs using two ways for feature extraction and also a classifier. Using the whole image generally with several feature vectors useful for detection process, this way does not depend on the type of the image. The second way focus on specific characteristics of the image which are the colour and the texture features relating to the system purposes. Two different ways for feature extraction integrated by the Classification And Regression Tree (CART) classifier are proposed, analysed, and qualified by comparing the two methods performance and accuracies. The experimental results for zebrafish eggs classification into three distinct classes: live egg, live embryo, dead egg show higher accuracy using the texture and colour feature extraction with an accuracy 97% without any manual intervention. The proposed system results very promising for another type of classification such as the zebrafish larva deformations.

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MARWIN is a mobile autonomous robot platform designed to carry out maintenance and inspection tasks in the European XFEL. The XFEL is an accelerator plant which is operated in Hamburg, Germany. The robot system consists of an four-wheel drive chassis and a scissor lift for easy inspection and maintenance tasks. Through this manipulator and the chassis, the robot system acquires three degrees of freedom. MARWIN is intended for autonomous radiation measurements along the XFEL research facility and thus needs accurate localization. The facility describes a straight tunnel and consists partly of irregular structures and also of sections with almost no obstacles. In the 1000 meter long sections in which MARWIN operates, the robot must approach the facilities to a few centimeters, but must not touch them. For this purpose, di fferent localization methods were tested and checked for accuracy. Furthermore, the influence of radiation on the localization is investigated.

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Automatic speech emotion recognition (SER) techniques based on acoustic analysis show high confusion between certain emotional categories. This study used an indirect approach to provide insights into the amplitude-frequency characteristics of different emotions in order to support the development of future, more efficiently differentiating SER methods. The analysis was carried out by transforming short 1-second blocks of speech into RGB or grey-scale images of spectrograms. The images were used to fine-tune a pre-trained image classification network to recognize emotions. Spectrogram representation on four different frequency scales – linear, melodic, equivalent rectangular bandwidth (ERB), and logarithmic – allowed observation of the effects of high, mid-high, mid-low and low frequency characteristics of speech, respectively. Whereas the use of either red (R), green (G) or blue (B) components of RGB images showed the importance of speech components with high, mid and low amplitude levels, respectively. Experiments conducted on the Berlin emotional speech (EMO-DB) data revealed the relative positions of seven emotional categories (anger, boredom, disgust, fear, joy, neutral and sadness) on the amplitude-frequency plane.

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Advanced sensing technologies are providing for greater capabilities to discern and classify details of objects as they appear in actual environments as experienced by nonprofessional drivers. Distinctive geometric configurations of new sensory devices including but not limited to infrared (abbreviated as IR) and LIDAR sensory units are appearing as cost effective data acquisition systems for environment sensing and presenting. Here, we describe a novel IR sensory-based autonomous vehicle guidance and its associated convoy unit. The underlying systems is first presented in a general system model and the experimental test results have been elaborated to demonstrate the usefulness of the presented prototype in futuristic auto industries and its supporting branches, respectively.

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