Study, definition and analysis of pilot/system performance measurements for planetary entry experiments

Definition analysis for experimental prediction of pilot performance during planetary entr

Smart nanotextiles: materials and their application

Textiles are ubiquitous to us, enveloping our skin and surroundings. Not only do they provide a protective shield or act as a comforting cocoon but they also serve esthetic appeal and cultural importance. Recent technologies have allowed the traditional functionality of textiles to be extended. Advances in materials science have added intelligence to textiles and created ‘smart’ clothes. Smart textiles can sense and react to environmental conditions or stimuli, e.g., from mechanical, thermal, chemical, electrical, or magnetic sources (Lam Po Tang and Stylios 2006). Such textiles find uses in many applications ranging from military and security to personalized healthcare, hygiene, and entertainment. Smart textiles may be termed ‘‘passive’’ or ‘‘active.’’ A passive smart textile monitors the wearer’s physiology or the environment, e.g., a shirt with in-built thermistors to log body temperature over time. If actuators are integrated, the textile becomes an active, smart textile as it may respond to a particular stimulus, e.g., the temperature-aware shirt may automatically roll up the sleeves when body temperature rises. The fundamental components in any smart textile are sensors and actuators. Interconnections, power supply, and a control unit are also needed to complete the system. All these components must be integrated into textiles while still retaining the usual tactile, flexible, and comfortable properties that we expect from a textile. Adding new functionalities to textiles while still maintaining the look and feel of the fabric is where nanotechnology has a huge impact on the textile industry. This article describes current developments in materials for smart nanotextiles and some of the many applications where these innovative textiles are of great benefit

物理/バーチャル空間の接続と分離を媒介する可動壁に関する研究

Tohoku University博士（情報科学）thesi

Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions

Robust simultaneous myoelectric control of multiple degrees of freedom in wrist-hand prostheses by real-time neuromusculoskeletal modeling

Objectives: Robotic prosthetic limbs promise to replace mechanical function of lost biological extremities and restore amputees' capacity of moving and interacting with the environment. Despite recent advances in biocompatible electrodes, surgical procedures, and mechatronics, the impact of current solutions is hampered by the lack of intuitive and robust man-machine interfaces. Approach: Based on authors' developments, this work presents a biomimetic interface that synthetizes the musculoskeletal function of an individual's phantom limb as controlled by neural surrogates, i.e. electromyography-derived neural activations. With respect to current approaches based on machine learning, our method employs explicit representations of the musculoskeletal system to reduce the space of feasible solutions in the translation of electromyograms into prosthesis control commands. Electromyograms are mapped onto mechanical forces that belong to a subspace contained within the broader operational space of an individual's musculoskeletal system. Results: Our results show that this constraint makes the approach applicable to real-world scenarios and robust to movement artefacts. This stems from the fact that any control command must always exist within the musculoskeletal model operational space and be therefore physiologically plausible. The approach was effective both on intact-limbed individuals and a transradial amputee displaying robust online control of multi-functional prostheses across a large repertoire of challenging tasks. Significance: The development and translation of man-machine interfaces that account for an individual's neuromusculoskeletal system creates unprecedented opportunities to understand how disrupted neuro-mechanical processes can be restored or replaced via biomimetic wearable assistive technologies

Open electronics for medical devices: State-of-art and unique advantages

A wide range of medical devices have significant electronic components. Compared to open-source medical software, open (and open-source) electronic hardware has been less published in peer-reviewed literature. In this review, we explore the developments, significance, and advantages of using open platform electronic hardware for medical devices. Open hardware electronics platforms offer not just shorter development times, reduced costs, and customization; they also offer a key potential advantage which current commercial medical devices lack—seamless data sharing for machine learning and artificial intelligence. We explore how various electronic platforms such as microcontrollers, single board computers, field programmable gate arrays, development boards, and integrated circuits have been used by researchers to design medical devices. Researchers interested in designing low cost, customizable, and innovative medical devices can find references to various easily available electronic components as well as design methodologies to integrate those components for a successful design

Rehabilitation and Exercise Machine

An improved rehabilitation and exercise machine is provided which allows a person with physical limitations, disabilities or chronic conditions to use the machine in order to rehabilitate their muscles, improve joint flexibility, and enhance cardiovascular fitness

Conscious machines: memory, melody and muscular imagination

A great deal of effort has been, and continues to be, devoted to developing consciousness artificially (A small selection of the many authors writing in this area includes: Cotterill (J Conscious Stud 2:290–311, 1995, 1998), Haikonen (2003), Aleksander and Dunmall (J Conscious Stud 10:7–18, 2003), Sloman (2004, 2005), Aleksander (2005), Holland and Knight (2006), and Chella and Manzotti (2007)), and yet a similar amount of effort has gone in to demonstrating the infeasibility of the whole enterprise (Most notably: Dreyfus (1972/1979, 1992, 1998), Searle (1980), Harnad (J Conscious Stud 10:67–75, 2003), and Sternberg (2007), but there are a great many others). My concern in this paper is to steer some navigable channel between the two positions, laying out the necessary pre-conditions for consciousness in an artificial system, and concentrating on what needs to hold for the system to perform as a human being or other phenomenally conscious agent in an intersubjectively-demanding social and moral environment. By adopting a thick notion of embodiment—one that is bound up with the concepts of the lived body and autopoiesis (Maturana and Varela 1980; Varela et al. 2003; and Ziemke 2003, 2007a, J Conscious Stud 14(7):167–179, 2007b)—I will argue that machine phenomenology is only possible within an embodied distributed system that possesses a richly affective musculature and a nervous system such that it can, through action and repetition, develop its tactile-kinaesthetic memory, individual kinaesthetic melodies pertaining to habitual practices, and an anticipatory enactive kinaesthetic imagination. Without these capacities the system would remain unconscious, unaware of itself embodied within a world. Finally, and following on from Damasio’s (1991, 1994, 1999, 2003) claims for the necessity of pre-reflective conscious, emotional, bodily responses for the development of an organism’s core and extended consciousness, I will argue that without these capacities any agent would be incapable of developing the sorts of somatic markers or saliency tags that enable affective reactions, and which are indispensable for effective decision-making and subsequent survival. My position, as presented here, remains agnostic about whether or not the creation of artificial consciousness is an attainable goal