How a Diverse Research Ecosystem Has Generated New Rehabilitation Technologies: Review of NIDILRR’s Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers

Over 50 million United States citizens (1 in 6 people in the US) have a developmental, acquired, or degenerative disability. The average US citizen can expect to live 20% of his or her life with a disability. Rehabilitation technologies play a major role in improving the quality of life for people with a disability, yet widespread and highly challenging needs remain. Within the US, a major effort aimed at the creation and evaluation of rehabilitation technology has been the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Centers (RERCs) sponsored by the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research. As envisioned at their conception by a panel of the National Academy of Science in 1970, these centers were intended to take a “total approach to rehabilitation”, combining medicine, engineering, and related science, to improve the quality of life of individuals with a disability. Here, we review the scope, achievements, and ongoing projects of an unbiased sample of 19 currently active or recently terminated RERCs. Specifically, for each center, we briefly explain the needs it targets, summarize key historical advances, identify emerging innovations, and consider future directions. Our assessment from this review is that the RERC program indeed involves a multidisciplinary approach, with 36 professional fields involved, although 70% of research and development staff are in engineering fields, 23% in clinical fields, and only 7% in basic science fields; significantly, 11% of the professional staff have a disability related to their research. We observe that the RERC program has substantially diversified the scope of its work since the 1970’s, addressing more types of disabilities using more technologies, and, in particular, often now focusing on information technologies. RERC work also now often views users as integrated into an interdependent society through technologies that both people with and without disabilities co-use (such as the internet, wireless communication, and architecture). In addition, RERC research has evolved to view users as able at improving outcomes through learning, exercise, and plasticity (rather than being static), which can be optimally timed. We provide examples of rehabilitation technology innovation produced by the RERCs that illustrate this increasingly diversifying scope and evolving perspective. We conclude by discussing growth opportunities and possible future directions of the RERC program

Campus Mobility for the Future: The Electric Bicycle

Sustainable and practical personal mobility solutions for campus environments have traditionally revolved around the use of bicycles, or provision of pedestrian facilities. However many campus environments also experience traffic congestion, parking difficulties and pollution from fossil-fuelled vehicles. It appears that pedal power alone has not been sufficient to supplant the use of petrol and diesel vehicles to date, and therefore it is opportune to investigate both the reasons behind the continual use of environmentally unfriendly transport, and consider potential solutions. This paper presents the results from a year-long study into electric bicycle effectiveness for a large tropical campus, identifying barriers to bicycle use that can be overcome through the availability of public use electric bicycles

Empowering and assisting natural human mobility: The simbiosis walker

This paper presents the complete development of the Simbiosis Smart Walker. The device is equipped with a set of sensor subsystems to acquire user-machine interaction forces and the temporal evolution of user's feet during gait. The authors present an adaptive filtering technique used for the identification and separation of different components found on the human-machine interaction forces. This technique allowed isolating the components related with the navigational commands and developing a Fuzzy logic controller to guide the device. The Smart Walker was clinically validated at the Spinal Cord Injury Hospital of Toledo - Spain, presenting great acceptability by spinal chord injury patients and clinical staf

Modeling of Terrain Impact Caused by Off-road Vehicles

Terrain impact models were developed for both wheeled vehicles and tracked vehicles based on the analysis of vehicle dynamics, soil mechanics, and geometric relationships between vehicle parameters and the disturbed width. The terrain impact models, including both disturbed width models and impact severity models, were developed separately for tracked vehicles and wheeled vehicles. The disturbed width models of both vehicle types were primarily based on the geometric relationship between vehicle contact width and vehicle dynamic parameters. For both vehicle types, the impact severity was defined as the ratio between soil shear stress and soil shear strength. The impact severity model of wheeled vehicles was based on the balance between the centrifugal force of the vehicle and the soil shearing force that was related to vehicle dynamic parameters. For tracked vehicles, the soil shear stress was primarily de- rived from the lateral displacement of the tracks, not the centrifugal force, thus the impact severity model of tracked vehicles was based on the relationship between soil shear stress and soil lateral displacement caused by the lateral movement of the tracks. Field tests of both wheeled vehicles and tracked vehicles were conducted at different test sites with different soil types and soil strength. The wheeled vehicles included a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV), and a Light Armored Vehicle (LAV). The tracked vehicles included an M1A1 tank, an M577 armored personal carrier (APC), and an M548 cargo carrier. The field test data supported the prediction of terrain impact models. The average per- centage errors of the disturbed width model of the LAV and the HMMWV were 19.5 % and 8.6 %, respectively. The average percentage errors of the impact severity model for the LAV were 48.5 % and 34.2 % for the high-speed (9.6 m/s) test and low-speed (5.4 m/s) test, respectively. The average percentage errors of the disturbed width model for the M1A1, M577, and the M548 were 10.0 %, 27.3 %, and 8.5 %, respectively. The average percent- age errors of the impact severity model of the M1A1 and M577 were 25.0 % and 21.4 %, respectively

Mobile forensic triage for damaged phones using M_Triage

Mobile forensics triage is a useful technique in a digital forensics investigation for recovering lost or purposely deleted and hidden files from digital storage. It is particularly useful, especially when solving a very sensitive crime, for example, kidnapping, in a timely manner. However, the existing mobile forensics triage tools do not consider performing a triage examination on damaged mobile phones. This research addressed the issues of performing triage examination on damaged Android mobile phones and reduction of false positive result generated by the current mobile forensics triage tools. Furthermore, the research addressed the issues of ignoring possible evidence residing in a bad block memory location. In this research a new forensics triage tool called M_Triage was introduced by extending Decode’s framework to handle data retrieval challenges on damaged Android mobile phones. The tool was designed to obtain evidence quickly and accurately (i.e. valid address book, call logs, SMS, images, and, videos, etc.) on Android damaged mobile phones. The tool was developed using C#, while back end engines was done using C programming and tested using five data sets. Based on the computational time processing comparison with Dec0de, Lifter, XRY and Xaver, the result showed that there was 75% improvement over Dec0de, 36% over Lifter, 28% over XRY and finally 71% over Xaver. Again, based on the experiment done on five data sets, M_Triage was capable of carving valid address book, call logs, SMS, images and videos as compared to Dec0de, Lifter, XRY and Xaver. With the average improvement of 90% over DEC0DE, 30% over Lifter, 40% over XRY and lastly 61% over Xaver. This shows that M_Triage is a better tool to be used because it saves time, carve more relevant files and less false positive result are achieved with the tool

Mobile forensic triage for damaged phones using M_Triage

Mobile forensics triage is a useful technique in a digital forensics investigation for recovering lost or purposely deleted and hidden files from digital storage. It is particularly useful, especially when solving a very sensitive crime, for example, kidnapping, in a timely manner. However, the existing mobile forensics triage tools do not consider performing a triage examination on damaged mobile phones. This research addressed the issues of performing triage examination on damaged Android mobile phones and reduction of false positive result generated by the current mobile forensics triage tools. Furthermore, the research addressed the issues of ignoring possible evidence residing in a bad block memory location. In this research a new forensics triage tool called M_Triage was introduced by extending Decode’s framework to handle data retrieval challenges on damaged Android mobile phones. The tool was designed to obtain evidence quickly and accurately (i.e. valid address book, call logs, SMS, images, and, videos, etc.) on Android damaged mobile phones. The tool was developed using C#, while back end engines was done using C programming and tested using five data sets. Based on the computational time processing comparison with Dec0de, Lifter, XRY and Xaver, the result showed that there was 75% improvement over Dec0de, 36% over Lifter, 28% over XRY and finally 71% over Xaver. Again, based on the experiment done on five data sets, M_Triage was capable of carving valid address book, call logs, SMS, images and videos as compared to Dec0de, Lifter, XRY and Xaver. With the average improvement of 90% over DEC0DE, 30% over Lifter, 40% over XRY and lastly 61% over Xaver. This shows that M_Triage is a better tool to be used because it saves time, carve more relevant files and less false positive result are achieved with the tool

Performance evaluation of a second-generation elastic loop mobility system

Tests were conducted to evaluate the mobility performance of a second-generation Elastic Loop Mobility System (ELMS II). Performance on level test lanes and slopes of lunar soil simulant (LSS) and obstacle-surmounting and crevasse-crossing capabilities were investigated. In addition, internal losses and contact pressure distributions were evaluated. To evaluate the soft-soil performance, two basic soil conditions were tested: loose (LSS1) and dense (LSS5). These conditions embrace the spectrum of soil strengths tested during recent studies for NASA related to the mobility performance of the LRV. Data indicated that for the tested range of the various performance parameters, performance was independent of unit load (contact pressure) and ELMS II drum angular velocity, but was influenced by soil strength and ELMS pitch mode. Power requirements were smaller at a given system output for dense soil than for loose soil. The total system output in terms of pull developed or slope-climbing capability was larger for the ELMS II operating in restrained-pitch mode than in free-pitch mode

Road Improvement and Poverty Reduction in Laos

Laos is a mountainous country with poor roads and a high rate of poverty incidence, especially in rural areas. It is obvious that better roads could reduce poverty, but by how much? And what forms of road improvement reduce poverty the most? The economic effects of road improvement are complex and multi-channeled. This paper uses a multi-household general equilibrium modeling approach to study these issues. The results indicate that road improvement does reduce poverty but that the quantitative impact depends heavily on the types of road that are provided and the areas in which the road is located.General equilibrium modelling, infrastructure, poverty, Southeast Asia., Food Security and Poverty, Public Economics,

Review article: locomotion systems for ground mobile robots in unstructured environments

Abstract. The world market of mobile robotics is expected to increase substantially in the next 20 yr, surpassing the market of industrial robotics in terms of units and sales. Important fields of application are homeland security, surveillance, demining, reconnaissance in dangerous situations, and agriculture. The design of the locomotion systems of mobile robots for unstructured environments is generally complex, particularly when they are required to move on uneven or soft terrains, or to climb obstacles. This paper sets out to analyse the state-of-the-art of locomotion mechanisms for ground mobile robots, focussing on solutions for unstructured environments, in order to help designers to select the optimal solution for specific operating requirements. The three main categories of locomotion systems (wheeled - W, tracked - T and legged - L) and the four hybrid categories that can be derived by combining these main locomotion systems are discussed with reference to maximum speed, obstacle-crossing capability, step/stair climbing capability, slope climbing capability, walking capability on soft terrains, walking capability on uneven terrains, energy efficiency, mechanical complexity, control complexity and technology readiness. The current and future trends of mobile robotics are also outlined