A study of smart device-based mobile imaging and implementation for engineering applications

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on June 12, 2013Thesis advisor: ZhiQiang ChenVitaIncludes bibliographic references (pages 76-82)Thesis (M.S.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2013Mobile imaging has become a very active research topic in recent years thanks to the rapid development of computing and sensing capabilities of mobile devices. This area features multi-disciplinary studies of mobile hardware, imaging sensors, imaging and vision algorithms, wireless network and human-machine interface problems. Due to the limitation of computing capacity that early mobile devices have, researchers proposed client-server module, which push the data to more powerful computing platforms through wireless network, and let the cloud or standalone servers carry out all the computing and processing work. This thesis reviewed the development of mobile hardware and software platform, and the related research done on mobile imaging for the past 20 years. There are several researches on mobile imaging, but few people aim at building a framework which helps engineers solving problems by using mobile imaging. With higher-resolution imaging and high-performance computing power built into smart mobile devices, more and more imaging processing tasks can be achieved on the device rather than the client-server module. Based on this fact, a framework of collaborative mobile imaging is introduced for civil infrastructure condition assessment to help engineers solving technical challenges. Another contribution in this thesis is applying mobile imaging application into home automation. E-SAVE is a research project focusing on extensive use of automation in conserving and using energy wisely in home automation. Mobile users can view critical information such as energy data of the appliances with the help of mobile imaging. OpenCV is an image processing and computer vision library. The applications in this thesis use functions in OpenCV including camera calibration, template matching, image stitching and Canny edge detection. The application aims to help field engineers is interactive crack detection. The other one uses template matching to recognize appliances in the home automation system.Introduction -- Background and related work -- Basic imaging processing methods for mobile applications -- Collaborative and interactive mobile imaging -- Mobile imaging for smart energy -- Conclusion and recommendation

Internet of Things-aided Smart Grid: Technologies, Architectures, Applications, Prototypes, and Future Research Directions

Traditional power grids are being transformed into Smart Grids (SGs) to address the issues in existing power system due to uni-directional information flow, energy wastage, growing energy demand, reliability and security. SGs offer bi-directional energy flow between service providers and consumers, involving power generation, transmission, distribution and utilization systems. SGs employ various devices for the monitoring, analysis and control of the grid, deployed at power plants, distribution centers and in consumers' premises in a very large number. Hence, an SG requires connectivity, automation and the tracking of such devices. This is achieved with the help of Internet of Things (IoT). IoT helps SG systems to support various network functions throughout the generation, transmission, distribution and consumption of energy by incorporating IoT devices (such as sensors, actuators and smart meters), as well as by providing the connectivity, automation and tracking for such devices. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey on IoT-aided SG systems, which includes the existing architectures, applications and prototypes of IoT-aided SG systems. This survey also highlights the open issues, challenges and future research directions for IoT-aided SG systems

Advanced photonic and electronic systems - WILGA 2017

WILGA annual symposium on advanced photonic and electronic systems has been organized by young scientist for young scientists since two decades. It traditionally gathers more than 350 young researchers and their tutors. Ph.D students and graduates present their recent achievements during well attended oral sessions. Wilga is a very good digest of Ph.D. works carried out at technical universities in electronics and photonics, as well as information sciences throughout Poland and some neighboring countries. Publishing patronage over Wilga keep Elektronika technical journal by SEP, IJET by PAN and Proceedings of SPIE. The latter world editorial series publishes annually more than 200 papers from Wilga. Wilga 2017 was the XL edition of this meeting. The following topical tracks were distinguished: photonics, electronics, information technologies and system research. The article is a digest of some chosen works presented during Wilga 2017 symposium. WILGA 2017 works were published in Proc. SPIE vol.10445

Internet based data collection and monitoring for wireless sensor networks

Thesis (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2007The omnipresence of the Internet and the advances in integrated circuit technologies has expanded the potential modes of communication and data collection. Adding Internet capabilities to any electronic device greatly extends the device's user interface, allowing the user to remotely configure and monitor the device over the network through the embedded web server. The embedded web server is expected to establish two-way communication and serve dynamic web pages using very limited resources. We adapted an existing embedded web server to allow remote control and monitoring of wireless sensor networks (WSN). This required establishing an interface to the WSN and developing firmware and user programs to communicate with the remote client. An interactive and flexible web-based user management interface is developed to allow the two-way interaction between the remote user and the wireless sensor network. The embedded server generates email alerts to the administrator about critical issues in the WSN, provides secure access to the WSN control modules, etc. Two embedded web servers are developed using different hardware platforms. The first solution is a low cost, energy efficient solution with somewhat limited functionality. The other uses a more powerful microcontroller-based platform and implements a fully-functional, dynamic web server with multiple web pages.1. Introduction -- 2. Embedded web server -- 3. Related studies -- 4. MSP430-based Web Server -- 5. Rabbit-based web server -- 6. Conclusion and future work -- 7. References -- Appendix A: TCP/IP protocol frame formats -- Appendix B: Embedded web server snapshots

Power line communications: an implementation of a real time control architecture for smart grid

Negli ultimi anni è aumentata la presenza di risorse energetiche distribuite (DERs) nella rete elettrica. La visione della ``rete intelligente'' (Smart Grid) cerca di introdurre un'infrastruttura di controllo e di comunicazione di tipo distribuito in modo da sfruttare le potenzialità delle DERs e quindi potenziare e modernizzare la rete di distribuzione attuale. Applicandolo alle reti a bassa tensione, la cosiddetta ``Smart Microgrids'', si è sviluppato un banco di prova (testbed) che permette di dimostrare tecniche di riduzione delle perdite di distribuzione. La soluzione adottata bilancia localmente la potenza reattiva della microgrid attraverso il controllo delle risorse locali ottenendo una riduzione della corrente necessaria per alimentare la rete. Inoltre, vengono analizzati i vantaggi nell'usare la linea elettrica come mezzo di comunicazione e vengono evidenziati alcuni standard di comunicazion

Quality assessment technique for ubiquitous software and middleware

The new paradigm of computing or information systems is ubiquitous computing systems. The technology-oriented issues of ubiquitous computing systems have made researchers pay much attention to the feasibility study of the technologies rather than building quality assurance indices or guidelines. In this context, measuring quality is the key to developing high-quality ubiquitous computing products. For this reason, various quality models have been defined, adopted and enhanced over the years, for example, the need for one recognised standard quality model (ISO/IEC 9126) is the result of a consensus for a software quality model on three levels: characteristics, sub-characteristics, and metrics. However, it is very much unlikely that this scheme will be directly applicable to ubiquitous computing environments which are considerably different to conventional software, trailing a big concern which is being given to reformulate existing methods, and especially to elaborate new assessment techniques for ubiquitous computing environments. This paper selects appropriate quality characteristics for the ubiquitous computing environment, which can be used as the quality target for both ubiquitous computing product evaluation processes ad development processes. Further, each of the quality characteristics has been expanded with evaluation questions and metrics, in some cases with measures. In addition, this quality model has been applied to the industrial setting of the ubiquitous computing environment. These have revealed that while the approach was sound, there are some parts to be more developed in the future

Thrust Joint Manipulation to the Cervical Spine in Participants with a Primary Complaint of Temporomandibular Disorder (TMD): A Randomized Clinical Trial

Background: Temporomandibular disorder (TMD) is a common and costly problem often leading to chronic pain. There exists moderate evidence for physical therapy (PT) interventions in the management of TMD. A known relationship between TMD and the cervical spine exists with some evidence to support cervical intervention treatments. Cervical spine thrust joint manipulation (TJM) is an effective PT intervention explored in a limited fashion for this population. Objectives: To determine the immediate and short term (1 and 4 week) effects of cervical TJM on pain, dysfunction, and perception of change in individuals with a primary complaint of TMD. Methods: In this single blind randomized clinical trial, individuals with TMD (n=50) were randomly assigned to receive cervical TJM or sham manipulation in 4 PT visits over 4-weeks. All participants also received behavioral education, a home exercise program, and soft tissue mobilization. Primary outcomes included jaw range of motion (ROM), Numeric Pain Rating Scale (NPRS), TMD Disability Index, Jaw Functional Limitation Scale (JFLS), Tampa Scale of Kinesiophobia (TSK-TMD), and Global Rating of Change (GROC). Self-report and objective measurements (with blinded assessor) were taken at baseline, immediately after baseline treatment, 1-week, and 4-weeks. A 2 x 4 mixed model ANOVA was used with treatment group as the between-subjects factor and time as the within-subjects factor. Separate ANOVAs were performed for dependent variables and the hypothesis of interest was the group by time interaction. Results: Statistically significant 2-way interactions were noted in JFLS (p = .026) and TSK-TMD (p = .008), favoring the thrust manipulation group. Both groups showed statistically significant main effects in all measures over time. GROC and PASS favored the thrust manipulation group with statistically significant differences in successful outcomes noted immediately after baseline treatment (NNT = 5) and at 4-weeks (NNT = 4). Conclusion: Both groups received identical multi-modal treatments with the addition of the randomized intervention: cervical TJM or sham manipulation. Differences between groups were small, however, improvements favored the TJM on all measures. Cervical TJM may be beneficial in the treatment of TMD

Methods and good practice guidelines for human joint kinematics estimation through magnetic and inertial wearable sensors

According to the World Health Organization, the ability to move is recognized as a key factor for the human well-being. From the wearable Magnetic and Inertial Measurement Units (MIMUs) signals it is possible to extract several digital mobility outcomes including the joint kinematics. To this end, it is first required to estimate the orientation of the MIMUs by means of a sensor fusion algorithm (SFA). After that, the relative orientation is computed and then decomposed to obtain the joint angles. However, the MIMUs do not provide a direct output of the physical quantity of interest which can be only determined after an ad hoc processing of their signals. It follows that the joint angle accuracy mostly depends on multiple factors. The first one is the magnitude of the MIMU measurements errors and up to date there is still a lack of methods for their characterization. A second crucial factor is the choice of the SFA to use. Despite the abundance of formulations in the literature, no-well established conclusions about their accuracy have been reached yet. The last factor is the biomechanical model used to compute the joint angles. In this context, unconstrained methods offer a simple way to decompose the relative orientation using the Euler angles but suffer from the inherent issues related to the SFA. In contrast, constrained approaches aim at increasing the robustness of the estimates by adopting models in which an objective function is minimized through the definition of physiological constraints. This thesis proposed the methods to accurately estimate the human joint kinematics starting from the MIMU signals. Three main contributions were provided. The first consisted in the design of a comprehensive battery of tests to completely characterize the sources of errors affecting the quality of the measurements. These tests rely on simple hypotheses based on the sensor working principles and do not require expensive equipment. Nine parameters were defined to quantify the signal accuracy improvements (if any) of 24 MIMUs before and after the refinement of their calibration coefficients. The second contribution was focused on the SFAs. Ten among the most popular SFAs were compared under different experimental conditions including different MIMU models and rotation rate magnitudes. To perform a “fair” comparison it was necessary to set the optimal parameter values for each SFA. The most important finding was that all the errors fall within a range from 3.8 deg to 7.1 deg thus making it impossible to draw any conclusions about the best performing SFA since no statistically significant differences were found. In addition, the orientation accuracy was heavily influenced by the experimental variables. After that, a novel method was designed to estimate the suboptimal parameter values of a given SFA without relying on any orientation reference. The maximum difference between the errors obtained using optimal and suboptimal parameter values amounted to 3.7 deg and to 0.6 deg on average. The last contribution consisted in the design of an unconstrained and a constrained methods for estimating the joint kinematics without considering the magnetometer to avoid the ferromagnetic disturbances. The unconstrained method was employed in a telerehabilitation platform in which the joint angles were estimated in real time. Errors collected during the execution of a full-body protocol were lower than 5 deg (considered the acceptability threshold). However, this method may be inaccurate after few minutes since no solutions can be taken to mitigate the drift error. To overcome this limitation a constrained method was developed based on a robotic model of the upper limb to set appropriate constraints. Errors relative to a continuous robot motion for twenty minutes were lower than 3 deg at most suggesting the feasibility of employing these solutions in the rehabilitation programs to properly plan the treatment and to accurately evaluate the outcomes

Space-Based Information Infrastructure Architecture for Broadband Services

This study addressed four tasks: (1) identify satellite-addressable information infrastructure markets; (2) perform network analysis for space-based information infrastructure; (3) develop conceptual architectures; and (4) economic assessment of architectures. The report concludes that satellites will have a major role in the national and global information infrastructure, requiring seamless integration between terrestrial and satellite networks. The proposed LEO, MEO, and GEO satellite systems have satellite characteristics that vary widely. They include delay, delay variations, poorer link quality and beam/satellite handover. The barriers against seamless interoperability between satellite and terrestrial networks are discussed. These barriers are the lack of compatible parameters, standards and protocols, which are presently being evaluated and reduced