The Enhancement of the Goodyer Skin Rheometer by means of a Microcontroller Based PCB.

GSI Ltd designs and manufactures low volume high cost specialist Test and Measurement Equipment, mainly concentrating on systems for use by the cosmetics industry, and for use in prototype vehicles. The FUSE project involved the design, evaluation and production of a micro-controller based data acquisition system to log data from, and to control, a Skin Rheometer used by the cosmetics industry to determine the effectiveness of skin creams, which work by changing the hydration levels in the skin. Hydration levels can be inferred by measuring the change in skin elasticity. The system measures the elasticity of human skin in-vivo using a micromechanical motor/lead screw arrangement that moves a lateral probe attached to the hand or forearm of a subject, under force feedback closed loop control. The existing product used a PC, the new design uses four PC104 cards; · an analogue card with extensive facilities, · a PC replacement card with 486 and 20Mb memory, · a VGA interface card, and · a display card with full colour camcorder type LCD display. The budget was 57,000 ECUs and duration 12 months. The project started on 1st March 1996 and was completed on 31st March 1997. The payback period was 12 months and the return on investment 3- fold over the life of the product

The Enhancement of the Goodyer Skin Rheometer by means of a Microcontroller Based PCB.

GSI Ltd designs and manufactures low volume high cost specialist Test and Measurement Equipment, mainly concentrating on systems for use by the cosmetics industry, and for use in prototype vehicles. The FUSE project involved the design, evaluation and production of a micro-controller based data acquisition system to log data from, and to control, a Skin Rheometer used by the cosmetics industry to determine the effectiveness of skin creams, which work by changing the hydration levels in the skin. Hydration levels can be inferred by measuring the change in skin elasticity. The system measures the elasticity of human skin in-vivo using a micromechanical motor/lead screw arrangement that moves a lateral probe attached to the hand or forearm of a subject, under force feedback closed loop control. The existing product used a PC, the new design uses four PC104 cards; · an analogue card with extensive facilities, · a PC replacement card with 486 and 20Mb memory, · a VGA interface card, and · a display card with full colour camcorder type LCD display. The budget was 57,000 ECUs and duration 12 months. The project started on 1st March 1996 and was completed on 31st March 1997. The payback period was 12 months and the return on investment 3- fold over the life of the product

The cryogenic wind tunnel concept for high Reynolds number testing

Theoretical considerations indicate that cooling the wind-tunnel test gas to cryogenic temperatures will provide a large increase in Reynolds number with no increase in dynamic pressure while reducing the tunnel drive-power requirements. Studies were made to determine the expected variations of Reynolds number and other parameters over wide ranges of Mach number, pressure, and temperature, with due regard to avoiding liquefaction. Practical operational procedures were developed in a low-speed cryogenic tunnel. Aerodynamic experiments in the facility demonstrated the theoretically predicted variations in Reynolds number and drive power. The continuous-flow-fan-driven tunnel is shown to be particularly well suited to take full advantage of operating at cryogenic temperatures

Facing Shadows: working with young people to coproduce a short film about depression

Background: IMPACT (Improving Mood with Psychoanalytic and Cognitive Therapies) is a multi-centre randomised controlled trial of three therapeutic interventions for the treatment of depression in young people. IMPACT- My Experience (IMPACT-ME), a qualitative research study, followed up a sub-sample of families involved in IMPACT to explore young people's experiences of therapy and depression. Members of the IMPACT-ME steering group, who brought their own experiences of depression and engaging with mental health services, were keen to find ways to provide information about depression and help-seeking beyond traditional academic audiences, specifically to other young people experiencing depression and wondering where to turn: their chosen medium was film. Here we describe and reflect on the four-day coproduction workshops in which researchers, young people and film-makers coproduced 'Facing Shadows', a short animation about depression and therapy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdmRPKUhNEY). Main body: We outline the process, focusing on the four-day creative, collaborative workshop in which young people shared their experiences, decided on the tone, tenor and message of the film, identified their primary audience and produced the bulk of the audio and visual material. The adults acted as facilitators: developing a creative, collaborative learning environment in which trusting relationships could flourish, as well as offering guidance, instruction, advice and support. To date the film has been viewed around 12,000 times on YouTube. The young people learned new skills, felt listened to and enjoyed the process. They produced a film which sends a hopeful message to other young people, '… that they are not alone'. Conclusion: We reflect on the creative participatory workshop approach which transformed the project from dissemination to an insightful learning experience for young people and researchers alike

Eyes on the bog. Long-term monitoring network for UK peatlands

Eyes on the Bog provides a scientifically robust, repeatable, low tech, long-term monitoring initiative. The standardised methodology enables individual peatland sites to be consistently monitored across the UK, creating a network of comparable sites. The initiative employs cheap, simple techniques and modern technology to enable useful monitoring information to be collected by peatland community employees or volunteers on: Peat subsidence and carbon loss Carbon capture Water table behaviour Peat soil condition Vegetation status, structure and composition Historical context of change and current trajectorie

Conic deformation of the subglottic mucosa and its impact on the aerodynamics of the airflow over the vocal folds

Objective: This study mapped the variation in tissue elasticity of the subglottic mucosa, applied that data to provide initial models of the likely deformation of the mucosa during the myoelastic cycle, and hypothesised as to the impact on the process of phonation. Study Design: 6 donor human larynges were dissected along the sagittal plane to expose the vocal folds and subglottic mucosa. A Linear Skin Rheometer was used to apply a controlled shear force, and the resultant displacement was measured. This data provided a measure of the stress/strain characteristics of the tissue at each anatomical point. A series of measurements were taken at 2mm interval inferior of the vocal folds, and the change in elasticity determined. Results: It was found that the elasticity of the mucosa in the subglottic region increased linearly with distance from the vocal folds in all 12 samples. A simple deformation model indicated that under low pressure conditions the subglottic mucosa will deform to form a cone, which could result in a higher velocity thus amplifying the low pressure effect resulting from the Venturi principle, and could assist in maintaining laminar flow. Conclusions: This study indicated that the deformation of the subglottic mucosa could play a significant role in the delivery of a low pressure air flow over the vocal folds

Texture based characterization of sub-skin features by specified laser speckle effects at λ=650nm region

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.Objective: The textural structure of “skin age” related sub-skin components enables us to identify and analyse their unique characteristics, thus making substantial progress towards establishing an accurate skin age model. Methods: This is achieved by a two stage process. First by the application of textural analysis using laser speckle imaging, which is sensitive to textural effects within the λ=650 nm spectral band region. In the second stage a Bayesian inference method is used to select attributes from which a predictive model is built. Results: This technique enables us to contrast different skin age models, such as the laser-speckle effect against the more widely used normal light (LED) imaging method, whereby it is shown that our laser speckle based technique yields better results. Conclusion: The method introduced here is non-invasive, low-cost and capable of operating in real-time; having the potential to compete against high-cost instrumentation such as confocal microscopy or similar imaging devices used for skin age identification purposes

Neighbouring Link Travel Time Inference Method Using Artificial Neural Network

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This paper presents a method for modelling relationship between road segments using feed forward back-propagation neural networks. Unlike most previous papers that focus on travel time estimation of a road based on its traffic information, we proposed the Neighbouring Link Inference Method (NLIM) that can infer travel time of a road segment (link) from travel time its neighbouring segments. It is valuable for links which do not have recent traffic information. The proposed method learns the relationship between travel time of a link and traffic parameters of its nearby links based on sparse historical travel time data. A travel time data outlier detection based on Gaussian mixture model is also proposed in order to reduce the noise of data before they are applied to build NLIM. Results show that the proposed method is capable of estimating the travel time on all traffic link categories. 75% of models can produce travel time data with mean absolute percentage error less than 22%. The proposed method performs better on major than minor links. Performance of the proposed method always dominates performance of traditional methods such as statistic-based and linear least square estimate methods

Adapting Traffic Simulation for Traffic Management: A Neural Network Approach

Static models and simulations are commonly used in urban traffic management but none feature a dynamic element for near real-time traffic control. This work presents an artificial neural network forecaster methodology applied to traffic flow condition prediction. The spatially distributed architecture uses life-long learning with a novel adaptive Artificial Neural Network based filter to detect and remove outliers from training data. The system has been designed to support traffic engineers in their decision making to react to traffic conditions before they get out of control. We performed experiments using feed-forward backpropagation, cascade-forward back-propagation, radial basis, and generalized regression Artificial Neural Networks for this purpose. Test results on actual data collected from the city of Leicester, UK, confirm our approach to deliver suitable forecasts