Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) for astronauts: a collaboration project on the International Space Station

Long-duration missions bring numerous risks that must be understood and mitigated in order to keep astronauts healthy, rather than treat a diagnosed health disorder. Having a limited medical support from mission control center on space exploration missions, crew members need a personal health-tracking tool to predict and assess his/her health risks if no preventive measures are taken. This paper refines a concept employing technologies from Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) for systems, namely real-time health monitoring and condition-based health maintenance with predictive diagnostics capabilities. Mapping particular PHM-based solutions to some Human Health and Performance (HH&P) technology candidates, namely by NASA designation, the Autonomous Medical Decision technology and the Integrated Biomedical Informatics technology, this conceptual paper emphasize key points that make the concept different from that of both current conventional medicine and telemedicine including space medicine. The primary benefit of the technologies development for the HH&P domain is the ability to successfully achieve affordable human space missions to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and beyond. Space missions on the International Space Station (ISS) program directly contribute to the knowledge base and advancements in the HH&P domain, thanks to continued operations on the ISS, a unique human-tended test platform and the only test bed within the space environment. The concept is to be validated on the ISS, the only “test bed” on which to prepare for future manned exploration missions. The paper authors believe that early self-diagnostic coupled with autonomous identification of proper preventive responses on negative trends are critical in order to keep astronauts healthy

Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) for astronauts: a collaboration project on the International Space Station

Long-duration missions bring numerous risks that must be understood and mitigated in order to keep astronauts healthy, rather than treat a diagnosed health disorder. Having a limited medical support from mission control center on space exploration missions, crew members need a personal health-tracking tool to predict and assess his/her health risks if no preventive measures are taken. This paper refines a concept employing technologies from Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) for systems, namely real-time health monitoring and condition-based health maintenance with predictive diagnostics capabilities. Mapping particular PHM-based solutions to some Human Health and Performance (HH&P) technology candidates, namely by NASA designation, the Autonomous Medical Decision technology and the Integrated Biomedical Informatics technology, this conceptual paper emphasize key points that make the concept different from that of both current conventional medicine and telemedicine including space medicine. The primary benefit of the technologies development for the HH&P domain is the ability to successfully achieve affordable human space missions to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and beyond. Space missions on the International Space Station (ISS) program directly contribute to the knowledge base and advancements in the HH&P domain, thanks to continued operations on the ISS, a unique human-tended test platform and the only test bed within the space environment. The concept is to be validated on the ISS, the only “test bed” on which to prepare for future manned exploration missions. The paper authors believe that early self-diagnostic coupled with autonomous identification of proper preventive responses on negative trends are critical in order to keep astronauts healthy

Characterisation of oxide scale adherence after the high temperature oxidation of nickel-based superalloys

The scratch test technique was used to characterise the adherence of multi-layered oxide scales formed during the high temperature isothermal oxidation (1100 degrees celsius) of a single crystal Ni-based superalloy AM1 with varying sulfur concentrations (0.22 – 3.2 ppmw). Results were discussed in relation to cyclic oxidation behaviour and microstructural evolution of oxidised samples. The most commonly used elastic energy-based models were applied to calculate the work of adhesion. The obtained values of the work of adhesion were then analysed with regard to the mode-dependence of the fracture behaviour and the possible sources of errors in the scratch test results interpretation. This analysis allowed us to understand the limits of validity of these models and of the experimental value of the work of adhesion

Metodologias de ensino na educação a distância em ciências da saúde: formação lato sensu

The aim was to identify the role of teaching methodologies used in lato sensu courses in Distance Education in Health Sciences. Descriptive qualitative research. Research subjects: professors/coordinators of lato sensu courses in the areas of health in Distance Education. A form on teaching tools and methodologies and a semi-structured interview were used. For data analysis, the content analysis method was used under the concepts of Vygotsky's socio-interactionist theory. The data raised the tools used in the teaching platforms. The analysis of the interviews resulted in four categories. These data showed the difficulties, experiences and expectations of teachers/coordinators. Distance Education provides expansion and deepening of knowledge. There is concern about the quality of teaching, directed to the need to adapt the methodologies applied to the use of different tools. Distance Education provides expansion of access to professional qualification, consequently improving health care for the population.Objetivou-se identificar o papel das metodologias de ensino utilizadas em cursos lato sensu em Educação a Distância nas Ciências da Saúde. Pesquisa qualitativa descritiva. Sujeitos da pesquisa: professores/coordenadores de cursos lato sensu nas áreas da saúde em Educação a Distância. Foram utilizados formulário sobre ferramentas e metodologias de ensino e entrevista semiestruturada. Para análise dos dados foi utilizado o método de análise de conteúdo sob os conceitos da teoria sócio-interacionista de Vygotsky. Os dados levantaram as ferramentas utilizadas nas plataformas de ensino. A análise das entrevistas resultou em quatro categorias. Esses dados mostraram as dificuldades, experiências e expectativas dos professores/coordenadores. A Educação a Distância proporciona expansão e aprofundamento de conhecimento. Existe preocupação quanto a qualidade do ensino, direcionada a necessidade de adequação das metodologias aplicadas ao uso das diferentes ferramentas. A Educação a Distância proporciona ampliação ao acesso à qualificação profissional, consequentemente melhorando a assistência de saúde à população

Avoided Crossing Patterns and Spectral Gaps of Surface Plasmon Modes in Gold Nano-Structures

The transmission of ultrashort (7 fs) broadband laser pulses through periodic gold nano-structures is studied. The distribution of the transmitted light intensity over wavelength and angle shows an efficient coupling of the incident p-polarized light to two counter-propagating surface plasmon (SP) modes. As a result of the mode interaction, the avoided crossing patterns exhibit energy and momentum gaps, which depend on the configuration of the nano-structure and the wavelength. Variations of the widths of the SP resonances and an abrupt change of the mode interaction in the vicinity of the avoided crossing region are observed. These features are explained by the model of two coupled modes and a coupling change due to switching from the high frequency dark mode to the low frequency bright mode for increasing wavelength of the excitation light. PACS numbers: 73.20.Mf, 42.70.Qs, 42.25.-p,Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure

Tigris: Architecture and Algorithms for 3D Perception in Point Clouds

Machine perception applications are increasingly moving toward manipulating and processing 3D point cloud. This paper focuses on point cloud registration, a key primitive of 3D data processing widely used in high-level tasks such as odometry, simultaneous localization and mapping, and 3D reconstruction. As these applications are routinely deployed in energy-constrained environments, real-time and energy-efficient point cloud registration is critical. We present Tigris, an algorithm-architecture co-designed system specialized for point cloud registration. Through an extensive exploration of the registration pipeline design space, we find that, while different design points make vastly different trade-offs between accuracy and performance, KD-tree search is a common performance bottleneck, and thus is an ideal candidate for architectural specialization. While KD-tree search is inherently sequential, we propose an acceleration-amenable data structure and search algorithm that exposes different forms of parallelism of KD-tree search in the context of point cloud registration. The co-designed accelerator systematically exploits the parallelism while incorporating a set of architectural techniques that further improve the accelerator efficiency. Overall, Tigris achieves 77.2$\times$ speedup and 7.4$\times$ power reduction in KD-tree search over an RTX 2080 Ti GPU, which translates to a 41.7% registration performance improvements and 3.0$\times$ power reduction.Comment: Published at MICRO-52 (52nd IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture); Tiancheng Xu and Boyuan Tian are co-primary author

Transverse momentum spectra of b jets in pPb collisions at sqrt(s[NN]) = 5.02 TeV

We present a measurement of b jet transverse momentum (pt) spectra in proton-lead (pPb) collisions using a dataset corresponding to about 35 inverse nanobarns collected with the CMS detector at the LHC. Jets from b quark fragmentation are found by exploiting the long lifetime of hadrons containing a b quark through tagging methods using distributions of the secondary vertex mass and displacement. Extracted cross sections for b jets are scaled by the effective number of nucleon-nucleon collisions and are compared to a reference obtained from PYTHIA simulations of pp collisions. The PYTHIA-based estimate of the nuclear modification factor is found to be 1.22 +/- 0.15 (stat + syst pPb) +/- 0.27 (syst PYTHIA) averaged over all jets with pt between 55 and 400 GeV/c and with abs(eta[lab]) < 2. We also compare this result to predictions from models using perturbative calculations in quantum chromodynamics