Tracking and Hands Motion Detection Approach for Monitoring Hand-Hygiene Compliance for Food Handling and Processing Industry

Hand-hygiene is a very critical issue for both food handling and processing industry and health care service providers. Poor hand-hygiene practice can easily lead to foodborne illness or large scale decease transmission. In this research, an automatic tracking and monitoring system was developed that used a 3D camera for hand washing and hands motion detection and a sensor-based monitoring system for hand-hygiene activities evaluation. An active Wi-Fi portable Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tag was used for personal ID tracking. The effective hand washing time, soaping time were measured based on the hands motion detection and hand movement tracking. Water temperature, water flow, paper towel, soap and hand sanitizer usage were also measured for each hand washing event. All the data were forwarded to a system server for data recording, storage and management. Preliminary test data were collected to evaluate the system performance. The results showed that the system could effectively collect most of the hand-hygiene related factors including hand-hygiene product usage, hand washing time and soap lathering time for hand-hygiene evaluation.Biosystems & Agricultural Engineerin

Nozzle Sensor for In-System Chemical Concentration Monitoring

Chemical concentration is a vital parameter for determining appropriate chemical application. This study describes the design and testing of a sensor that attempted to monitor concentration of chemicals upstream from each nozzle body. The sensor is based on an LED and photodiode pair. Its ability to detect chemical concentration within the main carrier was tested with a 2,4-D formulation, a glyphosate formulation, and a powdered Acid Blue 9 dye. The liquid herbicide formulations of glyphosate and 2,4-D were tested across common application concentrations of 0% to 12.5% by volume. The powdered dye produced a much stronger effect on the sensor and was only tested at the much lower concentrations of 0 to 50 mg L-1. Further tests were conducted in which the dye was mixed with the herbicide formulation before the combined solution was added to the carrier. While this enabled establishment of pre-determined sensor outputs based on given concentrations of the pre-mixed solution, the sensor may have been responding to the predominance of a dye mixed with a herbicide formulation and not directly to the concentration of the herbicide. While the sensor did not appreciably respond to the concentration of the glyphosate formulation, it did respond in a consistent manner to the 2,4-D formulation and the dye. The sensor‘s response to the concentration of these chemicals was a rational (1/x type) relationship, and the R2 values for the rational models describing these relationships were greater than 0.99. With the mixed dye and herbicide formulation, the effects of the dye and the 2,4-D formulation combined independently, and the total sensor output was a multiplication of the percent effect of each alone. The test with the pre-mixed dye and 2,4-D formulation produced the expected 1 V output at a 12.5% by volume concentration of the 2,4-D formulation, proving that dye can be added to a herbicide to produce a desired response from the sensor. Overall, the sensor‘s response was remarkably stable, with a maximum standard deviation of 42.2 mg L-1 of 2,4-D active ingredient for samples taken at a constant chemical concentration. These tests confirmed that the sensor could respond to chemical formulations and dye in a consistent and predictable manner. However, use of the sensor for herbicide monitoring will require sensor calibration for each combination of herbicide and dye mixture, as the light transmittance properties of the tested mixtures were not quantified and the light transmittance properties of formulations and dyes can be arbitrarily changed by manufacturers

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Fast Solution of Pressure and Stress of Dry Contact Using Multigrid Techniques

Fast computation of the elastic deformation integrals of dry contact is accomplished using multigrid techniques. The method is called multi-level multi-integration, which enables the efficient numerical solution of contact pressure for large dry-contact problems. The computing effort can be reduced to O (NlogN) operations, compared to that of classical solution methods, O (N2). The fast integration technique can be straightforwardly applied to computing sub-surface stresses. As an example, the pressure and stress distribution of the contact of wire rope and friction lining, a large calculation due to the wire rope’s complicated construction, were fast solved. Subsequently, the friction lining’s transient temperature, when the wire rope was sliding, was solved using multigrid techniques

Prediction of High-Tech Talents Flow Impact on Labor Income Share: Based on DEA and Fractional Hausdorff Grey Model

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of high-tech talents flow on labor income share and explore the influencing mechanism. It can be proved that high-tech talents flow affects labor income share by production function, with technological progress as a mediator variable. The labor income share is the dependent variable, and the gravity of high-tech talents as the independent variable is the index to measure the high-tech talents flow, constructing the panel data model with the Malmquist index of technological progress as a mediator variable. Furthermore, the Malmquist index of technological progress is decomposed into catching-up of technological progress index and leapfrogging of technological progress index, which, respectively, replaces the Malmquist index of technological progress as a mediator variable in the panel data model. Regression analysis shows that technological progress is a mediator variable for high-tech talents flow to reduce labor income share, and the impact mainly comes from leapfrogging of technological progress. However, although the mediating effect of catching-up technological progress index is not significant at the significance level of 10%, it is a mediator variable for high-tech labor mobility to increase income share at the significance level of 20%. Finally, this paper predicts the change in labor income share from 2018 to 2027 by the fractional Hausdorff grey model, and the results show that it is an increasing trend. However, the Gini coefficient whose change trend is opposite to the labor income share remains high in the past two years, indicating that there are other factors affecting the income gap, such as the urbanization rate and the transportation convenience. The innovation of this paper is mainly to reveal that the leapfrogging of technological progress is the major cause of the high-tech talents flow rising income inequality gap, while the catching-up of technological progress is the source of the former narrowing the latter. The fractional Hausdorff grey model predicts that the key determinants of income inequality gap are more than labor income share

Experimental Study on the Nonlinear Dynamic Characteristics of Wire Rope under Periodic Excitation in a Friction Hoist

The nonlinear dynamic responses of a wire rope under periodic excitation in a friction hoisting system are investigated. Longitudinal excitation experiments of different periodic excitation frequencies are performed. The nonlinear dynamic characteristics of the rope, including transverse, longitudinal, and coupled vibrations, are discussed with time-frequency analysis. The results show that the transverse vibration is a forced vibration following the excitation, while the longitudinal vibration shows a complex, random vibration state. The vibration amplitude and intensity deviate significantly from their linear trend (superharmonic resonance) at some excitation frequencies, and this deviation indicates the typical nonlinear multiorder natural frequency characteristics. The lifting motion can lead to additional corrugated high-order harmonics and cause a fundamental wave distortion of low-frequency excitation. Experimental evidence for the coupling characteristics of the transverse-longitudinal rope vibration in the lifting process is found

Invention of a Medical Glove Durability Assessment Device

Healthcare workers across the globe rely on medical gloves to prevent the transfer of harmful bacteria and viruses between themselves and their patients. Unfortunately, due to the lack of an in-use durability standard for medical gloves by the American Society for Testing and Materials, many of these gloves are of low quality and are easily torn or punctured, exposing wearers and patients to potentially deadly diseases. To solve this problem, a device that automatically detects material failures the size of a pinhole during active testing was invented. The device consists of a prosthetic hand, vacuum pump, mobile textured roller, pressure sensor, and liquid spray system. It works by creating a vacuum inside the glove and repeatedly moving the textured roller into contact with the fingertips, which, on the prosthetic hand, are porous. When a glove perforates, the vacuum is broken, pressure within the hand rapidly increases, and the operator is alerted on a touchscreen that the glove has failed. In addition, the liquid spray system allows the user to test gloves in “real world” conditions, because healthcare workers often come into contact with liquids that may alter glove durability. As a preliminary test of the device’s accuracy, five nitrile and five latex exam gloves were tested using the system’s default settings. Natural latex is known to be the highest performing glove material, so the nitrile gloves were expected to fail more quickly than the latex gloves. The test results concur with this expected order of failure: nitrile first, with an average failure time of 300 s and 42 average number of roller touches, followed by natural latex, with an average failure time of 2206 s and 300 average number of roller touches. These results provide evidence that the device accurately ranks glove durability, and therefore could be used to develop an ASTM durability standard and improve the quality of gloves made from different polymers

Enantioselective Alkynylzinc Addition to Carbonyl Compounds by Tf-based Sulfamide-amine Alcohol Catalysis

The new Tf-based sulfamide-amine alcohol 3a was found to be very effective in catalyzing the enantioselective alkynylzinc addition to both aromatic aldehydes and unactivated aromatic ketones without using another metal species under mild condition, providing up to 92% ee and 90% ee for aldehydes and ketones, respectively

Determining the Role of the Molecular Weight of Poly(Ethylene Glycol) Additives in Perovskite Photodetectors

The performance of perovskite photodetectors was often tuned by changing the functional groups of polymeric additives, rather than their molecular weight to improve defect passivation. As a result of the steric effect of polymeric additives, we found that the molecular weight of poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) additives played an important role in determining the perovskite crystal size, which increased from 470 to 550 nm with increasing molecular weight from 6k to 10k but declined back to 450 nm with further increasing molecular weight to 20k. The noise current, rather than the external quantum efficiency, was the dominant factor that can be tailored to improve the photodetection performance using PEG additives with different molecular weights. The photodetectors based on the 10k PEG additive exhibited a high specific detectivity of 1.9 × 1011 Jones, a linear dynamic range of 119 dB, and a frequency response −3 dB of 11.57 kHz. This work demonstrates an alternative approach by tailoring the molecular weight of polymeric additives to optimize the morphology of perovskite films for improved performance in perovskite photodetectors and other perovskite optoelectronic devices