Power-Assist Wheelchair Attachment

This senior design project sought to combine the best characteristics of manual and power wheelchairs by creating a battery-powered attachment to propel a manual wheelchair. The primary customer needs were determined to be affordability, portability, and travel on uneven surfaces. After the initial prototype, using a hub motor proved unsuccessful, so a second design was developed that consisted of a gear reduction motor and drive wheel connected to the back of the wheelchair by a trailing arm that could be easily attached/detached from the frame. The prototype of the second design succeeded in meeting most of the project goals related to cost, off-road capability, inclines, and range. Improvements can be made by reducing the attachment weight and improving user control of the device

Reliability of measuring thoracic kyphosis angle, lumbar lordosis angle and straight leg raise with an inclinometer

Licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution non-commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, providing that the work is properly citedPurpose: Several non-invasive measurement methods have been described in the literature for recording thoracic kyphosis, lumbar lordosis and straight leg raise (SLR). However, attempts to quantify the reliability of the inclinometer in these measurements are scarce. In addition, existing reliability studies within the literature were found to use small sample sizes. The aim of this investigation was to examine the intra-rater reliability of the chief investigator (SM), in order to provide clinicians with data that will allow them to better measure sagittal spinal posture and SLR. A blinded test-retest design was performed to determine the intra-rater reliability of thoracic kyphosis, lumbar lordosis and SLR when assessed using an Isomed inclinometer in normals. Methods. Thirty asymptomatic subjects were assessed on two occasions separated by a time interval of 1 hour to reduce investigator memory bias. Thoracic and lumbar measurements were recorded in a relaxed standing position using an inclinometer; SLR of the dominant leg was assessed with subjects in the supine position. Intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC), 95% confidence intervals (CI), and standard errors of measurement (SEM) were analysed to determine measurement reliability. Results. The chief investigator demonstrated excellent intra-rater reliability in the measurements of thoracic kyphosis, lumbar lordosis and SLR. ICC (2,3) values for all three variables exceeded the 0.90 threshold suggesting that the reliability of these measures are acceptable for clinical application. Conclusions. The inclinometer technique employed in this study to record thoracic kyphosis, lumbar lordosis and SLR is a reliable measurement method.Peer reviewe

Life Cycle Assessment of Solar Chimneys

Climate change is increasingly becoming a significant issue globally and the use of solar thermal technology is one approach in managing the world’s environment. There is now greater use of renewable energy sources in order to minimize the depletion of energy resources while providing an environmentally-friendly energy source that has minimal impact on the environment. It is thus important to be able to assess the environmental impact of different types of solar thermal technologies in order to have an understanding of the actual impact of solar thermal on the environment. Most solar thermal technologies need to use water in the production process to produce electricity. The most viable place to produce solar energy is in extremely hot climates like deserts where there is not much water to choose from. Most of the time water comes from sources that are far away and becomes expensive to transport the water to the solar plant sites. There is one solar thermal technology that does not require water to produce electricity. It is called Solar Chimney or Solar updraft tower. This paper will assess the environmental impact of Solar Chimneys across its life cycle using the Life Cycle Assessment approach (LCA). The contribution of this paper is providing further understanding of the environmental impact of solar chimneys across its life cycle particularly as new technologies in solar technology continue to be developed

Meta-data alignment in open Tracking & Tracing systems

In Tracking and Tracing systems, attributes of objects (such as location, time, status and temperature) are recorded as these objects move through a supply chain. In closed, dedicated systems, the attributes to record and store are determined at design time. However, in open Tracking and Tracing systems, the attributes are not known beforehand, as the type of objects and the set of stakeholders may evolve over time. Many supply chains require open Tracking and Tracing systems. The participants in the supply chain are individual companies, spread over many countries. Their trading relations change constantly. Usually they participate in multiple supply chains. E.g., a company producing chemicals may serve the chemical industry, the food industry and the textile industry at the same time. Transport companies carry goods for multiple industry sectors. Yet, they play a role in the traceability of all goods they produce or carry. Open tracking and Tracing systems are not dedicated for a certain type of product or object nor for a specific industry sector. They simply record the location, time and other attributes of the identified objects, and store that information in the data store of the object owner, based on the identification (e.g. RFID) tag. What attributes are to be stored is determined by stakeholders, such as (end) users of the object. In some cases (e.g. food) legislation prescribes what to record. An open Tracking and Tracing system therefore needs to be able to dynamically handle the set of attributes to be recorded and stored. In this chapter, a method is presented that enables components of Tracking and Tracing systems to negotiate at run time what attributes may be stored for a particular object type. Components may include scanning equipment, data stores and query clients. Attributes may be of any data type, including time, location, status, temperature and ownership. Apart from simple attributes, associations between objects may be recorded and stored, e.g. when an object is packed in another object, loaded in a truck or container or assembled to be a new object. The method makes use of findings in ontology engineering and of type theory. New types are based on existing types, with some restrictions. Both the range of values of a type and its meta‐attributes (such as cardinality) may be restricted to define a new type. Programmatically, concepts of co‐ and contra variance are used to make the method implementable. The method was developed in two European funded research projects: TraSer and ADVANCE. In TraSer, a truly open and extensible Tracking and Tracing system was developed (TraSer project consortium, 2006; Monostori et al., 2009). In ADVANCE, a distributed management information system for logistics operations was designed and implemented, that makes use of Tracking and Tracing information (ADVANCE project consortium, 2010; Kemény et al., 2011a)

Application of an automated labour performance measuring system at a confectionery company

Published ArticleThis paper focuses on the implementation of a labour performance measuring system at a confectionery company. The computer vision based system is based on the work sampling methodology. It consists of four cameras linked to a central computer via USB extenders. The computer uses a random function in C++ in order to determine when measurements are to be taken. OpenCV is used to track the movement of a target worker's dominant hand at a given work station. Tracking is accomplished through the use of a bandwidth colour filter. The speed of the worker's hand is used to identify whether the worker is busy, idle or out of the frame over the course of the sampling period. Data collected by the system is written into a number of text files. The stored data is then exported to a Microsoft Excel 2007 spread sheet where it is analysed and a report on the labour utilisation is generated

SERVICE DELIVERY IN A PHYSICALLY RESTRICTED SERVICE ENVIRONMENT: THE CASE OF AIRLINE FLIGHT ATTENDANTS

Business Managemen

Industrial-scale production and purification of a heterologous protein in Lactococcus lactis using the nisin-controlled gene expression system NICE: The case of lysostaphin

BACKGROUND: The NIsin-Controlled gene Expression system NICE of Lactococcus lactis is one of the most widespread used expression systems of Gram-positive bacteria. It is used in more than 100 laboratories for laboratory-scale gene expression experiments. However, L. lactis is also a micro-organism with a large biotechnological potential. Therefore, the aim of this study was to test whether protein production in L. lactis using the NICE system can also effectively be performed at the industrial-scale of fermentation. RESULTS: Lysostaphin, an antibacterial protein (mainly against Staphylococcus aureus) from S. simulans biovar. Staphylolyticus, was used as a model system. Food-grade lysostaphin expression constructs in L. lactis were grown at 1L-, 300-L and 3000-L scale and induced with nisin for lysostaphin production. The induction process was equally effective at all scales and yields of about 100 mg/L were obtained. Up-scaling was easy and required no specific effort. Furthermore, we describe a simple and effective way of downstream processing to obtain a highly purified lysostaphin, which has been used for clinical phase I trials. CONCLUSION: This is the first example that shows that nisin-regulated gene expression in L. lactis can be used at industrial scale to produce large amounts of a target protein, such as lysostaphin. Downstream processing was simple and in a few steps produced a highly purified and active enzyme

The anatomy of collective failure in the Netherlands

A review of evaluation findings on Dutch policy successes and failures points to the influence of political culture on policy effectiveness