Design of immersive virtual reality system to improve communication skills in individuals with autism

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) regularly experience situations in which they need to give answers but do not know how to respond; for example, questions related to everyday life activities that are asked by strangers. Research geared at utilizing technology to mend social and communication impairments in children with autism is actively underway. Immersive virtual reality (VR) is a relatively recent technology that has the potential of being an effective therapeutic tool for developing various skills in autistic children. This paper presents an interactive scenario-based VR system developed to improve the communications skills of autistic children. The system utilizes speech recognition to provide natural interaction and role-play and turntaking to evaluate and verify the effectiveness of the immersive environment on the social performance of autistic children. In experiments conducted, participants showed more improved performance with a computer augmented virtual environment (CAVE) than with a head mounted display (HMD) or a normal desktop. The results indicate that immersive VR could be more satisfactory and motivational than desktop for children with ASD.Scopu

Novel Ternary Adder and Multiplier Designs without Using Decoders or Encoders

Multiple-Valued Logic systems present significant improvements in terms of energy consumption over binary logic systems. This paper proposes new ternary combinational digital circuits that reduce energy consumption in low-power nano-scale embedded systems and Internet of Thing (IoT) devices to save their battery consumption. The 32 nm CNTFET-based ternary half adder (THA) and multiplier (TMUL) circuits use novel ternary unary operator circuits and implement two power supplies Vdd and Vdd/2 without using any ternary decoders, basic logic gates, or encoders to minimize the number of used transistors and improve the energy efficiency. Extensive simulations (over 160) of the proposed designs in terms of PVT (Process, Voltage, Temperature) variations, noise effect, and scalability studies, along with several benchmark designs using HSPICE simulator, prove the significance of the proposed circuits to decrease the power-delay product (PDP), improve the robustness to process variations, and the noise tolerance. The obtained results show the superiority of the designs in a reduction between 32% and 74% in transistors count and between 18% and 99% in PDP compared to the most recent works.Scopu

QUWI: An Arabic and English handwriting dataset for offline writer identification

This paper presents a new offline dataset called the Qatar University Writer Identification dataset (QUWI). This dataset contains both Arabic and English handwritings and can be used to evaluate the performance of offline writer identification systems. It consists of handwritten documents of 1017 volunteers of different ages, nationalities, genders and education levels. The writers were asked to copy a specific text and to generate a random text, which allows the dataset to be used for both text-dependent and text-independent writer identification tasks. We describe the gathering and processing steps and define several evaluation tasks regarding the use of this dataset.Scopu

Designing a Mobile Serious Game for Raising Awareness of Diabetic Children

Mobile serious games are very important tools for self-learning, training, and edutainment. They can be used to improve the children's learning skills to grasp new concepts rapidly in an enjoyable manner. Fun, motivation, and engagement are the most important features in designing attractive serious games. Therefore, designers should always find the best strategies and techniques to keep children playing the game with motivation and enthusiasm. The process is very long and requires different expertise from all the stakeholders. Arcade games are the most played games for fun and amusement in the last decades. Their approach is based on simplicity, easiness, repetitiveness, and soft challenges. The players of arcade games need only to improve their scores in every episode and avoid frustration and hard challenges as in other games. Hence, this arcade-based approach can be used in designing attractive serious games for young children and adolescents. We propose in this research a new serious game for diabetic children to teach them about the disease in a very easy manner. The game uses the arcade approach coupled with useful information about diabetes where the children discover them incrementally during the play. The longer time the child spends on the game, the most she/he can learn and enhance her/his knowledge on the disease. The game success came from its design and implementation with the presence of diabetes children, advisors, and nutritionists. We compare the game with the well-known DEX pet-based game for diabetes awareness on different aspects including user experience, usability, and learning outcomes. The study is conducted on twenty children from a diabetes camp who accepted voluntarily to participate in this research. We evaluate their educational aspects, using an improved version of the MEEGA+ model. We demonstrate the importance of the proposed game in enhancing the children knowledge on diabetes and adopt a new healthy lifestyle.This work was supported by the National Priorities Research Program (NPRP) from the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) (a Member of Qatar Foundation) under Grant 10-0205-170346.Scopu

Ultra-Low Energy CNFET-Based Ternary Combinational Circuits Designs

The embedded systems, IoT (Internet of Things) devices, and portable electronic devices spread very quickly recently. Most of them depend on batteries to operate. The target of this work is to decrease energy consumption by (1) using Multiple-valued logic (MVL) that shows notable enhancements regarding energy consumption over binary circuits and (2) using carbon nanotube field-effect transistors (CNFET) that show better performance than CMOS. This work proposes ternary combinational circuits using 32 nm CNFET: Ternary Half Adder (THA) with 36 transistors and Ternary Multiplier (TMUL) with 23 transistors. To reduce energy consumption by utilizing the unary operator of the ternary system and employing two voltage supplies (Vdd and Vdd/2). The result of extensive HSPICE simulations regarding PVT (Process, Voltage, and Temperatures) variations and Noise Immunity Curve (NIC) show the improvements of the proposed designs up to 25% in transistors count and up to 98% in energy consumption reductions. Further, increasing the robustness of process variations and the noise tolerance compared to recent similar designs. CCBYScopu