A brief review: assistive technology and autism, a proposal for virtual tools for improved communication and emotional recognition

Autism is a condition that affects over one percent of the population, and is a condition that has varying degrees of severity. There currently exist various therapies to help people with autism communicate effectively. As a result some researchers and schools have expanded this provision by creating virtual tools to assist the communication process and allow a greater level of independence and generalization. Therefore, this brief paper aims to present a review of literature surrounding assistive technology, augmentative and alternative communication and autism, and how these fields of knowledge can be better understood to help develop virtual tools – more specifically a virtual world

Diagnostics of an O2–He RF Atmospheric Plasma Discharge by Spectral Emission

In this paper optical emission spectroscopy (OES) is used as a Diagnostic technique for the measurement of atomic and molecular spectral emissions generated using a helium rf industrial atmospheric plasma jet system. The OES of neutral atomic spectral lines and molecular bands are investigated over a range of plasma process parameters.Wavelength resolve optical emission profiles suggest that the emission of helium’s spectral lines shows that the high energy electrons have a larger influence than helium metastables on the overall spectral emission. Furthermore, the experimental data indicates that the use of high helium flow rates, in any confined open air plasma discharge, limits thesignificance of air impurities, e.g., nitrogen, for the creation and sustainability of plasma discharges in helium–oxygen gas chemistry

Protein adhesion on water stable atmospheric plasma deposited acrylic acid coatings

There is considerable interest in the application of plasma polymerised acrylic acid (ppAAc) coatings due to their ability to enhance the adhesion of cells and proteins. An issue with this coating however is its stability in water and previous studies carried out using low pressure plasmas have demonstrated that high plasma powers are required to achieve water stable coatings. In this paper the use of both helium and air atmospheric plasmas is compared for the deposition of ppAAc coatings. The deposition studies were carried out on silicon wafer substrates using the PlasmaStream™ and PlasmaTreat™ plasma jet deposition systems respectively. The coatings were characterised using contact angle, FTIR, SEM, XPS, ellipsometry and optical profilometry. While both the helium and air plasmas were successful in the deposition of ppAAc coatings, the nm thick films deposited using the PlasmaTreat system exhibited significantly higher levels of water stability, probably due to a higher level of coating cross-linking. Ellipsometry measurements demonstrated only a 0.2 nm reduction in the thickness of an 18 nm thick ppAAc coating, when immersed in an aqueous buffer solution for one hour. Protein attachment studies were carried out using a flow cell system, which was monitored using a spectroscopic ellipsometer. This study was carried out with Bovine Serum Albumin (BSA), Immunoglobulin G (IgG) and Fibrinogen (Fg) proteins. In all three cases increased levels of protein adhesion were observed for the ppAAc coating, compared to that obtained on the uncoated silicon wafer substrates.Deposited by bulk importTS 27.09.13"In press", print copy not published yet. TS 09.1

Acoustic Metrology : From Atmospheric Plasma to Solo Percussive Irish Dance

LabVIEW software is used to decode step sequences generated by Irish light and hard shoes and bare feet. To remove the low frequency reverberation of the floor a Savitzky-Golay digital filter is used to de-convolute the percussion sound of the step sequences. Floor types and foot apparel are compared.Deposited by bulk import1/11/2013. SB

Safety Issues and Infrared Light

Infrared light is the most common choice for illumination of the eye in current eye trackers, usually produced via IR light-emitting diodes (LEDs). This chapter provides an overview of the potential hazards of over-exposure to infrared light, the safety standards currently in place, configurations and lighting conditions employed by various eye tracking systems, the basics of measurement of IR light sources in eye trackers, and special considerations associated with continuous exposure in the case of gaze control for communication and disabled users. It should be emphasised that any eye tracker intended for production should undergo testing by qualified professionals at a recognised test house, in a controlled laboratory setting. However, some knowledge of the measurement procedures and issues involved should be useful to designers and users of eye tracking systems

Efficient communication with one or two buttons

Abstract. We discuss how the arithmetic-coding-based communication system, Dasher, could be driven by discrete button presses. We describe several prototypes and predict their information rates. Dasher is a communication system based on a beautiful idea from information theory, called arithmetic coding (Witten et al., 1987; MacKay, 2003, Chapter 6). Arithmetic coding is an optimal method for text-compression using a language model. By turning arithmetic coding on its head, we obtain an optimal method for text-generation. We view a person’s gestures as a source of information, and the sentences they wish to communicate as the sink of information. Good interface design maximizes the number of bits per second that are conveyed from the user into text. Poor interfaces waste the user’s time either by failing to extract all the bits that the user could easily generate, or by diverting the user’s bits into redundant activity. The Dasher approach to interface design decouples the issues of efficient bitgeneration and efficient language-generation. Unlike in most interfaces, a Dasher-user’s gestures have no relationship to particular symbols in the language. Instead, they control navigation in a continuous space whose contents are laid out using a languag

Influence of coating properties on the adhesion of proteins to atmospheric plasma modified surfaces

European Conference of Nanofilms (ECNF 2010), Liege, Belgium, 22 to 25 March 2010Protein adhesion is of key importance for the biocompatibility of medical devices. This study investigates the adsorption of protein, bovine serum albumin (BSA), onto both uncoated silicon wafers and nanometre thick fluorosiloxane coated wafers. A plasma polymerised coating was deposited from a mixture of tetramethylcyclotetrasiloxane (TC) and perfluorooctyltriethoxysilane (FS) (1:1 by vol. ratio). The liquid precursor mixture was nebulised into an atmospheric plasma jet formed using the PlasmaStreamTM system. The adsorption of protein on the plasma polymerised coatings was evaluated under dynamic flow conditions using a spectroscopic ellipsometry technique. The rate of protein adsorption onto coated and uncoated silicon wafer substrates was monitored over time after the BSA solution was introduced into a flow cell. These measurements indicated the adsorption of a 2 nm thick BSA protein layer on the uncoated silicon wafers. The ellipsometry thickness measurements of adsorbed protein on silicon wafer were confirmed using quartz crystal microbalance measurements (QCM). The BSA adsorption studies were then repeated with a fluorosiloxane coating. These coatings exhibited a highly textured surface morphology with low surface energy and a high water contact angle of 156 . The ellipsometry flow cell tests with BSA indicated almost no adsorption of protein onto the superhydrophobic fluorosiloxane coating. This study demonstrated the ability of ellipsometry to measure protein adsorption under dynamic flow 2 conditions and the influence of surface properties on protein adsorption.Author has checked copyrightAD 22/01/201