837 research outputs found
Assessing the feasibility of augmenting fall detection systems by relying on UWB-based position tracking and a home robot
Falls in the home environment are a primary cause of injury in older adults. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, every year, one in four adults 65 years of age and older reports experiencing a fall. A variety of different technologies have been proposed to detect fall events. However, the need to detect all fall instances (i.e., to avoid false negatives) has led to the development of systems marked by high sensitivity and hence a significant number of false alarms. The occurrence of false alarms causes frequent and unnecessary calls to emergency response centers, which are critical resources that should be utilized only when necessary. Besides, false alarms decrease the level of confidence of end-users in the fall detection system with a negative impact on their compliance with using the system (e.g., wearing the sensor enabling the detection of fall events). Herein, we present a novel approach aimed to augment traditional fall detection systems that rely on wearable sensors and fall detection algorithms. The proposed approach utilizes a UWB-based tracking system and a home robot. When the fall detection system generates an alarm, the alarm is relayed to a base station that utilizes a UWB-based tracking system to identify where the older adult and the robot are so as to enable navigating the environment using the robot and reaching the older adult to check if he/she experienced a fall. This approach prevents unnecessary calls to emergency response centers while enabling a tele-presence using the robot when appropriate. In this paper, we report the results of a novel fall detection algorithm, the characteristics of the alarm notification system, and the accuracy of the UWB-based tracking system that we implemented. The fall detection algorithm displayed a sensitivity of 99.0% and a specificity of 97.8%. The alarm notification system relayed all simulated alarm notification instances with a maximum delay of 106 ms. The UWB-based tracking system was found to be suitable to locate radio tags both in line-of-sight and in no-line-of-sight conditions. This result was obtained by using a machine learning-based algorithm that we developed to detect and compensate for the multipath effect in no-line-of-sight conditions. When using this algorithm, the error affecting the estimated position of the radio tags was smaller than 0.2 m, which is satisfactory for the application at hand
Possible mechanism responsible for observed impurity outward flow under radio frequency heating
The effect of poloidal asymmetry of impurities on impurity transport driven
by electrostatic turbulence in tokamak plasmas is analyzed. It is found that in
the presence of in-out asymmetric impurity populations the zero-flux impurity
density gradient (the so-called peaking factor) is significantly reduced. A
sign change in the impurity flux may occur if the asymmetry is sufficiently
large. This may be a contributing reason for the observed outward convection of
impurities in the presence of radio frequency heating. The effect of in-out
asymmetry is most significant in regions with low temperature gradients. In the
trapped electron mode dominated case also an up-down asymmetry can lead to a
sign change in the peaking factor from positive to negative. The effect of ion
parallel compressibility on the peaking factor is significant, and leads to
positive peaking factors in regions with high temperature gradients, even in
the presence of in-out asymmetry.Comment: 19 pages, 14 figure
Wireless sensor web for rover planetary exploration
Together with the “traditional“ approach, during the last years a new concept of planetary surface exploration has been introduced and investigated by the space community, including the European Space Agency (ESA). The concept consists in deploying a number of sensors communicating among themselves in a wireless networked architecture (WSN). These sensors, altogether, constitute a distributed instrument with the potential of broadening the capabilities of making science on and around a planetary body. When compared to big and monolithic planetary probes, with payloads able to obtain high-quality local measurements (e.g. by imaging or sampling), wireless sensor networks allow mapping larger planetary surfaces and/or volumes over a large time span. This concept is particularly suitable to retrieve localised simple measurements such as pressure, temperature, humidity or gas type, which could support the major interests of space exploration: 1) determine if life ever arose on a certain celestial body, 2) characterise the geology and topology of the body surface, 3) characterise its climate, and 4) prepare for human exploration. In line with this trend ESA initiated the RF-WIPE project (RF Wireless for Planetary Exploration), with GMV leading a consortium completed by SUPSI (University of Applied Sciences and Arts of Southern Switzerland) and UPM (Technical University of Madrid
Electromagnetic filaments and edge modifications induced by electrode biasing in the RFX-mod tokamak
Statistical features of edge turbulence in RFX-mod from Gas Puffing Imaging
Plasma density fluctuations in the edge plasma of the RFX-mod device are
measured through the Gas Puffing Imaging Diagnostics. Statistical features of
the signal are quantified in terms of the Probability Distribution Function
(PDF), and computed for several kinds of discharges. The PDFs from discharges
without particular control methods are found to be adequately described by a
Gamma function, consistently with the recent results by Graves et al [J.P.
Graves, et al, Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion 47, L1 (2005)]. On the other hand,
pulses with external methods for plasma control feature modified PDFs. A first
empirical analysis suggests that they may be interpolated through a linear
combination of simple functions. An inspection of the literature shows that
this kind of PDFs is common to other devices as well, and has been suggested to
be due to the simultaneous presence of different mechanisms driving
respectively coherent bursts and gaussian background turbulence. An attempt is
made to relate differences in the PDFs to plasma conditions such as the local
shift of the plasma column. A simple phenomenological model to interpret the
nature of the PDF and assign a meaning to its parameters is also developed.Comment: 27 pages. Published in PPC
Resonance Lifetimes from Complex Densities
The ab-initio calculation of resonance lifetimes of metastable anions
challenges modern quantum-chemical methods. The exact lifetime of the
lowest-energy resonance is encoded into a complex "density" that can be
obtained via complex-coordinate scaling. We illustrate this with one-electron
examples and show how the lifetime can be extracted from the complex density in
much the same way as the ground-state energy of bound systems is extracted from
its ground-state density
Impurity transport studies in multiple helicity and enhanced confinement QSH regimes in RFX-mod
The most recent impurity transport studies in RFX-mod are presented. Results from enhanced confinement quasi-single helicity (QSH) and multiple helicity (MH) are compared. The transport parameters are determined by comparing a 1-dimensional collisional radiative simulation with experimental spectroscopic data. Transport parameters obtained for Ni particles injected by the laser blow-off method are described and discussed in relation to results from Ne injection and previous studies
Equilibrium reconstruction for Single Helical Axis reversed field pinch plasmas
Single Helical Axis (SHAx) configurations are emerging as the natural state
for high current reversed field pinch (RFP) plasmas. These states feature the
presence of transport barriers in the core plasma. Here we present a method for
computing the equilibrium magnetic surfaces for these states in the force-free
approximation, which has been implemented in the SHEq code. The method is based
on the superposition of a zeroth order axisymmetric equilibrium and of a first
order helical perturbation computed according to Newcomb's equation
supplemented with edge magnetic field measurements. The mapping of the measured
electron temperature profiles, soft X-ray emission and interferometric density
measurements on the computed magnetic surfaces demonstrates the quality of the
equilibrium reconstruction. The procedure for computing flux surface averages
is illustrated, and applied to the evaluation of the thermal conductivity
profile. The consistency of the evaluated equilibria with Ohm's law is also
discussed.Comment: Submitted to Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusio
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