About the importance of auditory alarms during the operation of a plant simulator

An experiment was carried out to estimate the effect of auditory alarms on the work of a plant operator in the context of a computer simulation. The process simulator was implemented so that each of eight machines (computer numeric controlled [CNC] robots) produced sounds to indicate its status over time. Each sound was designed to reflect the ‘real-world' semantic of the actual breakdown event. As many as 32 different auditory alarms plus six normal machine sounds could be played at once. We attempted to design the auditory alarms so that none would be masked (rendered inaudible) by other auditory alarms. Eight students of computer science operated our process simulation program of an assembly line with the eight CNC robots. Relevant information of disturbances and machine breakdowns was given in a visual (test condition 1), and in visual and auditory form (test condition 2). The results indicate that the additional feedback of auditory alarms significantly improves operator performance and increases some mood aspects positivel

The Evolution of First Person Vision Methods: A Survey

The emergence of new wearable technologies such as action cameras and smart-glasses has increased the interest of computer vision scientists in the First Person perspective. Nowadays, this field is attracting attention and investments of companies aiming to develop commercial devices with First Person Vision recording capabilities. Due to this interest, an increasing demand of methods to process these videos, possibly in real-time, is expected. Current approaches present a particular combinations of different image features and quantitative methods to accomplish specific objectives like object detection, activity recognition, user machine interaction and so on. This paper summarizes the evolution of the state of the art in First Person Vision video analysis between 1997 and 2014, highlighting, among others, most commonly used features, methods, challenges and opportunities within the field.Comment: First Person Vision, Egocentric Vision, Wearable Devices, Smart Glasses, Computer Vision, Video Analytics, Human-machine Interactio

Left/Right Hand Segmentation in Egocentric Videos

Wearable cameras allow people to record their daily activities from a user-centered (First Person Vision) perspective. Due to their favorable location, wearable cameras frequently capture the hands of the user, and may thus represent a promising user-machine interaction tool for different applications. Existent First Person Vision methods handle hand segmentation as a background-foreground problem, ignoring two important facts: i) hands are not a single "skin-like" moving element, but a pair of interacting cooperative entities, ii) close hand interactions may lead to hand-to-hand occlusions and, as a consequence, create a single hand-like segment. These facts complicate a proper understanding of hand movements and interactions. Our approach extends traditional background-foreground strategies, by including a hand-identification step (left-right) based on a Maxwell distribution of angle and position. Hand-to-hand occlusions are addressed by exploiting temporal superpixels. The experimental results show that, in addition to a reliable left/right hand-segmentation, our approach considerably improves the traditional background-foreground hand-segmentation

Self-Reported Seat Discomfort Among Dutch Commercial Truck Drivers

Comfort is an attribute that today’s consumers demand more and more. The seat has an important role to play in fulfilling these comfort expectations. Seating comfort is a major concern for drivers and other members of the work force who are exposed to extended periods of sitting and its associated side effects. In this paper, we described of the survey that examine the seat discomfort and travel time factors for Dutch commercial truck driver. For the survey, the self-administered questionnaires were completed by 217 truck drivers in the Netherlands. Statistical methods such as factor analysis and one way ANOVA were used to find the differences between body discomfort of truck drivers after one hour and five hours sitting while driving. The results showed that truck drivers experienced different level of body discomfort for one hour and five hours sitting while driving. Subsequently, the survey also found that there is significant discomfort at different body part. The outcomes from the analytical results were important and required more attention to reduce the body discomfort for long hour sitting

Self-Reported Seat Discomfort Among Dutch Commercial Truck Drivers

Comfort is an attribute that today’s consumers demand more and more. The seat has an important role to play in fulfilling these comfort expectations. Seating comfort is a major concern for drivers and other members of the work force who are exposed to extended periods of sitting and its associated side effects. In this paper, we described of the survey that examine the seat discomfort and travel time factors for Dutch commercial truck driver. For the survey, the self-administered questionnaires were completed by 217 truck drivers in the Netherlands. Statistical methods such as factor analysis and one way ANOVA were used to find the differences between body discomfort of truck drivers after one hour and five hours sitting while driving. The results showed that truck drivers experienced different level of body discomfort for one hour and five hours sitting while driving. Subsequently, the survey also found that there is significant discomfort at different body part. The outcomes from the analytical results were important and required more attention to reduce the body discomfort for long hour sitting

Adaptive Neck Support For Wellbeing During Air Travel

Air travel is becoming increasingly more accessible to people both through the availability of low cost flights. Health problems may arise due to anxiety and unfamiliarity with airport departure procedures prior to flying, whilst during the air travel, problems may arise as a result of the food served on board, differences in the environmental conditions inside the cabin, the risk of crossinfection from fellow passengers, seat position, posture adopted and duration of the flight. These can be further compounded by changes in time zones and meal times, which may continue to affect an individual’s health long after arrival at the final destination. The aircraft passenger comfort depends on different features and the environment during air travel. Seat comfort is a subjective issue because it is the customer who makes the final determination and customer evaluations are based on their opinions having experienced the seat. The aircraft passenger seat has an important role to play in fulfilling the passenger comfort expectations. The seat is one of the important features in the passenger aircraft and is the place where the passenger spends most of time during air travel. This chapter describes the development of adaptive neck support system to improve the wellbeing experience during air travel for economy class aircraft passenger. Design concept, prototyping, system implementation, experimental testing and design evaluation in an aircraft cabin simulator developed at Eindhoven University of Technology will be presented in the chapter

Unsupervised Understanding of Location and Illumination Changes in Egocentric Videos

Wearable cameras stand out as one of the most promising devices for the upcoming years, and as a consequence, the demand of computer algorithms to automatically understand the videos recorded with them is increasing quickly. An automatic understanding of these videos is not an easy task, and its mobile nature implies important challenges to be faced, such as the changing light conditions and the unrestricted locations recorded. This paper proposes an unsupervised strategy based on global features and manifold learning to endow wearable cameras with contextual information regarding the light conditions and the location captured. Results show that non-linear manifold methods can capture contextual patterns from global features without compromising large computational resources. The proposed strategy is used, as an application case, as a switching mechanism to improve the hand-detection problem in egocentric videos.Comment: Submitted for publicatio

Total Design Of Low Cost Aircraft Cabin Simulator

Testbed is a platform on which an assortment of experimental tools and products may be deployed and allowed to interact in real-time. Successful tools and products can be identified and developed in an interactive testbed. A testbed also can be defined as an environment that is created for testing and validating purpose. The total design method is the systematic activity oriented, from the market need identification, to the final product that satisfied the need. The activity of total design includes product, process, people and organization [Sapuan 2005]. The aircraft cabin simulator is a testbed that is developed for European project, namely, SEAT (Smart tEchnologies for Stress free Air Travel). The SEAT project aims to develop a new radical approach through integration of cabin systems with multimedia features. The aircraft cabin simulator is fully designed and built by us. The simulator consists of a small scale cabin-like testing platform, an inventory section, a simulation section and a control section. The interior of the aircraft cabin consists of an economy class section, a business class section, a galley and a lavatory. Each passenger seat and the lavatory are provided with a personal entertainment touch screen monitor. An inventory section is used to store the testing related equipments. A sky-like projection environment is created at the external location. In addition, the simulator is built with an innovative low-cost motion platform. The motion platform is used to simulate the flight environment such as taxing, taking off, turbulence, descending and landing. The control section is fully equipped with a state of art computer system that is used to control and monitor the simulator. In this paper, the aircraft cabin simulator was designed with solid modelling software. Five conceptual designs of simulator were developed with 3D solid model. To determine the final design of simulator, the matrix evaluation method was used. The weight of the simulator was obtained through weight analysis. The simulator was successfully designed and built with lower cost compared with the commercial aircraft simulator. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 describes the current development of commercial aircraft simulator and Section 3 describes the simulator design methodology. Subsequently, conceptual design of simulator follows in Section 4 and scenario of the final concept presented in Section 5. Section 6 describes the final design of aircraft simulator. The paper is concluded in Section 7