Study of Biomechanical Response of Human Hand-Arm to Random Vibrations of Steering Wheel of Tractor

This paper reports a study on the biomechanical response of a human hand-arm model to random vibrations of the steering wheel of a tractor. An anatomically accurate bone-only hand-arm model from TurboSquidTM was used to obtain a finite element (FE) model to understand the Hand-arm vibration syndrome (HAVS), which is a neurological and vascular disorder caused by exposure of the human hand-arm to prolonged vibrations. Modal analysis has been done to find out the first few natural frequencies and mode shapes of the system. Coupling of degrees of freedom (DOF) had to be done in the FE idealization to do modal analysis, as the bones were not attached to each other in the TurboSquidTM model. The shoulder bone, scapula, has been constrained at one end for eigenvalue analysis. It was observed that the first five natural frequencies were in the range of 0-250 Hz, which is the range in which the effect of HAVS is the highest. Harmonic analysis was done by giving a swept sine excitation in the frequency range 0 to 200 Hz. For this, a force input of 25 N was imparted at nodes perpendicular to the hand, the force value chosen being the nominal force in most applications involving powered hand-held tools and steering wheels of tractors. The nodes chosen for force application were determined experimentally from observations made by gripping the steering wheel. The frequency response function (FRF) plots were obtained in the x, y and z directions. Random vibration analysis was done next by giving force power spectral densities (PSD) in the form of nodal excitation as input to the FE model of hand-arm, and computing the output acceleration PSDs. The input force PSDs were measured using FlexiForce® sensors along the three axes. The acceleration responses at the steering wheel were also measured using tri-axial accelerometers for validating the computed results. The output acceleration PSDs were then weighted using the frequency weighting curves for hand-arm vibration and the total daily exposure A(8), computed using ISO 5349-1 standards, was compared with the vibration action and limit values. The A(8) values obtained are found to be higher than the vibration limit values.     

Measurement of the car steering wheel turning force of persons with cervical cord injuries.

Steering wheel turning force was measured in persons with cervical cord injuries for evaluation of their ability to drive a car. Seventeen subjects were divided into two groups according to their functional level: Group I (comprising 11 subjects of functional level C6) and Group II (comprising 6 subjects of functional level C7-C8). A device for hand fastening was attached to a steering wheel, which was mounted onto the rotation shaft of a Cybex machine, and the torque for turning the wheel with the right hand at a constant speed was measured. Persons with cervical cord injuries showed characteristically higher left-turning torque than right-turning torque. Mean values and standard deviation of the two groups were: 0.52 +/- 0.16 kgf-m (left-turning) and 0.40 +/- 0.12 kgf-m (right-turning) for Group I; and 0.81 +/- 0.16 kgf-m (left-turning) and 0.76 +/- 0.15 kgf-m (right-turning) for Group II. Subjects in Group I had a turning torque lower than 0.30 kgf-m (the lowest wheel turning torque shown by Japanese cars equipped with a power-steering system) at a turning angle range of between 0-135 degrees in left-turning and 45-200 degrees in right-turning.     

Computer simulation of occupant neck response to airbag deployment in frontal impacts.

A mathematical simulation was performed to study the potential of head and neck injury to an unbelted driver restrained by an airbag. The baseline study represented a 50th percentile male dummy driving in a compact car with the steering wheel perpendicular to the floor. The vehicle was moving at 48 km/hour at the time of impact. Model predictions were compared with sled test results. The data agreed reasonably well. A parametric study was performed to study the effect of changing the steering wheel angle and the size of the airbag. It was found that when the standard 20 degrees angle steering wheel was used, neck joint torques were decreased by 22 percent while the resultant head acceleration increased 41 percent from the base line study. When the vertical dimension of the airbag was reduced by 10 percent, neck joint torques were increased by 14 percent, while head acceleration showed a slight decrease of 9 percent.     

Optimal trajectory formation of constrained human arm reaching movements

Opening a door, turning a steering wheel, and rotating a coffee mill are typical examples of human movements that are constrained by the physical environment. The constraints decrease the mobility of the human arm and lead to redundancy in the distribution of actuator forces (either joint torques or muscle forces). Due to this actuator redundancy, there is an infinite number of ways to form a specific arm trajectory. However, humans form trajectories in a unique way. How do humans resolve the redundancy of the constrained motions and specify the hand trajectory? To investigate this problem, we examine human arm movements in a crank-rotation task. To explain the trajectory formation in constrained point-to-point motions, we propose a combined criterion minimizing the hand contact force change and the actuating force change over the course of movement. Our experiments show a close matching between predicted and experimental data.     

Sustainability criteria and indicators of bioenergy systems from steering,research and Finnish bioenergy business operators’ perspectives

This paper addresses the interface of steering, research, and business operators’ perspectives to bioenergy sustainability. Although bioenergy business operators are essential for sustainable development of bioenergy systems through implementation of sustainability criteria, their perspective to sustainability is rarely studied. We systematically studied the relevant sustainability criteria and indicators from the three perspectives in different stages of a general bioenergy life cycle and in different sustainability dimensions, and evaluated bioenergy operators’ sustainability principles, criteria and indicators simultaneously with respect to the steering and research data and a business sustainability maturity framework. We collected data from literature and a workshop for Finnish bioenergy experts. The results show a similar division of steering and operators’ sustainability criteria and indicators to life cycle stages and sustainability dimensions with a slight emphasis on business economic sustainability from operators’ perspective. The acceptability principle could provide bioenergy operators a meaningful way of identifying the role of sustainability criteria and indicators from steering and research sources in advancing their business sustainability maturity.     

Dimensionality Reduction and Visualization of the Environmental Impacts of Domestic Appliances

There is an increasing worldwide concern about the problem of dealing with the waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), given the high volume of appliances that are disposed of every day. In this article, an environmental evaluation of WEEE is performed that combines life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology and multivariate statistical techniques. Because LCA handles a large number of data in its different phases, when one is trying to uncover the structure of large multidimensional data sets, multivariate statistical techniques can provide useful information. In particular, principal‐component analysis and multidimensional scaling are two important dimension‐reducing tools that have been shown to be of help in understanding this type of complex multivariate data set. In this article, we use a variable selection method that reduces the number of categories for which the environmental impacts have to be computed; this step is especially useful when the number of impact categories or the number of products or processes to benchmark increases. We provide a detailed illustration showing how we have used the proposed approach to analyze and interpret the environmental impacts of different domestic appliances.     

应用VCS技术的白细胞的分类和计数

在相当长的一段时间里,各种自动白细胞识别方法已被广泛的应用。其中有一种方法应用了ＶＣＳ技术。这种方法即是本文将讨论的内容。一种专用试剂能够防止细胞受染色溶剂或细胞化学试剂的影响而改变。细胞的一些原始特性,诸如白细胞的大小,内部的物理、化学特性,以及各个细胞特殊的表面结构特性可基本保持不变。ＶＣＳ方法是同时运用体积分析（ＡｎａｌｙｓｉｓｏｆＶｏｌｕｍｅ）,传导系数（Ｃｏｎｄｕｃｔｉｖｉｔｙ）和激光光散射（Ｌａｓｅｒ－ｌｉｇｈｔ－Ｓｃａｔｔｅｒｉｎｇ）三种技术,得到每个白细胞几乎处于原始状态的多维记录     

Development of multidimensional liquid chromatography and application in proteomic analysis

As a complementary approach to 2D-PAGE, multidimensional liquid chromatography (MDLC) separation methods have been widely applied in all kinds of biological sample investigations. MDLC coupled with mass spectrometry is playing an important role in proteome research owing to its high speed, high resolution and high sensitivity. Among MDLC strategies, ion-exchange chromatography together with reversed-phase LC is still a most widely used chromatography in proteome analysis; other chromatographic methods are also frequently used in protein prefractionations. Recent MDLC technologies and applications to a variety of proteome analyses have achieved great development. The diversity of combinations of different chromatography modes to set up MDLC systems was demonstrated and discussed. Novel developments of MDLC techniques such as ultra-pressure system, array-based separation and monolithic material are also included in this article.     

Measurement and modelling of x-direction apparent mass of the seated human body-cushioned seat system

For modelling purposes and for evaluation of driver's seat performance in the vertical direction various mechano-mathematical models of the seated human body have been developed and standardized by the ISO. No such models exist hitherto for human body sitting in an upright position in a cushioned seat upper part, used in industrial environment, where the fore-and-aft vibrations play an important role. The interaction with the steering wheel has to be taken into consideration, as well as, the position of the human body upper torso with respect to the cushioned seat back as observed in real driving conditions. This complex problem has to be simplified first to arrive at manageable simpler models, which still reflect the main problem features. In a laboratory study accelerations and forces in x-direction were measured at the seat base during whole-body vibration in the fore-and-aft direction (random signal in the frequency range between 0.3 and 30 Hz, vibration magnitudes 0.28, 0.96, and 2.03 ms(-2) unweighted rms). Thirteen male subjects with body masses between 62.2 and 103.6 kg were chosen for the tests. They sat on a cushioned driver seat with hands on a support and backrest contact in the lumbar region only. Based on these laboratory measurements a linear model of the system-seated human body and cushioned seat in the fore-and-aft direction has been developed. The model accounts for the reaction from the steering wheel. Model parameters have been identified for each subject-measured apparent mass values (modulus and phase). The developed model structure and the averaged parameters can be used for further bio-dynamical research in this field.     

An Adaptive Hybrid OLAP Architecture with optimized memory access patterns

OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing) is an approach to efficiently evaluate multidimensional data for business intelligence applications. OLAP contributes to business decision-making by identifying, extracting, and analyzing multidimensional data. The fundamental structure of OLAP is a data cube that enables users to interactively explore the distinct data dimensions. Processing depends on the complexity of queries, dimensionality, and growing size of the data cube. As data volumes keep on increasing and the demands by business users also increase, higher processing speed than ever is needed, as faster processing means faster decisions and more profit to industry. In this paper, we are proposing an Adaptive Hybrid OLAP Architecture that takes advantage of heterogeneous systems with GPUs and CPUs and leverages their different memory subsystems characteristics to minimize response time. Thus, our approach (a) exploits both types of hardware rather than using the CPU only as a frontend for GPU; (b) uses two different data formats (multidimensional cube and relational cube) to match the GPU and CPU memory access patterns and diverts queries adaptively to the best resource for solving the problem at hand; (c) exploits data locality of multidimensional OLAP on NUMA multicore systems through intelligent thread placement; and (d) guides its adaptation and choices by an architectural model that captures the memory access patterns and the underlying data characteristics. Results show an increase in performance by roughly four folds over the best known related approach. There is also the important economical factor. The proposed hybrid system costs only 10 % more than same system without GPU. With this small extra cost, the added GPU increases query processing by almost 2 times.     

Penalized gaussian process regression and classification for high-dimensional nonlinear data

The model based on Gaussian process (GP) prior and a kernel covariance function can be used to fit nonlinear data with multidimensional covariates. It has been used as a flexible nonparametric approach for curve fitting, classification, clustering, and other statistical problems, and has been widely applied to deal with complex nonlinear systems in many different areas particularly in machine learning. However, it is a challenging problem when the model is used for the large-scale data sets and high-dimensional data, for example, for the meat data discussed in this article that have 100 highly correlated covariates. For such data, it suffers from large variance of parameter estimation and high predictive errors, and numerically, it suffers from unstable computation. In this article, penalized likelihood framework will be applied to the model based on GPs. Different penalties will be investigated, and their ability in application given to suit the characteristics of GP models will be discussed. The asymptotic properties will also be discussed with the relevant proofs. Several applications to real biomechanical and bioinformatics data sets will be reported.     

Rapid prediction of multi-dimensional NMR data sets

We present a computational environment for Fast Analysis of multidimensional NMR DAta Sets (FANDAS) that allows assembling multidimensional data sets from a variety of input parameters and facilitates comparing and modifying such ??in silico?? data sets during the various stages of the NMR data analysis. The input parameters can vary from (partial) NMR assignments directly obtained from experiments to values retrieved from in silico prediction programs. The resulting predicted data sets enable a rapid evaluation of sample labeling in light of spectral resolution and structural content, using standard NMR software such as Sparky. In addition, direct comparison to experimental data sets can be used to validate NMR assignments, distinguish different molecular components, refine structural models or other parameters derived from NMR data. The method is demonstrated in the context of solid-state NMR data obtained for the cyclic nucleotide binding domain of a bacterial cyclic nucleotide-gated channel and on membrane-embedded sensory rhodopsin II. FANDAS is freely available as web portal under WeNMR (http://www.wenmr.eu/services/FANDAS).     

A Motor-Controlled Device for Slow-Motion Cutting with the Ultramicrotome

The preparation of ultrathin sections of high quality with a Porter-Blum microtome requires that the drive wheel be rotated at a slow, uniform rate during actual cutting. A mechanical device to control the motion of the microtome drive wheel consists of a synchronous motor connected to a drive shaft (4 rev/min), which can be intermittently coupled to the rim of the microtome wheel by a friction drive of 1/2-inch diameter. The microtome drive wheel is rotated manually at a rapid rate until the specimen is about to come into contact with the knife; then the mechanical drive is engaged for slow movement during cutting. When the section has been cut, the drive is disengaged by a lever operated with the left hand; after which, the microtome wheel is turned quickly back to the cutting position with the right hand.     

A two-part joint model for the analysis of survival and longitudinal binary data with excess zeros

Summary .   Many longitudinal studies generate both the time to some event of interest and repeated measures data. This article is motivated by a study on patients with a renal allograft, in which interest lies in the association between longitudinal proteinuria (a dichotomous variable) measurements and the time to renal graft failure. An interesting feature of the sample at hand is that nearly half of the patients were never tested positive for proteinuria (≥1g/day) during follow-up, which introduces a degenerate part in the random-effects density for the longitudinal process. In this article we propose a two-part shared parameter model framework that effectively takes this feature into account, and we investigate sensitivity to the various dependence structures used to describe the association between the longitudinal measurements of proteinuria and the time to renal graft failure.     

A Motor-Controlled Device for Slow-Motion Cutting with the Ultramicrotome

The preparation of ultrathin sections of high quality with a Porter-Blum microtome requires that the drive wheel be rotated at a slow, uniform rate during actual cutting. A mechanical device to control the motion of the microtome drive wheel consists of a synchronous motor connected to a drive shaft (4 rev/min), which can be intermittently coupled to the rim of the microtome wheel by a friction drive of 1/2-inch diameter. The microtome drive wheel is rotated manually at a rapid rate until the specimen is about to come into contact with the knife; then the mechanical drive is engaged for slow movement during cutting. When the section has been cut, the drive is disengaged by a lever operated with the left hand; after which, the microtome wheel is turned quickly back to the cutting position with the right hand.     

Mechanical energy and power flow analysis of wheelchair use with different camber settings

It has been suggested that minimisation of energy cost is one of the primary determinants of wheelchair designs. Wheel camber is one important parameter related to wheelchair design and its angle may affect usability during manual propulsion. However, there is little available literature addressing the effect of wheel camber on the mechanical energy or power flow involved in manual wheelchair propulsion. Twelve normal subjects (mean age, 22.3 years; SD, 1.6 years) participated in this study. A video-tracking system and an instrumented wheel were used to collect 3D kinematic and kinetic data. Wheel camber of 0° and 15° was chosen to examine the difference between mechanical power and power flow of the upper extremity during manual wheelchair propulsion. The work calculated from power flow and the discrepancy between the mechanical work and power flow work of upper extremity had significantly greater values with increased camber. The upper arm had a larger active muscle power compared with that in the forearm and hand segments. While propelling the increased camber, the magnitude of both the proximal and distal joint power and proximal muscle power was increased in all three segments. While the propelling wheel with camber not only needs a greater energy cost but also there is greater energy loss.     

Integrated environmental risk assessment approach for transportation modes

Abstract

The main aim of this study is to develop and implement new integrated environmental risk assessment for transportation activities. With this purpose, environmental risks occur from transportation activities from different transportation modes which are air, road, sea and rail are determined. Transportation modes are compared with the Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) approach in order to obtain importance weights and impact categories of air, soil and water are used as criteria where the weights are determined with Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP). For the risk assessment process, Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) has been used and prioritizations of risks are calculated with weights of the calculated transportation modes. In the study, integrated multi-criteria decision-making methods with the classic FMEA method with different categories of impacts reveal new multidimensional perspective to classic environmental risk assessment methods.     

Auditory pattern recognition and steering in the cricket Teleogryllus oceanicus

Male crickets Teleogryllus oceanicus (Le Guillou) produce a complex species‐specific calling song with phrases combining groups of single pulses (chirps) and groups of double‐pulses (trills) to attract females, which fly or walk towards singing males. In open‐loop trackball experiments, phonotactic steering responses to normal calling song phrases consisting of chirps and trills are strongest, suggesting that both components are necessary for maximal attractiveness. Sequences of just chirps or trills are less effective in eliciting phonotactic walking and steering. Split‐song paradigms are used to analyze the steering behaviour underlying orientation in more detail. The females' phonotactic steering reflects the alternating acoustic pattern of the split‐song paradigm. Analysis with high temporal resolution demonstrate, that even when the calling song is presented only from one side, the steering velocity and lateral deviation towards the song is modulated by steering events to single‐sound pulses. Therefore, pattern recognition, which integrates the structure of the song, appears not to be directly involved in the rapid steering response. This organization of phonotactic behaviour with a parallel processing of pattern recognition and steering is similar to other cricket species and may allow T. oceanicus females to steer transiently towards distorted song patterns as they occur in natural habitats.     

Anthropometry and numerical taxonomy in clinical genetics: An example of applied biological anthropology

Biological anthropologists can contribute a unique perspective as well as technical expertise to the diagnosis and classification of genetic disorders. Anthropometry has been used with increasing frequency to characterize syndromes and to establish ranges of variation within syndromes. The specific anthropometric-radiologic technique of metacarpophalangeal pattern profile analysis has proven useful in discriminating individuals with the Prader-Labhart-Willi (PLW) syndrome from unaffected persons. Analysis of these data also indicate a negative correlation between age and Z-score transformations of individual hand bone lengths. These findings sound a cautionary note to clinical investigators who would use the Z-score transformation to standardize for age and sex. Problems encountered in the classification of genetic syndromes afford many parallels with those faced by anthropologists in the classification of living and fossil populations. The reliance on “key” traits and the necessity of focusing on pedigree analysis results in a deemphasis of the total range of variation and typological thinking. Application of numerical taxonomic techniques to the classification of the heterogeneous connective tissue disease osteogenesis imperfecta (OI) illustrates the heuristic value of this technique and points out the need to consider phenotypic overlap when defining typologies. Clinical genetics affords just one example of an area in medicine where the unique training and generalist perspective of the biological anthropologist is in demand. The decline in the availability of positions in the traditional academic habitat for biological anthropologists makes it imperative that graduate students be aware of alternatives and that they obtain training in the practical skills which such alternatives will demand.