Search results

This paper aims to present the design and implementation of VirSense, a novel six-DOF haptic interface system, with an emphasis on its gravity compensation and fixed-base motors.

In this paper, the design and manufacture of the VirSense robot and its comparison with the existing haptic devices are presented. The kinematic analysis of the robot, design of the components, and manufacturing of the robot are explained as well.

The proposed system is employed to generate a Virtual Sense (VirSense) with fixed-base motors and a spring compensation system for counterbalancing the torques generated by the weight of the links. The fixed bases of the motors reduce the system's effective mass and inertia, which is an important factor in haptic interface systems. A novel cabling system is used to transmit the motor torques to the end-effector. The spring-based gravity compensation system causes more reduction in the effective mass and inertia.

This paper provides the details of the VirSense haptic device, its gravity compensation system, and a novel cabling power transmission.

Currently, the health system is a treatment-oriented system focused on service providers. In this system, the main focus is on the health market, with little attention on insured. One way to get out of existing conditions is to empower the insured in order to involve them actively in maintaining and improving health. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This qualitative study was done using the content analysis method. Based on the purposive sampling method and theoretical saturation criterion, 24 individuals including 12 health insurance experts and 12 insured participated in the study in 2018. The semi-structured interview method was used to collect data. Data were analyzed using MAXQDA10 software.

Having analyzed the interviews, 750 codes were obtained. These codes were categorized into two categories of “insurance experts” and “insured” and ten subcategories of “informing and educating, cost reduction, intersectional activities, expectations from the insured, services package, access to services, inability to pay costs, participation, and expectations from the insurance organization.”

This qualitative study was conducted to assess and determine the effective strategies for empowering the insured under health insurance. The results of this study are helpful to the health insurance organizations and health decision makers to detect the effective ways to develop the quality of insurance services, improve the status of insured, and increase access to health care goods and services.

According to the Indian Sign Language Research and Training Centre (ISLRTC), India has approximately 300 certified human interpreters to help people with hearing loss. This paper aims to address the issue of Indian Sign Language (ISL) sentence recognition and translation into semantically equivalent English text in a signer-independent mode.

This study presents an approach that translates ISL sentences into English text using the MobileNetV2 model and Neural Machine Translation (NMT). The authors have created an ISL corpus from the Brown corpus using ISL grammar rules to perform machine translation. The authors’ approach converts ISL videos of the newly created dataset into ISL gloss sequences using the MobileNetV2 model and the recognized ISL gloss sequence is then fed to a machine translation module that generates an English sentence for each ISL sentence.

As per the experimental results, pretrained MobileNetV2 model was proven the best-suited model for the recognition of ISL sentences and NMT provided better results than Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) to convert ISL text into English text. The automatic and human evaluation of the proposed approach yielded accuracies of 83.3 and 86.1%, respectively.

It can be seen that the neural machine translation systems produced translations with repetitions of other translated words, strange translations when the total number of words per sentence is increased and one or more unexpected terms that had no relation to the source text on occasion. The most common type of error is the mistranslation of places, numbers and dates. Although this has little effect on the overall structure of the translated sentence, it indicates that the embedding learned for these few words could be improved.

Sign language recognition and translation is a crucial step toward improving communication between the deaf and the rest of society. Because of the shortage of human interpreters, an alternative approach is desired to help people achieve smooth communication with the Deaf. To motivate research in this field, the authors generated an ISL corpus of 13,720 sentences and a video dataset of 47,880 ISL videos. As there is no public dataset available for ISl videos incorporating signs released by ISLRTC, the authors created a new video dataset and ISL corpus.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate nonlinear vibrations of triple-walled carbon nanotubes buried within Pasternak foundation carrying viscous fluids.

Considering the geometry of nanotubes, the governing equations were initially derived using Timoshenko and modified couple stress theories and by taking into account Von-Karman expressions. Then, by determining boundary conditions, type of fluid motion, Knudsen number and, ultimately, fluid viscosity, the principal equation was solved using differential quadrature method, and linear and nonlinear nanotube frequencies were calculated.

The results indicated that natural frequency is decreased as the fluid velocity and aspect ratio increase. Moreover, as the aspect ratio is increased, the results converge for simple and fixed support boundary conditions, and the ratio of nonlinear to linear frequencies approaches. Natural frequency of vibrations and critical velocity increase as Pasternak coefficient and characteristic length increase. As indicated by the results, by assuming a non-uniform velocity for the fluid and a slip boundary condition at Kn = 0.05, reductions of 10.714 and 28.714% were observed in the critical velocity, respectively. Moreover, the ratio of nonlinear to linear base frequencies decreases as the Winkler and Pasternak coefficients, maximum deflection of the first wall and characteristic length are increased in couple stress theory.

This paper is a numerical investigation of nonlinear vibration analysis for triple-walled carbon nanotubes conveying viscous fluid.

This study aims to examine the experiences of UK higher education students and the impact that emergency-imposed changes had on their learning, teaching and assessment (LTA) during the lockdown. It reflects on the views of students on how these changes impacted their education and personal circumstances. It makes suggestions, based on student observations, on how educators might support students’ LTA learning experiences more effectively.

The study uses an anonymous online questionnaire, imposed by lockdown and closure of universities, to gather the views of HE students across the UK on how COVID-19 and lockdown affected their education and personal circumstances. Using a cross-sectional study, participants were asked to complete several questions, providing quantitative and qualitative data which is analysed for the study. A total of 349 participants took part in the questionnaire and data were analysed descriptively.

Key findings suggest that the use of online virtual classrooms as a substitute for traditional face-to-face LTA has its positives and its negatives. The most significant positives are the “flexible assessments” and “digital content” and, in contrast, one of the significant drawbacks is the lack of interactions, this being true for both male and female students. However, as compared to females, males found to be missing “the campus life” more during the lockdown. Finally, the majority of student felt that there was a lack of support from the university and teaching staff during the lockdown. Universities’ governance must take control of how this issue is driven forward and learn from the experience of students.

The study makes three contributions: firstly, using students’ views to open a fresh debate on LTA approaches during the pandemic; secondly, examining the impact on student experiences due to the changes introduced because of lockdown; and finally, suggesting strategies to be implemented by HE management based on the opinions of participating students.