Search results

The purpose of this paper is to make compliant training control of exoskeleton for ankle joint with electromyograph (EMG)-torque interface.

A virtual compliant mapping which is modeled by mass-spring-damper system is incorporated into the whole system at the reference input. The EMG-torque interface contains both data acquisition and torque estimator/predictor, and extreme learning machine is utilized for joint torque estimation/prediction from multiple channels of EMG signals.

The reference ankle joint angle to follow is produced from the compliance mapping whose input is the measured/predicted torque on healthy subjects. The control system works well with the desired angle to track. In the actuation level, the input torque to drive the ankle exoskeleton is less than the actual torque of the subject(s). This may have positive influence on diminishing overshoot of input torque from motors and protect the actuators. The torque prediction and final tracking control performance demonstrate the efficiency of the presented architecture.

This work can be beneficial to compliant training of ankle exoskeleton system for pilots and enhance current training control module in rehabilitation.

Examines the tenth published year of the ITCRR. Runs the whole gamut of textile innovation, research and testing, some of which investigates hitherto untouched aspects. Subjects discussed include cotton fabric processing, asbestos substitutes, textile adjuncts to cardiovascular surgery, wet textile processes, hand evaluation, nanotechnology, thermoplastic composites, robotic ironing, protective clothing (agricultural and industrial), ecological aspects of fibre properties – to name but a few! There would appear to be no limit to the future potential for textile applications.

To dilute the financial difficulties in agricultural production and operation, the Chinese government has actively explored and developed rural supply chain finance (RSCF) service systems. The purpose of this study is to evaluate and analyze the performance of RSCF systems in China.

To evaluate the performance of RSCF systems in China, this study proposes a two-stage data envelopment analysis model. Compared with other models, the model proposed in this study considers not only the technical gap between RSCF systems but also the maximization of intermediate output to conform to the practice of RSCF.

Based on the empirical analysis, this study draws the following four conclusions. First, the overall efficiency of China's RSCF systems is low, and there remains great potential for improvement. Second, the technology gap ratio index score and meta-frontier efficiency of RSCF systems in Central China are the lowest in all regions, indicating that the technical level of RSCF systems in Central China is the lowest. Third, the relationship between rural residents' disposable income and the efficiency of RSCF systems is U-shaped, and the efficiency of RSCF systems in the high-income group is far greater than that of other income groups. Finally, the main reason for the lack of efficiency in RSCF seems to lie in management and technology.

This study divides all RSCF systems into four types according to management potential and technical potential, and recommend corresponding improvement suggestions for different kinds of RSCF systems.

The purpose of this paper is to study online clothing consumers' behaviour and their visual attention mechanism to provide objective and quantitative evidences for the display and sales of online clothing.

Firstly, this paper conducted a Focus Group Methodology and questionnaire survey to obtain concern factors of online clothing. Secondly, the online clothing's bottom-up visual stimulation and consumer's top-down expectations were analysed, and proposed the hypotheses about significant stimulus of clothing and consumer's emotional experience. Thirdly, the online clothing consumer's visual attention rules and related qualitative results were discussed, and proposed visual attention law for online clothing. Finally, took the company's 84th quarter clothing design practices as research projects, all the hypotheses were demonstrated through eye movement physiology experiments, online clothing trial release and node sales data.

Online clothing has unique visual display ways compared with other online products such as online advertising, brands and food packaging. Clothing patterns of unfamiliar (fresh) font shapes are more attractive than the patterns of familiar fonts. The cause of the bottom-up visual attention bias is the contrast between clothing features, not the absolute stimulus intensity of the features themselves. Clothing factors can change their emotional experience from no difference to significant difference under the influence of other clothing factors.

Put forward hypotheses of online clothing consumer behaviour and its visual attention mechanism, provided objective and quantitative evidences through eye tracker.

In recent years, the rapid growth of big data has presented immense potential for business applications as well as raised great interest from academia. In response to this emerging phenomenon, the purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive literature review of big data.

A bibliometric method was used to analyze the articles obtained from the Scopus database published between 2013 and 2018. A sample size of 4,070 articles was evaluated using SciVal metrics.

The analysis revealed an array of interesting findings as follows: the number of publications related to big data increased steadily over the past six years, though the rate of increase has slowed since 2014; the scope of big data research is quite broad in regards to both research domains and countries; despite a large volume of publications, the overall performance of big data research is not well presented as measured by the field-weighted citation impact metric; collaboration between different institutions, particularly in the form of international collaboration and academic–corporate collaboration, has played an important role in improving the performance of big data research.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to provide a holistic view of the big data research. The insights obtained from the analysis are instrumental for both academics and practitioners.

Organisational learning plays a critical role for firms to keep abreast of a supply chain environment filled with volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA). This study investigates the extent to which supply chain learning (SCL) affects operational resilience under such circumstances.

This study developed a research framework and underlying hypotheses based on SCL and information processing theory (IPT). An empirical test was carried out using secondary data derived from the “Supply Chain Policy” launched by the Chinese government and two large related conferences.

SCL positively relates to operational resilience, and several moderators influence the relationship between them. The authors argue that digital-technological diversity could weaken the role of SCL in operational resilience, whereas customer concentration, and participating in a pilot programme could enhance the effect of SCL.

Firms should embrace the power of SCL in building resilience in the VUCA era. Meanwhile, they should be cautious of a digital-technological diversification strategy, appraise the customer base profile and proactively engage in pilot programmes.

This research develops the SCL construct further in the context of China and empirically measures its power on operational resilience using a unique dataset. This contributes to the theorisation of SCL.

Smart contracts are written in high-level programming languages, compiled into Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) bytecode, deployed onto blockchain systems and called with the corresponding address by transactions. The deployed smart contracts are immutable, even if there are bugs or vulnerabilities. Therefore, it is critical to verify smart contracts before deployment. This paper aims to help developers effectively and efficiently locate potential defects in smart contracts.

GethReplayer, a smart contract testing method based on transaction replay, is proposed. It constructs a parallel transaction execution environment with two virtual machines to compare the execution results. It uses the real existing transaction data on Ethereum and the source code of the tested smart contacts as inputs, conditionally substitutes the bytecode of the tested smart contract input into the testing EVM, and then monitors the environmental information to check the correctness of the contract.

Experiments verified that the proposed method is effective in smart contract testing. Virtual environmental information has a significant effect on the success of transaction replay, which is the basis for the performance of the method. The efficiency of error locating was approximately 14 times faster with the proposed method than without. In addition, the proposed method supports gas consumption analysis.

This paper addresses the difficulty that developers encounter in testing smart contracts before deployment and focuses on helping develop smart contracts with as few defects as possible. GethReplayer is expected to be an alternative solution for smart contract testing and provide inspiration for further research.

This paper aims to explore the nexus between family involvement and environmental, social and governance (ESG) performance based on socioemotional wealth theory, and it also analyzes the potential influence mechanism.

Based on the categorization of China Stock Market & Accounting Research database, this study divides the Chinese listed firms into family and nonfamily firms and applies multiple regression methods to test the theoretical hypotheses.

Family involvement can incentivize corporations to enhance corporate transparency, which can in turn enhance their ESG performance. The role of family involvement in bolstering corporate ESG performance is negatively contingent on external financing constraints.

There are insufficient studies on the nexus between family ownership and ESG performance. The findings provide insights into helping policymakers formulate targeted measures to encourage corporations to be more active in promoting ESG initiatives.

For online experiential products, tactile attributes are important but hard-to-achieve features. This research aims to explore consumers' emotional experiences by incorporating tactile attributes into the online clothing shopping scenario.

This paper presents two online shopping experiments by consumers who purchase online clothing: one experiment involves subjects browsing clothing products on a computer screen; the other one involves subjects touching the clothing fabric while browsing a corresponding product on a computer screen. Based on the stimulus–organism–response (S-O-R) model, a physiological polygraph was used to record the emotional experience of subjects under the stimuli of “sight” and “sight + touch.”

(1) Subjects had a more positive emotional arousal under the stimuli of “sight + touch”; (2) the visual merchandising of clothing and expected touch task affect subjects' overall emotional experience with clothing, and with a good visual experience and expected tactile experience, the subjects showed a more positive emotional valence under the stimuli of “sight + touch”; (3) differing from previous research, this experimental data only supports the hypothesis that the skin conductance indicator is related to the level of emotional arousal, without supporting its correlation with emotional valence. However, the heart rate indicator is correlated with emotional valence but not with emotional arousal.

This work proposes a way to study the tactile attributes of online clothing and enriches the theoretical framework of polygraph and the S-O-R model for the research of online experiential products, and in terms of application, it sheds light on sales strategies of online experiential products for retailers and brand owners.

This paper aims to systematically demonstrate a methodology to determine the relative and absolute encapsulation efficiencies (α_Re and α_Ab) for thermally- and chemically-robust inorganic pigments, typically like ZrSiO₄-based pigments, thereby enhancing their coloring performance.

The authors designed a route, surplus alkali-decomposition and subsequently strong-acid dissolution (SAD2) to completely decompose three classic zircon pigments (Pr–ZrSiO₄, Fe₂O₃@ZrSiO₄ and CdS@ZrSiO₄) into clear solutions and preferably used inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES) to determine the concentrations of host elements and chromophores, thereby deriving the numeric data and interrelation of α_Re and α_Ab.

Zircon pigments can be thoroughly decomposed into some dissoluble zirconate–silicate resultants by SAD2 at a ratio of the fluxing agent to pigment over 6. ICP-OES is proved more suitable than some other quantification techniques in deriving the compositional concentrations, thereby the values of α_Re and α_Ab, and their transformation coefficient K_RA, which maintains stably within 0.8–0.9 in Fe₂O₃@ZrSiO₄ and CdS@ZrSiO₄ and is slightly reduced to 0.67–0.85 in Pr–ZrSiO₄.

The SAD2 method and encapsulation efficiencies are well applicable for both zircon pigments and the other pigmental or non-pigmental inhomogeneous systems in characterizing their accurate composition.

The authors herein first proposed strict definitions for the relative and absolute encapsulation efficiencies for inorganic pigments, developed a relatively stringent methodology to determine their accurate values and interrelation.