Active food packaging is a dynamic area where the scientific community and industry have been trying to find new strategies to produce innovative packaging that is economically viable and compatible with conventional production processes. The materials used to develop active packaging can be organized into scavenging and emitting materials, and based on organic and inorganic materials. However, the incorporation of these materials in polymer-based flexible packaging is not always straightforward. The challenges to be faced are mainly related to active agents’ sensitivity to high temperatures or difficulties in dispersing them in the high viscosity polymer matrix. This review provides an overview of methodologies and processes used in the production of active packaging, particularly for the production of active flexible films at the industrial level. The direct incorporation of active agents in polymer films is presented, focusing on the processing conditions and their effect on the active agent, and final application of the packaging material. Moreover, the incorporation of active agents by coating technologies and supercritical impregnation are presented. Finally, the use of carriers to help the incorporation of active agents and several methodologies is discussed. This review aims to guide academic and industrial researchers in the development of active flexible packaging, namely in the selection of the materials, methodologies, and process conditions.
Safety-critical applications often use dependability cases to validate that specified properties are invariant, or to demonstrate a counter example showing how that property might be violated. However, most dependability cases are written with a single product in mind. At the same time, software product lines (families of related software products) have been studied with the goal of modeling variability and commonality, and building family based techniques for both analysis and testing. However, there has been little work on building an end to end dependability case for a software product line (where a property is modeled, a counter example is found and then validated as a true positive via testing), and none that we know of in an emerging safety-critical domain, that of robotic surgery. In this paper, we study a family of surgical robots, that combine hardware and software, and are highly configurable, representing over 1300 unique robots. At the same time, they are considered safety-critical and should have associated dependability cases. We perform a case study to understand how we can bring together lightweight formal analysis, feature modeling, and testing to provide an end to end pipeline to find potential violations of important safety properties. In the process, we learned that there are some interesting and open challenges for the research community, which if solved will lead towards more dependable safety-critical cyber-physical systems. CCS CONCEPTS • Software and its engineering → Software defect analysis; Formal software verification; Model-driven software engineering;
Pectus excavatum (PE) is the most common abnormality of the thoracic cage, whose severity is evaluated by extracting three indices (Haller, correction and asymmetry) from computed tomography (CT) images. To date, this analysis is performed manually, which is tedious and prone to variability. In this paper, a fully automatic framework for PE severity quantification from CT images is proposed, comprising three steps: (1) identification of the sternum's greatest depression point; (2) detection of 8 anatomical keypoints relevant for severity assessment; and (3) measurements' geometric regularization and extraction. The first two steps rely on heatmap regression networks based on the Unet++ architecture, including a novel variant adapted to predict 1D confidence maps. The framework was evaluated on a database with 269 CTs. For comparative purposes, intra-observer, inter-observer and intra-patient variability of the estimated indices were analyzed in a subset of patients. The developed system showed a good agreement with the manual approach (a mean relative absolute error of 4.41%, 5.22% and 1.86% for the Haller, correction, and asymmetry indices, respectively), with limits of agreement comparable to the inter-observer variability. In the intrapatient analysis, the proposed framework outperformed the expert, showing a higher reproducibility between indices extracted from distinct CTs of the same patient. Overall, these results support the feasibility of the developed framework for the automatic, accurate and reproducible quantification of PE severity in a clinical context.
This paper presents a longitudinal user study that investigated the adoption of some Bluetooth based functionalities for a public digital display in a high school. More specifically, the utilization of Bluetooth device naming extended beyond social identity representation and introduced the use of a simple interaction mechanism. The interaction mechanism involves recognizing parts of the Bluetooth device name as explicit instructions to trigger the generation of content on an interactive public display. Together with representatives of the teachers' community, the design team defined some social rules concerning usage in order to account for the specificities of the place. In the user study, three fully functional prototypes were deployed at the school hall of the high school. The functionalities introduced with the different prototypes were: the visualization on the display of the Bluetooth device names, the possibility to contribute to tag clouds and the possibility to choose icons from a given set for self-expression. The results suggest that people appropriated some but not all of the functionalities employed. Implications of our findings to the design of interactive digital displays are pointed out.
The demographic changes demonstrate that the population is aging rapidly. The average life expectancy leads to the development of various diseases related to aging. The dependence and partial or total inability of a person to perform daily activities, requires a care plan to minimize the impact of their addiction. The main objective of assistance is to protect and care of fragile elders. Provide accesses to a walk-in or wheel chair accessible shower is essential for people with bathing disability. Bath is a fundamental action, referring to bedridden elder hygiene daily activities provided by caregivers. According to the context of care there must be provided particular attention to the skin of the elder. The contact of external means with this organ is one of the major concerns while designing this kind of devices as it can cause the thinning, drying and occasionally lesions and ulcers on the organ. This interdisciplinary concept project, on the domain of Ambient Assisted Living, consists in the conceptual design of a mechatronic system especially devoted to the assistance during the bath.
Remote control devices are commonly used for interaction with multimedia equipment and applications (e.g., smart TVs, gaming, etc.). To improve conventional keypad-based technologies, haptic feedback and user input capabilities are being developed for enhancing the UX and providing advanced functionalities in remote control devices. Although the sensation provided by haptic feedback is similar to mechanical push buttons, the former offers much greater flexibility, due to the possibility of dynamically choosing different mechanical effects and associating different functions to each of them. However, selecting the best haptic feedback effects among the wide variety that is currently enabled by recent technologies, remains a challenge for design engineers aiming to optimise the UX. Rich interaction further requires text input capability, which greatly influences the UX. This work is a contribution towards UX evaluation of remote control devices with haptic feedback and text input. A user evaluation study of a wide variety of haptic feedback effects and text input methods is presented, considering different technologies and different number of actuators on a device. The user preferences, given by subjective evaluation scores, demonstrate that haptic feedback has undoubtedly a positive impact on the UX. Moreover, it is also shown that different levels of UX are obtained, according to the technological characteristics of the haptic actuators and how many of them are used on the device.
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