This study was aimed to establish a standard protocol and to quantitatively assess the reliability of harmonic analysis of the radial pulse wave measured by a harmonic wave analyzer (TD01C system). Both intraobserver and interobserver assessments were conducted to investigate whether the values of harmonics are stable in successive measurements. An intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and a Bland–Altman plot were used for this purpose. For the reliability assessments of the intraobserver and the interobserver, 22 subjects (mean age 45 ± 14 years; 14 males and 8 females) were enrolled. The first eleven harmonics of the radial pulse wave presented excellent repeatability (\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{upgreek} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} }{}$\text {ICCs}>0.9$ \end{document} and \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{upgreek} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} }{}$\text {p}<0.001$ \end{document}) for the intraobserver assessment and high reproducibility (ICCs range from 0.83 to 0.96 and \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{upgreek} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document} }{}$\text {p}<0.001$ \end{document}) for the interobserver assessment. The Bland–Altman plot indicated that more than 90% of harmonic values fell within two standard deviations of the mean difference. Thus, we concluded that the harmonic analysis of the radial pulse wave using the TD01C system is a feasible and reliable method to assess a hemodynamic characteristic in clinical trial.

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Wire breakage and unstable machining drastically reduce the machining efficiency and accuracy in wire electrical discharge machining (WEDM). When a stair-shaped workpiece is machined, poor electrolyte flow around the steps leads to wire rupture or unstable machining. This paper presents a WEDM adaptive control system that maintains optimal machining and improves the stability of machining at the stair section where workpiece thickness changes. A three-layer back propagation neural network is used to estimate the thickness of a workpiece. The developed adaptive control system is executed in the hierarchical structure of three control loops, using fuzzy control strategy. In the first control loop, the total sparking frequency is controlled within a safe level for wire rupture suppression. In the second control loop, the proportion of abnormal sparks is maintained at a pre-determined level for process control purposes. Based on the estimated thickness of a workpiece, adaptive parameter optimisation is carried out to determine the optimal machining settings and to provide the reference targets for the other two control loops. Experimental results demonstrate that the workpiece height can be estimated by using a feed-forward neural network. The developed adaptive control system results in faster machining and better machining stability than does the commonly used gap voltage control system.