A fine motor test involves the manipulation of smaller objects with fingers, hands, and wrists. This test is an integral part of the evaluation of an upper extremity function. Nine Hole Peg Test (NHPT) is one among such tests which assess the ability to manipulate pegs with the thumb and finger. There is a need to develop a fine motor assessment tool which is reproducible and mimics closely the natural movement of hands. The aim of this work is to develop an electronic pegboard which is easy to administer and efficient in terms of time. Pegboard device is modified and standardized by (1) Adding electronic circuits to custom-made pegboard and programmed using a microcontroller (ATmega2560), (2) Following a specific sequence in placing and picking the pegs from the board, and (3) Using Infrared sensor and robust algorithm to ensure one peg movement at a time. The setup is administered on 15 healthy participants (nine females, six males aged between 21 and 80) and the outcome is compared with the results of traditional NHPT. Predefined sequence in moving the pegs and electronic timer features provide reliable results for repeated measurements and facilitate storing test score in a digital repository. This data could be used as reference data during the follow-up visits. The maximum difference between the measured timing between the present setup and traditional NHPT is about 6.7%. It is important to note that, due to inherent delay (response time) in the traditional NHPT, when compared to present setup the measured timing is always on the higher side. Nondependency on the manual stopwatch to record the time and hands-free of any wearable device are the advantages of the present setup.
A street lighting system is a very essential part of the highways and streets of a smart city. Managing power consumption and maintenance of a street light system will be a challenging task in huge countries. The proposed work is mainly focused on the minimization of power consumption in the implementation of a smart street lighting system. Also, use a mobile application for setting up the brightness levels of the lamps in an encrypted form so that an unauthorized person will not be able to modify the settings. In the existing streetlight system, wireless sensors are installed to control and monitor the streetlamps. In the proposed system, using an nRF24L01 radio transceiver module, a secured communication link is established to operate the streetlights depending on the ambient weather conditions, movement of humans, vehicles and any other objects. A failsafe mechanism is implemented in the modules for conventional lamp operation in the case of module failures. Light-dependent resistor (LDR) is used to determine the ambient brightness levels to automatically turn on/off the streetlights based on weather conditions and lighting on roads. Using smartphones, we access and control the brightness information from the master node at which the nRF24L01 radio transceiver module is installed, and the same information is relayed to all the slave nodes. The results show that we could effectively monitor and control the brightness of streetlights in a secure way and there is a significant amount of power savings. The proposed system saves the average powers of 53.45%, 44.76%, 39.39%, and 32.25% respectively for 10%, 20%, 30%, and 50% idle mode brightness compared to the state-of-the-art techniques present in the literature.
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