This paper describes the use of Weighed Aggregated Sum Product ASsessment (WASPAS) method to suggest a direction for a powered wheelchair. The method considers five directions as alternatives. The ultrasonic sensors readings are used as criteria weights. The overall score of the alternatives is converted to vector magnitudes and the directions of the alternatives are considered as vector angles. The suggested direction is represented as a resultant vector formed from the vector manipulation of the vectors magnitudes and angles. The suggested direction tends to move a powered wheelchair away from obstacles. The whole system helps disabled wheelchair users to drive their powered wheelchairs using a decision-making process. This paper presents that process along with a new way of selecting a best compromise direction. Three cases are considered, and a best compromised direction is suggested in each case. The user is able to override suggestions from WASPAS by holding a steering joystick in a set position.
Intensive care units (ICUs) are busy and noisy areas where patients and professional staff can be exposed to acoustic noise for long periods of time. In many cases, noise levels significantly exceed the levels recommended by the official health organisations. This situation can affect not only patient recovery but also professional staff, making ICUs unhealthy work and treatment environments. To introduce the measures and reduce the acoustic noise in the ICU, acoustic noise levels should first be measured and then appropriately analysed. However, in most studies dealing with this problem, measurements have been performed manually over short periods, leading to limited data being collected. They are usually followed by insufficient analysis, which in turn results in inadequate measures and noise reduction. This paper reviews recent works dealing with the problem of excessively high noise levels in ICUs and proposes a more thorough analysis of measured data both in the time and frequency domains. Applied frequency domain analysis identifies the cyclic behaviour of the measured sound pressure levels (SPLs) and detects the dominant frequency components in the SPL time series. Moreover, statistical analyses are produced to depict the patterns and SPLs to which patients in ICUs are typically exposed during their stay in the ICU. It has been shown that the acoustic environment is very similar every night, while it can vary significantly during the day or evening periods. However, during most of the observed time, recorded SPLs were significantly above the prescribed values, indicating an urgent need for their control and reduction. To effectively tackle this problem, more detailed information about the nature of noise during each of the analysed periods of the day is needed. This issue will be addressed in the continuation of this project.
SummaryBroadband satellite communication networks, operating at Ka band and above, play a vital role in today's worldwide telecommunication infrastructure. The problem, however, is that rain can be the most dominant impairment factor for radio propagation above 10 GHz. This paper studies bandwidth and time slot allocation problem for rain faded DVB‐RCS satellite networks. We investigate how using finer rain granularity can improve bandwidth utilization in DVB‐RCS return links. The paper presents a mathematical model to calculate the bandwidth on demand. We formulate the radio resource allocation as an optimization problem and propose a novel algorithm for dynamic carrier bandwidth and time slots allocation, which works with constant bit rate type of traffic. We provide theoretical analysis for the time slot allocation problem and show that the proposed algorithm achieves optimal results. The algorithm is evaluated using a MATLAB simulation with historical rain data for the UK. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
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