Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) is a relatively recent term coined to represent living cultural expressions and practices, which are recognised by communities as distinct aspects of identity. The safeguarding of ICH has become a topic of international concern primarily through the work of UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation). However, little research has been done on the role of new technologies in the preservation and transmission of intangible heritage. The chapter examines resources, projects and technologies providing access to ICH and identifies gaps and constraints. It draws on research conducted within the scope of the collaborative research project, i-Treasures. In so doing, it covers the state of the art in technologies that could be employed for access, capture and analysis of ICH in order to highlight how specific new technologies can contribute to the transmission and safeguarding of ICH.
In this paper, a customizable wearable 3D-printed bionic arm is designed, fabricated, and optimized for a right arm amputee. An experimental test has been conducted for the user, where control of the artificial bionic hand is accomplished successfully using surface electromyography (sEMG) signals acquired by a multi-channel wearable armband. The 3D-printed bionic arm was designed for the low cost of 295 USD, and was lightweight at 428 g. To facilitate a generic control of the bionic arm, sEMG data were collected for a set of gestures (fist, spread fingers, wave-in, wave-out) from a wide range of participants. The collected data were processed and features related to the gestures were extracted for the purpose of training a classifier. In this study, several classifiers based on neural networks, support vector machine, and decision trees were constructed, trained, and statistically compared. The support vector machine classifier was found to exhibit an 89.93% success rate. Real-time testing of the bionic arm with the optimum classifier is demonstrated.
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