EMBEDDED – IEEE & Final Year PROJECTS

Abstract

 Remote monitoring of photovoltaic systems is critically important for the users. The performance of each component existing in these systems should be observable. In this study, a cheap and easily mountable remote monitoring design for low cost photovoltaic systems located near urban areas is proposed. With this design, it is aimed to transmit collected information at the remote solar energy station with MPI (Message Passing Interface). A design has been done for a remote monitoring of a 1kW photovoltaic system. With this design, panel and battery voltages, temperature and humidity can be observed remotely. An embedded system cluster consisting of single-board computers has been used in the design. This cluster is composed of a center single-board computer and remote node single-board computers as many as the photovoltaic system count. Collected information is broadcasted over internet using the single-board computer at the center.

Download PDF

Abstract

 One of the best ways to obtain health information is from an electrocardiogram (ECG). Through an ECG, characteristics such as patients’ heartbeats, heart conditions, and heart disease can be analyzed. Unfortunately, most available healthcare devices do not provide clinical data such as information regarding patients’ heart activities. Many researchers have tried to solve this problem by inventing wearable heart monitoring systems with a chest strap or wristband, but their performances were not feasible for practical applications. Thus, the aim of this study is to build a new system to monitor heart activity through ECG signals. The proposed system consists of capacitive-coupled electrodes embedded in an armband. It is considered to be a reliable, robust, and low-power-transmission ECG monitoring system. The reliability of this system was achieved by the careful placement of sensors in the armband. Bluetooth low energy (BLE) was used as the protocol for data transmission; this protocol was proposed to develop the low-power-transmission system. For robustness, the proposed system is equipped with analysis capabilities–e.g., real-time heartbeat detection and a filter algorithm to ignore distractions from body movements or noise from the environment.

Download PDF

Abstract

Energy harvesting systems that couple solar panels with supercapacitor buffers offer an attractive option for powering computational systems deployed in “field settings,” where power infrastructure is inaccessible. Supercapacitors offer a particularly compelling advantage over electrochemical batteries for such settings because of their ability to survive many more charge-discharge cycles. We share UR-SolarCap – a versatile open source design for such a harvesting system that targets embedded system applications requiring power in the 1–10 W range. Our system is designed for high efficiency and controllability and, importantly, supports auto-wakeup from a state of complete energy depletion. This paper summarizes our design methodology, and the rationale behind our design and configuration decisions. Results from the operation and testing of a system realized with our design demonstrate: (a) an achievable harvester efficiency of 85%, (b) the ability to maintain sustained operation over a two week period when the solar panel and buffer are sized appropriately, and (c) a robust auto-wakeup functionality that resumes system operation upon availability of harvestable energy after a period in which the system has been forced into a dormant state because of a lack of usable energy. To facilitate the use of the system by researchers exploring embedded system applications in environments that lack a power infrastructure, our designs are available for download as an archive containing design schematics, PCB files, firmware code, and a component list for assembly of the system. Additionally, a limited number of pre-assembled kits are available upon request.

Download PDF

Abstract

The main objective of this research is design and realization of real-time monitoring and alarming system for patient health, especially for patients suffering from diseases during their normal life. The proposed system has an embedded microcontroller connected to a set of medical sensors (related to the patient case) and a wireless communication module (Bluetooth). Each patient is considered as a node in a wireless sensor network and connected to a central node installed at the medical center through an internet connection. The embedded microcontroller checks if the patient health status is going well or not by analyzing the scanned medical signals. If the analysis results are abnormal, the embedded unit uses the patient’s phone to transmit these signals directly to the medical center. In this case, the doctor will send medical advice to the patient to save his/her life. The implemented prototype has been tested and calibrated with standard devices. The experimental results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed system that is accurate in scanning, clear in monitoring, intelligent in decision making, reliable in communication, and cheap (about 100 US$).

Download PDF

Abstract

This letter presents a novel architecture for evaluating the success of picking operations that are executed by industrial robots. It is formed by a cascade of machine learning algorithms (kNN and SVM) and uses information obtained by a 6 axis force/torque sensor and, if available, information from the built-in sensors of the robotic gripper. Beyond measuring the success or failure of the entire operation, this architecture makes it possible to detect in real-time when an object is slipping during the picking. Therefore, force and torque signatures are collected during the picking movement of the robot, which is decomposed into five different stages that allows to characterize distinct levels of success over time. Several trials were performed using an industrial robot with two different grippers for picking a long and flexible object. The experiments demonstrate the reliability of the proposed approach under different picking scenarios since, it obtained a testing performance (in terms of accuracy) up to 99.5% of successful identification of the result of the picking operations, considering an universe of 400 attempts.

Download PDF

Abstract

One of the strategies being used over the last years to increase the user commitment and motivation on rehabilitation systems is the use of virtual reality (VR) environments. In addition to contributing to motivation, these systems can simulate real life activities and provide means to measure and evaluate user performance. The use of natural interaction devices originally conceived to the game market allowed the development of low-cost and minimally invasive systems. With the advent of interaction devices based on electromyography, the electromyographic signals of the user can also be used on the natural interaction process. This work has as goal to verify if, by using a evaluation model, is possible to evaluate user performance in real time through gesture recognition by means of an electromyography device attached to a rehabilitation system.

Download PDF

Abstract

In this paper, ZigBee-VLC Transmitter and Receiver are designed, implemented and tested. By utilizing the ZigBee-VLC Transmitter and Receiver, commissioning procedures for light control network configuration are simplified and commissioning time is drastically reduced. With this configuration, lighting control network configured to use a maximum of 216 lighting is possible. As a result of this research, the transmitter is complete with ZigBee-VLC features implemented in the Single MCU without rising production costs and the 1-board solution receiver including a ZigBee and VLC functions are implemented. In addition, as a result of the test work using the light control app, dramatically shortening commissioning time, easy lighting control is possible was confirmed.

Download PDF

Abstract

The development of telemonitoring via wireless body area networks (WBANs) is an evolving direction in personalized medicine and home-based mobile health. A WBAN consists of small, intelligent medical sensors which collect physiological parameters such as electrocardiogram, electroencephalography, and blood pressure. The recorded physiological signals are sent to a coordinator via wireless technologies, and are then transmitted to a healthcare monitoring center. One of the most widely used wireless technologies in WBANs is ZigBee because it is targeted at applications that require a low data rate and long battery life. However, ZigBee-based WBANs face severe interference problems in the presence of WiFi networks. This problem is caused by the fact that most ZigBee channels overlap with WiFi channels, severely affecting the ability of healthcare monitoring systems to guarantee reliable delivery of physiological signals. To solve this problem, we have developed an algorithm that controls the load in WiFi networks to guarantee the delay requirement for physiological signals, especially for emergency messages, in environments with coexistence of ZigBee-based WBAN and WiFi. Since WiFi applications generate traffic with different delay requirements, we focus only on WiFi traffic that does not have stringent timing requirements. In this paper, therefore, we propose an adaptive load control algorithm for ZigBee-based WBAN/WiFi coexistence environments, with the aim of guaranteeing that the delay experienced by ZigBee sensors does not exceed a maximally tolerable period of time. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm guarantees the delay performance of ZigBee-based WBANs by mitigating the effects of WiFi interference in various scenarios.

Download PDF

Abstract

Observing activities of working vehicles on a work site, such as a factory, is important in regard to managing the lifetime of vehicles and achieving high operational availability. However, it is a problem that an administrator cannot completely grasp the activities of a working vehicle. Existing systems cannot cover a large area, particularly in an indoor environment. A system is proposed for monitoring operating activities of working vehicles, regardless of whether they are operating indoors or outdoors. The system calculates the activity rate of a vehicle by analyzing the topology of a network configured by the wireless technology ZigBee. In addition, it was experimentally verified that network topology and RSSI can be used to estimate activities of working vehicles.

Download PDF

Abstract

With the rapid development of wireless communication technology, people’s life has undergone great changes. In recent years, the comfort and safety of the building environment have become a universal concern. However, building fire is the greatest threat to building safety. In consideration of the current issues on building security, the design applies the important part, the wireless sensor network technology to building fire safety monitoring system and establishes the wireless sensor network by using ZigBee technology and ZigBee-WiFi gateway which transforms ZigBee network into WiFi network, In addition, taking advantage of the ZigBee wireless sensor network locates a fire place so that the fire information is uploaded to the handheld terminal and the building security personnel work out the retreat and rescue plan in time. This paper provides a new solution for building fire monitoring system.

Download PDF

Abstract

One of the biggest challenges that consumers and service providers have is connecting a wide range of consumer electronics in a smart home environment. Resource planning and bandwidth allocation for these networks in the license free Industrial Scientific Medical (ISM) frequency band can not be guaranteed. In this paper, we propose improvements for ZigBee physical layer in order to cope with coexistence issue. A detailed MATLAB/Simulink simulator is developed to achieve our objective. In order to balance the trade-off between multipath effects and receiver complexity, the spreading gain of the conventional Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) scheme is limited to 9dB. Unfortunately, this reduces the interference suppression capability of spread spectrum schemes. Here, we propose a low complex spread spectrum scheme for the ZigBee physical layer. The proposed scheme is shown to be robust against multipath fading and interference with a low complexity.

Download PDF

Abstract

An interference-mitigated ZigBee-based advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) solution, namely IMM2ZM, has been developed for high-traffics smart metering (SM). The IMM2ZM incorporates multiradios multichannels network architecture and features an interference mitigation design by using multiobjective optimization. To evaluate the performance of the network due to interference, the channel-swapping time (Tcs) has been investigated. Analysis shows that when the sensitivity (PRχ) is less than -12 dBm, Tcs increases tremendously. Evaluation shows that there are significant improvements in the performance of the application-layer transmission rate (σ) and the average delay (D). The improvement figures are σ > ~300% and D > 70% in a 10-floor building, σ > ~280 % and D > 65% in a 20-floor building, and σ > ~270% and D > 56% in a 30-floor building. Further analysis reveals that IMM2ZM results in typically less than 0.43 s delay for a 30-floor building under interference. This performance fulfills the latency requirement of less than 0.5 s for SMs in the USA (Magazine of Department of Energy Communications, USA, 2010). The IMM2ZM provides a high-traffics interference-mitigated ZigBee AMI solution.

Download PDF

Abstract

Indoor Air Quality (IAQ) is an urgent topic nowadays. It is concluded that 90% of human’s life is spent indoor. However, it is commonly known that materials used in construction or furniture is often detected to release Volatile organic compounds (VOC) which affect IAQ significantly and lead to dizziness, respiratory irritation, fatigue, asthma and allergic airway disease and even cancer. As a result, IAQ monitoring system assists of improving IAQ, and wireless sensor network is an efficient method for building up the system network. In this paper, a new ZigBee network for IAQ monitoring system is designed. A Multi-criteria decision-making method VIKOR is used to figure out the best parameters of the MAC layer and CSMA/CA mechanism under this environment. The network designed can achieve 35% improvement of energy saving without affecting the latency and throughput performance compared with the commonly-used TOPSIS method.

Download PDF

Abstract

Time is of the essence when ambulances are utilized to save people’s lives, but when an ambulance needs to pass through a junction, its speed often must be reduced due to traffic. This complicates situations when the patient in the ambulance needs urgent treatment that can be administered only at a hospital. Due to the unavailability of advanced medical procedures in an ambulance, there is the possibility for patients to suffer a loss of life.

Download PDF

Abstract

Nowadays, home appliances manufacturers are increasingly relying on wireless sensor network and single chip embedded technologies to build smart environment. Many existing systems are already in the market, however, they were designed without envisioning the need of residents with special needs. This work presents a framework that enables the integration and control of devices within a smart home environment for residents with disabilities. The framework supports the integration of multiple control devices for different residents with different disabilities. Moreover, the work addresses the safety of the users by providing warnings and notifications in case of an emergency. A prototype was designed, implemented and tested.

Download PDF

Abstract

The rapid development of wireless communication technology facilitates the realization of the Internet-of-Things (IoT). Automatic configuration and smart connection system have become relative important issue in accordance with extensive applications of IoT, and the energy saving concepts. Therefore, this work presents the integration of ???Automatic Configuration and Wisdom Connection System??? with Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), IoT and ZigBee technology, to actualize automatic configuration based on a received signal strength indicator (Received Signal Strength Indicator, RSSI), lighting auto-configuration area, regional allocation, and sub-areas. The proposed ???Automatic Configuration and Wisdom Connection System??? automatically configures different lightings to the same position within in the range ???3dBm when the RSSI value varies only slightly. The system is configured to the same lighting site within the experimental environment when the sub-area range set ???3dBm. This study presents a significant contribution to new configuration of objects in Things (Web of Objects), context awareness control, and optimization of network control platform.

Download PDF

Abstract

This paper aims to determine the distance between the mobile sensor node (i.e., bicycle) and the anchor node (i.e., coach) in outdoor and indoor environments. Two approaches were considered to estimate such a distance. The first approach was based on the traditional channel propagation model that used the log-normal shadowing model (LNSM), while the second approach was based on a proposed hybrid particle swarm optimization-artificial neural network (PSO-ANN) algorithm to improve the distance estimation accuracy of the mobile node. The first method estimated the distance according to the LNSM and the measured received signal strength indicator (RSSI) of the anchor node, which in turn used the ZigBee wireless protocol. The LNSM parameters were measured based on the RSSI measurements in both outdoor and indoor environments. A feed-forward neural network type and the Levenberg-Marquardt training algorithm were used to estimate the distance between the mobile node and the coach. The hybrid PSO-ANN algorithm significantly improved the distance estimation accuracy more than the traditional LNSM method without additional components. The hybrid PSO-ANN algorithm achieved a mean absolute error of 0.022 and 0.208 m for outdoor and indoor environments, respectively. The effect of anchor node density on localization accuracy was also investigated in the indoor environment.

Download PDF

Abstract

Wireless mesh networking extends the communication range among cooperating multiple low-power wireless radio transceivers and is useful for collecting data from sensors widely distributed over a large area. By integrating an off-the-shelf wireless design, such as the XBee module, development of sensor systems with mesh networking capability can be accelerated. This study introduces an open-source wireless mesh network (WMN) module, which integrates the functions of network discovery, automatic routing control, and transmission scheduling. In addition, this design is open source in order to promote the use of wireless mesh networking for environmental monitoring applications. Testing of the design and the proposed networking module is reported. The proposed wireless mesh networking module was evaluated and compared with XBee. The average package delivery ratio and standard deviation of the proposed WMN module and the XBee are 94.09%, 91.19%, 5.14%, and 10.25%, respectively, in a 20 node experiment. The proposed system was demonstrated to have the advantages of low-cost combined with high reliability and performance, and can aid scientists in implementing monitoring applications without the complications of complex wireless networking issues.

Download PDF

Abstract

A smart helmet has been developed that is able to detect of hazardous events in the mines industry. In the development of helmet, we have considered the three main types of hazard such as air quality, helmet removal, and collision (miners are struck by an object). The first is the concentration level of the hazardous gases such as CO, SO2, NO2, and particulate matter. The second hazardous event was classified as a miner removing the mining helmet off their head. An IR sensor was developed unsuccessfully but an off-the shelf IR sensor was then used to successfully determine when the helmet is on the miner’s head. The third hazardous event is defined as an event where miners are struck by an object against the head with a force exceeding a value of 1000 on the HIC (Head Injury Criteria). An accelerometer was used to measure the acceleration of the head and the HIC was calculated in software. The layout of the visualisation software was completed, however the implementation was unsuccessful. Tests were successfully done to calibrate the accelerometer. PCB’s that were designed and made included a breakout board and a prototype board. A whole software implementation was done based on Contiki operating system in order to do the control of the measuring of sensors and of calculations done with the measured values. This paper presents the undertaken design detailing solutions to issues raised in previous research.

Download PDF

Abstract

Many devices and solutions for remote electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring have been proposed in the literature. These solutions typically have a large marginal cost per added sensor and are not seamlessly integrated with other smart home solutions. Here, we propose an ECG remote monitoring system that is dedicated to non-technical users in need of long-term health monitoring in residential environments and is integrated in a broader Internet-of-Things (IoT) infrastructure. Our prototype consists of a complete vertical solution with a series of advantages with respect to the state of the art, considering both the prototypes with integrated front end and prototypes realized with off-the-shelf components: 1) ECG prototype sensors with record-low energy per effective number of quantized levels; 2) an architecture providing low marginal cost per added sensor/user; and 3) the possibility of seamless integration with other smart home systems through a single IoT infrastructure.

Download PDF

Abstract

This paper deals with a novel sensor network system designed for gathering disaster information including physical environmental information and potential signals of survivers. The system consists of numerous sensor probes and a central database server. The sensor probes organize their own ZigBee network, which is managed by the central database server. The server is connected to the Internet to be able to provide total disaster information worldwide. In this paper, the authors introduce their development and show some basic performance test to verify its potential usability.

Download PDF

Abstract

A cyber-physically organized swarm of insect biobots or biological robots can aid first responders in search-and-rescue scenarios after natural disasters or earthquakes by establishing an under-rubble sensor network. In such a network, the nodes are represented by the insect biobots equipped with electronic backpacks utilizing a system-on-chip. This application requires effective real-time localization of the mobile sensor nodes. Radio signal strength (RSS) is a measurement of the received signal power, and can be used in estimating the distance between two nodes, which then can help localize the biobotic sensor nodes in the future. This paper investigates RSS variability and its suitability for biobotic localization.

Download PDF

Abstract

Goal: To describe and validate a noncontacting sensor that used reflected ultrasound to separately monitor respiratory, nonrespiratory, and caretaker movements of infants. Methods: An in-phase and quadrature (I & Q) detection scheme provided adequate bandwidth, in conjunction with postdetection filtering, to separate the three types of movement. The respiratory output was validated by comparing it to the electrical activity of the diaphragm (Edi) obtained from an infant ventilator in 11 infants. The nonrespiratory movement output was compared to movement detected by miniature accelerometers attached to the wrists, ankles, and heads of seven additional infants. Caretaker movement was compared to visual observations annotated in the recordings. Results: The respiratory rate determined by the sensor was equivalent to that from the Edi signal. The sensor could detect the onset of inspiration significantly earlier than the Edi signal (23+/-69 ms). Nonrespiratory movement was identified with an agreement of 0.9 with the accelerometers. It potentially interfered with the respiratory output an average of 4.7+/-4.5% and 14.9+/15% of the time in infants not requiring or on ventilatory support, respectively. Caretaker movements were identified with 98% sensitivity and specificity. The sensor outputs were independent of body coverings or position. Conclusion: This single, noncontacting sensor can independently quantify these three types of movement. Significance: It is feasible to use the sensor as trigger for synchronizing mechanical ventilators to spontaneous breathing, to quantify overall movement, to determine sleep state, to detect seizures, and to document the amount and effects of caretaker activity in infants.

Download PDF

Abstract

Health monitoring systems have rapidly evolved recently, and smart systems have been proposed to monitor patient current health conditions, in our proposed and implemented system, we focus on monitoring the patient’s blood pressure, and his body temperature. Based on last decade statistics of medical records, death rates due to hypertensive heart disease, shows that the blood pressure is a crucial risk factor for atherosclerosis and ischemic heart diseases; thus, preventive measures should be taken against high blood pressure which provide the ability to track, trace and save patient’s life at appropriate time is an essential need for mankind. Nowadays, Globalization demands Smart cities, which involves many attributes and services, such as government services, Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), energy, health care, water and waste. This paper proposes a system architecture for smart healthcare based on GSM and GPS technologies. The objective of this work is providing an effective application for Real Time Health Monitoring and Tracking. The system will track, trace, monitor patients and facilitate taking care of their health; so efficient medical services could be provided at appropriate time. By Using specific sensors, the data will be captured and compared with a configurable threshold via microcontroller which is defined by a specialized doctor who follows the patient; in any case of emergency a short message service (SMS) will be sent to the Doctor’s mobile number along with the measured values through GSM module. furthermore, the GPS provides the position information of the monitored person who is under surveillance all the time. Moreover, the paper demonstrates the feasibility of realizing a complete end-to-end smart health system responding to the real health system design requirements by taking in consideration wider vital human health parameters such as respiration rate, nerves signs … etc. The system will be able to bridge the gap between pat- ents – in dramatic health change occasions- and health entities who response and take actions in real time fashion.

Download PDF

Abstract

Locating the nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) is currently a very active area of research due to their increasing number of potential applications. Wireless networks composed of smartphones have gained particular interest, mainly due to the high availability of such devices. This paper presents a novel algorithm for blind localization of commercial off-the-shelf smartphones in a WSN. The algorithm uses acoustic signals and inertial sensors to estimate the sensor positions simultaneously. Estimates of range and direction-of-arrival (DOA) locally obtained in each node are combined with a maximum likelihood estimator. A tailored optimization algorithm is also proposed to solve the DOA uncertainty problem. Our proposal obtains low localization errors without considering any reference node nor any prior synchronization between nodes.

Download PDF

Abstract

A growing number of Internet-connected sensors have already promoted the advance of sensor search service. Accessing all available objects to find the sought sensor results in huge communication overhead, thus a low-overhead and high-precision prediction model (LHPM) is proposed to improve the sensor search efficiency. We design the approximation method to lower the reporting energy cost. Then a multistep prediction method is proposed to accurately estimate the sensor state. Furthermore, a sensor ranking method is presented to assess the matching probabilities of sensors, so as to effectively reduce the communication overhead of the search process. Simulation results demonstrate the validity of the proposed prediction model in the area of content-based sensor search.

Download PDF

Abstract

This paper presents an information-gain-based sensor selection approach as well as a sensor sensing probability model-based calibration process for multihuman tracking in distributed binary pyroelectric infrared sensor networks. This research includes three contributions: 1) choose the subset of sensors that can maximize the mutual information between sensors and targets; 2) find the sensor sensing probability model to represent the sensing space for sensor calibration; and 3) provide a factor graph-based message passing scheme for distributed tracking. Our approach can find the solution for sensor selection to optimize the performance of tracking. The sensing probability model is efficiently optimized through the calibration process in order to update the parameters of sensor positions and rotations. An application for mobile calibration and tracking is developed. Simulation and experimental results are provided to validate the proposed framework.

Download PDF

Abstract

Recently, the frequent coal mine safety accidents have caused serious casualties and huge economic losses. It is urgent for the global mining industry to increase operational efficiency and improve overall mining safety. This paper proposes a lightweight mashup middleware to achieve remote monitoring and control automation of underground physical sensor devices. First, the cluster tree based on ZigBee Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is deployed in an underground coal mine, and propose an Open Service Gateway initiative (OSGi)-based uniform devices access framework. Then, propose a uniform message space and data distribution model, and also, a lightweight services mashup approach is implemented. With the help of visualization technology, the graphical user interface of different underground physical sensor devices could be created, which allows the sensors to combine with other resources easily. Besides, four types of coal mine safety monitoring and control automation scenarios are illustrated, and the performance has also been measured and analyzed. It has been proved that our lightweight mashup middleware can reduce the costs efficiently to create coal mine safety monitoring and control automation applications.

Download PDF

Abstract

 It is a challenge to integrate RFID technology into the healthcare sector to increase security by obtaining traceability of patients during their hospital stay. In this case, RFID provides arange of technical architectures for implementing an RFID system. The installation or use of the WIFI network available in a hospital is a possible element in system design since a priori with a correct configuration of RFID components, excellent results in location accuracy can be obtained over other architectures available in the market. The accuracy of RFID Aeroscout WIFI system can be improved with the installation of exciters. These are components that assist the localisation engine in calculating the location of an active RFID tag WIFI. The precision offered by the localisation engine depends on multiple configurable parameters set by the engineers responsible for the design and development of an active RFID WIFI system.

Download PDF

Abstract

This paper investigates the problem of joint estimation of a pedestrian user path and the available WiFi access point locations. The observations are limited to unlabeled WiFi received signal strength (RSS) values. The problem is formed as a partially observable Markov decision process and RSS gradients are integrated to estimate and update the user locations along the path. The RSS data is modeled as a Gaussian process and gradient vectors are updated for each step based on the motion dynamics. Realistic assumptions and constraints are introduced to model the user’s movement and reduce the computational complexity.

Download PDF

Abstract

 The most important thing immediately before, during and after a disaster occurs is the dissemination of information, a deployment of devices enabled by IoT (Internet of Things) could bring benefits in terms of giving to people information opportunely for making decisions in face of this disaster. In this paper, we present a sensor to measure water level in rivers, lakes, lagoons and streams. For such purpose and to prove our concept, we designed a pilot project through a micro-model that is constructed with a water level measurement sensor based on a simple open circuit that closes when in contact with water and experimentally tested into a water container under a controlled environment. This micro-model is performed on the basis of a programmable electronic board (Netduino Plus 2), an electronic circuit connected to electrical resistances that are located at a specific height, within a water container, when the water level rises and reaches the resistors, varies the impedance, this shows the actual water level and so on for different heights. The information from water level sensor is transmitted via WiFi to a laptop, then this information is also seen in smartphones, where users can see the water level in rivers. Finally, the micro-model is tested by experimental tests under a controlled environment and satisfactory results are obtained.

Download PDF

Abstract

Future neuroprosthetics will be tightly coupled with the user in such a way that the resulting system can replace and restore impaired upper limb functions because controlled by the same neural signals than their natural counterparts. However, robust and natural interaction of subjects with sophisticated prostheses over long periods of time remains a major challenge. To tackle this challenge we can get inspiration from natural motor control, where goal-directed behavior is dynamically modulated by perceptual feedback resulting from executed actions. Current brain-computer interfaces (BCI) partly emulate human motor control as they decode cortical correlates of movement parameters -from onset of a movement to directions to instantaneous velocity- in order to generate the sequence of movements for the neuroprosthesis. A closer look, though, shows that motor control results from the combined activity of the cerebral cortex, subcortical areas and spinal cord. This hierarchical organization supports the hypothesis that complex behaviours can be controlled using the low-dimensional output of a BCI in conjunction with intelligent devices in charge to perform low-level commands. A further component that will facilitate intuitive and natural control of motor neuroprosthetics is the incorporation of rich multimodal feedback and neural correlates of perceptual cognitive processes resulting from this feedback. As in natural motor control, these sources of information can dynamically modulate interaction.

Download PDF