User's Hand Research Articles

Contraceptive self-injection through routine service delivery: Experiences of Ugandan women in the public health system.

Contraceptive self-injection (SI) is a new self-care practice with potential to transform women's family planning access by putting a popular method, injectable contraception, directly into the hands of users. Research shows that SI is feasible and acceptable; evidence regarding how to design and implement SI programs under real-world conditions is still needed. This evaluation examined women's experiences when self-injection of subcutaneous depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA-SC) was introduced in Uganda alongside other contraceptive options in the context of informed choice. We conducted structured survey interviews with 958 randomly selected SI clients trained in three districts in 2019. SI clients demonstrated their injection technique on a model to permit an assessment of injection proficiency. A randomly selected subset of 200 were re-interviewed 10–17 months post-training to understand resupply experiences, waste disposal practices and continuation. Finally, we conducted survey interviews with a random sample of 200 clients who participated in training but declined to self-inject. Data were analyzed using Stata IC/14.2. Differences between groups were measured using chi square and t-tests. Multivariate analyses predicting injection proficiency and SI adoption employed mixed effects logistic regression. Nearly three quarters of SI clients (73%) were able to demonstrate injection proficiency without additional instruction from a provider. Years of education, having received a complete training, practicing, and taking home a job aid were associated with higher odds of proficiency. Self-reported satisfaction and continuation were high, with 93% reinjecting independently 3 months post-training. However, a substantial share of those trained opted not to self-inject. Being single, having a partner supportive of family planning use, training with a job aid, practicing, witnessing a demonstration and exposure to a full training were associated with higher odds of becoming an SI client; conversely, those trained in a group had reduced odds of becoming an SI client. The self-care program was successful for the majority of women who became self-injectors, enabling most women to demonstrate SI proficiency. Nearly all those who opted to self-inject reinjected independently, and the majority continued self-injecting for at least 1 year. Additional research should identify strategies to facilitate adoption by women who wish to self-inject but face challenges.

非接触タッチパネル操作者の手の表現によるユーザビリティへの影響

非接触タッチパネル操作者の手の表現によるユーザビリティへの影響

Assessing the Cognitive Demand of Hand Controlled Exoskeleton Walking.

Individuals with spinal cord injury have motor and sensory deficits leading to ambulatory problems. Our current research is focused on developing innovative control mechanisms for wearable robotic exoskeletons to provide such users with complete control of their gait while allowing them to perform other activities (such as conversing, etc.). In this study, we evaluated the cognitive load due to using the user's hand movement to control the gait of a robot using a dual-task paradigm. The results show that there was no difference in symmetry and duty cycle between with and without a competing cognitive task, and the number of cognitive responses was similar to healthy controls walking on the treadmill. There was also no difference in obstacle navigation with and without the cognitive task. Results of this study suggest that using our control mechanisms is intuitive, easy to learn, and requires cognitive attention that is similar to normal human walking. Clinical Relevance-Initial evidence to understand the effects of the novel control mechanism on cognitive load over that of typical walking.

Configuration-based Optimization for Virtual Hand Haptic Simulation.

Interacting with virtual objects via haptic feedback using the user's hand directly (virtual hand haptic interaction) provides a natural and immersive way to explore the virtual world. It remains a challenging topic to achieve 1 kHz stable virtual hand haptic simulation with no penetration amid hundreds of hand-object contacts. In this paper, we advocate decoupling the high-dimensional optimization problem of computing the graphic-hand configuration, and progressively optimizing the configuration of the graphic palm and fingers, yielding a decoupled-and-progressive optimization framework. We also introduce a method for accurate and efficient hand-object contact simulation, which constructs a virtual hand consisting of a sphere-tree model and five articulated cone frustums, and adopts a configuration-based optimization algorithm to compute the graphic-hand configuration under non-penetration contact constraints. Experimental results show both high update rate and stability for a variety of manipulation behaviors. Non-penetration between the graphic hand and complex-shaped objects can be maintained under diverse contact distributions, and even for frequent contact switches. The update rate of the haptic simulation loop exceeds 1 kHz for the whole-hand interaction with about 250 contacts.

HCI Based Virtual Controlling System

Abstract: Researchers around the globe are working on making our devices more interactive and making them function with minimal physical contact in this research project. The proposed system is an interactive computer system that can operate without a physical keyboard or mouse. This system will benefit everyone, particularly immobilized people with special needs operating a physical keyboard and mouse. So in the system, they have developed an interface that uses visual hand-gesture analysis. These gestures are used to assist those who are having trouble controlling or operating computers or gadgets. The model is being developed in such a way that it can assist us in recognizing and implementing it. Regarding hand gestures, our interface uses OpenCV, Python, and computer vision algorithms that can detect different finger orientations, distinguish the user's hand from the background, and distinguish significant hand movements from unwanted hand movements. Keywords: Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Image Processing, OpenCV, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

Cardiopulmonary Consequences of Vaping in Adolescents: A Scientific Statement From the American Heart Association.

Although the US Food and Drug Administration has not approved e-cigarettes as a cessation aid, industry has at times positioned their products in that way for adults trying to quit traditional cigarettes; however, their novelty and customizability have driven them into the hands of unintended users, particularly adolescents. Most new users of e-cigarette products have never smoked traditional cigarettes; therefore, understanding the respiratory and cardiovascular consequences of e-cigarette use has become of increasing interest to the research community. Most studies have been performed on adult e-cigarette users, but the majority of these study participants are either former traditional smokers or smokers who have used e-cigarettes to switch from traditional smoking. Therefore, the respiratory and cardiovascular consequences in this population are not attributable to e-cigarette use alone. Preclinical studies have been used to study the effects of naive e-cigarette use on various organ systems; however, almost all of these studies have used adult animals, which makes translation of health effects to adolescents problematic. Given that inhalation of any foreign substance can have effects on the respiratory and cardiovascular systems, a more holistic understanding of the pathways involved in toxicity could help to guide researchers to novel therapeutic treatment strategies. The goals of this scientific statement are to provide salient background information on the cardiopulmonary consequences of e-cigarette use (vaping) in adolescents, to guide therapeutic and preventive strategies and future research directions, and to inform public policymakers on the risks, both short and long term, of vaping.

Re-framing the policy conversation for preventing cyberstalking

PurposeCyberstalking is a growing threat to society, and policymakers should address it utilizing the input of constituents. For this, two key components are required: actionable objectives informed by the values of society and the means of implementation to maximize their potential benefits. The process should be guided by the constituent's values, requiring the elicitation of intrinsic values as individual preferences that are extrapolated to society at large.Design/methodology/approachThe authors utilize Keeney's (1990) public value forum and Sen's (1999) social choice theory (Sen, 1999) to elicit and convert these intrinsic values to serve as the basis for developing public policy to prevent cyberstalking.FindingsThe results demonstrate a strong desire by participants to have clear regulations, policies and procedures developed in concert with industry and enforced by the government that elucidate required protections against cyberstalking in combination with strong technical controls. These policies should guide technical control development and implementation, but leave ultimate control in the hands of technology users to decide what controls they want to utilize.Originality/valueThis study is the first to utilize Keeney's (1988) public value forum in the context of cyberstalking to develop quantitative measures regarding technology users' desired cybersecurity protections against cyberstalking. The authors provide a decision-making framework for policymakers to develop a new policy based on the input of their constituents in a manner that maximizes their potential utility and ultimate benefit.

The Blockchain-Based Service Network: The People's Republic of China's Implementation of Digital Authoritarianism in Web3

Web3, the new iteration of the internet, is vying to put power back in the hands of users around the world. Web3 technologies like blockchain hold tremendous promise in enabling this vision with a broad range of applications, from modernizing existing financial systems to changing the way individuals interact with one another in the digital world. While the ethos of Web3 is decentralization, the People's Republic of China (PRC) is shaping its own vision of Web3 according to its principles of authoritarian rule—outlawing uncontrollable technologies like cryptocurrencies while simultaneously developing Web3-inspired projects like the Blockchain-based Service Network to influence global technology standards. Despite the promise of Web3 to decentralize the internet, the PRC is using Web3 as a tool for further control.

Through a Drone Darkly: Drone Media as Pandemic Witnessing

When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in 2020, countries around the world began enacting lockdown measures and enforcing social distancing rules. Almost at the same time, the use of drones also began to see a spike, especially in the hands of civilian users. This article examines the phenomenon of the drone video as a genre of the pandemic. While drone imagery is not endemic to the COVID-19 crisis, in the face of mass deaths and lockdowns, drone users globally began to turn to the drone as a mobile archive machine. Drawing on recent scholarship on drones, I examine how the drone’s vertical vision afforded a form of pandemic witnessed by proxy. Despite the increasing use of drones for policing, surveillance and warfare, in the case of India, drone imagery also played an important role in countering government narratives about the pandemic and its body counts. Examining the drone images captured by the late photographer Danish Siddiqui, I demonstrate how the drone’s ‘vertical play’ facilitated the emergence of a counter-archive of the pandemic.

Gesture Controlled Robot with Robotic Arm

Abstract: In today's world, industry and daily routine tasks are increasingly attracted to and implemented through robotic automation. Well, this study proposes a method for replacing buttons and joysticks with a more novel technology, namely, commanding the entire Robotic Arm with the user's hand movement, motion, or gesture. The goal is to alter how people think about remote controllers for manually driven robotic arms. Pick and place robots are a type of technology used in the industrial industry to execute pick and place tasks. The system is constructed in such a way that it reduces human error and intervention, resulting in more exact work. The system is designed with a simple, flexible, and minimum control technique in mind. There are numerous domains in which human intervention is problematic, yet the process in question must be operated and regulated, which leads to the application of robots. According to the literature, pick and place robots are conceived and deployed in a variety of industries, including the bottle filling industry, surveillance to identify and eliminate bombs, and so on. The goal of the project is to create a gesture-controlled robot with a robotic arm that can perform any pick-and-place tasks. A radio frequency transmission is used to control the pick and place robot. For the gripper open and close, up and down, forward and backward, base clockwise and counterclockwise, the Robotic Hand has certain independent commands. Four Omni wheels support the robotic arm's displacement on the chassis. The implemented robotic arm has four degrees of freedom. Line follower, wall hugger, obstacle avoider, metal detector, and other capabilities can be added to this robot to increase its versatility. Index Terms: Pick & Place Robot, Robotic arm, Robotic Hand.

BioPrivacy: a behavioral biometrics continuous authentication system based on keystroke dynamics and touch gestures

PurposeThis research aims to build a system that will continuously. This paper is an extended version of SECPRE 2021 paper and presents a research on the development and validation of a behavioral biometrics continuous authentication (BBCA) system that is based on users keystroke dynamics and touch gestures on mobile devices. This paper aims to build a system that will continuously authenticate the user of a smartphone.Design/methodology/approachSession authentication schemes establish the identity of the user only at the beginning of the session, so they are vulnerable to attacks that tamper with communications after the establishment of the authenticated session. Moreover, smartphones themselves are used as authentication means, especially in two-factor authentication schemes, which are often required by several services. Whether the smartphone is in the hands of the legitimate user constitutes a great concern and correspondingly whether the legitimate user is the one who uses the services. In response to these concerns, BBCA technologies have been proposed on a large corpus of literature. This paper presents a research on the development and validation of a BBCA system (named BioPrivacy), which is based on the user’s keystroke dynamics and touch gestures, using a multi-layer perceptron (MLP). Also, this paper introduces a new BB collection tool and proposes a methodology for the selection of an appropriate set of BB.FindingsThe system achieved the best results for keystroke dynamics which are 97.18% accuracy, 0.02% equal error rate, 97.2% true acceptance rate and 0.02% false acceptance rate.Originality/valueThis paper develops a new BB collection tool, named BioPrivacy, by which behavioral data of users on mobile devices can be collected. This paper proposes a methodology for the selection of an appropriate set of BB. This paper presents the development of a BBCA system based on MLP.

Assessment of microbial contamination of mobile phones among mothers in Raichur city, Karnataka

Studies have reported that multiple contaminated surfaces play an important part in spreading diseases including mobile phones. Cell phones act as a medium by which bacterial pathogens are transmitted- either from phone to phone or from the hand of user to mobile phone; resulting in exchange of microbial flora. This study was carried out to assess the amount of bacterial contamination among mobile phone users who are mothers and handle kids below 6 years of age. The aim of the present study was to assess the presence of different microbial species for contamination among mothers with children <6 years of age using different mobile phones in Raichur. A cross sectional study was carried out among 60 mothers in Raichur city of Karnataka. The sterile swab was used to collect samples and transferred to the laboratory for assessment. Among the 60 study subjects, all of them did not know that micro-organisms spread from their body parts to mobile phone. No one was advised by the doctor on ill effects of mobile phone usage during pregnancy and none cleaned their phones regularly with any chemical disinfectant. Half of the microbes identified was Coagulase negative species.

Exodex Adam-A Reconfigurable Dexterous Haptic User Interface for the Whole Hand.

Applications for dexterous robot teleoperation and immersive virtual reality are growing. Haptic user input devices need to allow the user to intuitively command and seamlessly “feel” the environment they work in, whether virtual or a remote site through an avatar. We introduce the DLR Exodex Adam, a reconfigurable, dexterous, whole-hand haptic input device. The device comprises multiple modular, three degrees of freedom (3-DOF) robotic fingers, whose placement on the device can be adjusted to optimize manipulability for different user hand sizes. Additionally, the device is mounted on a 7-DOF robot arm to increase the user’s workspace. Exodex Adam uses a front-facing interface, with robotic fingers coupled to two of the user’s fingertips, the thumb, and two points on the palm. Including the palm, as opposed to only the fingertips as is common in existing devices, enables accurate tracking of the whole hand without additional sensors such as a data glove or motion capture. By providing “whole-hand” interaction with omnidirectional force-feedback at the attachment points, we enable the user to experience the environment with the complete hand instead of only the fingertips, thus realizing deeper immersion. Interaction using Exodex Adam can range from palpation of objects and surfaces to manipulation using both power and precision grasps, all while receiving haptic feedback. This article details the concept and design of the Exodex Adam, as well as use cases where it is deployed with different command modalities. These include mixed-media interaction in a virtual environment, gesture-based telemanipulation, and robotic hand–arm teleoperation using adaptive model-mediated teleoperation. Finally, we share the insights gained during our development process and use case deployments.

Side edge printed eight-element compact MIMO antenna array for 5G smartphone applications

A compact eight-element antenna array based on loop antennas to be utilized in 5G mobile applications is presented in this paper. The individual antenna elements are installed on the side frames of the main circuit board. The array operates over LTE 42 (3.4–3.6 GHz) band with a compact size of mm. The performance parameters that characterize the proposed array such as, isolation (>14.8 dB), Envelop correlation coefficient () are presented. The proposed array has decent channel capacity of 41 bps/Hz. The effects of installing battery and plastic frame have been discussed. In addition, the user's hand proximity effect on the proposed antenna array performance is presented. The array design was fabricated and its radiation characteristics are experimentally verified. The simulated and measured results are in good agreement with each other.

A Handheld Gyroscopic Device for Haptics and Hand Rehabilitation.

We propose a novel, gyroscopic device for haptics and hand rehabilitation, named Gymball. It consists of a fully actuated rotor-gimbal assembly encased in an easy-to-grip appealing design. When held, the device generates a gyroscopic torque which causes the user's hand to move about the wrist. Interviews with occupational therapists, simulations, and proof-of-concept models helped determine the design specifications of Gymball. Compared to the existing gyroscopic devices, Gymball has the following advantages. (i) A smaller form-factor with better user appeal while achieving 0.5 Nm torque. (ii) A wire entanglement-free design allowing complete rotations of the rotor-gimbal assembly. (iii) Negligible rotary imbalances owing to a symmetrical design, resulting in haptic signals with minimal vibratory noise. In this paper, we detail the design and analysis of the device. A feasibility study was conducted to validate prospect of using the device for haptic feedback or therapy. Specifically, the study focused on (i) whether the gyroscopic torque generated by the device can passively move the user's hand about the wrist and (ii) whether the produced hand motion can be controlled. The results show that Gymball can successfully generate about 7° of hand oscillations. The amplitude and frequency of the hand oscillations can be controlled using the speed of rotor and gimbal.

Notions of shock and attention in Tik Tok videos

This work seeks to understand how and if the entertainment experience obtained by watching videos on the Tik Tok social platform that uses editing and design tools, such as distortion filters for physical appearance and voice, is an immersive experience that causes a Shock to the user as seen in Walter Benjamin. And if the social network has created daily increasing the number of accesses, seeking to retain the media user and seem to attempt to lead the user to an Attention Economy system described by Jonathan Crary. Platforms that work with such design are also guided by the hands of users with content creation to Shock an audience immersed in what is called Snack Culture by Scolari. As for a culture that develops a sensorial audio-visual content format, these contents provoke a sensory effect, a brief experience within a platform design that can create a dynamic between playful and entertainment. This text is built applied to the communicational practice of the use of platforms and is an attempt to understand the contemporary media paths that are outlined with the platform of culture.

Hands-Free Wearable Electrolarynx using Linear Predictive Coding Residual Waves and Listening Evaluation

A conventional electrolarynx (EL), which is used by laryngectomees, produces monotonous sound and occupies a user's hand; hence, we developed a hands-free wearable device that improves voice quality. The proposed device estimates individual vocal tract features using linear predictive coding (LPC) and generates sound vibrations using an LPC inverse filter. Additionally, we reproduced the vibration sound using a transducer and amplified the first harmonic frequency and the second one. We conducted an objective experiment to compare the spectra of natural voice, a conventional EL, and the proposed device. We also conducted a subjective experiment in which we asked healthy subjects to listen to and evaluate the conventional EL and the proposed device. The results of the objective experiment demonstrated that our model was characterized by two formant peaks that were similar to the conventional EL and the natural voice. The results of the subjective experiment demonstrated that our model was more powerful and clearer than the conventional EL. These findings indicate that the voice of our device is spectrally close to human voice and gives the audience a more powerful and clearer sound.

Exploring Biomimetic Stiffness Modulation and Wearable Finger Haptics for Improving Myoelectric Control of Virtual Hand.

The embodiment of virtual hand (VH) by the user is generally deemed to be important for virtual reality (VR) based hand rehabilitation applications, which may help to engage the user and promote motor skill relearning. In particular, it requires that the VH should produce task-dependent interaction behaviors from rigid to soft. While such a capability is inherent to humans via hand stiffness regulation and haptic interactions, yet it have not been successfully imitated by VH in existing studies. In this paper, we present a work which integrates biomimetic stiffness regulation and wearable finger force feedback in VR scenarios involving myoelectric control of VH. On one hand, the biomimetic stiffness modulation intuitively enables VH to imitate the stiffness profile of the user's hand in real time. On the other hand, the wearable finger force-feedback device elicits a natural and realistic sensation of external force on the fingertip, which provides the user a proper understanding of the environment for enhancing his/her stiffness regulation. The benefits of the proposed integrated system were evaluated with eight healthy subjects that performed two tasks with opposite stiffness requirements. The achieved performance is compared with reduced versions of the integrated system, where either biomimetic impedance control or wearable force feedback is excluded. The results suggest that the proposed integrated system enables the stiffness of VH to be adaptively regulated by the user through the perception of interaction torques and vision, resulting in task-dependent behaviors from rigid to soft for VH.

Hand Blockage Impact on 5G mmWave Beam Management Performance

Modelling and managing user-induced rotation and blockage in handheld multi-antenna panel devices are some of the pivotal challenges of future narrow beam millimeter wave (mmWave) communications. While studies have been conducted separately on multi-panel beam management (BM) performance and mmWave user blockage loss, no study has been made to date, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, on how hand blockage influences beam alignment accuracy in the context of 5G new radio (NR). This paper presents a link-level evaluation on the impact of user hand grip in BM performance under a 5G NR standard compliant signalling and measurement framework. A high-detail handset model is employed, equipped with multiple panels and different hand grips obtained with CST Microwave Studio, a 3D electromagnetic field simulation tool. Additionally, this study incorporates aspects such as intra-cell mobility, device rotation, hand grip variability and changing propagation conditions. Results show that hand blockage can significantly degrade beam alignment performance, particularly for dual-hand grips in predominantly line-of-sight (LOS) environments. Finally, results suggest that the current blockage model proposed by 3GPP must be further enhanced to account for blockage on a per-panel basis. This would allow a more accurate portrayal of user hand behaviour, which would support the analysis and design of effective solutions to overcome the user’s unpredictable shadowing effects at mmWave frequencies.

An electrically small 4-port self-decoupled MIMO antenna pairs operating in n78 5G NR band for smartphone applications

In this article, a 4-port electrically small multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna system functioning in 5G n78 band for the future smartphone implementation is recommended. The system includes two antenna pairs that are positioned in the exact centers of the vertical edges of the smartphone system. The overall size of each antenna pair is only 23.5 × 5.2 mm2. The reduction is size is obtained by connecting the two radiators, and the antenna pair is excited by coaxial feeding technique. A very good and acceptable isolation amid the antenna elements are accomplished by inserting a T-shaped structure, and is further enhanced with the addition of a reflector at the backside of the radiator. The self-isolated MIMO system operates in the n78 sub-6 GHz band (3.4–3.6 GHz) of the 5G Frequency Range 1 (FR1), with worst case isolation of −17.5 dB between the antennas in the same block in the entire band of operation. The evolution analysis to acquire the proposed structure and parametric study of some ideal parameters are carried out to get a superior insight of the operating principle of the proposed structure. Various MIMO diversity parameters such as Envelope Correlation Coefficient (ECC), Channel Capacity Loss (CCL), Total Active Reflection Coefficient (TARC), Diversity Gain (DG), and Mean Effective Gain (MEG) of the MIMO system are measured and compared with the calculated values. The ECC value is <0.009 in the whole essential operating band, the poorest being between Ant.1 and Ant. 2. A model of the designed smartphone MIMO system is fabricated and experimentally verified, with acceptable coherence between the simulated and the measured results. The MIMO system has a total efficiency and peak gain over 74% and 4.53 dBi correspondingly in the complete operating bandwidth, making it a suitable contender for the future 5G smartphone application. Likewise, the effect of user hand on the S-Parameters and antenna pattern are studied and acceptable results are obtained. Also, the specific absorption rate of the system is analyzed, and <1.23 W/Kg is achieved.