Single System Design Research Articles

An Evaluation of a Community-Based Mental Health Literacy Intervention for Black Adults

Purpose: This single-system design evaluation study assessed whether 18 Beams to Bridges (BTB) program participants would experience increased mental health literacy (MHL). It was hypothesized that MHL scores would increase significantly between the pre-intervention and intermediate assessments, but there would be no significant difference in scores between the intermediate and post-intervention assessments. Method: The MHL scale was used to assess MHL at the three timepoints. Differences in assessment scores were evaluated using paired samples t-tests. Results: Supporting the hypotheses, BTB participants had higher MHL scores on intermediate assessments compared to pre-intervention. There was also no difference between intermediate and post-intervention scores. Conclusion: MHL among Black adults increased during participation in BTB. Despite some limitations, this work is one of the first studies on MHL interventions specifically created for the Black community and should be used to further efforts to address MHL-related contributors to mental health treatment disparities impacting this community.

A personalised activity programme helps reduce fatigue in people after Guillain-Barré Syndrome in a replicated single system design

Purpose We evaluated the effectiveness of an online activity-focussed programme to decrease fatigue in people with prior Guillain-Barré Syndrome and explored the perspectives of participants regarding the acceptability and feasibility of the programme. Materials and methods We recruited eight people diagnosed with Guillain-Barré Syndrome more than two years previously who still had fatigue limiting daily activity. We used mixed methods with a replicated single system design using repeated outcome measures across the three phases (baseline, intervention, follow-up) to evaluate the impact of the intervention on fatigue, activity, wellbeing and confidence to exercise. We used qualitative interviews to explore participants’ perspectives of the programme. Results All participants developed a personalized plan to manage fatigue using goals and feedback, which was effective in reducing fatigue for most participants. Participants were positive about what they had learnt about fatigue, themselves and strategies to manage fatigue. Some participants also experienced improvements in activity, exercise confidence and health and wellbeing. Not all changes were sustained past the follow-up period, which reflects participants’ differing levels of confidence to continue with their plan. Conclusion Graduated physical activity in association with developing a personalised plan were key features effective in managing fatigue after Guillain-Barré Syndrome.

Performance of single axis tracker technology and automatic battery monitoring in solar hybrid systems

Utilization of elevation angles and azimuth angles is a very important part in maximizing solar energy into electrical energy in photovoltaic (PV). One way to maximize PV power output is to design a single axis tracker system and take into account the azimuth and elevation angles of the sun using the sun position calculator application. The single axis tracker system is set based on the position of the angle of inclination of the surface of the PV 45°, then the angle of 90° and the angle of inclination of 135°. The test results show that the single axis tracker PV system design can work based on the angle settings that have been programmed. Then the use of a battery control system to support the PV reliability system automatically cuts off electricity when the battery voltage drops below 12 V during cloudy weather conditions and excessive battery usage. The integration of the PZEM-017 module with the battery will support monitoring of battery power usage in real time. PV energy data conversion performance uses single axis tracker technology for maximum power reaching 631.72 Watt DC at 12.00 pm and the lowest power reaching 56.02 Watt DC at 6.00 pm.

Design of a Four-Axis Robot Arm System Based on Machine Vision

With the concept of industrial automation gradually being put forward, the four-axis robotic arm is gradually being applied in industrial production environments due to its advantages such as a stable structure, easy maintenance, and expandability. However, it is difficult to diversify and improve the traditional four-axis robotic arm system due to the high software and hardware coupling and the single system design, which results in high production costs. At the same time, its low intelligence and high-power consumption limit its wide application. The paper proposes an embedded design of a four-axis manipulator system based on vision guidance. Based on the robot kinematics theory and geometric principles, the dynamics simulation of the manipulator model is carried out. Through the forward and reverse analysis of the manipulator model and the trajectory planning of the manipulator, the YOLOV7 target detection algorithm is introduced and deployed on the embedded device, which greatly reduces the manufacturing cost of the manipulator while meeting the control and power consumption requirements. It has been verified by experiments that the robot arm in this paper can achieve an end accuracy of 0.05 mm under the condition of a load of 1 kg using the ISO 9283 international standard, and the recognition algorithm adopted can achieve a recognition accuracy of 95.2% at a frame rate of 29. The overall power consumption is also lower than that of traditional robotic arms.

Fourier-Optics Based Opto-Electronic Architectures for Simultaneous Multi-Band, Multi-Beam, and Wideband Transmit and Receive Phased Arrays

Current trends in wireless communications require a Base Transceiver Station (BTS) to support an ever-increasing number of antennas, wider bandwidths, multiple frequency bands, and many simultaneous beams. This is a tall order when considering all-electronic implementations, especially when operating at high carrier frequencies. We describe here Fourier-optics based opto-electronic architectures that include analog and fully connected transmit (TX) and receive (RX) implementations that support simultaneous multi-band, multi-beam phased arrays where optical up- and down-conversion are used to generate IF/RF and RF/IF, respectively, signals for simultaneous multi-user and multi-beam transmission and reception over a wide range of frequencies. The proposed lens-based architectures have the ability to transmit and receive multiple distinct beams simultaneously even when only analog beamforming is performed, thus greatly simplifying the tasks of cell search and initial access without having to resort to complex matrix-based beamforming networks. Additionally, lens-based TX and RX beamforming is performed in the analog optical domain with zero power consumption and negligible latency bounded only by the time the light takes to travel through the lens. Photonic signal processing also reduces the number of RF components required at the remote radio unit (RRU) and the number of costly and power-hungry high-performance analog-to-digital/digital-to-analog converters (ADCs/DACs) required. The optical subsystems are ultra-wideband and frequency agnostic as only the front-end components (antennas, amplifiers) are RF frequency/band specific. Therefore, a single photonic system design may be operated at any band and, furthermore, existing installations may be modified/upgraded to operate in different bands with minimal component replacements needed. Finally, the presented architectures provide near unlimited beam-bandwidth product (BBP) with minimal power requirements and no external cooling. Theoretical analysis and experimental confirmation of the proposed architecture will both be reported, including a receiver with a nominal BBP of 36 GHz with a prototype system that consumed less than 300 W, thus yielding a power efficiency of beam formation of 8 W/GHz, which is more than a 6× improvement over the current state of the art.

Investigation of decontamination characteristics of a serial multiple pool scrubber system for consequence mitigation of severe accidents

A pool scrubber is often used as a wet-type design to mitigate the consequence of a severe nuclear accident. While studies indicated higher decontamination performance of a deeper pool, utilizing a very tall pool can be problematic due to potential structural stability and water backflow issues. This study proposes, as an alternative to a single pool system, a pool scrubber system composed of serially connected multiple pools with lower heights. Since large fraction of aerosol removal takes place in the injection region, serially connected pool scrubber system is expected to enhance the overall decontamination capability of a pool scrubber system. To support the analysis of the proposed system's decontamination capability, a new computer model was developed in the study to describe the bubble size dependent effect on aerosol removal including the effect of pool residence time. The accuracy of the new model was examined against experimental data for its validation. The proposed scrubber system composed of serially connected multiple shorter pools is found to have much improved decontamination performance over the current single pool system design.

Survivorship Comparisons of Ultracongruent, Cruciate-Retaining and Posterior-Stabilized Tibial Inserts Using a Single Knee System Design: Results From the Australian Orthopedic Association National Joint Replacement Registry.

Ultracongruent (UC) tibial inserts can increase knee replacement stability, but how survivorship compares to cruciate retaining (CR) or posterior stabilized (PS) inserts is unclear. Data from a large joint registry were used to calculate the cumulative percent revision of a single popular knee design used with different inserts. There were 67,523 procedures, of which 12,434 were UC, 21,635 CR, and 33,454 PS. Revision rates and reasons for revision were analyzed. The cumulative percent revision at 18 years was 8.3% for UC, 9.2% for CR, and 8.9% for PS. There was no difference when UC was compared to CR, but PS had a higher risk of revision. Revision reasons were similar. Compared to the CR, an UC insert did not increase revision rates and was actually lower than a PS insert. An UC insert does not compromise long-term total knee arthroplasty survivorship in the Genesis II prosthesis.

End-to-end learned single lens design using fast differentiable ray tracing.

In traditional imaging system design, the optical lens is often optimized toward the artificial optimization target like modulation transfer function and field-of-view (FoV). This usually leads to complex stacks of lenses. In order to reduce the complexity, we propose an end-to-end single lens imaging system design method. First, the imaging and processing model is established, whose input end is the ground truth image, and the output end is the restored image by Res-Unet. Then, with the optimization target of minimizing the difference between the restored image and the ground truth image, the parameters of the lens surface and the parameters of the restoration algorithm are optimized simultaneously by deep learning. In order to realize the end-to-end design, the imaging model is required to be differentiable to the lens parameters, so a fast differentiable ray tracing model is proposed. A single lens imaging system with high-quality large FoV (47°) has been designed by the end-to-end method. This method will have a wide application prospects in the design of light and small optoelectronic imaging systems.

Novel operating band design schemes for high-contrast passive terahertz security screening systems

A passive terahertz security screening system utilizes the contrast of imaged targets in the terahertz band to identify concealed contraband. The variety of covered clothing textures presents a wide distribution of transmission characteristics, resulting in the diversity of high-contrast detection frequencies within the terahertz band. Thus the commonly used single operating band system modelled under one clothing texture is inadequate in multi-type clothing scenarios in practical applications. In this study, the concept of relative contrast is proposed for the detection of concealed metal contraband, and the relationship between the operating band and relative contrast is revealed. Two novel operating band design schemes, a reconfigurable multi-band single-system design and a fixed multi-band dual-system design, are presented. Computer simulation results show that these two design schemes can effectively improve the imaging contrast and enhance the detection effect of passive terahertz security screening systems.

Single Phase Energy Smart Meter System Design and Implementation Using RFID and Based on IoT

The measuring of the distributed energy system and billing are complicate and have many problems such as easily prone to tampering, inaccurate, and requires a large number of human operators. This paper proposed the design and implementation of modern and highly accurate single-phase smart energy meter using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology and based on the Internet of thing (IoT). The proposed system has three units, smart energy meter and control centre and recharging RFID card system, which contains a unit for generating a serial number for each card and storing these numbers in the control centre unit. The transmission of consumed energy and smart meter readings information is sent using Wi-Fi technology to the central control unit.

The techno-economic and environmental analysis of genetic algorithm (GA) optimized cold thermal energy storage (CTES) for air-conditioning applications

Thermal energy storage can be employed for air conditioning system load management, i.e., load shifting and leveling, to serve the peak electricity demand for the air-conditioning system with high capacity utilization. Ice and phase change material-based thermal energy storage systems were modeled and optimized for air-conditioning applications. The mathematical modeling involved energy, exergy, environmental and economic analysis of both the systems at full and partial operating modes. The system is then optimized for a commercial building to give maximized exergy efficiency and minimized total annual investment and operating cost over five different system temperatures as decision variables. The full operating mode strategy resulted in a higher exergy efficiency for both systems, whereas partial operating mode proved to be a more economical operating strategy. The multi-objective genetic algorithm-based optimization is carried out with two different refrigerants (R134a and R717) in the vapor compression refrigeration cycle of the systems. A single system design point is then selected using a multi-criteria decision-making technique. The electricity consumption while utilizing the thermal energy storage based system was lower as compared to the conventional system for air-conditioning applications. The two modeled systems are compared based on storage media, operating strategies, and the refrigerant used.

Assessment method of social entrepreneurship nature and its development

The study of social entrepreneurship and the assessment of its necessity caused by socio-economic problems like low level of household purchasing power and state failure to solve is relevant. The need to introduce and develop social entrepreneurship requires favourable environment in the country, determined by state support, public acceptance and availability of potential investors. The phenomenon of social entrepreneurship in the economy has dual nature: it contributes to full satisfaction of households` basic needs and ensures social entrepreneur`s self-realization. Social enterprise provides both non-commercial and commercial activity. A non-profit component is a key one in the European model of social entrepreneurship. Assessment of nature and opportunities of social enterprises development allows to reach the principle of “need-opportunity” balance aimed at effective management decision-making regarding the expediency to introduce the form of business in the country. If there is a need for social entrepreneurship national economy demands building favourable environment for its functioning and development. The study purpose is to propose the assessment method of social entrepreneurship nature and its development and the necessity of its application around the world, to single out conditions for its development to solve socio-economic problems and move towards the economy with a human face. The study object is scientific and practical basis of social entrepreneurship development in the context of the necessity of its implementation and operating environment. Methodology: comprehensive assessment approach has been used in the study. It comprises different methods, namely: the index method (to calculate sub-indices and the overall index, to make single system design to facilitate comparison); the matrix method (grouping of countries according to their changing need for social entrepreneurship); multiplicative model (analytical toolkit to determine overall index to estimate the contribution of each indicator simultaneously). The study result is the assessment method of social entrepreneurship nature and development implemented in the EU. Conclusions: it has been determined that during 2016 and 2019, with a lag of three years, a third of European countries have changed their attitude towards social entrepreneurship. Some countries have increased their need for social enterprises, but favourable conditions for their development have not been built. Other countries have been improving environment for social enterprise activities, but their demand has been diminishing. The growing need for social enterprises in one third of the countries has been accompanied by favourable environment for their activity and development. Scientific and practical relevance is the possibility to apply the proposed method for any country or group of countries with similar level of economic development to prove the relevance of social entrepreneurship implementation as innovation form of business, to identify the terms of its advantageous development in the long period and to build the strategy of social enterprises operations and their management. JEL Classification: L31, O11, O15.

Single Tyre System Design and Implementation using Optimization based PI Controller

This work described in the paper to show the implementation of Proportional Integral (PI) controller, Genetic algorithm based PI (GAPI), and Particle swarm optimization based PI (PSO-PI) for a Quarter Car System. The trip comfort is developed by means of the decrease of the body acceleration caused by the car body, due to the smoothness of the road. This paper tells about the model and controllers used in the study and discuss the vehicle response results. In the conclusion, a comparison of PI, GA-PI, and PSO-PI is shown using MATLAB simulations.

Exploration of the Risk Evolution Cues of NIMBY Projects under Urbanization Process

With the increasing urbanization rate in our country, the occurrence of "not in my back yard" (NIMBY) conflict has become intensified, so it is particularly important to analyze the causes of these conflicts.Therefore, to explore the effects of the risk evolution of NIMBY projects on NIMBY conflicts, we have generalized and identified 13 cues (decision reference variables) by summarizing the existing research results. Further, to realize prediction about the influencing factors whereby NIMBY risk evolves into NIMBY conflict, we then constructed a single system design lens model of NIMBY conflict evolution and prediction. Based on the simulation analysis of 75 collected pieces of valid SJT questionnaire data collected by Policy EXC software, through integration and analysis we obtained the following three predictability cues: government departments closing and not sharing NIMBY information, degree of environmental pollution, and impaired quality of life.

Effect of stretching & strengthening of cervical muscles on neck mobility of lower cervical facet syndrome-A single system design

Effect of stretching & strengthening of cervical muscles on neck mobility of lower cervical facet syndrome-A single system design

Multi-professional-delivered enhanced supportive care improves quality of life for patients with incurable cancer.

Enhanced supportive care (ESC) promotes the earlier implementation of supportive care within cancer care. While earlier supportive care has been demonstrated to improve patient outcomes, the model of delivery is variable. The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre has developed a multi-professional delivered model with clinical nurse specialists providing ongoing patient review and care. A retrospective single-system design was used to assess longitudinal changes in Integrated Palliative Care Outcome Scale (IPOS) scores as indicators of quality of life. For other outcomes, a retrospective case control analysis was undertaken. Statistically significant improvements in all IPOS scores were observed for patients attending ESC. Compared to controls, quantitative outcomes included prolonged survival and reduced chemotherapy-related mortality. Multi-professional delivered ESC successfully improves quality of life and outcomes.

New Hanger Design Approach of Tied-Arch Bridge to Enhance Its Robustness

As the crucial components among the tied-arch bridge, the local failure of hangers may trigger a progressive collapse through the entire tied-arch bridge. However, the current design guidance as regards hangers still lacks consideration of structure robustness under an extreme hazard. To improve the structural robustness of tied-arch bridge under extreme conditions, a new hanger design method is proposed, which is termed as asymmetric parallel double-hanger system. Based on Miner’s linear cumulative damage law, an analysis on the fatigue life of the double-hanger system was conducted to verify the feasibility of the proposal, and then a dynamic time-history analysis was employed to simulate the transitory fracture impact due to one or more hangers fracturing. According to the simulation results, the structural robustness is greatly enhanced with asymmetric parallel-double hanger system design, when compared with single hanger system design. When one or more hangers reveal local damage, it will not trigger a progress failure to the whole structure in particular. Several practical suggestions of bridge system’s load-carrying capacity are also put forward for the future arch bridge design at the end of this paper.

Both the single user and multi user MIMO system design with individual transmit power constraint and improper constellation

This work address the problem of designing joint optimum transceiver for both single-user (SU) and multi-user (MU) MIMO system. Most of the previous works on both SU and MU-MIMO system, the joint precoder and decoder designs are based on the total transmit power constraint (TTPC) with proper modulation techniques. On the other hand, in practice, individual transmit power constraint (ITPC) is more realistic as the power at each antenna at the transmitter is restricted independently by the linearity of the power amplifier. In this work, a minimum total mean squared error (TMSE) design is formulated as a non-convex optimisation problem. This formulation is under equal power allocation (EPA) and the power constraint that jointly meets both EPA and TTPC (i.e., ITPC). The closed-form optimum linear precoder and decoder for SU-MIMO systems with an improper modulation are determined by solving this non-convex optimisation problem. It considers both the perfect and imperfect channel state information (CSI) is available at both the transmitter and receiver. The simulation results show the performance improvement of the proposed work over conventional work in terms of bit error rate (BER).

Both the single user and multi user MIMO system design with individual transmit power constraint and improper constellation

Both the single user and multi user MIMO system design with individual transmit power constraint and improper constellation

Effects of Task-oriented Training by Wearing Weighted Vest on the Self-esteem and Activities of Daily Living for Children with Down’s Syndrome: Single System Design

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of task-oriented training on the self-esteem and activities of daily living for children Down syndrome. ABA single case research design was applied to this study. Study subjects were instructed to perform task oriented training by wearing weighted vest 12 times in total at the rate of 2 times a week and for 40 minutes each during the intervention, and self-esteem and activities of daily living were measured 3 times in total at the baseline, intervention line and the 2nd baseline stages. There was statistically significant differences in total Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory and activities of daily living scores in accordance with the baseline, intervention line, the 2nd baseline stages (p<.05). This study suggests that task-oriented training by wearing weighted vest improve the total Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory and activities of daily living scores in children with Down’s syndrome.