Ultrasonic Motion Sensors Research Articles

Evaluation of Ambient Sound, Vibration, and Light in Rodent Housing Rooms.

Excessive sound, vibration, and light are detrimental to rodent welfare, yet these parameters are rarely recorded in vivaria. Whether housing environments exceed the suggested thresholds and which specific factors may alter these parameters is generally unknown. The goal of this study was to determine how environmental factors may alter sound, vibration, and light at the room and cage levels. Measurements were made using an ultrasonic microphone, accelerometer, and light sensor. Measurement sites were 1) in open air at a central location in 64 rooms located in 9 buildings, and 2) inside an empty mouse or rat cage containing chow, water, and bedding and located on an animal transfer station (n = 51) or housing rack (n = 102). Information collected for each transfer station and rack measurement included the year of manufacture, the species on the rack, and the number of cages on the rack. For each location, a baseline measurement was taken with the transfer station turned off, followed by another measurement after the transfer station was turned on. In general, many factors influenced ambient sound, vibration, and light, indicating that values are not uniform across rodent rooms in the same institution or across cages in a single room. Sound peaks capable of startling rodents were measured in association with hallway ultrasonic motion sensors and during cage change. Vibration and light intensity were generally low when cages were located on the rack. In contrast, active transfer stations had more vibration and light intensity, reaching levels that were potentially stressful for rodents. These data reflect the ambient sound, vibration, and light that rodents experience during normal facility operations. These patterns may extend to other locations, but given the variability in all parameters, the data highlight the need for institutions to conduct their own monitoring.

Augmented Reality Active Learning (AnReAL) activities for teaching/learning motion concepts

From a physicist point of view, Virtual Reality setups are high-precision, low-cost, 6 degrees-of-freedom, high-speed, multiple-objects tracking devices. These setups prove to be very high-quality sensors that are well suited to be used in the physics laboratory for tracking in motion experiments. Augmented Reality can be achieved by attaching a stereo to the headset to allow students to see the 3D tracking of the experiment in the physical world. A series of Augmented Reality Active Learning (AnReAL) activities are presented, while also comparing this setup to more traditional ones, i.e. ultrasonic motion sensors and video tracking analysis software. Virtual and augmented reality setups, such as the presented one, are likely to prove very beneficial for information retention, following the emerging theory of embodied cognition.

Cloud-Based Fault Prediction Using IoT in Office Automation for Improvisation of Health of Employees.

The novel paradigm of Internet of Things (IoT) is gaining recognition in the numerous scenarios promoting the pervasive presence of smart things around us through its application in various areas of society, which includes transportation, healthcare, industries, and agriculture. One more such application is in the smart office to monitor the health of devices via machine learning (ML) that makes the equipment more efficient by allowing real-time monitoring of their health. It guarantees indoor comfort as per the user's satisfaction as it emphasizes on fault prediction in real-life devices. Early identification of various types of faults in IoT devices is the key requirement in smart offices. IoT devices are becoming ubiquitous and provide an assistant to supervise an office that is regulated by ML and data received from sensors is stored in cloud. A recommender system facilitates the selection of an appropriate solution for faults in IoT-enabled devices to mitigate faults. The architecture proposed in this paper is used to monitor each and every office appliance connected via IoT technology using ML technique, and recommender system is used to recommend solutions for fault patterns without much human intervention. The ultrasonic motion sensor is used to fetch the information of employee availability in cubicles and data is sent to the cloud through the WiFi module. ATmega8 is used to control electrical appliances in the office environment. The significance of this work is to forecast the faults in IoT appliances which will have an impact on life and reliability of IoT appliances. The main objective is to design a prototype of a smart office using IoT that can control and automate workplace devices and forecast whether the device needs repairing or replacing, thus reducing the overall burden on the employee and helping out in increasing physical as well as mental health of the person.

Adaptive power switching technique for ultrasonic motion sensors

Smart sensing technologies play a key role in the core of smart systems, which form the rapidly evolving internet of things. In this context, buildings' occupancy information is an important input that allows smart systems to be seamlessly aware of and responsive to the inhabitants, thus ensuring their comfort. Ultrasonic motion sensors are used to obtain occupancy information of indoor spaces. Although they provide a high accuracy as compared to other sensors, like Passive InfraRed, they require a higher power consumption. In this work, we propose an adaptive power switching technique, which we call power hopping. This technique allows ultrasound motion sensors to optimize their transmitter power level, in order to best fit their surrounding environment. The objective is to reduce the overall energy consumption of these sensors. We have tested our method using a sensor prototype, and the results show that, depending on the sensor's environment, a possible saving in the transmitter power can be achieved, which reached up to 78% in our experiments. We also derive an upper bound limit of the method's convergence time, and we propose an automatic sensing method to detect potential changes in the sensor's environment.

Muscle Strength Endurance Testing Development Based Photo Transistor with Motion Sensor Ultrasonic

The endurance of upper-body muscles is one of the most important physical fitness components. As technology develops, the process of test and assessment is now getting digital; for instance, there are a sensor stuck to the shoe (Foot Pod, Polar, and Sunto), Global Positioning System (GPS) and Differential Global Positioning System (DGPS), radar, photo finish, kinematic analysis, and photocells. Those devices aim to analyze the performances and fitness of athletes particularly the endurance of arm, chest, and shoulder muscles. In relation to that, this study attempt to create a software and a hardware for pull-ups through phototransistor with ultrasonic motion sensor. Components needed to develop this device consist of microcontroller MCS-51, photo transistor, light emitting diode, buzzer, ultrasonic sensor, and infrared sensor. The infrared sensor is put under the buffer while the ultrasonic sensor is stuck on the upper pole. The components are integrated with an LED or a laptop made using Visual Basic 12 software. The results show that pull-ups test using digital device (mean; 9.4 rep) is lower than using manual calculation (mean; 11.3 rep). This is due to the fact that digital test requires the test-takers to do pull-ups perfectly.

A Transmitter—Receiver System for Long-Range Capacitive Sensing Applications

Human occupancy detection and localization are important in a variety of smart building applications including building security, assisted living monitors, and energy-efficient heating ventilation and air cooling and lighting. Current implementation of such systems is limited by motion–sensor technologies, e.g., passive infrared (PIR) and ultrasonic sensors, which substitute as occupancy detectors but ultimately suffer from an inability to detect stationary objects. Capacitive sensing can detect stationary objects, but the technology has almost exclusively been developed for short-range human detection and localization, e.g., touch-screen human interfacing of smart devices. This paper presents a transmitter–receiver platform for research and development of capacitive sensing for long-range human occupancy detection and localization. During testing, the system revealed a detection range of 3.5 m, a typical room dimension in homes. Further, tests of a multitransmitter single-receiver system in a $3.2~\text {m} \times 3.2$ m space showed the system’s potential for occupant localization. Ultimately, this system represents an alternative to PIR and ultrasonic motion sensors, and has the potential to increase smart building system implementation.

A perspective on motion sensors and free-fall

When an ultrasonic motion sensor is not aligned correctly with an object's motion, the geometry of the transmitted and reflected sonar signals leads to an underestimate of velocity. This is not a large effect under most teaching laboratory conditions, but compounding such an error in the production of acceleration data can produce surprisingly large overestimates. Presented here is an analysis of the general problem for free-fall experiments, followed by experimental data that show the relative importance of these errors.

Hands-on demonstrations for Project Listen Up: Education outreach part III

Midshipmen will be getting involved in an ASA education outreach effort by presenting or recording a number of acoustical demonstrations geared to promote a hands-on learning experience for middle- and high-school age girl scouts. This is an extension of the demonstration effort and outreach presented at the ASA Meeting held in Baltimore in 2009 and Seattle in 2011. The demos are designed to visualize certain wave effects that will be explained by the Midshipmen “live” or by computer video. The participants will be free to explore, control the apparatus, and make their own scientific discoveries. The hands-on demonstrations will include (1) a ripple tank with two separated periodic point sources or a plane wave source driver for wave studies, (2) an ultrasonic motion sensor for measuring and displaying displacement, particle velocity and acceleration of an oscillating object or a person's motion, (3) tuning forks matched to Helmholtz resonators, and (4) a driven clamped circular plate supporting a column of dry sifted masonry sand (or uncooked rice or grass seed) for studying the resonant frequency versus. granular mass loading.

Motor activity of squirrel monkeys measured with an ultrasonic motion sensor

We describe an ultrasonic motion sensing system for measuring the motor activity of individual squirrel monkeys in their home cage. The system utilizes an inexpensive Commodore 64 microcomputer for data collection and can distinguish between movements of short (i.e., < 1.0 s) and longer (i.e., ≥ 1.0s) duration, and between number of movements and time spent in motion. The diurnal pattern of spontaneous activity is illustrated along with the dose-dependent effects of d-amphetamine (0.025–1.6 mg/kg) and haloperidol (0.025–0.4 mg/kg).

Obstetric uses of the ultrasonic motion sensor

1.1. The Doppler ultrasonic flowmeter is a safe and valuable instrument with many practical obstetric uses.2.2. Observation of fetal blood flow may serve as evidence of pregnancy. Evidence of fetal life may be determined earlier with this equipment than conventional methods including fetoscope or notation of fetal movement by the mother.3.3. Among the various distinctive output signals which may be recorded from the pregnant uterus are those which may be identified as motion of the fetal heart and blood flow in the umbilical cord, in the placenta and in both fetal and maternal blood vessels.4.4. Use of this principle for prenatal placental localization appears to be reliable and practical, with results which compare favorably with other methods of placental localization.