5153 research outputs found
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Mindfulness Meditation and Child Birth
No full textThe practice of mindfulness meditation offers a variety of benefits. These benefits include stress and anxiety reduction, overwhelmed feelings, irritability, worry, and chronic pain. There have been many studies that support this practice and confirm this to be true. Dr. Adrienne Brown a clinical psychologist also confirms the benefits mindfulness meditation has on childbirth. Mindfulness is an insight into habitual thinking, and power to alleviate stress and suffering. There are numerous mindfulness techniques people use. During childbirth one of these techniques include Lamaze breathing. This is a natural labor and childbirth method that focuses on breathing and relaxation. The focus of mindfulness meditation and child labor is to limit stress, anxiety, fear, and labor pain during the birthing process
A Bioengineered Memory Storage Device Using Bacteriorhodopsin and Graphene
No full textBacteriorhodopsin (BR) is a photoactive protein, which has been studied as a memory storage device owing to its photochemical and thermal stability. BR photocycle comprises of two distinct stable binary states, bR (0) and Q (1) based on the wavelength of the applied radiation. However, such devices have a limited success due to low quantum yield of the Q state1. Many studies have used genetic and chemical modification as optimization strategies to increase the yield of the Q state compromising the overall photochemical stability of the BR1. Here we come up with a unique way of stabilizing the conformations of BR and thereby the BR and Q states of the protein through its adsorption onto graphene. We have used all-atom molecular dynamics (MD) simulations utilizing NAMD (Nanoscale Molecular Dynamics) and the CHARMM (Chemistry at HARvard Macromolecular Mechanics) force field to understand the interactive events at the interface of BR and a single layer graphene sheet. Based on the stable RMSD (Root Mean Square Deviation) and interactive energies such as Van-der-Waals and electrostatics, we propose that the adsorption of BR onto graphene can stabilize the photochemical behavior of BR. Furthermore, the switching between Cis and Trans conformations of the retinal based on the angular change of the dihedral demonstrates that such an adsorption is beneficial to preserve the binary states
Design and Development of A New Biomedical Instrument
No full textA new biomedical instrument is introduced to apply multiple surgical clips to patients’ tissue or vessel. In the surgical process, the instrument jaw is placed around the tissue or other organ structure. When bring the handles of instrument together, the clip can close and secure the tissue or vessel to prevent them from bleeding. With the release of handles, next surgical clip is automatically loaded into the instrument jaw. This latest design shows several potential features to help surgeons’ operational procedure if compared with current surgical clip instrument, including advanced mechanism proposed to eliminate the accident shooting out when surgical clip is loaded into jaws, strong structure designed to reduce the jaws twist that can damage tissues, enhanced supporting feature added to prevent accident jaw closure when extra side-load exerted, and etc. The instrument is analyzed by computer modeling and simulation to prove its feasible performance with good mechanical advantage
Balluino: High Altitude IOT Based Real Time Air Quality Management system using Balloon/Drone
No full textInternet of Things paradigm originates from the proliferation of intelligent devices that can sense, compute and communicate data streams in a ubiquitous information and communication network. Degradation of air quality in cities is the result of a complex interaction between natural and anthropogenic environmental conditions. With the increase in urbanization and industrialization and due to poor control on emissions and little use of catalytic converters, a great amount of particulate and toxic gases are produced. Air quality is extremely difficult for human beings to feel or sense. In this paper we present Balliuno High Altitude Drone/Balloon based open source pollution monitoring device. We have integrated several sensor like gas, temperature, humidity, pressure, altitude with popular microcontroller and logging data on cloud and as well as logging on SD card for offline analysis. This research project will help us to monitor and identify source of pollution using quadcopter and also level of various gases in that region
Golden Penney Ante
No full textThis research is joint work with Mark Elmer of SUNY Oswego. In 1969, Walter Penney introduced his "Penney Ante" game, and in 1973 Craswell developed a memory state machine for computing probabilities in this game. We generalized Craswell’s results for arbitrary coin probabilities. In the analysis of the HHH vs HTH game, we noticed that the Golden Ratio played a role. Subsequently, we defined D(n,k) integers which are analogous to the binomial coefficients. Pascal's Triangle displays the binomial coefficients in a triangle so that many interesting and important identities which relate these integers can be discovered. Our goal was to discover and to prove similar identities in the D(n,k) integers. We display the D(n,k) integers in a triangle similar to Pascal's triangle. Our preliminary analysis showed the existence of many analogous identities. We proved these identities through the techniques of mathematical induction and generating functions
AD or Non-AD: A Deep Learning Approach to Detect Advertisements from Magazines
No full textThe processing and analyzing of multimedia data has become a popular research topic due to the evolution of deep learning. Deep learning has played an important role in addressing many challenging problems, such as computer vision, image recognition, and image detection, which can be useful in many real-world applications. In this study, we analyzed visual features of images to detect advertising images from scanned images of various magazines. The aim is to identify key features of advertising images and to apply them to real-world application. The proposed work will eventually help improve marketing strategies, which requires the classification of advertising images from magazines. We employed convolutional neural networks to classify scanned images as either advertisements or non-advertisements (i.e., articles). The results show that the proposed approach outperforms other classifiers and the related work in terms of accuracy.http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/e2012098
A Highly Accurate And Reliable Data Fusion Framework For Guiding The Visually Impaired
No full textThe world has approximately 285 million visually impaired (VI) people according to a report by the World Health Organization. Thirty-nine million people are estimated to be blind, whereas 246 million people are estimated to have impaired vision. An important factor that motivated this research is the fact that 90% of VI people live in developing countries. Several systems have been designed to improve the quality of the life of VI people and support the mobility of VI people. Unfortunately, none of these systems provides a complete solution for VI people, and the systems are very expensive. Therefore, this work presents an intelligent framework that includes several types of sensors embedded in a wearable device to support the visually impaired (VI) community. The proposed work is based on an integration of sensor-based and computer vision-based techniques in order to introduce an efficient and economical visual device. The designed algorithm is divided to two components: obstacle detection and collision avoidance. The system has been implemented and tested in real-time scenarios. A video dataset of 30 videos and an average of 700 frames per video was fed to the system for the testing purpose. The achieved 96.53% accuracy rate of the proposed sequence of techniques that are used for real-time detection component is based on a wide detection view that used two camera modules and a detection range of approximately 9 meters. The 98% accuracy rate was obtained for a larger dataset. However, the main contribution in this work is the proposed novel collision avoidance approach that is based on the image depth and fuzzy control rules. Through the use of x-y coordinate system, we were able to map the input frames, whereas each frame was divided into three areas vertically and further 1/3 of the height of that frame horizontally in order to specify the urgency of any existing obstacles within that frame. In addition, we were able to provide precise information to help the VI user in avoiding front obstacles using the fuzzy logic. The strength of this proposed approach is that it aids the VI users in avoiding 100% of all detected objects. Once the device is initialized, the VI user can confidently enter unfamiliar surroundings. Therefore, this implemented device can be described as accurate, reliable, friendly, light, and economically accessible that facilitates the mobility of VI people and does not require any previous knowledge of the surrounding environment. Finally, our proposed approach was compared with most efficient introduced techniques and proved to outperform them
Reenvisioning Clifford in The House of the Seven Gables
Get PDFMost critics see Nathaniel Hawthorne's characters as largely two dimensional, rarely developing significantly. Clifford Pyncheon, in The House of the Seven Gables, is overwhelmingly considered to be an example of Hawthorne's static character design. An unbiased examination, however, reveals that Clifford does undergo a clear developmental arc, calling into question the conventional view
A Smart Intraocular Pressure Risk Assessment Framework Using Frontal Eye Image Analysis
No full textIntraocular pressure (IOP) in general refers to the pressure in the eyes. Gradual increase of IOP and high IOP are conditions/symptoms that may lead to certain diseases such as glaucoma and therefore must be closely monitored. While the pressure in the eye increases, different parts of the eye may become affected until the eye parts are damaged. An effective way to prevent rise in eye pressure is by early detection. A new smart healthcare framework is presented to evaluate the intraocular pressure risk from frontal eye images. The framework monitors the status of IOP risk by analyzing frontal eye images using image processing and machine learning techniques. A database of images collected from Princess Basma Hospital in Jordan was used in this work. The database contains 400 eye images: 200 images with normal IOP and 200 high eye pressure case images. The framework extracts five features from the frontal eye image: the pupil and iris diameter ratio, mean redness level of the sclera, red area percentage of the sclera, and two other features measured from the extracted contour of the sclera (contour height and contour area). Once the features were extracted, a neural network is trained and tested to obtain the status of the patients in terms of eye pressure. The framework detects the status of IOP (normal or high IOP) and produces evidence of the relationship between the five extracted frontal eye image features and IOP, which has not been previously investigated through automated image processing and machine learning techniques using frontal eye images.https://doi.org/10.1186/s13640-018-0334-