Publication Server of Kempten University
Not a member yet
2351 research outputs found
Sort by
Development of Accelerated Durability Test Protocols for Polymer Electrolyte Membrane Fuel Cell Stacks Under Realistic Operating Conditions
No full textPolymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell durability is still a major challenge. To overcome time-consuming durability tests, so-called accelerated durability tests (ADTs) are of urgent need. This work presents our recent results in developing ADT protocols in the context of realistic operating conditions, especially voltage clipping at 0.85 V. A 5500 h long-term test was carried out as a reference applying a realistic automotive drive cycle. Focusing on different stressors such as temperature, relative humidity (RH), and load profile four different ADT protocols of 1200 h duration were derived. Seven-cell short stacks with 240 cm2 active area were used. Comparing cell voltage as a key indicator, an acceleration factor of 3–7 could be achieved. In-situ characterization techniques such as spatially resolved current measurement, cyclic voltammetry, and electrochemical impedance spectra were employed to investigate the influences of individual stressors on specific degradation mechanisms and components. The highest acceleration was observed in the mass transport region of ADTs addressing RH as a stressor, suggesting that RH cycling leads to increased degradation of hydrophobic surfaces. Increased temperature was found to accelerate primarily carbon support degradation. Accelerated catalyst aging seems to be low, demonstrating the effectiveness of voltage-clipping conditions. Our most promising ADT shows quite a homogeneous acceleration of voltage degradation across all current regions
Citizens' preferences on smart energy technologies and services for smart districts
No full textThe design of sustainable urban environments is one of the most pressing endeavors. Particularly the emergence of digital technologies has triggered a range of technocentric movements for urban development, such as smart cities or districts. City stakeholders, including city or district planners, public administrators, or governance stakeholders, expect technological innovations to enhance life in the city. However, citizens are under-represented in discussions about respective technical designs. Against this backdrop, we measure 2930 German citizens' preferences for smart energy technologies and services of future smart districts as a small sub-area of the city and starting point for larger change. Using Best-Worst scaling, we find that citizens prefer local energy storage, photovoltaic, and district and local heating systems. Further, a cluster analysis reveals three distinct clusters of citizens with different preferences. We describe the clusters in terms of socio-demographics, living situation, attitude to sustainability, and affinity for technology. Results provide insight by revealing citizens' preferences for smart energy technologies and services that can inform the design of future citizen-centered smart districts
Wertschätzende Kommunikation in einer digitalen Welt
No full textIn einer zunehmend digitalisierten Welt scheint die menschliche Komponente der Kommunikation oft verloren zu gehen. Dies kann erhebliche Auswirkungen auf die Zusammenarbeit und Teamdynamik in Unternehmen haben. Eine transparente und wertschätzende Kommunikation sowie ein offener und respektvoller Umgang sind jedoch entscheidend für eine gesunde Zusammenarbeit und positive Teamentwicklung, welche die Basis für die langfristige Wettbewerbsfähigkeit eines Unternehmens durch eine nachhaltige Leistungsfähigkeit des Teams darstellen
Evaluations-Framework CARE REGIO
No full textZweck des Evaluations-Frameworks ist es, eine einheitliche Bewertung von Systemen der digitalen Pflege zu erreichen, mit der – unter Einschränkungen – eine Bewertung verschiedener Systeme auch untereinander möglich ist. Hierzu ist es notwendig, alle möglichen Effektgrößen zu berücksichtigen sowie bei den Messungen auf quantitative direkte Messgrößen oder validierte Messinstrumente zurückzugreifen
Zwischen Mensch und Messtechnik: Der Weg der Stanz-Biege-Technik in eine digialisierte Zukunft
No full textDie Veröffentlichung beleuchtet den Übergang der Stanz-Biege-Technik in eine digitalisierte Zukunft. Der Fokus liegt auf der Rolle der Messtechnik als treibende Kraft der Digitalisierung und der Verschmelzung von Mensch und Technik, wie es in Industrie 5.0 angestrebt wird. Die Präsentation skizziert die aktuellen Herausforderungen und Potenziale der Digitalisierung in der Produktionstechnik und betont die zentrale Bedeutung des Faktors Mensch. Im Zentrum steht die Vision einer zunehmend vernetzten, datengetriebenen Fertigungsumgebung, die Nachhaltigkeit und Effizienzsteigerung miteinander verbindet. Ein wesentlicher Aspekt ist dabei die Berücksichtigung menschlicher Expertise, um die Komplexität zu reduzieren und die Autonomie der Fachkräfte zu fördern. Der Ausblick verweist auf die Notwendigkeit, die zukünftige Industrieentwicklung durch die Integration technologischer Innovationen und humanzentrierter Ansätze nachhaltig zu gestalten
Analysis of Neural Network Inference Response Times on Embedded Platforms
No full textThe response time of Artificial Neural Network (ANN)-inference is of utmost importance in embedded applications, particularly continual stream-processing. Predictive maintenance applications require timely predictions of state changes. This study serves to enable the reader to estimate the response time of a given model based on the underlying platform, and emphasizes the relevance of benchmarking generic ANN applications on edge devices. We analyze the influence of net parameters, activation functions as well as single- and multithreading on execution times. Potential side effects such as tact rate variances or other hardware-related influences are being outlined and accounted for. The results underline the complexity of task-partitioning and scheduling strategies while emphasizing the necessity of precise concertation of the parameters to achieve optimal performance on any platform. This study shows that cutting-edge frameworks don’t necessarily perform the required concertations automatically for all configurations, which may negatively impact performance
Effectiveness of gamified digital interventions in mental health prevention and health promotion among adults: a scoping review
No full textBackground
Though still a young field of research, gamified digital interventions have demonstrated potential in exerting a favourable impact on health and overall well-being. With the increasing use of the internet and digital devices, the integration of game elements presents novel opportunities for preventing mental disorders and enhancing mental health. Hence, this review aims to assess the effectiveness of gamified interventions focusing on preventing mental disorders or promoting mental health among adults.
Methods
Based on a scoping review across four databases (MEDLINE, Embase, PsycInfo and Web of Science), 7,953 studies were initially identified. After removing duplicates and screening titles, abstracts and full texts, 16 studies were identified as suitable for inclusion in a narrative synthesis of findings. We included interventional studies encompassing an intervention and a control group aiming to investigate the effectiveness of the use of gamified digital mental health interventions and the use of gamified digital elements.
Results
Overall, positive effects of gamified interventions on mental health-related outcomes were identified. In particular, beneficial consequences for psychological well-being and depressive symptoms were observed in all studies. However, further outcomes, such as resilience, anxiety, stress or satisfaction with life, showed heterogenous findings. Most game elements used were reward, sensation and progress, whilst the quantity of elements was not consistent and, therefore, no substantiated conclusion regarding the (optimal) quantity or composition of game elements can be drawn. Further, the outcomes, measurements and analyses differed greatly between the 16 included studies making comparisons difficult.
Conclusion
In summary, this review demonstrates the potential of integrating digital game elements on mental health and well-being with still a great gap of research. A taxonomy is needed to adequately address relevant game elements in the field of mental health promotion and prevention of mental disorders. Therefore, future studies should explicitly focus on the mechanisms of effect and apply rigorous study designs
Digitalisierung als integraler Bestandteil der Gesellschaft
No full textDigitale Bildungslandschaften sind das Ergebnis einer tiefgreifenden Transformation durch die zunehmende Digitalisierung in der Gesellschaft. Die Bedeutung digitaler Medien in der Bildung wächst stetig, besonders bei Kindern und Jugendlichen, deren Lebenswelt mit digitalen Medien eng verzahnt ist. Die Digitalisierung hat neue Möglichkeiten für den Zugang zu Bildung geschaffen und verändert gleichzeitig die Art und Weise, wie Lehrende und Lernende kollaborieren und interagieren. Die Integration von künstlicher Intelligenz (KI) in die Bildungslandschaft eröffnet dahingehend neue Dimensionen
Multimodal immersive digital twin platform for cyber–physical robot fleets in nuclear environments
No full textAbstractThe nuclear energy sector can benefit from mobile robots for remote inspection and handling, reducing human exposure to radiation. Advances in cyber–physical systems have improved robotic platforms in this sector through digital twin (DT) technology. DTs enhance situational awareness for robot operators, crucial for safety in the nuclear energy sector, and their value is anticipated to increase with the growing complexity of cyber–physical systems. The primary motivation of this work is to rapidly develop and evaluate a robot fleet interface that accounts for these benefits in the context of nuclear environments. Here, we introduce a multimodal immersive DT platform for cyber–physical robot fleets based on the ROS‐Unity 3D framework. The system design enables fleet monitoring and management by integrating building information models, mission parameters, robot sensor data, and multimodal user interaction through traditional and virtual reality interfaces. A modified heuristic evaluation approach, which accounts for the positive and negative aspects of the interface, was introduced to accelerate the iterative design process of our DT platform. Robot operators from leading nuclear research institutions (Sellafield Ltd. and the Japan Atomic Energy Agency) performed a simulated robot inspection mission while providing valuable insights into the design elements of the cyber–physical system. The three usability themes that emerged and inspired our design recommendations for future developers include increasing the interface's flexibility, considering each robot's individuality, and adapting the platform to expand sensor visualization capabilities
Masked Discriminators for Content-Consistent Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation
No full textA common goal of unpaired image-to-image translation is to preserve content consistency between source images and translated images while mimicking the style of the target domain. Due to biases between the datasets of both domains, many methods suffer from inconsistencies caused by the translation process. Most approaches introduced to mitigate these inconsistencies do not constrain the discriminator, leading to an even more ill-posed training setup. Moreover, none of these approaches is designed for larger crop sizes. In this work, we show that masking the inputs of a global discriminator for both domains with a content-based mask is sufficient to reduce content inconsistencies significantly. However, this strategy leads to artifacts that can be traced back to the masking process. To reduce these artifacts, we introduce a local discriminator that operates on pairs of small crops selected with a similarity sampling strategy. Furthermore, we apply this sampling strategy to sample global input crops from the source and target dataset. In addition, we propose feature-attentive denormalization to selectively incorporate content-based statistics into the generator stream. In our experiments, we show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in photorealistic sim-to-real translation and weather translation and also performs well in day-to-night translation. Additionally, we propose the cKVD metric, which builds on the sKVD metric and enables the examination of translation quality at the class or category level