Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Investigation of Sleep Deprivation Effect on Driver’s Electromyography Signal Features in a Driving Simulator

Background and Objective: Sleep deprivation is an important cause of driver drowsiness. Surface electromyography (sEMG) of the upper arm and the shoulder is an important physiological signal affected by the driver drowsiness. The objective of this paper is to derive the pattern of sleep-deprived drivers’ sEMG. Materials and Methods: The tests were conducted on 7 men with no sleep disorder aged between 25 and 50 years in a driving simulator. Each subject participated in the tests once without sleep deprivation and another time with two hours of sleep in the 24-hour period before the tests. The sEMG signal from the upper arm and shoulder muscles were measured for the mid deltoid, clavicular portion of the pectoralis major, and triceps and biceps long heads. Four features including power spectral kurtosis (SK), mean frequency, absolute amplitude, and root mean square (RMS) were extracted. Results: The k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) algorithm classifier detected drowsiness with 90% accuracy, 82% precision, 77% sensitivity, and 94% specificity. Driver’s sleep deprivation can be detected through sEMG signal with 85% accuracy, 80% precision, 70% sensitivity, and 88% specificity. Conclusion: The sEMG signal amplitude and the frequency content of the sleep-deprived subjects were higher than those of the normal subjects by 37% and 15%, respectively. For the sleep-deprived subjects, muscle contraction did not change much in transition between the last two levels of drowsiness, while the normal subjects experienced 27% drop in this transition. At the last level of drowsiness, the sleep-deprived subjects experienced mental drowsiness without significant change in the muscle contraction level. © 2018 Tehran University of Medical Sciences. All rights reserved.
Feeling like a caiman: Bodily experiences of corruption

When I started exploring water access in Senegal, the goal of my research was to test the legal-rational Weberian paradigm through an ethnography of the everyday experience of the State. In the central region of the country, a team of servants attached to the Water Supervisory Ministry were charged with the maintenance of water access. Citizens mostly depicted these agents as “caimans”: Greedy predators who were always asking for money. Witnessing illegal transactions on the field, yet they did not seem to all belong to the same moral world. Asking the protagonists to explain themselves always led to a dead end. Another type of ethnographic engagement was required. To access the inner life of the corporation, I came to work as an apprentice. Or, more accurately, to make sense of my presence I was offered the role of the apprentice by my informants. When it all began as a way of witnessing illegal transactions, my apprenticeship led me to build trust and feelings. As an apprentice, I became part of the moral economy of a particular group of street-level bureaucrats. Being an apprentice gave me a position where I could not only become a good observer or listener but a decent feeler. Accordingly, this article addresses ethnography not only as a method but as a positionality.
“They don’t know what it’s like in here”: Incarcerated individuals’ communication with family members

The incarcerated population is large and growing. Maintaining family connections during confinement is linked to positive outcomes, yet the family communication of incarcerated individuals is understudied. We examine the family communication of individuals incarcerated in an urban county jail for women. Four family communication themes were identified: 1) communication access and understanding, 2) family support, 3) parenting challenges, and 4) family conflict. The findings inform both theoretical and practical implications.
“To Believe in God and in Own Personal Competencies”: The Family Life of Arab Muslim Widowed Women in Israel

This study is of five Muslim widowed women from the Arabic city of “Tabula” (a fictitious place for ethical reasons) from the north of Israel, out of a desire that they would expose their personal experiences (Spradley, 1979) [1]. It deals with women’s personal status, the widows’ difficulties, and the conflicts between the Arab Muslim traditional society and modernity. The Arab society is a traditional, collective, patriarchal and religious society. The women’s status is considered inferior to that of the men’s and their main role is conceived as raising children and taking care of the house. Following are the stories of Muslim women who became civilian widows by the ages 30 to 40. The study examines the way widows coped with their situation in a time in which the society underwent great changes, moving from a traditional society to a more modern one. By dealing with this situations: 1) The personal changes; 2) The main difficulty of being lonely; 3) The return to religion; 4) Coping with the loss of the husband; 5) The women’ expectations out of the Arab society.
Stress and support: The dual role of the migrant community in the acculturation of Korean migrant families in Australia

Despite recent exploration of diverse acculturation experiences, there is still limited understanding of the specific acculturation features of the migrant experience. To address this gap, the current study aimed to explore subjective acculturation experiences of Korean migrant families by focusing on the contexts of home country, migrant community, and marital relationship. Twenty-three married South Korean migrants with young children participated in four focus groups. Thematic analysis was used to identify major themes from the discussion. Participants reported that, contrary to a stressful life in Korea, they developed premigration expectations regarding a relaxed life in Australia. However, once the participants became involved in the Korean migrant community in Australia, their expectations were mismatched by recreating their previous stressful lives in the new country. The Korean migrant community was helpful in participants' adaptation but also unhelpful in handling acculturation issues of mismatched expectations and parental stress. The study also found that although some postmigration marital conflicts arose, marital communication in the relationship may have a protective role in solving migrants' difficulties. These findings highlight the need for enhancing the traditional acculturation framework with other theoretical frameworks to capture both general and specific acculturation features of the migrant experience.
Market regulations in social relationships and attitudes towards disabled people

The article presents an empirical study on some predictors of attitudes to disabled people� The assumption was that in market-oriented societies attitudes to the needy and underprivileged are connected with the calculation of the costs and benefits of their inclusion in society� Psychological mercantilism is an individual characteristic which makes people especially keen on conducting such calculations� The relation between mercantilism and attitudes to the disabled with the perception of costs and benefits as mediators was examined in the group of 126 university students� The results showed a negative correlation between the main variables as well as the assumed mediation effect�
Applied interdisciplinary research: a critical realist perspective

ABSTRACT This article uses the philosophy of critical realism to overcome the problem that most contemporary guidelines for interdisciplinary research fail to provide would-be researchers with adequate advice. It arrives at five important steps in the interdisciplinary research process: an initial planning phase; a disciplinary phase; a teamwork phase characterized by cross-disciplinary understanding; and a transdisciplinary, creative phase that involves epistemic emergence, and that results in the integration of knowledge. The fifth phase is the result of the integrative fourth phase; it provides a holistic interdisciplinary understanding of the involved structures and mechanisms of the issue at hand. To make interventions derived from interdisciplinary research useful, they must be disseminated in such way as to include a return to reality, that is, there must be a movement from epistemology to ontology.
Recovery oriented mental health nursing: a pilot Intervention study

Based on previous studies that have been focusing on current practices in mental health nursing and the on-going development in mental health practice towards a more recovery-oriented approach this pilot intervention study focuses on improving mental health nursing practice through providing specific training sessions for nurses and the implementation of goal-oriented care in close collaboration with service users. Results are measured within a pre- and post-test design among health professionals and service users. The presentation will contain an introduction of the study protocol, an experience report and hopefully some initial results of the study.
Task load modulation of tDCS effects on behavioural and neural correlates of phonological processing: a brain-state-dependent stimulation approach

This thesis investigates the task load modulation of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) effects on the behavioural and neural correlates of phonological processing in the healthy, dyslexic and aphasic brain. Tasks selected from a range of speech perception to speech production were assumed to engage the two main regions of the dorsal pathway of phonological processing, the targets left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) and left superior temporal gyrus (LSTG), differently: increasing engagement for the LIFG and decreasing engagement for the LSTG across the range. Anodal tDCS (facilitatory) and cathodal tDCS (inhibitory) were expected to have an effect as a direct function of target engagement with the task. Cathodal tDCS was also expected to induce indirect facilitation via network compensation negatively related to target engagement. These effects should be weaker in dyslexia and aphasia, and consistent with their altered pattern of brain activity. The findings suggest that task load modulation of tDCS effects occurred. Outcomes such as improved performance in a speech perception task caused by cathodal tDCS would suggest that cathodal tDCS induced network compensation. Results in dyslexia and aphasia were consistent with their altered pattern of brain activity, indicating that tDCS shows promise as both diagnosis and treatment tool.
Despeckling the 2D Medical Ultrasound Image through Individual Despeckling of the Envelopes of Its 1D Radio Frequency Echo Lines by STFT

In this paper Short Time Fourier Transform (STFT) is used to despeckle the medical ultrasound image before reconstruction. STFT is applied individually to the one dimensional (1D) Radio Frequency (RF) envelopes that constitute the two dimensional (2D) image. Total Variation Filter (TVF) and Anisotropic Diffusion Filter (ADF) are also applied to the speckle noisy 2D ultrasound image after reconstruction. Performance comparison is held between despeckling the ultrasound image before reconstruction and after reconstruction. Despeckling the ultrasound image before reconstruction through STFT has removed the speckle noise more efficiently than TVF and ADF. It also maintained the texture of the original image and that is compared to STFT performance when applied to the 2D image after reconstruction. TVF is found more efficient in removing speckle when applied through overlapping blocks compared with applying it as a whole to the 2D image. ADF is found outperforming TVF in removing speckle noise and it is found more efficient when applied as a whole to the 2D image compared with applying it through overlapping blocks. 
Towards a smart fall detection system using wearable sensors

A fall-detection system is employed in order to monitor an older person or infirm patient and alert their carer when a fall occurs. Some studies use wearable-sensor technologies to detect falls, as those technologies are getting smaller and cheaper. To date, wearable-sensor-based fall-detection approaches are categorised into thresholdand machine-learning-based approaches. A high number of false alarms and a high computational cost are issues that are faced by the thresholdand machine-learningbased approaches, respectively. The goal of this thesis is to address those issues by developing a novel low-computational-cost machine-learning-based approach for fall detection using accelerometer sensors. Toward this goal, existing fall-detection approaches (both thresholdand machine-learning-based) are explored and evaluated using publicly accessible datasets: Cogent, SisFall, and FARSEEING. Four machine-learning algorithms are implemented in this study: Classification and Regression Tree (CART), k-Nearest Neighbour (k-NN), Logistic Regression (LR), and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The experimental results show that using the correct size and type for the sliding window to segment the data stream can give the machine-learning-based approach a better detection rate than the threshold-based approach, though the di erence between the thresholdand machine-learning-based approaches is not significant in some cases. To further improve the performance of the machine-learning-based approaches, fall stages (pre-impact, impact, and post-impact) are used as a basis for the featureextraction process. A novel approach called an event-triggered machine-learning approach for fall detection (EvenT-ML) is proposed, which can correctly align fall stages into a data segment and extract features based on those stages. Correctly aligning the stages to a data segment is di cult because of multiple high peaks, where a high peak usually indicates the impact stage, often occurring during the pre-impact stage. EvenT-ML significantly improves the detection rate and reduces the computational cost of existing machine-learning-based approaches, with an up to 97.6% F-score and a reduction in computational cost by a factor of up to 80 during feature extraction. Also, this technique can significantly outperform the threshold-based approach in all cases. Finally, to reduce the computational cost of EvenT-ML even further, the number of features needs to be reduced through a feature-selection process. A novel genetic-algorithm-based feature-selection technique (GA-Fade) is proposed, which uses multiple criteria to select features. GA-Fade considers the detection rate, the computational cost, and the number of sensors used as the selection criteria. GAFade is able to reduce the number of features by 60% on average, while achieving vi
Implementing Safety Cultures in Medicine: What We Learn by Watching Physicians

Abstract : This study explores the workplace dynamics associated with physicians and medical mistakes. Two residency settings (i.e. surgery and intensive care) were subjected to direct observation for a period of 6 weeks, revealing a total of 46 mistakes and near-miss events. Key findings that suggest greater contextual barriers to the advancement of learning cultures in residency settings with respect to patient safety include the small number of mistakes and near misses that led to adverse patient outcomes, the high percentage of resident mistakes and near misses that occur in isolation, the prevalence of "easy to explain" mistakes and near misses, and the negative reactions of attending and resident physicians to instances of failure. Key findings that support greater opportunities for advancing learning cultures include the prevalence of commission errors over omission errors, leading to the potential for greater mistake visibility, as well as the prevalence of so-called "harmless" mistakes that provide a training opportunity for learning best practices. Taken together, the results suggest the need for a situational approach to determining how and when a learning culture founded on patient safety can be implemented and sustained. The study further demonstrates the value of qualitative methods such as the direct observation of physicians in patient safety research.
Consumers' perceived usefulness of online reviews: Effects of emotional certainty and product involvement

In this study I examined 2 products for the effects of the level of consumers' involvement on their perception of the usefulness of online reviews from the perspective of emotional certainty. I used the experimental method of scene simulation verification with a sample comprising 727 participants. Results show that for both low- and high-involvement products, a review in which a positive emotion that is certain (happiness) is expressed is perceived as more useful than one expressed with an uncertain positive emotion (hope); for low-involvement products, the reviews in which a negative emotion that is certain is expressed (anger) are perceived as more useful than those with an uncertain negative emotion (worry); when emotions expressed in the reviews are the same but level of involvement with the products differs, compared with high-involvement products, consumers perceive online reviews of low-involvement products as being more useful. This study enriches the research on the content structure of online reviews and provides a reference platform to optimize the evaluation system.
Outdoor localization system for mobile robots based on radio-frequency signal strength

In the field of Mobile Robotics, the localization problem consists on determining a robot’s position and orientation in a three-dimensional space through sensor information. The most common solution to this problem is to employ a Global Positioning System receiver, also known as GPS, which reports absolute position in relation to an Earth-centered fixed coordinate system. However, GPS signals are greatly affected by atmospheric conditions and line-of-sight occlusion, sometimes providing very poor position estimates, if any at all. Inspired by these problems, this project proposes a localization system to be used by a robot in an uncontrolled outdoor environment, where GPS measurements are poor or unavailable. As common sensors provide inaccurate position estimates due to environmental factors (e.g. rough terrain), we propose the use of Radio-Frequency receiver-transmitter pairs, in which the Received Signal Strength Indicator is used for estimating the distances between receiver and transmitter, which in turn are used for positioning. This measurement has the advantage of being independent from lighting conditions or the state of the terrain, factors which affect other localization methods such as visual or wheel odometry. A mean positioning error of 0.41 m was achieved by fusing wheel odometry, angular velocity from a gyroscope and the received signal strength, in an Augmented Extended Kalman Filter algorithm, with an improvement of 82.66% relative to the mean error of 2.38 m obtained with a common GPS sensor.
“Pretty good for a girl”:A feminist content analysis of female video game characters,and interviews with female gamers

Feminist media scholars have long sought to understand the representations of women in the media, in which women are consistently depicted as secondary to men, which they have used to highlight issues of gender relations. My research involved the analysis of representations of female characters in games and explored how female gamers make sense of them, providing a more in-depth look at women in the media, whilst also addressing issues of gender such as leisure time. The gendering of leisure is important as it provides a wider basis for my more nuanced arguments about video games and those who play them. Throughout my research I endeavoured to study not only how women are represented in video games, but also the experiences of female gamers and how they continue to interact with the gaming community. Drawing widely from existing feminist media research, I studied the common representations of women in video games, and what female gamers thought of them. I also researched their experiences as female gamers within the gaming community – how they had been treated as “gamers”, but also how they continued to engage and interact with the gaming community. In order to gather this information, I utilised Content Analysis to gather and analyse game content through further Visual Analysis. This provided me with a range of insights into common patterns in the representations of women across a wide range of currently popular games, such as the role of healer. As for the experiences and engagement of gamers, I utilised interviews to gather information from individuals and tracked patterns across their experiences as a whole. Most notable are the issues of abuse and harassment, but also how women continue to engage with gaming and create their own “safe spaces” within the community both for themselves and others.
Appealing to the Heart: How Social Media Communication Characteristics Affect Users' Liking Behavior During the Manchester Terrorist Attack

Social media enable users to exchange information, sympathy, and support in disasters. To understand the communication characteristics leading to users’ liking behavior, we examine how social media audiences react during disasters to various message features, including emotional appeals, informal tone, and message frames in textual and visual forms. A content analysis was conducted on a random sample of tweets related to a terrorist bombing in 2017. Our results from multilevel modeling ( N = 698) reveal that the number of likes a tweet receives is positively predicted by the presence of emotional appeals, human-interest frames, and inconsistent text-image framing. The results provide a sophisticated understanding of social media audiences’ message preferences during disasters. It is recommended that practitioners employ personally relatable messages that accommodate people’s emotional needs during disasters.
A 60-GHz 3.0-Gb/s Spectrum Efficient BPOOK Transceiver for Low-Power Short-Range Wireless in 65-nm CMOS

This paper presents a 60-GHz transceiver for low-power high-speed short-range wireless using the proposed binary-phase on-off keying (BPOOK) modulation scheme. The proposed BPOOK wireless transceiver transmits radio frequency (RF) signal with amplitude modulated on and off by input baseband data, and meanwhile, the phase is changing between 0° and 180°. The BPOOK transceiver achieves doubled spectral efficiency compared with OOK modulation and binary-phase-shift keying (BPSK) modulation. It also cancels the intrinsic local-oscillator feed through (LOFT) issue in the OOK modulation. The BPOOK RF signal can be demodulated by employing low-power square-law envelope detector incoherently. The transceiver is fabricated in a standard 65-nm CMOS technology. A data rate of 3.0 Gb/s is achieved while consuming a power of 100 mW from 1-V supply. The incoherent receiver has a sensitivity of −46 dBm. The core area of the transceiver is 1.56 mm2.
Digitalization of posture-based Seat Design : Developing car interiors by involving user demands and activities

The conventional development of a new automobile starts with a first proportional model. In this model, the exterior geometry of a car can be distinguished into vehicle, power train portfolio, market requests, safety requirements, and design target. The interior design results from the proportional model with specific characteristics, such as spaciousness, control and display concept, and ergonomic requirements. The automobile emerged from the sole purpose of transportation with driver orientation into a vacation or commuter experience of all users by a broad spectrum of comfort- and infotainment features. This is sustained by emerging mobility concepts like autonomous car concepts. In order to consider this change in mobility concepts, consumer habits and mobility behavior of users, the interior design becomes more important, which creates the frame for this PhD project. An essential part of the interior is the seat. This PhD thesis focuses on designing car interiors from the inside to the outside by user involvement.