A Navigation and Augmented Reality System for Visually Impaired People

In recent years, we have assisted with an impressive advance in augmented reality systems and computer vision algorithms, based on image processing and artificial intelligence. Thanks to these technologies, mainstream smartphones are able to estimate their own motion in 3D space with high accuracy. In this paper, we exploit such technologies to support the autonomous mobility of people with visual disabilities, identifying pre-defined virtual paths and providing context information, reducing the distance between the digital and real worlds. In particular, we present ARIANNA+, an extension of ARIANNA, a system explicitly designed for visually impaired people for indoor and outdoor localization and navigation. While ARIANNA is based on the assumption that landmarks, such as QR codes, and physical paths (composed of colored tapes, painted lines, or tactile pavings) are deployed in the environment and recognized by the camera of a common smartphone, ARIANNA+ eliminates the need for any physical support thanks to the ARKit library, which we exploit to build a completely virtual path. Moreover, ARIANNA+ adds the possibility for the users to have enhanced interactions with the surrounding environment, through convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained to recognize objects or buildings and enabling the possibility of accessing contents associated with them. By using a common smartphone as a mediation instrument with the environment, ARIANNA+ leverages augmented reality and machine learning for enhancing physical accessibility. The proposed system allows visually impaired people to easily navigate in indoor and outdoor scenarios simply by loading a previously recorded virtual path and providing automatic guidance along the route, through haptic, speech, and sound feedback.

SRMIP

Existing mobility protocols suffer from multimedia and data transfer disruption when crossing cities' boundaries by trains or cars. Session continuity in wide area motion is an officially raised goal by 5G-PPP vision. This research adopts 5G methodology by using software defined networking to propose a new mobile IP framework that facilitates seamless handover and ensures session continuity in standard and wide area coverage. The same uninterruptible experience is used to extend smart indoor services with effective offload mechanism to avoid core network congestion. Performance excels existing protocols in setup and handover delays as of eliminating 4G LTE bearer setup/release out-band signaling and isolating user's packets in OpenFlow virtual path that is recursively established in-line with IP address allocation. Handover cross cities in wide area motion becomes feasible with lower latency than LTE handover inside city. Throughput is instantly restored after handover while standard packets are wire speed forwarded as of tunnel headers' elimination and OpenFlow hardware abstraction.

Universal Spectrum Identifier for mass spectra

The Universal Spectrum Identifier (USI) provides a standardized mechanism for encoding a virtual path to any mass spectrum contained in datasets deposited to public proteomics repositories. USIs enable greater transparency for providing spectral evidence in support of key findings in publications, with more than 1 billion USI identifications from over 3 billion spectra already available through ProteomeXchange repositories.

Digital Sequence and Virtual Path Construction-Based Impact Imaging Method for Onboard Monitoring of Aerospace Composite Structures

Because of the rapidly growing use and poor impact resistance of composite materials, impact monitoring of composite structures has become more and more important, especially for aerospace engineering applications. Among the existing impact monitoring methods, piezoelectric transducer (PZT) network and guided wave-based imaging method has proved to be an effective structural health monitoring (SHM) technology. However, the pursuit of accurate localization of ordinary impact imaging methods comes at a cost, the high requirement for the SHM hardware system making these methods inapplicable for onboard impact monitoring. In order to realize accurate impact monitoring of aerospace composite structures onboard, this paper proposes a digital sequence and virtual path construction-based impact imaging method, which is simple enough to work in a digital impact monitor with a greatly simplified hardware system. The monitor is used to convert the impact response signals of PZTs into digital sequences, based on which the method first recognizes the impact occurring sub-region. Then, the virtual pitch–catch paths of the recognized sub-region are innovatively defined and constructed to estimate the impact-induced influence on these paths so that the path-synthesis imaging algorithm-based impact imaging can be performed with little computation cost. To verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method, a total of 90 impacts are applied on a composite unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) wing, and experimental results show the good performance of accurate impact imaging and localization.

Immersive Virtual Tasks With Motor and Cognitive Components: A Feasibility Study With Young and Older Adults

Objective: To analyze the feasibility, safety, and acceptability of immersive virtual tasks. Methods: The authors recruited 11 young adults and 10 older adults. The participants performed three virtual reaching tasks while walking on a virtual path. The descriptive analysis and comparison between participants were performed using the Mann–Whitney U test and chi-square test for nonparametric and nominal variables, respectively. The authors also used analysis of variance for a between-groups comparison for normal variables. Results: Twenty percent of older adults and 81.8% of young adults completed all three tasks (chi-square test; p = .005). Both groups reported minor symptoms, with no significant differences. The older adults were more motivated to practice the tasks (Mann–Whitney U test; p = .015) and would be more likely to suggest them to others (chi-square test; p = .034). Conclusion: All three tasks were feasible for young adults. All participants, except for one, had cybersickness. The symptoms were mostly mild and subsided once the interaction was complete.