Long term EIT based compliance monitoring in COVID-19 patients

The COVID-19 is a viral infection that causes respiratory complications. Infected lungs often present ground glass opacities, thus suggesting that medical imaging technologies could provide useful information for the disease diagnosis, treatment, and posterior recovery. The Electrical Impedance Tomography (EIT) is a non-invasive, radiationfree, and continuous technology that generates images by using a sequence of current injections and voltage measurements around the body, making it very appropriate for the study to monitor the regional behaviour of the lung. Moreover, this tool could also be used for a preliminary COVID-19 phenotype classification of the patients. This study is based on the monitoring of lung compliances of two COVID-19-infected patients: the results indicate that one of them could belong to the H-type, while the other is speculated belongs to L-type. It has been concluded that the EIT is a useful tool to obtain information regarding COVID-19 patients and could also be used to classify different phenotypes.

HOW CAN TOYOTA MOTOR CORPORATION ACHIEVE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

For a lean enterprise which aims to construct sustainable development, we set a hypothesis that lean could bring the value of sustainability into the organization and try to explore the traveling process of sustainability value. The completion of this process also relies on the Japanese firm’s unique cultural and historical background. Furthermore, lean can contribute to sustainable development at the corporate level through continuous technology and process optimization. But strong sustainability implies that the enterprise needs to do more only than focus on eco-efficiency, and it depends on the senior management understanding of sustainability to some extent. For moral and practical reasons, realizing sustainable development needs collective decision making for the common good (Ball & Miline, 2005). If they determine their attitudes to ecological systems, natural and energy conservation will be a form topic in the company. Ecological values will become an essential criterion in the appraisement of corporate performance as well as traditional economic criteria. It will assist the firm to have a more reasonable production scale, and the usage of renewable and non-renewable resources will be more brilliant in the production. Finally, it will influence the values of the firm. But it may put the firm in an ethical dilemma caused by the conflicts between profits and future generation’s interest.

WAYS TO IMPROVE TECHNOLOGIES FOR PREPARATION OF CELLULOSE MATERIALS

At the present time, the preparation of textile materials is carried out mainly according to a continuous technology, which consists in impregnating the fabric with a cooking solution, steaming it, washing and souring it, followed by impregnation with a whitening solution, steaming and washing.

Exploring Consumers’ Discontinuance Intention of Remote Mobile Payments during Post-Adoption Usage: An Empirical Study

Despite being critical to continuous technology usage, research on remote mobile payments (m-payments) post-adoption usage has received much less attention. Furthermore, information systems usage research has traditionally been positively oriented, generally assuming that the inhibiting and enabling factors influencing technology usage as being the opposite sides of one dimension, which may result in overlooking antecedents to technology continuance. Therefore, this study aims to explore the inhibiting factors that may directly influence customers’ intention to discontinue m-payments during post-adoption usage. Drawing on behavioral theories, information systems, and marketing research, this study explores the inhibiting factors directly influencing consumers’ intentions to discontinue using m-payments. Survey data were collected from 254 current users in the UK and the PLS-SEM technique is employed to test hypotheses. The results show that poor quality of system, information, and service, as usage inhibitors, directly influence consumers’ discontinuance intentions. Importantly, usage frequency is found to have no moderating effect on the inhibitors of continuance intention, supporting the notion about different and asymmetric effects that negative factors can have on technology usage compared to positive ones. This interesting finding suggests that negative user experience will have different and asymmetric effects on intentions to use m-payments than positive user experience.

Improvement of continuous technology of electrochemical synthesis of nickel hydroxide by implementation of solution recycling

Nickel hydroxide is widely used in supercapacitors, alkaline batteries, for the electrocatalytic oxidation of organic contaminants, etc. Due to their electrochemical activity, Ni(OH)2 (α+β) samples with a layer structure synthesized in a slit diaphragm electrolyzer are the most promising. To improve the continuous technology of electrochemical synthesis of nickel hydroxide, the possibility of recycling the spent catholyte containing sodium sulfate was determined. For this, samples of nickel hydroxide were synthesized from a solution of nickel sulfate in the presence of sodium sulfate with concentrations of 40, 60, 80, 100, and 120 g/L. The crystal structure of the samples was studied by X-ray phase analysis; the electrochemical properties were studied by the method of cyclic voltammetry. It was shown that the base sample obtained without the presence of sodium sulfate was a monophase layered (α+β) structure with a high content of α-modification. The crystallinity of the sample was not high. It was revealed that the presence of sodium sulfate led to a decrease in the crystallinity of nickel hydroxide due to an increase in the electrical conductivity of the solution and a decrease in the voltage in the electrolyzer. Cyclic voltramperometry showed that synthesis in a slit diaphragm electrolyzer in the presence of Na2SO4 (40–80 g/L) did not lead to a significant change in the electrochemical activity of nickel hydroxide samples. An increase in the concentration of sodium sulfate in the catholyte to 100–120 g/L led to an increase in electrochemical activity – the specific current of the discharge peak was 3.7–3.9 A/g (compared to 2.1 A/g for the reference sample).A comprehensive analysis of the characteristics of nickel hydroxide samples synthesized in the presence of sodium sulfate revealed the possibility and prospects of recycling the spent catholyte in a continuous technology for producing Ni(OH)2 in a slit diaphragm electrolyzer. It was revealed that when introducing recycling, it was recommended to maintain a high concentration of sodium sulfate (80–100 g/L)

Uncertainty-Aware Compositional System-Level Reliability Analysis

Continuous technology scaling has increased the susceptibility of today’s electronic devices to manufacturing tolerances and environmental changes. The resulting uncertainty in component reliability can be only approximated or estimated at design time and might propagate to system level. Therefore, uncertainty must be considered to enable the design of robust systems. In this chapter, we propose a methodology for cross-level reliability analysis to tame the ever increasing analysis complexity of contemporary systems under the influence of uncertainties. The presented methodology combines various reliability analysis techniques across different levels of abstraction while providing an explicit modeling of uncertainties. It introduces mechanisms for (a) the composition and decomposition of the system during analysis and (b) converting analysis data between different levels of abstraction through adapters. The developed analysis techniques are integrated in an automatic electronic system-level reliability analysis tool to allow for the evaluation of reliability-increasing techniques and for DSE!. The tool thereby uses meta-heuristic algorithms for optimization and enables the comparison of system implementation candidates with objectives represented by uncertainty distributions.