Sharif Digital Repository

The assessment of the various impairments in brain damage including spasticity is important. The purpose of this study was to develop a new biomechanical method based on quantification of velocity reduction (VR) suitable for clinical use  

This article, introduces a new haptic robot, wrist-RoboHab, for upper limb rehabilitation of post stroke, orthopedic and Parkinson patients., The robot is designed for hand movement therapy and could be used for both treatment and evaluation purposes in three operational states; forearm supination/pronation, wrist flexion/extension and ulnar/radial deviation. At first the mechanical design and control system are described. Then the results of a case study are demonstrated. Clinical results, showed an improvement in Fugle-Meyer, AROM, power and the biomechanical assessment of the spasticity in a chronic patient. Furthermore, it was approved that the robot can have a good interaction with... 

We present a combined trust region-line search structured algorithm for solving constrained nonlinear least-squares problems. The approach is based on adaptive structured scheme due to Mahdavi-Amiri and Bartels of the exact penalty method of Coleman and Conn for nonlinearly constrained optimization problems. The structured adaptation also makes use of the ideas of Nocedal and Overton for handling quasi-Newton updates of projected Hessians. For robustness, we propose a new penalty parameter updating strategy and a specific line search strategy within the trust region, taking account of the least-squares objective and special structured considerations for the approximate projected... 

Over the last two decades there have been numerous reports from different seismically active regions of the world that thermal infrared (TIR) anomalies can be identified around the epicentral areas before major earthquakes [e.g. (Tronin et al., 2002)]. The TIR anomalies reportedly appear as early as 14 to 7 days before the seismic events and affect areas as large as 1000s to 100,000s km2 in size. Our case study for detection of TIRs using NOAA-AVHRR data(Band 4) is an Ms = 5.1 earthquake that occurred on 14th October 2004 near Ravar in Kerman province located in Loot and Tabas deserts, southeast-central Iran. The area is part of the Golbaf-Sirj seismogenic zone. It includes major faults... 

One of the essential requirements of embedded systems is a guaranteed level of reliability. In this regard, fault-tolerance techniques are broadly applied to these systems to enhance reliability. However, fault-tolerance techniques may increase power consumption due to their inherent redundancy. For this purpose, power management techniques are applied, along with fault-tolerance techniques, which generally prolong the system lifespan by decreasing the temperature and leading to an aging rate reduction. Yet, some power management techniques, such as Dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS), increase the transient fault rate and timing error. For this reason, heterogeneous multicore... 

Background: Gestational Diabetes Mellitus (GDM) is a health problem that is increasing around the world. Introduction: Prevention of GDM, rather than treatment, could have several benefits in terms of both health and economic cost. Even a slight reduction in maternal glucose in non-diabetic women, particularly in women at high risk for GDM, may have significant benefits for pregnancy results and the future health of off-springs. Probiotics are a relatively new intervention, which are assessed by mothers’ metabolism, and can reduce blood sugar levels, prevent gestational diabetes and reduce the maternal and fetal complications resulting from it. The aim of this study was to review the studies... 

This study presents an analytical approach for proper selection of output functions to be regulated for the Vienna rectifier such that the resultant closed-loop systems are minimum phase. Specifically, two different adaptive control methodologies based on the input-output linearisation are developed and categorised. In the first category, three output functions are introduced and imposed to be zero by using three dynamic feedback laws. On the basis of states to be regulated, four different cases are studied and it is shown that only one of these cases results in a one-dimensional zero dynamics with an asymptotically stable equilibrium point. In the second category, two output functions are... 

Low power consumption and high-reliability are often major objectives in the design of embedded systems. To reduce power consumption, embedded systems usually employ system-level power management techniques, e.g. Dynamic Voltage Scaling (DVS) and Dynamic Power Management (DPM). To achieve high reliability, embedded systems often exploit fault-tolerant techniques. Fault-tolerant techniques are in a trade-off with energy consumption, peak-power consumption, and temperature. Thus, different methods have been introduced that simultaneously consider reliability and power consumption as the system constraints. Several novel methods have been proposed in previous works to reduce the power... 

In this study, the essential oil of aerial parts species of a plant called Spearmint was extracted by CO 2 to optimize the results of the supercritical extraction process. In order to achieve maximum total yield extraction and SF-CO 2 concentration, tests were done in a laboratorial pilot considering the Taguchi method under following condition: pressure. 90,100,140,170 bar, temperature. of 35, 40, 45, 50 °C, mean particles size: 250,500,710,1000 μm, flow rate 1,3,5,8 ml/s and dynamic time 30,50,90,120 min. The optimizing conditions for SCE and SF-CO 2 concentration are: 90 bar, 45 °C, 500 μm, 5 ml/s, 120 min and 90 bar, 35 °C, 250 μm, 1 ml/s, 30 min. SCE total yield and CO 2 concentration... 

In this paper, using the continuum approximation together with Lennard-Jones potential, a new semi-analytical expression is given to evaluate the van der Waals interaction between two single-walled carbon nanotubes. Based on this expression, two new formulations are also proposed to model multi-walled carbon nanotubes. In the first one, the interactions between each pair of shells from the inner and outer tubes are summed up over all of the pairs, whereas in the second formulation, a set of correction factors are applied to convert the results of double-walled carbon nanotubes to the correlated multi-walled ones. With respect to the present formulations, extensive studies on the variations... 

In recent years, a growing interest in investigation of new energies has been observed. Pressure-retarded osmosis (PRO) could be a feasible source of renewable energy. This study aims to present a model based on the present technology of PRO power plant components for design and economic evaluation of a PRO power plant, and to investigate case studies in order to demonstrate how each main component of a PRO power plant affects the economic evaluation. Therefore, all the mechanisms including intake and outfall systems, pre-treatment system, membrane system, and transportation and generation systems are explicated and meant to present the capability of the model to design the PRO power plant.... 

In recent years, a growing interest in investigation of new energies has been observed. Pressure-retarded osmosis (PRO) could be a feasible source of renewable energy. This study aims to present a model based on the present technology of PRO power plant components for design and economic evaluation of a PRO power plant, and to investigate case studies in order to demonstrate how each main component of a PRO power plant affects the economic evaluation. Therefore, all the mechanisms including intake and outfall systems, pre-treatment system, membrane system, and transportation and generation systems are explicated and meant to present the capability of the model to design the PRO power plant....