Browse Topic: Children
This paper proposes HaloBus, an innovative, edge-computing solution designed to mitigate this risk by detecting student boarding and exiting in real time using lightweight AI based methods. A persistent challenge in elementary school transportation is the issue of missing students after they exit their buses, which disproportionately impacts low-income households. Current safety systems place the burden of implementation on individual households, often requiring independent methods. Common methods include applications on a personal device or a small tracker. However, not everyone can afford these options, and ensuring child safety is a primary concern for parents and caregivers. That is why HaloBus was invented. The system employs YOLOv5us—an Ultralytics-enhanced, anchor-free, split-head architecture that offers a superior accuracy speed trade-off. By providing real-time, on-device alerts, HaloBus enables immediate intervention to prevent a student from being left behind, thereby shifting the focus from reactive post-incident response to proactive safety. Trained on over 70,000 labeled and unlabeled images, the model can accurately detect multiple students simultaneously, significantly reducing false positives. In real-world deployment, the model sustained 30 frames per second on the Raspberry Pi and achieved detection confidence levels exceeding 75% even when subjects wore sunglasses or hoodies. With opt-in participation for each family, HaloBus effectively balances detection efficiency and privacy protection. Overall, HaloBus offers a low-cost, scalable, and ethically conscious approach to enhancing school-bus safety by delivering reliable, on-device boarding and exit detection for multiple students in varied real-world conditions.
During the first two years of life, the motor development of children is monitored closely, as motion is the natural base for their other development and interaction with the environment. Current methods do not allow accurate developmental monitoring throughout early childhood.
Researchers have created a groundbreaking prototype for a new kind of leadless pacemaker designed for both children and adults. The innovative micropacemaker would be the first fully leadless system to be placed in the pericardial space surrounding the heart. That would allow the device to be implanted in a minimally invasive way in children and those with congenital heart disease, while also providing a lower-risk leadless pacemaker option for adults.
It’s a game a lot of us played as children — and maybe even later in life: unspooling measuring tape to see how far it would extend before bending. But to engineers at the University of California San Diego, this game was an inspiration, suggesting that measuring tape could become a great material for a robotic gripper.
The Hospital for Sick Children/University of Toronto Toronto, ON, Canada
Chocolate-flavored pills for children who hate taking medicine. Several drugs combined into one daily pill for seniors who have trouble remembering to take their medications. Drugs printed at your local pharmacy at personalized dosages that best suit your health needs. These are just a few potential advantages of 3D drug printing, a new system for manufacturing drugs and treatments on-site at pharmacies, healthcare facilities, and other remote locations.
Researchers have designed a lightweight helmet with tiny LEGO-size sensors that scan the brain while a person moves. The helmet is the first of its kind to accurately record magnetic fields generated by brain activity while people are in motion. This advance could make it easier to conduct brain scans in young children and individuals with neurological disorders who can’t always remain still in conventional scanners.
Researchers at the EPFL have achieved a breakthrough in the treatment of tracheomalacia, a condition characterized by weak tracheal cartilage and muscles that normally keep the airway open for proper breathing. The team, composed of EPFL engineers and CHUV pediatric airway surgeons, has successfully developed a novel adhesive hydrogel patch that can effectively alleviate tracheomalacia, providing hope for improved treatment options for this challenging condition. The proof of concept was recently published in iScience.
Strep throat is a common and treatable childhood disease in the United States, but in less wealthy countries, children afflicted with strep can develop rheumatic fever, in which runaway inflammation attacks the body’s tissues. Rheumatic fever often damages the valves of the heart, causing rheumatic heart disease that can lead to serious health problems, including heart failure.
Side door latches in an automotive play a major role in occupants’ safety. The latches consist of both retention assembly and actuator assembly. The actuator assembly majorly consists of motor, gear & other components and these are protected through a Plastic Lower case and Housing. The Lower case (over-mold) with the Electrical Component Carrier - ECC (pre-mold) plays an important role in providing electrical power supply to the latch system. Since these parts are manufactured with terminal traces & plastics, upfront mold flow simulations help the product teams to evaluate the short fills, warpage, and other quality aspects in the critical areas of these components. In the part assembly station, the ECC (pre-mold) and the Lower case (over-mold) are connected to the Motor on one side and the Connector on the other. The proper alignment of the pre-mold pins is of great importance and the pre-mold must not be externally visible once the molding is complete. During the prototype build, the pins were offset/dislocated due to pre-mold shift. This in turn caused deformation of the Over-mold resulting in dimensional inconsistency leading to assembly & functional issues. This issue was complex since the part couldn’t be modified structurally because of the constraints in packaging as these interfaces with the backplate & the child feature would affect its integrity. Here, overcoming the ‘pre-mold’ shift was an important aspect to keep the Lower-case pins within the location limits ensuring a proper part assembly. However, it was challenging to control the ‘pre-mold’ shift defect merely based upon the molding manufacturing knowledge. Hence, we had to utilize ‘core-deflection analysis’ method in Moldex-3D, an injection molding specialized software, to verify the cause of ‘pre-mold’ shift and correct the problem. Virtual simulation technique has helped to resolve the issue and same technic was used in production tool. This paper will provide an insight to both the methodologies used and the tooling changes required to achieve the product assembly requirements.
The SJD Barcelona Children’s Hospital’s pediatric maxillofacial surgery team has used 3D printing technology to successfully perform a complicated operation to resect a malignant tumor in an 11-year-old boy. Given the complexity of the operation, the medical team, led by Dr. Josep Rubio, head of the maxillofacial surgery unit at SJD, decided to carry out preoperative planning and simulation using BCN3D’s technology and 3D anatomical models of the parts of the patient’s skull.
Vehicles that start moving from a stationary position can cause fatal traffic accidents involving pedestrians. Ultrasonic sensors installed in the vehicle front are an active technology designed to alert drivers to the presence of stationary objects such as rigid walls in front of their vehicles. However, the ability of such sensors to detect humans has not yet been established. Therefore, this study aims to ascertain whether these sensor systems can successfully detect humans. First, we conducted experiments using four vehicles equipped with ultrasonic sensor systems for vehicle-forward moving-off maneuvers and investigated the detection distances between the vehicles and a pipe (1 m long and having a diameter of 75 mm), child, adult female, or adult male. The detections of human volunteers were evaluated under two different conditions: front-facing and side-facing toward the front of each vehicle. Front-facing is defined as the condition where the human faces the vehicle front, while side-facing is that where the side of the human faces it. For both the front-facing and side-facing conditions, the results indicated that the sensor-detection distances for a child were shorter than those for the pipe, whereas those for adults were less than or approximately equivalent to those for the pipe. These results revealed that ultrasonic sensor systems for vehicle-forward moving-off maneuvers can detect not only stationary objects but also humans, indicating that ultrasonic sensors installed in the vehicle front could possibly reduce the risk of vehicle-forward moving-off accidents involving pedestrians.
This paper takes a review of fretting phenomenon on splines of the engaging gears and corresponding splines on shaft of automotive transmission and how it leads to failure of other components in the gearbox. Fretting is a special wear process which occurs at the contact area of two mating metal surfaces when subject to minute relative oscillating motion under vibration. In automotive gearbox, which is subjected to torsional vibrations of the powertrain, the splines of engaging gears and corresponding shaft may experience fretting, especially when the subject gear pair is not engaged. The wear debris formed under fretting process when oxidizes becomes very hard and more abrasive than base metal. These oxidized wear particles when comes in mesh contact with nearby components like bearings, gears etc. may damage these parts during operation and eventually lead to failure. In this paper, a case study is presented wherein fretting has been identified as the root cause of failures of some child parts in a gearbox. A parametric study was carried out, evaluating design and operational parameters to identify the causes of fretting and their relative impact on gearbox durability, through rig testing. Corrective action and their correlation in addressing the failures of other child parts was further proved though rig testing.
Child injury performance evaluation is becoming critical part of almost all legal and consumer ratings-based vehicle safety evaluation protocols. Most of New CAR Assessment Programs (NCAP) now have separate ratings exclusively to evaluate child restraint system effectiveness and child dummy performance under various crash testing modes. OEM’s have need and challenge to maximize injury performance. Sled tests are conventionally used for tuning restraints like seat belts and airbags for driver and co-driver under various frontal type test conditions. However, second row seats are used for CRS/ Child injury performance evaluations. In the present study an attempt is made to simulate child injury performance of P3 dummy positioned on second row seat on defined child seat for 64 kmph frontal Offset deformable barrier type test conforming to Global NCAP. Sled pulses are carefully tuned to capture key injury patterns. Thence restraint parameters are tuned to improve child dummy injuries
Ear infections occur when fluid builds up in the middle ear behind the eardrum and is infected. This buildup is also common in another condition called otitis media with effusion. Any kind of fluid buildup can be painful and make it hard for children to hear. A new smartphone app can detect fluid behind the eardrum by simply using a piece of paper and a smartphone’s microphone and speaker.
A cochlear implant enables people with severe hearing loss to hear again. An audiologist adjusts the device based on the user’s input, but this is not always easy. Think of children who are born deaf or elderly people with dementia. They have more difficulty assessing and communicating how well they hear the sounds, resulting in an implant that is not optimally tuned to their situation.
To improve the biofidelity of the currently available Hybrid III 10-year-old (HIII-10C) Anthropomorphic Test Device (ATD), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has developed the Large Omnidirectional Child (LODC) ATD. The LODC head is a redesigned HIII-10C head with mass properties and modified skin material required to match pediatric biomechanical impact response targets from the literature. A dynamic, nonlinear finite element (FE) model of the LODC head has been developed using the mesh generating tool Hypermesh based on the three-dimensional CAD model. The material data, contact definitions, and initial conditions are defined in LS-PrePost and converted to LS-Dyna solver input format. The aluminum head skull is stiff relative to head flesh material and was thus modeled as a rigid material. For the actual LODC, the head flesh is form fit onto the skull and held in place through contact friction. In an attempt to identify the matching flesh-skull contact definition in the FE model, a comparative assessment was conducted under four different boundary conditions between head flesh and skull: completely unconstrained, fully constrained, partial constraint at the head cap boundary, and partial constraint at the jaw. The boundary conditions under consideration influenced how the head flesh separated from the skull during the impact event. It was clear that the nose of the ATD contacted the impact plate during all drop tests leading to varying levels of contact area. For the most suitable boundary condition, the viscoelastic material parameters of the flesh were identified using an inverse method that minimizes the difference between measured and predicted acceleration impulse of the head form center of gravity under impact loading. This inverse method resulted in a reasonable match between physical test data and model-simulated data for head impacts from drop heights of 150, 300, and 450 mm at an angle of 60 degrees. Additional model predictions were then compared to head drop tests from the same heights at a modified angle of 62 degrees. The FE model with the skull-flesh contact definition of the partial constraint at the head cap boundary predicts the peak accelerations within 4% error with good agreement across the full acceleration time signal and the phase shift for all drop heights between the 60 and 62 degree drop angles.
Naturalistic driving studies have shown that pediatric occupants do not assume ideal seating positions in real-world scenarios. Current vehicle assessment programs and child restraint system (CRS) sled tests, such as FMVSS No. 213, do not account for a wide range of seating postures that are typically observed during real-world trips. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the kinematic and kinetic response of a pediatric human body model in various naturalistic seating positions in booster seats when subjected to a frontal offset impact in a full-vehicle environment, with and without the application of pre-crash automatic emergency braking (AEB). A 6YO (seated on a lowback and highback booster) and a 10YO (seated in no-CRS and on a lowback booster) PIPER pediatric human body model’s response was explored in a reference, and two most commonly observed seating postures: forward-leaning and forward-inboard-leaning. The vehicle environment with a side-curtain airbag (SCAB) was subjected to a small offset barrier impact (25% overlap at 40MPH), with and without the application of a pre-crash automatic emergency braking (AEB). 24 conditions were simulated using finite element analysis. Cases with a pre-crash AEB resulted in relatively lower kinematic and kinetic values due to the occupant being in a more flexed position before impact compared to without-AEB cases, coupled with the increased ride-down effect due to AEB. Moreover, different seating postures resulted in substantially different kinematics and kinetics, the injury metrics crossing the injury assessment reference values in some cases. Therefore, to design a passive safety standard test for pediatric occupants, it is important to consider the possible postural changes that may occur.
When Jane Lathrop Stanford and former California Governor Leland Stanford lost their only child to typhoid in 1884, they decided to build a university as the most fitting memorial. Leland Stanford Junior University — still its legal name — opened October 1, 1891 in Palo Alto, CA.
In order to study the influence of autonomous vehicles on short and medium distance mode choice for intercity travel, this paper incorporates the latent psychological variables that affect the choice behavior of autonomous vehicles into the latent class conditional logit model and establishes a hybrid choice model to conduct the empirical research based on the theory of planned behavior. The results show that compared with the traditional multinomial logit model, the latent class conditional logit model has higher fitting goodness. Travelers can be divided into three subgroups: class1, class2, and class 3, accounting for 40.7%, 24.4%, and 34.9%, respectively. At a 5% confidence level, gender, education, occupation, monthly household income, children, and IC card significantly affect the sample’s latent class. The value of in-vehicle time of class1 and class3 are 2.400 yuan/min and 2.169 yuan/min, which is slightly higher than the total in-vehicle time value of the sample (1.799 yuan/min); the access and egress and waiting time value of class1 is as low as 0.702 yuan/min, while the value of class3 is 8.607 yuan/min. Travelers from class 1 are more sensitive to the travel costs of autonomous vehicles and intercity buses than travelers from class 3 based on the elasticity analysis.
Dual mass flywheel (DMF) is an excellent solution to improve the noise, vibration and harshness (NVH) characteristic of any vehicle by isolating the driveline from the engine torsional vibrations. For the same reason, DMFs are widely used in high power-density diesel and gasoline engines. However, the real-world usage conditions pose a lot of challenges to the structural robustness of the DMF. In the present work, a new methodology is developed to evaluate the robustness of a DMF fitted in a compact sports utility vehicle (SUV) with rear-wheel drive architecture. The abuse conditions (mis-gear, sudden braking, etc) in the real-world usage could lead to a sudden engine stall leading to an abnormally high angular deceleration of the driveline components. The higher rate of deceleration coupled with the higher rotational moment of inertia of the systems might end up in introducing a significantly high impact torque on the DMF. Hence, prolonged usage of the vehicle in abuse conditions could lead to a structural failure of the DMF which needs to be assessed during the development stage of a vehicle. In the present work, the authors propose a unique methodology to assess the structural robustness of any DMF. The methodology is a combination of multiple mis-gear shifts and abuse maneuvers creating a high impact torque. The impact torque throughout the testing was measured to establish a correlation with real-world failures. The effectiveness of the methodology is confirmed by comparing the results of the tested DMFs with the long duration high mileage durability DMFs. Moreover, the duration of the methodology is designed to be extremely short that any DMF could be validated within 2 days. In the present work, based on the results of this proposed methodology, the robustness of the DMF could be improved by modifying the internal child parts of the DMF. The paper explains the typical robustness measures needed inside the DMF to avoid real-world structural failures.
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