Green separation and decomposition of crystalline silicon photovoltaic module's backsheet by using ethanol.

The treatment and recycling of discarded crystalline silicon photovoltaic modules (c-Si PV modules) has become a research focus, but few research have paid attention to the standardized treatment of c-Si PV module's fluorinated backsheet. Improper management of fluorinated backsheet can pose ecological and human health risks. Therefore, this study presents a novel method for processing the backsheet.

PVR-Vocoder: A Pathological Voice Repair Vocoder for Voice Disorders.

Vocoder-based speech synthesis has become a promising technique to accommodate the demands of high-quality speech analysis, manipulation, and synthesis. However, most existing works focus on how to synthesize normal human voice with high signal-to-noise ratio, neglecting individuals' pathological voice disorder in speech interaction. In this work, we propose a non-linear voice repair vocoder for pathological vowels and sentences, which takes the pathological speech as input and generates high-quality repaired speech.

Enabling Real-Time Quality-of-Service and Fine-Grained Aggregation for Wireless TSN.

Wireless Time-Sensitive Networking (WTSN) has emerged as a promising technology for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. To meet the latency requirements of WTSN, wireless local area network (WLAN) such as IEEE 802.11 protocol with the time division multiple access (TDMA) mechanism is shown to be a practical solution.

GuLiM: A Hybrid Motion Mapping Technique for Teleoperation of Medical Assistive Robot in Combating the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Driven by the demand to largely mitigate nosocomial infection problems in combating the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, the trend of developing technologies for teleoperation of medical assistive robots is emerging. However, traditional teleoperation of robots requires professional training and sophisticated manipulation, imposing a burden on healthcare workers, taking a long time to deploy, and conflicting the urgent demand for a timely and effective response to the pandemic. This paper presents a novel motion synchronization method enabled by the hybrid mapping technique of hand gesture and upper-limb motion (GuLiM).

System Error Calibration in Large Datasets of Wireless Channel Sounding for Industrial Applications.

In industrial applications, the large comprehensive wireless channel impulse response (CIR) reference dataset, measured by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), has been a useful tool for understanding propagation within factory environments. The NIST CIR reference dataset is obtained using a precision channel sounder instrument where transmitter and receiver are time-synchronized by two rubidium clocks. While the accuracy of the NIST CIRs is much higher than the CIRs measured by general commercial digital receiver, two types of system errors have been discovered within the dataset from the perspective of signal processing.

Plant Factory: A New Playground of Industrial Communication and Computing.

Plant Factory is a newly emerging industry aiming at transforming crop production to an unprecedented model by leveraging industrial automation and informatics. However, today's plant factory and vertical farming industry are still in a primitive phase, and existing industrial cyber-physical systems are not optimal for a plant factory due to diverse application requirements on communication, computing and artificial intelligence. In this paper, we review use cases and requirements for future plant factories, and then dedicate an architecture that incorporates the communication and computing domains to plant factories with a preliminary proof-of-concept, which has been validated by both academic and industrial practices.

User-Interactive Robot Skin With Large-Area Scalability for Safer and Natural Human-Robot Collaboration in Future Telehealthcare.

With the fourth revolution of healthcare, i.e., Healthcare 4.

Teleoperation of Collaborative Robot for Remote Dementia Care in Home Environments.

As a senile chronic, progressive and currently incurable disease, dementia has an enormous impact on society and life quality of the elderly. The development of teleoperation technology has changed the traditional way of care delivery and brought a variety of novel applications for dementia care. In this paper, a telerobotic system is presented which gives the caregivers the capability of assisting dementia elderly remotely.

Homecare Robotic Systems for Healthcare 4.0: Visions and Enabling Technologies.

Powered by the technologies that have originated from manufacturing, the fourth revolution of healthcare technologies is happening (Healthcare 4.0). As an example of such revolution, new generation homecare robotic systems (HRS) based on the cyber-physical systems (CPS) with higher speed and more intelligent execution are emerging.

Multiple Vowels Repair Based on Pitch Extraction and Line Spectrum Pair Feature for Voice Disorder.

Individuals, such as voice-related professionals, elderly people and smokers, are increasingly suffering from voice disorder, which implies the importance of pathological voice repair. Previous work on pathological voice repair only concerned about sustained vowel /a/, but multiple vowels repair is still challenging due to the unstable extraction of pitch and the unsatisfactory reconstruction of formant. In this paper, a multiple vowels repair based on pitch extraction and Line Spectrum Pair feature for voice disorder is proposed, which broadened the research subjects of voice repair from only single vowel /a/ to multiple vowels /a/, /i/ and /u/ and achieved the repair of these vowels successfully.

Flexible Insole Sensors with Stably Connected Electrodes for Gait Phase Detection.

Gait analysis is an important assessment tool for analyzing vital signals collected from individuals and for providing physical information of the human body, and it is emerging in a diverse range of application scenarios, such as disease diagnosis, fall prevention, rehabilitation, and human-robot interaction. Herein, a kind of surface processed conductive rubber was designed and investigated to develop a pressure-sensitive insole to monitor planar pressure in a real-time manner. Due to a novel surface processing method, the pressure sensor was characterized by stable contact resistance, simple manufacturing, and high mechanical durability.

IoT-Enabled Dual-Arm Motion Capture and Mapping for Telerobotics in Home Care.

With the paradigm shift from hospital-centric healthcare to home-centric healthcare in Healthcare 4.0, healthcare robotics has become one of the fastest growing fields of robotics. The combination of robot capabilities with human intelligence, for example, telerobotics for home care, is gradually showing promising potentials.

Non-Invasive Flexible and Stretchable Wearable Sensors With Nano-Based Enhancement for Chronic Disease Care.

Advances in flexible and stretchable electronics, functional nanomaterials, and micro/nano manufacturing have been made in recent years. These advances have accelerated the development of wearable sensors. Wearable sensors, with excellent flexibility, stretchability, durability, and sensitivity, have attractive application prospects in the next generation of personal devices for chronic disease care.

Development of Flexible Robot Skin for Safe and Natural Human⁻Robot Collaboration.

For industrial manufacturing, industrial robots are required to work together with human counterparts on certain special occasions, where human workers share their skills with robots. Intuitive human⁻robot interaction brings increasing safety challenges, which can be properly addressed by using sensor-based active control technology. In this article, we designed and fabricated a three-dimensional flexible robot skin made by the piezoresistive nanocomposite based on the need for enhancement of the security performance of the collaborative robot.

An IoT-Enabled Stroke Rehabilitation System Based on Smart Wearable Armband and Machine Learning.

Surface electromyography signal plays an important role in hand function recovery training. In this paper, an IoT-enabled stroke rehabilitation system was introduced which was based on a smart wearable armband (SWA), machine learning (ML) algorithms, and a 3-D printed dexterous robot hand. User comfort is one of the key issues which should be addressed for wearable devices.

User Access Management Based on Network Pricing for Social Network Applications.

Social applications play a very important role in people's lives, as users communicate with each other through social networks on a daily basis. This presents a challenge: How does one receive high-quality service from social networks at a low cost? Users can access different kinds of wireless networks from various locations. This paper proposes a user access management strategy based on network pricing such that networks can increase its income and improve service quality.

Smart Homes for Elderly Healthcare-Recent Advances and Research Challenges.

Advancements in medical science and technology, medicine and public health coupled with increased consciousness about nutrition and environmental and personal hygiene have paved the way for the dramatic increase in life expectancy globally in the past several decades. However, increased life expectancy has given rise to an increasing aging population, thus jeopardizing the socio-economic structure of many countries in terms of costs associated with elderly healthcare and wellbeing. In order to cope with the growing need for elderly healthcare services, it is essential to develop affordable, unobtrusive and easy-to-use healthcare solutions.