• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.25 no.2
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• pp.169-181
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• 2020

Sensor placement is a crucial aspect of bridge health monitoring (BHM) dedicated to accurately estimate and locate structural damages. In addressing this goal, a sensor placement framework based on the deflection influence line (DIL) analysis is here proposed, for the optimal design of damage detection-oriented BHM system. In order to improve damage detection accuracy, we explore the change of global stiffness matrix, damage coefficient matrix and DIL vector caused by structural damage, and thus develop a novel sensor placement framework based on the Fisher information matrix. Our approach seeks to determine the contribution of each sensing node to damage detection, and adopts a distance correction coefficient to eliminate the information redundancy among sensors. The proposed damage detection-oriented optimal sensor placement (OSP) method is verified by two examples: (1) a numerically simulated three-span continuous beam, and (2) the Pinghu bridge which has existing real damage conditions. These two examples verify the performance of the distance corrected damage sensitivity of influence line (DSIL) method in significantly higher contribution to damage detection and lower information redundancy, and demonstrate the proposed OSP framework can be potentially employed in BHM practices.

• CELLMED
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.4.1-4.4
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• 2011

Excessive stress is harmful to academic performance in children and may lead to dropping out of school. To meet the demands of a modern life-style which is full of speed, stress and tension, an all-round child health program is crucial. The use of yoga for children has diverse applications in maintaining and developing their physical, mental, intellectual, emotional and spiritual levels. Yoga, through its physical postures (asana), breathing practices (pranayama), cleansing techniques (kriya), meditation therapies (dhyana) and relaxation training (yoga nidra) yields a positive effect in the management of stress in children. Yoga practice benefited children by improving their eye-hand coordination, attention span, levels of concentration, competitive performance and relaxation. Visually impaired children showed a significant decrease in their abnormal anxiety levels when they practiced yoga for three weeks, while a program of physical activity had no such effect. Socially disadvantaged children in a remand home showed significant improvements in sleep, appetite and general well being, as well as a decrease in physiological arousal after yoga. In one study, it is found that a 4-week program of asana and meditation lowers the aggressive behavior of children. Meditation helped to reduce problems related to maladaptive behavior, increase emotional and physical health and psychological well-being in children. Finally, the possible role of yoga in improving the mental state and general well-being of children with cancer is being explored.

• Journal of the Korean housing association
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.121-132
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• 2003

This study has been performed to explore main reasons for staying in paid elderly residential care facilities among the residents. In this study, five males and seven females aged 65 to 82 were asked about main reasons for staying in the facilities. The answers of the qualitative interview were drawn as follows; first, some residents had suddenly decided to move into the facility due to critical life events such as bereavement, serious illness, or supporting problems. Second, some residents had taken a long period of considerations on whether staying home or in the facilities, because their health and family supports gradually diminished over the long life span. On the other hand, a few of them voluntarily chose to stay at the facilities, because they recognized supervised group activities, nutritionally well-planned meals, and health care as major inconveniences. In this study, suggestions were made as follows: first, guiding and settlement programs should be developed for the residents of the sudden events, particularly at early stage of admission. Second, intensive nursing care units should be in separation from healthy independent groups, so that the residents are relieved from stressful contacts with extremely ill patients in the residential area.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.11 no.1
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• pp.1-17
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• 2013

This paper intended to investigate the feasibility of bridge health monitoring using a linear system parameter of a time series model identified from traffic-induced vibrations of bridges through a laboratory moving vehicle experiment on scaled model bridges. This study considered the system parameter of the bridge-vehicle interactive system rather than modal ones because signals obtained under a moving vehicle are not the responses of the bridge itself but those of the interactive system. To overcome the shortcomings of modal parameter-based bridge diagnosis using a time series model, this study considered coefficients of Autoregressive model (AR coefficients) as an early indicator of anomaly of bridges. This study also investigated sensitivity of AR coefficients in detecting anomaly of bridges. Observations demonstrated effectiveness of using AR coefficients as an early indicator for anomaly of bridges.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.51-65
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• 2018

A number of sensing techniques have been implemented for detecting defects in civil infrastructures instead of onsite human inspections in structural health monitoring. However, the issue of faults in sensors has not received much attention. This issue may lead to incorrect interpretation of data and false alarms. To overcome these challenges, this article presents a deep learning-based method with a new architecture of Stateful Long Short Term Memory Neural Networks (S-LSTM NN) for detecting sensor fault without going into details of the fault features. As LSTMs are capable of learning data features automatically, and the proposed method works without an accurate mathematical model. The detection of four types of sensor faults are studied in this paper. Non-stationary acceleration responses of a three-span continuous bridge when under operational conditions are studied. A deep network model is applied to the measured bridge data with estimation to detect the sensor fault. Another set of sensor output data is used to supervise the network parameters and backpropagation algorithm to fine tune the parameters to establish a deep self-coding network model. The response residuals between the true value and the predicted value of the deep S-LSTM network was statistically analyzed to determine the fault threshold of sensor. Experimental study with a cable-stayed bridge further indicated that the proposed method is robust in the detection of the sensor fault.

• Journal of Nutrition and Health
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• v.33 no.3
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• pp.289-295
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• 2000

In the present work we investigated the effect of regular physical exercise on the activities of erythrocyte antioxidant enzyme, plasma total radical-trapping antioxidant potential(TRAP) and plasma level of lipid peroxidation(malondialdehyde, MDA) in 64 healthy male, aged 34-67 years. The study population were divided in two groups: small amount of exerciser(exercise time less than 10min/d) and moderate amount of exerciser(exercise time more than 20min/d) according to their physical exercise habits measured by a questionnaire. Erythrocyte superoxide dismutase(SOD), glutathione peroxidase(GSH-Px) and catalase(CAT), plasma TRAP, as well as plasma MDA were determined. Erythrocyte GSH-Px and plasma TRAP were higher in moderate amount of exercisers than those in small amount of exercisers by 17% and 26%, respectively. No significant differences were observed in erythrocyte SOD, CAT and plasma MDA between the two groups. Mean exercise time was positively correlated with the erythrocyte GSH-Px activity and plasma TRAP significantly. The results would sugest that regular moderate exercise enhances antioxidant defences against reactive oxygen species and may increase the likelihood of a healthier life span.

• Radiation Oncology Journal
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• v.37 no.2
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• pp.143-148
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• 2019

Although surgery is the mainstay of local treatment for skin cancer, definitive radiation therapy (RT) has been also applied for patients who are unable to tolerate surgery. Definitive RT regimens usually consist of daily treatment for 4-7 weeks. Such protracted daily RT regimens, however, would not be feasible for non-compliant patients or patients who are unable to make multiple daily trips for weeks. Without treatment, however, skin cancers can continuously progress and cause distressing symptoms. A cyclical hypofractionated RT (QUAD Shot: 14 Gy in 4 fractions, twice-daily treatments with 6 hours interval on 2 consecutive days) can be a practical RT regimen for those patients. In this report, we present the successful treatment course of repeated QUAD Shots in a 79-year-old patient with neglected skin cancer that was disfiguring his face yet declined definitive surgery and protracted RT. We also evaluated and compared biologically equivalent doses between QUAD Shots and conventionally fractionated protracted RT regimens.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.585-599
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• 2016

Steel cables serve as the key structural components in long-span bridges, and the force state of the steel cable is deemed to be one of the most important determinant factors representing the safety condition of bridge structures. The disadvantages of traditional cable force measurement methods have been envisaged and development of an effective alternative is still desired. In the last decade, the vision-based sensing technology has been rapidly developed and broadly applied in the field of structural health monitoring (SHM). With the aid of vision-based multi-point structural displacement measurement method, monitoring of the tensile force of the steel cable can be realized. In this paper, a novel cable force monitoring system integrated with a multi-point pattern matching algorithm is developed. The feasibility and accuracy of the developed vision-based force monitoring system has been validated by conducting the uniaxial tensile tests of steel bars, steel wire ropes, and parallel strand cables on a universal testing machine (UTM) as well as a series of moving loading experiments on a scale arch bridge model. The comparative study of the experimental outcomes indicates that the results obtained by the vision-based system are consistent with those measured by the traditional method for cable force measurement.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.9 no.8
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• pp.164-169
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• 2019

This study was examined that natural seasoning is related to health care and disease prevention through oriental medicinal theory. A typical oriental medicinal theory is the princeple of win-win cooperation between Yin-Yang and Five elements, the old belief is that our body moves in harmony with Yin-Yang and Five elements. From the records traditional books and papers, we would look at the affinity and nutritional relationship between Five taste(Sweet, Salt, Sour, Bitter, Heat and Spicy) and the body with "Sesame" Therefore, several type of Sesame which is represented by natural seasoning, through intake of Five taste because of body affinity, is expected to prolong health life span.

• Structural Monitoring and Maintenance
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• v.8 no.4
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• pp.379-402
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• 2021

Traditional approaches for structural health monitoring (SHM) seldom take ambient uncertainty (temperature, humidity, ambient vibration) into consideration, while their impacts on structural responses are substantial, leading to a possibility of raising false alarms. A few predictors model-based approaches deal with these uncertainties through complex numerical models running online, rendering the SHM approach to be compute-intensive, slow, and sometimes not practical. Also, with model-based approaches, the imperative need for a precise understanding of the structure often poses a problem for not so well understood complex systems. The present study employs a data-based approach coupled with Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) to correlate recorded response time histories under varying temperature conditions to corresponding damage scenarios. EMD decomposes the response signal into a finite set of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs). A two-dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (2DCNN) is further trained to associate these IMFs to the respective damage cases. The use of IMFs in place of raw signals helps to reduce the impact of sensor noise while preserving the essential spatio-temporal information less-sensitive to thermal effects and thereby stands as a better damage-sensitive feature than the raw signal itself. The proposed algorithm is numerically tested on a single span bridge under varying temperature conditions for different damage severities. The dynamic strain is recorded as the response since they are frame-invariant and cheaper to install. The proposed algorithm has been observed to be damage sensitive as well as sufficiently robust against measurement noise.