Matching Items (18)
Filtering by

Clear all filters

157187-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
One type of assistive device for the blind has attempted to convert visual information into information that can be perceived through another sense, such as touch or hearing. A vibrotactile haptic display assistive device consists of an array of vibrating elements placed against the skin, allowing the blind individual to

One type of assistive device for the blind has attempted to convert visual information into information that can be perceived through another sense, such as touch or hearing. A vibrotactile haptic display assistive device consists of an array of vibrating elements placed against the skin, allowing the blind individual to receive visual information through touch. However, these approaches have two significant technical challenges: large vibration element size and the number of microcontroller pins required for vibration control, both causing excessively low resolution of the device. Here, I propose and investigate a type of high-resolution vibrotactile haptic display which overcomes these challenges by utilizing a ‘microbeam’ as the vibrating element. These microbeams can then be actuated using only one microcontroller pin connected to a speaker or surface transducer. This approach could solve the low-resolution problem currently present in all haptic displays. In this paper, the results of an investigation into the manufacturability of such a device, simulation of the vibrational characteristics, and prototyping and experimental validation of the device concept are presented. The possible reasons of the frequency shift between the result of the forced or free response of beams and the frequency calculated based on a lumped mass approximation are investigated. It is found that one of the important reasons for the frequency shift is the size effect, the dependency of the elastic modulus on the size and kind of material. This size effect on A2 tool steel for Micro-Meso scale cantilever beams for the proposed system is investigated.
ContributorsWi, Daehan (Author) / SODEMANN, ANGELA A (Thesis advisor) / Redkar, Sangram (Committee member) / McDaniel, Troy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
135386-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder in the central nervous system that affects a host of daily activities and involves a variety of symptoms; these include tremors, slurred speech, and rigid muscles. It is the second most common movement disorder globally. In Stage 3 of Parkinson's, afflicted individuals begin to

Parkinson's disease is a neurodegenerative disorder in the central nervous system that affects a host of daily activities and involves a variety of symptoms; these include tremors, slurred speech, and rigid muscles. It is the second most common movement disorder globally. In Stage 3 of Parkinson's, afflicted individuals begin to develop an abnormal gait pattern known as freezing of gait (FoG), which is characterized by decreased step length, shuffling, and eventually complete loss of movement; they are unable to move, and often results in a fall. Surface electromyography (sEMG) is a diagnostic tool to measure electrical activity in the muscles to assess overall muscle function. Most conventional EMG systems, however, are bulky, tethered to a single location, expensive, and primarily used in a lab or clinical setting. This project explores an affordable, open-source, and portable platform called Open Brain-Computer Interface (OpenBCI). The purpose of the proposed device is to detect gait patterns by leveraging the surface electromyography (EMG) signals from the OpenBCI and to help a patient overcome an episode using haptic feedback mechanisms. Previously designed devices with similar intended purposes utilize accelerometry as a method of detection as well as audio and visual feedback mechanisms in their design.
ContributorsAnantuni, Lekha (Author) / McDaniel, Troy (Thesis director) / Tadayon, Arash (Committee member) / Harrington Bioengineering Program (Contributor) / School of Human Evolution and Social Change (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-05
136785-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
This paper presents the design and evaluation of a haptic interface for augmenting human-human interpersonal interactions by delivering facial expressions of an interaction partner to an individual who is blind using a visual-to-tactile mapping of facial action units and emotions. Pancake shaftless vibration motors are mounted on the back of

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a haptic interface for augmenting human-human interpersonal interactions by delivering facial expressions of an interaction partner to an individual who is blind using a visual-to-tactile mapping of facial action units and emotions. Pancake shaftless vibration motors are mounted on the back of a chair to provide vibrotactile stimulation in the context of a dyadic (one-on-one) interaction across a table. This work explores the design of spatiotemporal vibration patterns that can be used to convey the basic building blocks of facial movements according to the Facial Action Unit Coding System. A behavioral study was conducted to explore the factors that influence the naturalness of conveying affect using vibrotactile cues.
ContributorsBala, Shantanu (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis director) / McDaniel, Troy (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor)
Created2014-05
154747-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Text Classification is a rapidly evolving area of Data Mining while Requirements Engineering is a less-explored area of Software Engineering which deals the process of defining, documenting and maintaining a software system's requirements. When researchers decided to blend these two streams in, there was research on automating the process of

Text Classification is a rapidly evolving area of Data Mining while Requirements Engineering is a less-explored area of Software Engineering which deals the process of defining, documenting and maintaining a software system's requirements. When researchers decided to blend these two streams in, there was research on automating the process of classification of software requirements statements into categories easily comprehensible for developers for faster development and delivery, which till now was mostly done manually by software engineers - indeed a tedious job. However, most of the research was focused on classification of Non-functional requirements pertaining to intangible features such as security, reliability, quality and so on. It is indeed a challenging task to automatically classify functional requirements, those pertaining to how the system will function, especially those belonging to different and large enterprise systems. This requires exploitation of text mining capabilities. This thesis aims to investigate results of text classification applied on functional software requirements by creating a framework in R and making use of algorithms and techniques like k-nearest neighbors, support vector machine, and many others like boosting, bagging, maximum entropy, neural networks and random forests in an ensemble approach. The study was conducted by collecting and visualizing relevant enterprise data manually classified previously and subsequently used for training the model. Key components for training included frequency of terms in the documents and the level of cleanliness of data. The model was applied on test data and validated for analysis, by studying and comparing parameters like precision, recall and accuracy.
ContributorsSwadia, Japa (Author) / Ghazarian, Arbi (Thesis advisor) / Bansal, Srividya (Committee member) / Gaffar, Ashraf (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
154625-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
This reports investigates the general day to day problems faced by small businesses, particularly small vendors, in areas of marketing and general management. Due to lack of man power, internet availability and properly documented data, small business cannot optimize their business. The aim of the research is to address and

This reports investigates the general day to day problems faced by small businesses, particularly small vendors, in areas of marketing and general management. Due to lack of man power, internet availability and properly documented data, small business cannot optimize their business. The aim of the research is to address and find a solution to these problems faced, in the form of a tool which utilizes data science. The tool will have features which will aid the vendor to mine their data which they record themselves and find useful information which will benefit their businesses. Since there is lack of properly documented data, One Class Classification using Support Vector Machine (SVM) is used to build a classifying model that can return positive values for audience that is likely to respond to a marketing strategy. Market basket analysis is used to choose products from the inventory in a way that patterns are found amongst them and therefore there is a higher chance of a marketing strategy to attract audience. Also, higher selling products can be used to the vendors' advantage and lesser selling products can be paired with them to have an overall profit to the business. The tool, as envisioned, meets all the requirements that it was set out to have and can be used as a stand alone application to bring the power of data mining into the hands of a small vendor.
ContributorsSharma, Aveesha (Author) / Ghazarian, Arbi (Thesis advisor) / Gaffar, Ashraf (Committee member) / Bansal, Srividya (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
155511-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
The Internet is a major source of online news content. Online news is a form of large-scale narrative text with rich, complex contents that embed deep meanings (facts, strategic communication frames, and biases) for shaping and transitioning standards, values, attitudes, and beliefs of the masses. Currently, this body of narrative

The Internet is a major source of online news content. Online news is a form of large-scale narrative text with rich, complex contents that embed deep meanings (facts, strategic communication frames, and biases) for shaping and transitioning standards, values, attitudes, and beliefs of the masses. Currently, this body of narrative text remains untapped due—in large part—to human limitations. The human ability to comprehend rich text and extract hidden meanings is far superior to known computational algorithms but remains unscalable. In this research, computational treatment is given to online news framing for exposing a deeper level of expressivity coined “double subjectivity” as characterized by its cumulative amplification effects. A visual language is offered for extracting spatial and temporal dynamics of double subjectivity that may give insight into social influence about critical issues, such as environmental, economic, or political discourse. This research offers benefits of 1) scalability for processing hidden meanings in big data and 2) visibility of the entire network dynamics over time and space to give users insight into the current status and future trends of mass communication.
ContributorsCheeks, Loretta H. (Author) / Gaffar, Ashraf (Thesis advisor) / Wald, Dara M (Committee member) / Ben Amor, Hani (Committee member) / Doupe, Adam (Committee member) / Cooke, Nancy J. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
168661-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Ophthalmoscopes are integral to diagnosing various eye conditions; however, they often come at a hefty cost and are not generally portable, limiting access. With the increase in the prevalence of smart devices and improvements to their imaging capabilities, these devices have the potential to benefit areas where specialized imaging infrastructure

Ophthalmoscopes are integral to diagnosing various eye conditions; however, they often come at a hefty cost and are not generally portable, limiting access. With the increase in the prevalence of smart devices and improvements to their imaging capabilities, these devices have the potential to benefit areas where specialized imaging infrastructure is not well established. Smart device cameras alone cannot replace an ophthalmoscope. However, with the addition of lens and optics, it becomes possible to take diagnostic quality images. The goal is to design a modular system that acts as an adapter to a smart device enabling any user to take retinal images and corneal images with little to no previous experience. The device should be cost-effective, reliable, and easy to use. The device is not meant to replace conventional funduscopes but acts in areas where current units fail. Applications in non-optimal settings, low resource areas, or areas that currently receive suboptimal care due to geographic or socioeconomic barriers are examples where this device could be used. The introduction of screening programs run by nonspecialized medical personnel with devices that can capture and transmit quality eye images minimizes the long-term complications of degenerative eye conditions.
ContributorsSpyres, Dean (Author) / McDaniel, Troy (Thesis advisor) / Patel, Dave (Committee member) / Gintz, Jerry (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
171531-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
The reality of smart cities is here and now. The issues of data privacy in tech applications are apparent in smart cities. Privacy as an issue raised by many and addressed by few remains critical for smart cities’ success. It is the common responsibility of smart cities, tech application makers,

The reality of smart cities is here and now. The issues of data privacy in tech applications are apparent in smart cities. Privacy as an issue raised by many and addressed by few remains critical for smart cities’ success. It is the common responsibility of smart cities, tech application makers, and users to embark on the journey to solutions. Privacy is an individual problem that smart cities need to provide a collective solution for. The research focuses on understanding users’ data privacy preferences, what information they consider private, and what they need to protect. The research identifies the data security loopholes, data privacy roadblocks, and common opportunities for change to implement a proactive privacy-driven tech solution necessary to address and resolve tech-induced data privacy concerns among citizens. This dissertation aims at addressing the issue of data privacy in tech applications based on known methodologies to address the concerns they allow. Through this research, a data privacy survey on tech applications was conducted, and the results reveal users’ desires to become a part of the solution by becoming aware and taking control of their data privacy while using tech applications. So, this dissertation gives an overview of the data privacy issues in tech, discusses available data privacy basis, elaborates on the different steps needed to create a robust remedy to data privacy concerns in enabling users’ awareness and control, and proposes two privacy applications one as a data privacy awareness solution and the other as a representation of the privacy control framework to address data privacy concerns in smart cities.
ContributorsMusafiri Mimo, Edgard (Author) / McDaniel, Troy (Thesis advisor) / Michael, Katina (Committee member) / Sullivan, Kenneth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
157758-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Endowing machines with the ability to understand digital images is a critical task for a host of high-impact applications, including pathology detection in radiographic imaging, autonomous vehicles, and assistive technology for the visually impaired. Computer vision systems rely on large corpora of annotated data in order to train task-specific visual

Endowing machines with the ability to understand digital images is a critical task for a host of high-impact applications, including pathology detection in radiographic imaging, autonomous vehicles, and assistive technology for the visually impaired. Computer vision systems rely on large corpora of annotated data in order to train task-specific visual recognition models. Despite significant advances made over the past decade, the fact remains collecting and annotating the data needed to successfully train a model is a prohibitively expensive endeavor. Moreover, these models are prone to rapid performance degradation when applied to data sampled from a different domain. Recent works in the development of deep adaptation networks seek to overcome these challenges by facilitating transfer learning between source and target domains. In parallel, the unification of dominant semi-supervised learning techniques has illustrated unprecedented potential for utilizing unlabeled data to train classification models in defiance of discouragingly meager sets of annotated data.

In this thesis, a novel domain adaptation algorithm -- Domain Adaptive Fusion (DAF) -- is proposed, which encourages a domain-invariant linear relationship between the pixel-space of different domains and the prediction-space while being trained under a domain adversarial signal. The thoughtful combination of key components in unsupervised domain adaptation and semi-supervised learning enable DAF to effectively bridge the gap between source and target domains. Experiments performed on computer vision benchmark datasets for domain adaptation endorse the efficacy of this hybrid approach, outperforming all of the baseline architectures on most of the transfer tasks.
ContributorsDudley, Andrew, M.S (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / Venkateswara, Hemanth (Committee member) / McDaniel, Troy (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
157788-Thumbnail Image.png
Description
Parents fulfill a pivotal role in early childhood development of social and communication

skills. In children with autism, the development of these skills can be delayed. Applied

behavioral analysis (ABA) techniques have been created to aid in skill acquisition.

Among these, pivotal response treatment (PRT) has been empirically shown to foster

improvements. Research into

Parents fulfill a pivotal role in early childhood development of social and communication

skills. In children with autism, the development of these skills can be delayed. Applied

behavioral analysis (ABA) techniques have been created to aid in skill acquisition.

Among these, pivotal response treatment (PRT) has been empirically shown to foster

improvements. Research into PRT implementation has also shown that parents can be

trained to be effective interventionists for their children. The current difficulty in PRT

training is how to disseminate training to parents who need it, and how to support and

motivate practitioners after training.

Evaluation of the parents’ fidelity to implementation is often undertaken using video

probes that depict the dyadic interaction occurring between the parent and the child during

PRT sessions. These videos are time consuming for clinicians to process, and often result

in only minimal feedback for the parents. Current trends in technology could be utilized to

alleviate the manual cost of extracting data from the videos, affording greater

opportunities for providing clinician created feedback as well as automated assessments.

The naturalistic context of the video probes along with the dependence on ubiquitous

recording devices creates a difficult scenario for classification tasks. The domain of the

PRT video probes can be expected to have high levels of both aleatory and epistemic

uncertainty. Addressing these challenges requires examination of the multimodal data

along with implementation and evaluation of classification algorithms. This is explored

through the use of a new dataset of PRT videos.

The relationship between the parent and the clinician is important. The clinician can

provide support and help build self-efficacy in addition to providing knowledge and

modeling of treatment procedures. Facilitating this relationship along with automated

feedback not only provides the opportunity to present expert feedback to the parent, but

also allows the clinician to aid in personalizing the classification models. By utilizing a

human-in-the-loop framework, clinicians can aid in addressing the uncertainty in the

classification models by providing additional labeled samples. This will allow the system

to improve classification and provides a person-centered approach to extracting

multimodal data from PRT video probes.
ContributorsCopenhaver Heath, Corey D (Author) / Panchanathan, Sethuraman (Thesis advisor) / McDaniel, Troy (Committee member) / Venkateswara, Hemanth (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Gaffar, Ashraf (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019