Safety

Emergency responders must "see" the effects of an earthquake clearly and rapidly for effective response. Mobile phone and information technology can be used to measure ground motion intensity parameters and relay that information to emergency responders. However, the phone sensor is an imperfect device and has a limited operational range. Thus, shake table tests were performed to evaluate their reliability as seismic monitoring instruments. Representative handheld devices, either rigidly connected to the table or free to move, measured shaking intensity parameters well. Bias in 5%-damped...

In a mixed-autonomy traffic scenario, where human drivers and autonomous vehicles share the streets, self-driving cars need to be able to predict in a robust manner the behaviour of human-driven vehicles, in order to guarantee a safe and smooth driving experience. Although traffic theory provides several models of human drivers, these models are often parameterized by few parameters which can limit their performance in modeling complex behaviors. The lack of sufficient model capacity and the behavioral shifts in human driving reduces the usefulness of these methods in real-life...

Background: Lying on the floor for a long period of time has been described as a critical determinant of prognosis following a fall. In addition to fall-related injuries due to the trauma itself, prolonged immobilization on the floor results in a wide range of comorbidities and may double the risk of death in elderly. Thus, reducing the length of Time On the Ground (TOG) in fallers seems crucial in vulnerable individuals with cognitive disorders who cannot get up independently.
Objective: This study aimed to examine the effect of a new technology called SafelyYou Guardian (SYG) on early...

In this paper, a multi-lane multi-population microscopic model, which presents stop-and-go waves, is proposed to simulate traffic on a ring-road. Vehicles are divided between human-driven and autonomous vehicles (AV). Control strategies are designed with the ultimate goal of using a small number of AVs (less than 5% penetration rate) to represent Lagrangian control actuators that can smooth the multilane traffic flow and dissipate the traffic instabilities, and in particular stop-and-go waves. This in turn may reduce fuel consumption and emissions. The lane-changing mechanism is based on...