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The purpose of this paper is to develop a highly miniaturized wireless inertial sensor system based on a novel 3D packaging technique using a flexible printed circuit (FPC). The device is very suitable for wearable applications in which small size and lightweight are required such as body area network, medical, sports and entertainment applications.

Modern wireless inertial measurement units are typically implemented on a rigid 2D printed circuit board (PCB). The design concept presented here is based around the use of a novel planar, six‐faceted, crucifix or cross‐shaped FPC instead of a rigid PCB. A number of specific functional blocks (such as microelectromechanical systems gyroscope and accelerometer sensors, microcontroller (MCU), radio transceiver, antenna, etc.) are first assigned to each of the six faces which are each 1 cm² in area. The FPC cross is then developed into a 1 cm³, 3D configuration by folding the cross at each of five bend planes. The result is a low‐volume and lightweight, 1 cm³ wireless inertial sensor that can sense and send motion sensed data wirelessly to a base station. The wireless sensor device has been designed for low power operation both at the hardware and software levels. At the base station side, a radio receiver is connected to another MCU unit, which sends received data to a personal computer (PC) and graphical user interface. The industrial, scientific and medical band (2.45 GHz) is used to achieve half duplex communication between the two sides.

A complete wireless sensor system has been realized in a 3D cube form factor using an FPC. The packaging technique employed during the work is shown to be efficient in fabricating the final cubic system and resulted in a significant saving in the final size and weight of the system. A number of design issues are identified regarding the use of FPC for implementing the 3D structure and the chosen solutions are shown to be successful in dealing with these issues.

Currently, a limitation of the system is the need for an external battery to power the sensor system. A second phase of development would be required to investigate the possibility of the integration of a battery and charging system within the cube structure. In addition, the use of flexible substrate imposes a number of restrictions in terms of the ease of manufacturability of the final system due to the requirement of the required folding step.

The small size and weight of the developed system is found to be extremely useful in different deployments. It would be useful to further explore the system performance in different application scenarios such as wearable motion tracking applications. In terms of manufacturability, component placement needs to be carefully considered, ensuring that there is sufficient distance between the components, bend planes and board edges and this leads to a slightly reduced usable area on the printed circuit.

This paper provides a novel and useful method for realizing a wireless inertial sensor system in a 3D package. The value of the chosen approach is that a significant reduction in the required system volume is achieved. In particular, a 78.5 per cent saving in volume is obtained in decreasing the module size from a 25 to a 15 mm³ size.

DEPLOY is a successful technology demonstration project showing how state of the art technology can be implemented to achieve, continuous, real‐time monitoring of a river catchment.

The DEPLOY system is a wide area network of monitoring stations delivering data in near real‐time. The demonstration sites chosen are based in the River Lee, which flows through Ireland's second largest city, Cork. The sites include monitoring stations in five zones considered typical of significant river systems and demonstrate the versatility of the technology available. Data were collected from stations at pre‐programmed intervals and transmitted to the DEPLOY servers either by short range ISM band radio or directly via the GSM GPRS network. The data were then processed and made available in a controlled manner at www.deploy.ie Findings – The project demonstrates the capability of multi‐sensor systems to remotely monitor temporal and spatial variations in water quality, through the identification of short‐term events. A system like DEPLOY could be used as a decision support tool by regulatory bodies in managing our aquatic environment with the potential to cut overall monitoring costs and provide better coverage representing long‐term trends in fluctuations of pollutant concentrations.

The demonstration of a truly heterogeneous water quality monitoring networked system was one of the first of its kind in Ireland. Based on the collected data DEPLOY can provide recommendations for water quality monitoring systems from various perspectives, technical, operational and strategic.

This paper aims to describe the simulation, design, development and characterisation of antennas for wireless sensor networks operating in a variety of environments, including an under water submarine application and more usual “open air” deployments.

The experimental test methodology, fixtures, conditions and results used to characterize the performance of these antennas (both state of the art commercially available and those developed in‐house) are presented.

The underwater test results show a near omni‐directional pattern about the three principal axes, thus showing that a spherical field has been achieved for localisation purposes (with a certain loss of resolution).

The paper focuses on the development of a new antenna scheme to enable under water communications between robotic agents.

An emerging scholarly critique has claimed that entrepreneurial education triggers more neoliberalism in education, leading to increased inequality, neglect of civic values and an unjust blame of poor citizens for their misfortunes. The purpose of this paper is to develop a deeper understanding of this potentially problematic relationship between entrepreneurial education and neoliberalism.

A Hegelian dialectic method is used consisting of three steps. First, a thesis is articulated based on emerging literature, stating that entrepreneurial education triggers more neoliberalism in education. Then an antithesis is developed representing a logical opposite to the thesis. Finally, the resulting tensions are embraced in a synthesis that triggers deeper understanding.

The synthesis indicates that entrepreneurial education based on a self-oriented search for own happiness leads to more neoliberalism in education, and entrepreneurial education based on an others-oriented search for a meaningful impact on others mitigates some of the already strong neoliberal tendencies in education.

Due to an overlap between the two constructs, happiness and meaningfulness, it is difficult to fully disentangle doing well from doing good. How these two opposites interact is a topic that requires more research.

A “students-as-givers” kind of entrepreneurial education could represent a way to reach teachers currently skeptical of entrepreneurial education due to its perceived connection to capitalism. This could also make entrepreneurial education relevant to a wider student audience.

The paper represents a rare attempt to reconcile critical and praising perspectives on entrepreneurial education.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and analyze the foundation of higher education policies that have promoted entrepreneurship in Sweden since the mid-1990s.

To do this, the authors use Bacchi’s (1999) “What’s the problem?” approach. A central assumption of which is that perceptions of a problem affect how its solution looks. Bacchi’s approach is described as a type of discourse analysis.

The authors show that problem definition within policies regarding the role and importance of entrepreneurship within higher education has explicitly been directed toward equipping individuals to develop action-orientated skills in the field of entrepreneurship. The equipment of action-oriented skills has implicitly been directed to individuals’ personal initiatives to meet explicit social and collective problems, fueling a neoliberal development and fostering an enterprising culture. The authors also show how policy creates a discourse, which may be characterized as “useful, unreflective citizens.”

The study addresses the implicit steering that is being exercised through policies. This steering needs to be questioned and problematized in order to avoid blindly following the implied course of action.

The study contributes to current understanding of how entrepreneurship in higher education is both governed explicitly and implicitly, by policy, through the creation of new norms in society.

A decade and a half after the debut of pervasive computing, a large number of prototypes, applications, and interaction interfaces have emerged. However, there is a lack of consensus about the best approaches to create such systems or how to evaluate them. To address these issues, this paper aims to develop a performance evaluation framework for pervasive computing systems.

Based on the authors' experience in the Gator Tech Smart House – an assistive environment for the elderly, they established a reference scenario that was used to guide the analysis of the large number of systems they studied. An extensive survey of the literature was conducted, and through a thorough analysis, the authors derived and arrived at a broad taxonomy that could form a basic framework for evaluating existing and future pervasive computing systems.

A taxonomy of pervasive systems is instrumental to their successful evaluation and assessment. The process of creating such taxonomy is cumbersome, and as pervasive systems evolve with new technological advances, such taxonomy is bound to change by way of refinement or extension. This paper found that a taxonomy for something so broad as pervasive systems is very complex. It overcomes the complexity by focusing the classifications on key aspects of pervasive systems, decided purely empirically and based on the authors own experience in a real‐life, large‐scale pervasive system project.

There are currently no methods or frameworks for comparing, classifying, or evaluating pervasive systems. The paper establishes a taxonomy – a first step toward a larger evaluation methodology. It also provides a wealth of information, derived from a survey of a broad collection of pervasive systems.

This study aims to propose a computationally efficient framework for multi-objective optimization (MO) of antennas involving nested kriging modeling technology. The technique is demonstrated through a two-objective optimization of a planar Yagi antenna and three-objective design of a compact wideband antenna.

The keystone of the proposed approach is the usage of recently introduced nested kriging modeling for identifying the design space region containing the Pareto front and constructing fast surrogate model for the MO algorithm. Surrogate-assisted design refinement is applied to improve the accuracy of Pareto set determination. Consequently, the Pareto set is obtained cost-efficiently, even though the optimization process uses solely high-fidelity electromagnetic (EM) analysis.

The optimization cost is dramatically reduced for the proposed framework as compared to other state-of-the-art frameworks. The initial Pareto set is identified more precisely (its span is wider and of better quality), which is a result of a considerably smaller domain of the nested kriging model and better predictive power of the surrogate.

The proposed technique can be generalized to accommodate low- and high-fidelity EM simulations in a straightforward manner. The future work will incorporate variable-fidelity simulations to further reduce the cost of the training data acquisition.

The fast MO optimization procedure with the use of the nested kriging modeling technology for approximation of the Pareto set has been proposed and its superiority over state-of-the-art surrogate-assisted procedures has been proved. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this approach to multi-objective antenna optimization is novel and enables obtaining optimal designs cost-effectively even in relatively high-dimensional spaces (considering typical antenna design setups) within wide parameter ranges.

The purpose of this paper is to present the stages for manufacturing a low‐cost miniaturized prototype device, which observes the restrictions of implantable medical devices. The device measures the electrocardiography. The power for the implant is received passively as the same magnetic field as data is transferred to the reader device.

In this manufacturing technique, only easily attachable commercial available components are used, etching is used to simply produce a low‐cost double‐sided flexible printed circuit board which is converted to 3D by folding.

The circuit board was folded into the final shape after component attachment and the final result was a compact 3D package within the specifications determined by the electronics designer. The miniaturized prototype device was successfully tested both in vitro and in vivo.

The manufacturing technique of the sensing device can be readily adapted to other devices that need to be miniaturized. The coatings used for electrical insulation and chemical protection and the type of adhesives used for folded packages are easily utilized in similar miniaturization prototypes. By using bare chips, the final product would have been even smaller but for prototyping it is cheaper and faster to use easily acquired and attached components. In the case of mass production, the whole new design, where bare chips with flip chip attachments, integrated passives and/or stacked 3D packages with design considerations such as electrical, thermal and mechanical engineering is justified.

The purpose of this research is to outline and investigate a set of five experience elements from neuroscience research labeled SCARF that could impact the quality of perception, evaluation and engagement of executives, managers and employees in business-to-business (B2B) companies during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The proposed experience elements are perceived status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness and fairness. The authors demonstrate that all five elements are influential factors in B2B employees’ workplace environment during the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors outline several specific managerial implications and describe how companies can make better decisions related to several important market crisis decisions via a growth mindset built on the five experience elements. The authors also pay attention to implications to several B2B areas of research focus, including salesforce management and buying/supplier relationships.

The authors first examine existing B2B research to gauge if the five elements have been examined in B2B business contexts. They then analyze a combination of quantitative and qualitative survey data from 335 employees of different B2B companies to see if the five experience elements surface in discussion on how the pandemic has impacted their work experience and careers.

The authors find that several B2B research studies have looked at each of the individual components of the SCARF model, but none of them have yet included all five elements together in research or looked at them in the context of COVID-19. The results of analysis of surveys from employees in 335 B2B companies provide strong evidence that all five elements are influential factors in B2B employees workplace environment during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study contributes to prior research focusing on how B2B companies can thrive during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. The research offers valuable practical insights and detailed examples of how to apply a set of five elements/experiences that industrial and business-to-business organization leaders should adopt in their conscious decision-making evaluation and in their communications with employees, suppliers and customers during and after the pandemic.