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The aim of this paper is to investigate implementations of carbon‐black filled silicone rubber for tactile sensation.

The sensor‐elements for this tactile sensing structure were made by press‐curing from carbon‐black filled silicone rubber.

The behaviour of the silicone rubber shows strong non‐linearity, therefore, the sensor cannot be used for accurate measurements. The greatest advantage of this material lies in its high elasticity.

A new method for artificial tactile sensing skin for robotic applications.

This paper aims to focus on how long‐term digital archiving systems are tested and what benchmarks and other metrics are necessary for that testing to produce data that the community can use to make decisions.

The article reviews recent literature about digital archiving systems involving public and semi‐public tests. It then looks specifically at the rules and metrics needed for doing public or semi‐public testing for three specific issues: triggering migration; ingest rates; and storage capacity measurement.

Important literature on testing exists but common metrics do not, and too few data are available at this point to establish them reliably. Metrics are needed to judge the quality and timeliness of an archive's migration services. Archives should offer benchmarks for the speed of ingest, but that will happen only once they come to agreement about starting and ending points. Storage capacity is another area where librarians are raising questions, but without proxy measures and agreement about data amounts, such testing cannot proceed.

Testing is necessary to develop useful metrics and benchmarks about performance. At present the archiving community has too little data on which to make decisions about long term digital archiving, and as long as that is the case, the decisions may well be flawed.

The article shows that testing is key to making rational decisions about digital long term archiving systems but establishing metrics and rules by which librarians can compare the results is far from easy.

The diagnostic process after referral to an acute psychiatric treatment facility consists of more than the clinical investigation and laboratory tests. Psychometric tests in a broad range of languages may be such an augmentation of our diagnostic armamentarium. Whether such tests are in use, and how they are distributed among different patient categories was the aim of the study. All referrals in one calendar year (N=1168), as they are depicted in the hospital computerized medical records, were investigated. Fifty-six (6.1%) out of 926 ethnic Norwegians and six (3.0%) out of 198 non-Western immigrants were tested, whereas none of the 44 Western immigrants. The difference between ethnic Norwegians and the immigrants was significant (Z=-3.05 and P=0.002). Psychometric tests were thus almost not in use, and even lesser so in immigrants. Mean number of resident days was higher among those tested, 11.7 (SD=11.2) versus those not tested, 7.4 (SD=10.4) days, t=2.97 and P=0.004. Length of stay for ethnic Norwegians did not differ from that for non-Western immigrants 11.4 versus 11.7, respectively. The patients tested were older than those not tested. Mean age was 43.0 (SD=14.4) versus 38.8 (SD=12.1), with a t=2.65 and P=0.03. The difference in resident days between all immigrants and ethnic Norwegians was significant with a Z=−2.232 and P=0.026. Level of testing was higher in ethnic Norwegians, and the tested patients stayed longer, maybe indicating more room for testing. Whether this low test-activity influences treatment quality is an unsettled question.

WITH the introduction of high‐powered propulsion systems, and paralleling their continued development, an accompanying increase in acoustical problems has arisen.

This paper uses the strategy‐as‐practice perspective to explore the relationship between practices and organisational routines of governance in pluralistic contexts. The purpose of this paper is to explore empirically how strategising activities and organisational actions interact. It discusses and illustrates the relationship between strategising and organising through routines of governance, and in particular the use of board papers.

This research is based on a single longitudinal “soft” case study. The researchers collected both primary and secondary data. Primary data collection took place from the end of 2004 until early in 2008. Primary data collection occurred through three main methods: interviews, meeting observations, and “shadowing” of participants; six participants were each shadowed for a working week (five days), and another participant was shadowed for three days. Interviews were held with 20 participants and typically lasted for between one and two hours. The interviews and meetings resulted in over 150 hours of audio recordings. In addition, notes of shadowing covered 420 hours.

The first section of this paper presents the theoretical foundation before describing the research method. A discussion then explores the relationships between one of the specific strategising practices – the creation of board papers – and formal organisational routines of governance. The conclusion suggests that in professional service firms, informal practices that provide feedback are important in ensuring the stability and continuity of formal organisational routines.

The links between micro, meso, and macro levels – that is to say, between actors, organisational actions, and institutional field practices – have already been broadly investigated. However, much of the research remains theoretical rather than empirical in nature. Furthermore, although researchers have been increasingly interested in strategising within organisations featuring multiple goals, diffuse networks of power, and knowledge‐based work processes, a deep understanding of practices in these organisations is still underdeveloped.

Tactile sensation is an important sensory function for robots in contact with the external environment. To better acquire tactile information about objects, this paper aims to propose a three-layer structure of the interdigital flexible tactile sensor.

The sensor consists of a bottom electrode layer, a middle pressure-sensitive layer and a top indenter layer. First, the pressure sensitive material, structure design, fabrication process and circuit design of the sensor are introduced. Then, the calibration and performance test of the designed sensor is carried out. Four functions are used to fit and calibrate the relationship between the output voltage of the sensor and the contact force. Finally, the contact force sensing test of different weight objects and the flexible test of the sensor are carried out.

The performance test results show that the sensitivity of the sensor is 0.93 V/N when it is loaded with 0–3 N and 0.23 V/N when it is loaded with 3–5 N. It shows good repeatability, and the cross-interference between the sensing units is generally low. The contact force sensing test results of different weight objects show that the proposed sensor performs well in contact force. Each part of the sensor is a flexible material, allowing the sensor to achieve bending deformation, so that the sensor can better perceive the contact signs of the grasped object.

The sensor can paste the surface of the paper robot’s gripper to measure the contact force of the grasping object and estimate the contour of the object.

In this paper, a three-layer interdigital flexible tactile sensor is proposed, and the structural parameters of the interdigital electrode are designed to improve the sensitivity and response speed of the sensor. The indenter with three shapes of the prism, square cylinder and hemisphere is preliminarily designed and the prism indenter with better conduction force is selected through finite element analysis, which can concentrate the external force in the sensing area to improve the sensitivity. The sensor designed in this paper can realize the measurement of contact force, which provides a certain reference for the field of robot tactile.

In order to study the static and dynamic comfort of tight sportswear in winter, the subjective comfort was aimed to be evaluated by collecting sensory data such as humidity feeling, cold feeling and other perceptions. In this paper, the experiment was divided into standing, squatting, jumping, jogging, walking and so on.

Through particle swarm optimization-cuckoo search model, the sensory factors that affect the overall comfort were optimized, and it was found that there were great differences in the overall comfort factors under different motions. Then, analytic hierarchy process was used to sort the optimized sensory indicators in each experimental stage, and the influence degree of sensory indicators was studied. Finally, by the long short-term memory (LSTM) model, taking comfort senses of standing, squatting, jumping and jogging as input parameters, and regarding comfort senses of walking, lifting legs and resting as output parameters, the prediction model was founded.

The results showed that there were certain differences between the prediction value and the real subjective evaluation value, but most of the predicted values were consistent with the real values on the sensory level, and the overall prediction level was good, which meant that the LSTM model had more accurate prediction ability for subjective evaluation and could be extended to other sports.

The research results could provide scientific methods for the design of tight-fitting sportswear in winter.

Tactile sensing is the process of determining physical properties and events through contact with objects in the world. The purpose of this paper is to establish a novel design of an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) for estimation of contact position of a new tactile sensing structure.

The major task is to investigate implementations of carbon-black-filled silicone rubber for tactile sensation; the silicone rubber is electrically conductive and its resistance changes by loading or unloading strains.

The sensor-elements for the tactile sensing structure were made by press-curing from carbon-black-filled silicone rubber. The experimental results can be used as training and checking data for the ANFIS network.

This system is capable to find any change of contact positions and thus indicates state of the current contact location of the tactile sensing structure. The behavior of the use silicone rubber shows strong non-linearity, therefore, the sensor cannot be used for high accurate measurements. The greatest advantage of this sensing material lies in its high elasticity.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a thin tactile force sensor array based on conductive rubber and to offer descriptions of the sensor design, fabrication and test.

The sensor array consists of a sandwich structure. Sensing elements are distributed discretely in the sensor. Each sensing element has two electrodes and a piece of conductive rubber with piezoresistive property. The electrodes, as well as the conductive trace for signal transmission, are printed on the substrate layer by the screen printing technique. A scanning circuit based on zero potential method and an experimental set‐up based on balance to characterize the sensor array are designed and implemented in the test of the sensor array.

Experimental results verify the validity of the sensor array in measuring the vertical tactile force between the sensing elements and the object.

In this paper, all the sensors are tested without calibration procedures and the procedure of the dynamic test is implemented by manual operation.

The sensor array could be applied to measure the plantar force for gait detection in clinical applications.

The paper presents a tactile force sensor array with discrete sensing elements to essentially restrict the cross‐talk among sensing elements. This paper will provide many practical details that can help others in the field.

This paper aims to study the working principle of the capacitive pressure sensor and explore the distribution of pressure acting on the surface of the capacitor. Herein, a kind of high sensitivity capacitive pressure sensor was prepared by overlaying carbon fibers (CFs) on the surfaces of the thermoplastic elastomer (TPE), the TPE with high elasticity is a dielectric elastomer for the sensor and the CFs with excellent electrical conductivity were designed as the conductor.

Due to the excellent mechanical properties and electrical conductivity of CFs, it was designed as the conductor layer for the TPE/CFs capacitive pressure sensor via laminating CFs on the surfaces of the columnar TPE. Then, a ‘#' type structure of the capacitive pressure sensor was designed and fabricated.

The ‘#' type of capacitive pressure sensor of TPE/CFs composite was obtained in high sensitivity with a gauge factor of 2.77. Furthermore, the change of gauge factor values of the sensor under 10 per cent of applied strains was repeated for 1,000 cycles, indicating its outstanding sensing stability. Moreover, the ‘#' type capacitive pressure sensor of TPE/CFs was consisted of several capacitor arrays via laminating CFs, which could detect the distribution of pressure.

The TPE/CFs capacitive pressure sensor was easily fabricated with high sensitivity and quick responsiveness, which is desirably applied in wearable electronics, robots, medical devices, etc.

The outcome of this study will help to fabricate capacitive pressure sensors with high sensitivity and outstanding sensing stability.