Search Results (18)

Additive manufacturing is one of the foundational pillars of Industry 4.0, which is rooted in the integration of intelligent digital technologies, manufacturing, and industrial processes. Machine learning techniques are resources used to support Design for Additive Manufacturing, particularly in design phases and process analysis. Neural Networks are suited to manage complex and non-linear datasets. The article proposes a methodology for the time and cost assessment of the Laser-Powder Bed Fusion 3D printing process using a Neural Network-based approach. The methodology analyzes the main geometrical features of STL files to train Neural Network Machine Learning models. The methodology has been tested on a preliminary dataset that includes a set of parametric CAD models and their corresponding Additive Manufacturing simulations. The trained models achieve an R² value greater than 0.97. A web-service platform has been implemented to provide a valuable tool for users, transforming a research-grade model into a production-grade online endpoint. Full article

Introduction: Additive manufacturing has emerged as a promising solution for improving the accessibility and affordability of upper limb prostheses. Despite the growing need, traditional prosthetic devices remain costly and often inaccessible, particularly in underserved regions. This review examines the current landscape of 3D-printed upper limb prostheses, focusing on their design, functionality, and cost-effectiveness. It aims to assess the potential of 3D-printing upper limb prostheses in addressing current accessibility barriers. Methods: A two-phase approach was used to analyze the literature on 3D-printed upper limb prostheses. The first phase involved a literature search using keywords related to 3D printing and upper limbs prostheses. The second phase included data collection from online platforms such as Enabling the Future, Thingiverse, and NIH 3D Print Exchange. Studies focusing on the design, fabrication, and clinical application of 3D-printed prostheses were included. The results were organized into categories based on design characteristics, kinematic features, and manufacturing specifications. Results: A total of 35 3D-printed upper limb prostheses were reviewed, with the majority being hand prostheses. Devices were categorized based on their range of motion, actuation mechanism, materials, cost, and assembly complexity. The e-NABLE open-source platform has played a significant role in the development and dissemination of these devices. Prostheses were classified into cost categories (low, moderate, and high), with 64% of models costing under USD 50. Most designs were rated as easy to moderate in terms of assembly, making them accessible for non-specialist users. Conclusions: Three-dimensional printing offers an effective, low-cost alternative to traditional prosthetic manufacturing. However, variability in design, a lack of standardized manufacturing protocols, and limited clinical validation remain challenges. Future efforts should focus on establishing standardized guidelines, improving design consistency, and validating the clinical effectiveness of 3D-printed prostheses to ensure their long-term viability as functional alternatives to traditional devices. Full article

This study aims to enhance the visual design of ABC.com, a leading Indonesian online news portal, by using usability and eye-tracking methods. As news media transitions from print to digital, maintaining an optimal user experience is crucial. This study addresses design deficiencies on ABC.com, particularly related to news accessibility, search functionality, and the impact of advertisements. This research employs questionnaires and eye-tracking technology to identify user behavior and validate the findings. Key usability aspects, such as content accessibility, error prevention, and visual appeal, are analyzed to improve the website’s layout. The eye-tracking results reveal that users focus mainly on the center of the screen, often missing critical elements like the latest news and the search engine. This study proposes enhancements in typography, contrast, and page layout, based on the identified needs. The final design of ABC.com improved by enhancing efficiency, clarity, aesthetics, readability, and user comfort. The redesign showed mean improvements of 0.16, 0.41, 0.65, 0.32, and 0.54 in these criteria, respectively, indicating a notable enhancement in usability. This study’s findings offer a practical guideline that can be directly applied to enhance similar online news platforms in Indonesia. Full article

The Nigerian media have, over the years, moved back and forth via all manners of experience of leadership, from military to democratic, until they finally settled into the present democratic governance. Experience from previous regimes exposed them to the vagaries of power and how to cope with them. These traditional news media, newspapers/magazines, radio, and television, were then the major and authentic news sources for Nigerians. The coming of the internet with its social media handles threw the journalists of these media into confusion as the citizens have taken the reigns of news/information peddling from under them, turning them into agents of confirmation and authenticity of information. Ironically, these traditional media, television, radio, and print, have adjusted to online media streaming, thus liberating themselves from the vagaries of temporal and spatial limitedness. Deploying a survey method (opinion poll, OPL) and relying on a purposive sampling technique, the authors purposively selected WhatsApp group platforms (WGP) as the most suitable of the new/social media with access to all manners of news sources. These were used to interrogate how online media/information/news streaming has taken the audience away from traditional media by being on the ‘spot’ at all hours with their avalanche of “Breaking News”. The findings revealed that audiences currently resort to traditional media to confirm the authenticity of news and information carried online in a sort-of-when-in-doubt-watch-the television manner or listen to radio or read the newspapers/magazines. It concludes that online news streaming has become the coveted bride of present-day information and news seekers, albeit an unreliable one. Full article

Powder bed fusion—laser beam (PBF-LB), a prevalent and rapidly advancing additive manufacturing (AM) technology nowadays, serves the industry by producing thin, complex, and lightweight components for various sectors, including healthcare, automotive, defence, and aerospace. However, this technology encounters challenges related to the construction of critical parts and the high overall process costs. Equally significant is the role of support structures in metal laser powder bed fusion (PBF-LB/M). The absence of supports can lead to defective and collapsed parts, while the incorrect selection of a support type or the addition of unnecessary supports results in increased material usage and additional post-processing efforts. Therefore, there is a pressing need for advanced software capable of generating appropriate support structures and predicting the thermomechanical behaviour of a part under PBF-LB/M printing conditions. Such software would be beneficial for the industry to avoid printing defects caused by high thermal stresses, minimise material usage, reduce printing time, and ensure high-quality prints. In this study, we introduce a web-based support generation and optimisation platform for PBF-LB/M. Through this platform, among other features, users can import three-dimensional (3D) parts and generate block-type support structures with diamond perforations based on the PySLM library, all within a user-friendly web environment. The first release of the platform (v0.6) is fully interactive and accessible online at no cost. Full article

This study examines how the issue of ethnic identity is approached in Cameroon within the context of combating Boko Haram terrorism, considering the influence of the rise of social media on journalistic practices. The advent of these platforms has fundamentally altered the landscape of media coverage, challenging the traditional monopoly of journalists in shaping the narrative of news. How does this technological shift affect the discourse, especially in the designation of events and actors in the reporting of Boko Haram terrorism in Cameroon, whether in traditional print media or on online platforms like Facebook? Do these designations in print media and Facebook discussion forums indicate shifts in the dynamics of the Cameroonian media sphere (censorship, government repression, etc.), resulting from the emergence of new voices in digital discursive spaces? This study employs a dual analysis, integrating a critical examination of media discourse with a sociological study of journalistic production. The scrutiny of media discourse is based on the investigation of 497 articles published between 1st January and 30 June 2015, sourced from seven Cameroonian newspapers. The online corpus encompasses 450 written publications from three Facebook forums. We aim to establish a dialectical relationship between newspaper discourse, online content, and the sociological foundations shaping their production. The observed quality of designations in the studied forums unveils a surge in hate speech within the ethno-political landscape of Cameroon. While this phenomenon remained manageable through the intervention of state regulatory bodies in traditional media, the unrestrained nature of online content, coupled with the absence of state control, has facilitated the rise of inter-ethnic discursive hatred in politics. In conclusion, this study underscores the challenges stemming from the evolution of journalistic practices in a technological landscape and emphasizes the urgent need for regulatory frameworks to counteract the upswing in hate speech and inter-ethnic tensions within political discourse. Full article

In the background of the rapid development of artificial intelligence, big data, IoT, 5G/6G, and other technologies, electrochemical sensors pose higher requirements for high-throughput detection. In this study, we developed a workstation with up to 10 channels, which supports both parallel signal stimulation and online electrochemical analysis functions. The platform was wired to a highly integrated Bluetooth chip used for wireless data transmission and can be visualized on a smartphone. We used this electrochemical test platform with carbon–graphene oxide/screen-printed carbon electrodes (CB-GO/SPCE) for the online analysis of L-tyrosine (Tyr), and the electrochemical performance and stability of the electrodes were examined by differential pulse voltammetry (DPV). The CB-GO-based screen-printed array electrodes with a multichannel electrochemical platform for Tyr detection showed a low detection limit (20 μM), good interference immunity, and 10-day stability in the range of 20–200 μM. This convenient electrochemical analytical device enables high-throughput detection and has good economic benefits that can contribute to the improvement of the accuracy of electrochemical analysis and the popularization of electrochemical detection methods in a wide range of fields. Full article

To overcome the problems of long production cycle and high cost in the product manufacturing process, a P2P (platform to platform) cloud manufacturing method based on a personalized custom business model has been proposed in this paper by integrating different technologies such as deep learning and additive manufacturing (AM). This paper focuses on the manufacturing process from a photo containing an entity to the production of that entity. Essentially, this is an object-to-object fabrication. Moreover, based on the YOLOv4 algorithm and DVR technology, an object detection extractor and a 3D data generator are constructed, and a case study is carried out for a 3D printing service scenario. The case study selects online sofa photos and real car photos. The recognition rates of sofa and car were 59% and 100%, respectively. Retrograde conversion from 2D data to 3D data takes approximately 60 s. We also carry out personalized transformation design on the generated sofa digital 3D model. The results show that the proposed method has been validated, and three unindividualized models and one individualized design model have been manufactured, and the original shape is basically maintained. Full article

Interactivity has been a very sought-after feature in professional journalism ever since the media industry transitioned from print into the online space. Within this context, chatbots started to infiltrate the media sphere and provide news organizations with new and innovative ways to create and share their content, with an even larger emphasis on back-and-forth communication and news reporting personalization. The present research highlights two important factors that can determine the efficient integration of chatbots in professional journalism: the feasibility of chatbot programming by journalists without a background in computer science using coding-free platforms and the usability of the created chatbot agents for news reporting to the audience. This paper aims to review some of the most popular, coding-free chatbot creation platforms that are available to journalists today. To that end, a three-phase evaluation framework is introduced. First off, the interactivity features that they offer to media industry workers are evaluated using an appropriate metrics framework. Secondly, a two- part workshop is conducted where journalists use the aforementioned platforms to create their own chatbot news reporting agents with minimum training, and lastly, the created chatbots are evaluated by a larger audience concerning the usability and overall user experience. Full article

3D printing (3DP) is a manufacturing technology that produces 3D objects from a design file using layer-by-layer deposition of material. It has already found applications in the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries, while its use in the field of topical delivery has been extensively studied in the last two decades. The aim of this study is to provide a comprehensive overview of the 3DP-based developments in topical delivery, with special emphasis on its current and potential use in the cosmetic field. This review covers the principles and main types of 3DP technology, production, and characteristics of two key 3DP skin delivery platforms (patches and microneedles—MNs), as well as topical active materials used, focusing on those for cosmetic application. A comprehensive search of peer-reviewed articles in relevant databases was performed (including PubMed, Wiley Online Library, Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, Kosmet, ScienceDirect and Scopus) from 2004 to date. The study concludes that 3D printed MNs would gain prevalence over patches for both pharmaceutical and cosmetic applications and that dissolving MNs have the highest potential among them. The use of 3DP technology appears to be a promising approach to the development of efficient personalised cosmetic delivery platforms. Full article

Granting smart device consumers with information, simply and quickly, is what drives quick response (QR) codes and mobile marketing to go hand in hand. It boosts marketing campaigns and objectives and allows one to approach, engage, influence, and transform a wider target audience by connecting from offline to online platforms. However, restricted printing technology and flexibility in surfaces introduce noise while printing QR code images. Moreover, noise is often unavoidable during the gathering and transmission of digital images. Therefore, this paper proposed an automatic and accurate noise detector to identify the type of noise present in QR code images. For this, the paper first generates a new dataset comprising 10,000 original QR code images of varying sizes and later introduces several noises, including salt and pepper, pepper, speckle, Poisson, salt, local var, and Gaussian to form a dataset of 80,000 images. We perform extensive experiments by reshaping the generated images to uniform size for exploiting Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Logistic Regression (LG) to classify the original and noisy images. Later, the analysis is further widened by incorporating histogram density analysis to trace and target highly important features by transforming images of varying sizes to obtain 256 features, followed by SVM, LG, and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to identify the noise type. Moreover, to understand the impact of symmetry of noises in QR code images, we trained the models with combinations of 3-, 5-, and 7-noise types and analyzed the classification performance. From comparative analyses, it is noted that the Gaussian and Localvar noises possess symmetrical characteristics, as all the classifiers did not perform well to segregate these two noises. The results prove that histogram analysis significantly improves classification accuracy with all exploited models, especially when combined with SVM, it achieved maximum accuracy for 4- and 6-class classification problems. Full article

The main objective of this research was to develop a web-based geographic information system (GIS) based on a detailed analysis of user preferences from the perspective of forest research, management and education. An anonymous questionnaire was used to elicit user preferences for a hardware platform and evaluations of web-mapping applications, geographic data, and GIS tools. Mobile GIS was used slightly more often than desktop GIS. Web-mapping applications that provide information to the public and the present research results were rated higher than the forest management application. Orthophotos for general purposes and thematic layers such as forest stand maps, soils, protected areas, cadastre, and forest roads were preferred over highly specialized layers. Tools for data searching, map printing, measuring, and drawing on digital maps were rated higher than tools for online map editing and geographic analysis. The analysis of user preferences was used to design a new multipurpose GIS portal for the University Forest Enterprise. The GIS portal was designed with a three-tier architecture on top of the software library for managing user access, working interactively with digital maps, and managing web map applications. The web map applications focus on tools and geographic information not available elsewhere, specifically timber harvest and logistics, research plots, and hunting game management. Full article

Background: 3D printing is a rapidly developing technology in the healthcare industry and in dentistry. Its application clearly shows that this area of digital dentistry has potential for everyday usage across all fields, including prosthodontics, orthodontics, maxillofacial surgery, and oral implantology. However, despite gaining ground, there is a lack of information about how specialists (dentists and dental technicians) use additive technology. Our research group aimed to investigate the impact of social media on additive manufacturing technology among dental specialists and their everyday usage of 3D printing. Methods: This paper investigated specialists’ everyday usage of 3D printers via an online survey (Google Forms). The survey questions aimed to discover the number of 3D printers used, the accessibility of the devices, the annual cost, and the design programs. Since specialists tend to build online communities on social media, we circulated our study questionnaire using our profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram platforms during our research. Results: A total of 120 responses were received from 20 countries, with the most significant numbers being from Hungary 23.7% (n = 27), the United States 18.4% (n = 21), and the United Kingdom 7.9% (n = 9). Most of the participants were dentists (n = 68) or dental technicians (n = 29), but some CAD/CAM specialists (n = 23) also completed our survey. The participants had an average of 3.8 years (±0.7) of experience in the 3D printing field, and owned a total of 405 printing devices (3.6 on average/person). Conclusions: The impact of social media on this research field is growing increasingly. Hence, we support specialists in joining virtual communities on professional platforms. This article intended to provide a practical overview, feedback, and direction for dentists interested in 3D printing technology. From our survey, we can conclude that additive technology is broadening dental applications and the services that we can provide for our patients. Full article

Quantitative real-time PCR and genomic sequencing have become mainstays for performing molecular detection of biological threat agents in the field. There are notional assessments of the benefits, disadvantages, and challenges that each of these technologies offers according to findings in the literature. However, direct comparison between these two technologies in the context of field-forward operations is lacking. Most market surveys, whether published in print form or provided online, are directed to product manufacturers who can address their respective specifications and operations. One method for comparing these technologies is surveying end-users who are best suited for discussing operational capabilities, as they have hands-on experience with state-of-the-art molecular detection platforms and protocols. These end-users include operators in military defense and first response, as well as various research scientists in the public sector such as government and service laboratories, private sector, and civil society such as academia and nonprofit organizations performing method development and executing these protocols in the field. Our objective was to initiate a survey specific to end-users and their feedback. We developed a questionnaire that asked respondents to (1) determine what technologies they currently use, (2) identify the settings where the technologies are used, whether lab-based or field-forward, and (3) rate the technologies according to a set list of criteria. Of particular interest are assessments of sensitivity, specificity, reproducibility, scalability, portability, and discovery power. This article summarizes the findings from the end-user perspective, highlighting technical and operational challenges. Full article

There are 24.5 million visually impaired and blind (VIB) students who have limited access to educational materials due to cost or availability. Although advancement in technology is prevalent, providing individualized learning using technology remains a challenge without the proper tools or experience. The TacPic system was developed as an online platform to create tactile educational materials (TEM) based on the image inputs of users who do not have prior experience in tactile photo development or 3D printing. The TacPic system allows the users to simply upload images to a website and uses AI cloud computing on the Amazon Web Services platform. First, it segments and labels the images. Then, the text label is converted into braille words. Subsequently, surface rendering and consolidation of the image and text is performed, before it is converted into a single file that is ready for 3D printing. Currently, the types of TEM that can be created are tactile flashcards, tactile maps, and tactile peg puzzles, which can be developed within a few hours. This is in contrast to a development period of weeks using traditional methods. Furthermore, the tactile educational materials were tested by two VIB teachers and six VIB students. It was found that those who are congenitally blind need more time to identify the object and rely more on the braille labels compared to students who became blind at a later age. Teachers also suggested producing TEM that use simpler images, and TEM that are suitable for both sighted and VIB students. In conclusion, the researchers successfully developed a platform that allows more educators or parents to develop personalized and individualized TEM. In the future, further optimization of the algorithms to improve segmentation and the inclusion of other features, such as color, could be undertaken. Finally, new printing materials and methods are needed to improve printing efficiency. Full article