Recent Patents on Engineering - Volume 11, Issue 3, 2017

Background: Chinese massage robot is a humanoid robot, which combines Chinese medical technology and robot technology, used to simulate the process of Chinese massage. It can be mainly used for alleviating the physical pain of patients and training new massage therapist. Objective: To provide an overview of recent Chinese massage robots related patents and introduce their respective characteristics and the future development of Chinese massage robots. Method: This article reviews the representative patents related to Chinese massage robot, especially introduces the structural characteristics, control characteristics and applications of several typical Chinese massage robots. Results: The different structure types of Chinese massage robots are compared and analyzed, and their structural characteristics are obtained. The main problems encountered in the development are analyzed, and the current and future research of Chinese massage robots are discussed. Conclusion: The research of Chinese massage robots is of great significance and plays an important role in promoting Chinese massage robots technological innovation. The comfort, intelligence and safety of Chinese medicine massage robot need to be further improved. More patents related to Chinese massage robot should be invented.

Background: Cold formed steel channels are widely used in building construction. Advances in material technology contributed to the production of very thin cold formed steel channel sections with high yield strength that can be utilized in the industry in order to achieve light weight design. Extensive research work was conducted in the past three decades to explore the behavior of channel members used in various engineering applications and improve the design procedures. Objectives: The paper presents a comprehensive review of recent contributions and patents for the analysis and design of thin walled steel channel members. Method: The paper reviews engineering work developed in the past three decades to detail the behavior of channel members under various types of loadings. North American and European design code provisions are discussed. Empirical and simplified analytical models that were developed to estimate the channel ultimate strength for various limit states are also described. Results: Design investigations for local/distortional buckling effective width, influence of perforations, splice connections, fire performance, optimization, composite channel sections and defective channels are discussed. Conclusion: A state of the art “reference-manual” is presented for the analysis and design of cold formed steel channels that can be effectively utilized by practicing Engineers for various industrial applications.

Background: Food packaging technology is continuously evolving in response to the growing challenges in modern society. Active and intelligent packaging systems are two innovative branches of the packaging field, which allow the development of food products with extended shelf life, enhanced food quality and safety. Objective: The current work reviewed the most relevant recent patents and scientific publications on the different categories of active and intelligent packaging systems and currently available commercial applications with a closer look to the application of nanotechnology applied to the food packaging sector. Methods: The work has been carried out combining a qualitative/quantitative approach. In the specific patent data were combined with the most relevant scientific publication on food packaging technology. Results: The most recent patents and scientific works have been discussed with more emphasis on the use of nanotechnology for the development of new packaging materials with improved mechanical, barrier and antimicrobial properties and on the use of bio-based nanocomposites as a way to improve the technological properties of green materials, replacing conventional non-biodegradable petroleum-based plastic packaging materials. Conclusions: Low diffusion of active and intelligent packaging in EU countries has been related to their high costs and to the lack of a worldwide accepted legislation about their safety issues. Even though much progress has been made, further research still needs to be conducted on how these solutions may affect product characteristics.

Background: Patents reveal that security information producing big data make the risk assessment task very difficult at risk level evaluation because of high computational and communication overheads in collecting, storing, and managing information. Under the background of big data era today, facing vast amounts of the security information, information security risk assessment require special technologies to efficiently process large number of data. The traditional machine learning methods have some weakness need to overcome. We review the well-known machine learning methods, such as SVM, DT and Rough set. The weakness of them we pointed as follows. 1) parameters needs to optimized, 2)more computational costs and 3) too objectivity. Methods: This study proposes an evolutionary algorithm to address these problems, namely Clustering and Support Subset algorithm (CSS). The CSS algorithm (1) discretizes the evaluated risk level and (2) extract the rules fromthe sample set to predict the risk level of the testing set. Results: A number of experiments have been performed to compare CSS with the traditional classification algorithms to evaluate the CSS’s performance in classification with the datasets of UCI machine learning repository. Experimental results indicate that CSS can efficiently predict the risk level with a higher accuracy rate and the application of CSS algorithmin the information security risk assessment is shown in the experiments. Conclusion: The CSS algorithm is an alternatively machine learning method with three superiority: 1) less parameters, only on parameter in k-means step and the k is given by the user; 2) more efficiency, the time complexity can be calculated and shown the CSS is less computational cost; 3) more accuracy, the experiment results indicated the CSS have more powerful classification ability. Therefore the efficiency and the performance of prediction ability are better than ANN, SVM and C4.5. Consequently, the CSS can be used as alternative algorithmfor information security risk assessment.

Background: Lower limb exoskeleton rehabilitation robot is a bionic robot, which is the product of the combination of medical technology and robot technology, simulating human walking movement. It can be mainly used for rehabilitation training of patients with lower limb dysfunction. Objective: To provide an overview of recent lower limb exoskeleton rehabilitation robot and introduce their respective characteristics and development. Method: A recent lower limb exoskeleton rehabilitation robot is divided into passive drive, pneumatic drive, hydraulic drive and motor drive. This paper reviews various representative patents related to lower limb exoskeleton rehabilitation robot. The structural characteristics and applications of the typical lower limb exoskeleton rehabilitation robots are introduced. Results: The differences between different types of lower limb exoskeleton rehabilitation robots are compared and analyzed, and the structural characteristics are concluded. The main problems in its development are analyzed, the development trend is foreseen, and the current and future research of the patents on lower limb exoskeleton rehabilitation robot is discussed. Conclusion: There are a lot of patents and articles about the exoskeleton rehabilitation robots, however, if these problems can be solved, such as small size, light weight and high power output are solved at the same time, the consistency with human body will be advanced, with the combination of traditional rehabilitation medicine. It will be possible to maximize the rehabilitation of the lower limbs.

Background: In attempting to achieve high reliability for a system, a basic problem of the system analysts is how to evaluate the relative component importance. Importance measures are used to evaluate the component contribution to system reliability. The patents related to importance measures and their applications in system reliability have been studied. Contents of most patents are related to system identification, component ranks, reliability improvement, and classification. Methods: In this paper, some importance measures, such as the improvement potential, Birnbaum importance and Fussell-Vesely importance, are analyzed to identify the most important component for system reliability improvement. Results: The related properties of importance measures are derived. The change of system reliability is obtained by improving the component reliability in terms of importance measures. Conclusion: In order to identify the most important component, and get the maximal system reliability improvement, the proposed method is a useful guide to determine which component should be managed.

Background: Entrepreneurial support is an important factor that affects innovation and new technology development of a country. Scientific publications and patent applications are the indicators of the innovation level. Methods: In this study, the effect of entrepreneurial support on scientific publications and patent applications is analyzed by using the data collected at the country level. Descriptive statistics and correlations among the variables are presented. A fuzzy clustering approach is used to form groups of countries using entrepreneurial support data and then the mean differences between scientific publications and patent applications are revealed with the analysis of variance (ANOVA). Results: There is a significant difference among the clusters in terms of both patent applications and total publications. This indicates that the countries with higher entrepreneurial support provide higher patent applications and scientific publications. Conclusion: Entrepreneurial support is the key to achieve higher innovation levels and new technologies. In order to be successful in the long term, the governments should support entrepreneurial activities.

Background: With the development of equipment, the reliability test usually has to pay a high cost. In order to improve the test efficiency and reduce the resource waste, equipment reliability testing should be optimized. Importance measures can identify the systems' weak link and provide support for the system optimization design. We have reviewed the patents relating to the equipment' reliability testing, which seldom consider the importance measure. Methods: In this paper, the reliability importance measure is used to analyze structure evolution of the equipment. Then, based on the importance analysis, the improved scheme is proposed to optimize equipment reliability testing. Results: According to the importance measure, in a type of artillery system, the results show that due to the reduction of shock and vibration, the shooting and driving tests are considerably decreased. The system had been operated six months in the actual test. Conclusion: This provides the technology support for the application of the importance measure in the field of equipment reliability testing. The proposed method can effectively improve equipment reliability testing, and save the testing time and resources.

Background: Patents reveal that a comfortable touch, slim size and light in weight have become a prevailing trend in the design and development of computer keyboard. Current mechanical keyboard has attracted a great attention due to its advanced features especially the need for unique touch and comfort of mechanical key devices in the new era of computer technology. However, there are still shortcomings in the key size, portability and flexibility and also the assembling process. Methods: This paper proposes the novel use of the slider rocker mechanism for the thinner design of the mechanical keyboard key. The mechanism is combined with the snap-in connection to make the key thinner and assembling process simpler. Results: The slider rocker mechanism enables a thinner design of the key by driving the rotational motion through the rotary keycap to initiate the translational motion. This feature also improves the portability and flexibility for the mechanical keyboard. The key assembling process is deemed simpler based on the simple snap-in connection between the switch and the base of the key. The design and operation procedure of this mechanical keyboard key are described in detail. Conclusion: A novel thinner mechanical keyboard key has been developed based on the slider rocker mechanism and snap-in connection between the switch and base of the key to accomplish the reduction of size in the vertical direction of the key, improved portability and flexibility for mechanical keyboard and simpler key assembling process. To our knowledge, this is the first thinner mechanical key in the keyboard based on the new mechanisms of operation.