Calf massager: Intervention for body muscle discomfort during prolonged standing

Many occupations require workers to stand for long periods of time without proper interventions, which causes discomfort in the back and lower limbs. Therefore, this study aims to assess the effectiveness in alleviating body muscle discomfort during prolonged standing through the use of a calf massager. This study was conducted among male workers at a manufacturer with production line workers and the list was obtained from the HR Department and simple random sampling was done by number categorization. A total of 100 respondents (50 respondents for both the control and the experimental groups) participated in this study. The experiment took place in a room with a similar setup for the production line. Each respondent was requested to perform the simulated task for 2 hr. For the experimental group, the calf massager was turned on every 15 min. At every 15‐min interval after turning on the calf massager, respondents from both groups were required to evaluate their discomfort level on a Borg's scale CR‐10 questionnaire. The results showed that the level of body discomfort among respondents in the experimental group reduced (20–30%) compared with that of the control group. Multivariate analysis results revealed that the discomfort rating for the lower back, knees, thighs, calves, and feet was significantly lower (p < .05) among the experimental group compared with the control group. For lower body parts, the lower back region was statistically significant (p < .05) at the 90th, 105th, and 120th min; the thigh region was statistically significant (p < .05) at the 120th min; the knee region was statistically significant (p < .05) at the 105th and 120th min; the calf region was statistically significant (p < .05) at all minute intervals except the 15th and 45th min, while the feet region, was statistically significant at the 105th and 120th min. Therefore, this study indicates that calf massage treatment is capable of reducing body muscle discomfort during prolonged standing and highlights the significance of calf massage.     

Biohydrogen Production from Organic Waste – A Review

Hydrogen fuel is a promising alternative to fossil fuels because of its energy content, clean nature, and fuel efficiency. However, it is not readily available. Most current producion processes are very energy intensive and emit carbon dioxide. Therefore, this article reviews technological options for hydrogen production that are eco-friendly and generate clean hydrogen fuel. Biological methods, such different fermentation processes and photolysis are discussed together with the required substrates and the process efficiency.     

Dispersion-tolerant 10-gb/s duobinary system employing heterodyne detection and MLSE

We experimentally demonstrate a 10.7-Gb/s duobinary transmission system operating over a chromatic-dispersion range of /spl sim/12 000 ps/nm. Heterodyne detection and maximum-likelihood sequence estimation are employed to achieve this result.     

Review Processing, properties and applications of reactive silica from rice husk—an overview

Rice husk is an abundantly available waste material in all rice producing countries. In certain regions, it is sometimes used as a fuel for parboiling paddy in the rice mills. The partially burnt rice husk in turn contributes to more environmental pollution. There have been efforts not only to overcome this but also to find value addition to these wastes using them as secondary source of materials. Rice husk contains nearly 20% silica, which is present in hydrated amorphous form. On thermal treatment, the silica converts to crystobalite, which is a crystalline form of silica. However, under controlled burning conditions, amorphous silica with high reactivity, ultra fine size and large surface area is produced. This micro silica can be a source for preparing advanced materials like SiC, Si₃N₄, elemental Si and Mg₂Si. Due to the high pozzolanic activity, this rice husk silica also finds application in high strength concrete as a substitute for silica fume. Possibility of using this silica as filler in polymers is also studied. The present paper is an attempt to consolidate and critically analyse the research work carried out so far on the processing, properties and application of rice husk silica in various laboratories and also highlighting some results on the processing and characterization of RHA and reactive silica obtained from it in the authors' laboratory.     

Vestigial sideband filtering at 10 Gbit/s using 12.5 GHzchannel-spacing demux

A 32-channel 12.5 GHz-spaced free-space demux with low crosstalk and low polarisation dependent loss has been constructed. Using this demux, vestigial sideband filtering at 10 Gbit/s has been studied. It is shown that this demux can achieve very high spectral efficiency without polarisation division multiplexing     

Design of a wideband microstrip antenna and the use of artificial neural networks in parameter calculation

This paper deals with the design of a multi-slot hole-coupled microstrip antenna on a substrate of 2 mm thickness that gives multi-frequency (wideband) characteristics. The Method of Moments (MoM)-based IE3D software was used to simulate the results for return loss, VSWR, the Smith chart, and the radiation patterns. A tunnel-based artificial neural network (ANN) was also developed to calculate the radiation patterns of the antenna. The radiation patterns were measured experimentally at 10.5 GHz and 12 GHz. The experimental results were in good agreement with the simulated results from IE3D and those of the artificial neural network. A new method of using a genetic algorithm (GA) in an artificial neural network is also discussed. This new method was used to calculate the resonant frequency of a single-shorting-post microstrip antenna. The resonant frequency calculated using the genetic-algorithm-coupled artificial neural network was compared with the analytical and experimental results. The results obtained were in very good agreement with the experimental results.     

Eradication of Barrett''s mucosa with argon plasma coagulation and acid suppression: immediate and mid term results

Microcapsules are used for the formulation of drug controlled release and drug targeting dosage forms. Encapsulated hydrophobic drugs are often applied as their solutions in plant oils. The uptake of the oils in the complex coacervate microcapsules can be improved by the addition of surfactants. In this study, soybean, olive and peanut oils were chosen as the representatives of plant oils. The well characterized complex coacervation of gelatin and acacia has been used to produce the microcapsules. The amount of encapsulated oil has been determined gravimetrically. The encapsulation of the oils was high (75-80%). When the surfactants with HLB values from 1.8 to 6.7 were used, the amount of encapsulated oil was high (65-85%). A significant decrease of the oil content in the microcapsules was found when Tween 61 with HLB = 9.6 had been added into the mixture. No oil was found inside the microcapsules from the coacervate emulsion mixture containing Tween 81 (HLB = 10) and Tween 80 (HLB = 15), respectively. The results of the experiment confirm the dependence of hydrophobic substance encapsulation on the HLB published recently for Squalan.     

A 10 Gbit/s OEIC photoreceiver using InP/InGaAs heterojunction bipolar transistors

Metal organic molecular beam epitaxy (MOMBE) was successfully used for the first time to realise a high speed monolithic photoreceiver. Incorporating an InGaAs pin photodetector followed by a transimpedance preamplifier circuit implemented with InP/InGaAs heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBTs), the OEIC photoreceiver had a bandwidth of 6 GHz and a midband transimpedance of 350 Omega . In a system experiment performed at 10 Gbit/s, the receiver exhibited a sensitivity of -15.5 dBm for a bit error rate of 10/sup -9/ at a wavelength of 1.53 mu m. This is the first demonstration of operation of a long wavelength OEIC photoreceiver at this speed.<>     

Penalty interference of nonlinear intra-channel effects and PMD inultra high-speed TDM systems

Penalty interference of nonlinear propagation impairments and polarisation mode dispersion (PMD) caused signal distortions is experimentally investigated