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Objective To observe the effect of overground gait training with ‘Mobility Assisted Robotic System-MARS’ on gait parameters in patients with stroke Patients & Methods: This prospective pre-post study was conducted in a tertiary teaching research hospital with 25 stroke patients with age ranging between 18–65 years. Patients fulfilling the inclusion criteria were divided in 2 groups based on the duration of stroke (≤ 6 months-sub-acute stroke & > 6 months-chronic stroke) and provided overground gait training with MARS robot for 12 sessions over a period of 2–3 weeks. Primary outcome measures were; 10-Meter walk test, 6-minutes’ walk test-6MWT and Timed up & Go-TUG tests. Secondary outcome measures were Functional Ambulation Category-FAC, Modified Rankin Scale-MRS and Scandinavian Stroke Scale-SSS. Results No adverse events were reported. Twelve patients in sub-acute stroke group and 13 patients in chronic stroke group were provided gait training for a period of maximum 1 hour per session. All primary and secondary outcome measures showed significant improvement in gait parameters at the end of the training (p more...

Biophilic city refers to the affiliation of the cities to conserve the natural environment and strive to achieve high connections with the green surroundings. As cities face swift urbanization, the green lungs of vegetation and forestry are sacrificed to accommodate buildings and infrastructures needed by the increasing population. Via biophilic design approach, countries like Singapore and New Zealand have proven that they are able to reclaim the nature and green environment for better quality of lives. This preliminary study is therefore aimed to develop the biophilic climate-conscious design for an area by focusing on the biophilic way of sustaining natural wind condition. This is due to the fact that the disturbance on natural wind condition might lead to bad ventilation or other significant modified wind flow such as gust, where in worst case scenario, may cause disaster cause by abnormal wind. As a result, this paper is expected to discover an appropriate wind flow simulation for wind flow map of a chosen potential area which is useful in guiding the local authorities towards future development of naturally environment. more...

Despite the promising nature of alkali-surfactant-polymer (ASP) flooding, its application is limited by various technical issues and environmental concerns. The goal of mitigating the impact of these limitations has led to research into the oil recovery potential of alternative chemical agents. This study, therefore, focuses on investigating the potential of a "green" ASP formulation composed of monoethanolamine (ETA), sodium cocoyl alaninate (SCA) and Schizophyllan (SPG) for its enhanced oil recovery application. A conventional ASP formulation comprising sodium carbonate (Na2CO3), Sodium Dodecyl Sulfate (SDS) and partially hydrolyzed polyacrylamide (HPAM)was deployed for comparative purposes. The hardness tolerance of the green ASP shows that surfactant precipitation and scale formation could be mitigated. Lower surfactant concentration required to achieve low IFT and contact angle upon addition of alkali shows synergism in interfacial properties and wettability alteration. The ETA–SCA system yielded a better synergy in IFT reduction (minimum IFT of 4.73 × 10-2 mN/m) and wettability alteration (contact angle of 3° in 600 seconds) than the Na2CO3–SDS system (minimum IFT of 0.22 mN/m and contact angle of 5° in 600 seconds). Nevertheless, the conventional AS formulation exhibited better synergism with brine yielding minimum IFT of 1.52 × 10-2 mN/m. The ETA–SCA system also exhibited the ability to emulsify crude oil and form stable emulsions, a desirable property in chemical EOR processes. ETA had an insignificant impact on SPG's rheology, and the viscosity increased when SCA was added. The ETA–SCA–SPG solution showed shear thinning behavior at low shear rates. The oscillatory studies showed that both SPG and HPAM possess viscoelastic properties, with the green ASP retaining the viscoelasticity of SPG while HPAM loses its viscoelasticity in the presence of Na2CO3. SCA adsorption onto the sand surface was made unfavourable at a threshold of 0.3 wt% ETA. The green ASP formulation achieved an additional recovery of ~22%, while the conventional ASP formulation achieved ~19% additional recovery. Therefore, the green ASP formulation proves to have excellent oil recovery potential compounded by its environmentally benign nature. more...

Conventional agriculture systems normally ineffective and consume a lot of manpower and water resources. In this project, an automatic drip irrigation system based on IOT platform is designed. This system is implemented in cocoa nursery at Malaysian Cocoa (MCB) Bagan Datoh. Smart Cocoa Monitoring System Using IRT for Automatic Drip Irrigation is designed by creating optimal soil moisture conditions to facilitate healthy plant growth through proper irrigation frequencies. With a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, the user can monitor the soil moisture in the cocoa plant nursery and the irrigation machine through the network. Therefore, to monitor the environment for this agriculture, the system will collect the information of the soil moisture. Any changes detected by the built-in sensors of the system that can harm the cocoa plant nursery will be noted and the system will provide soil moisture information and can be monitored through ThinkSpeak.com application for further action to be taken. To monitor the efficiency of the system, the height of each cocoa plant (cm) and the number of leaves per cocoa plant is observed within 3 weeks. For comparison, this monitoring system that controlled by a Raspberry Pi3 model B with drip irrigation technique is recorded as Treatment 1 (T1) and the overhead sprinkler technique that has been applied in MCB, Bagan Datoh, Perak is recorded as Treatment 2 (T2). It is observed that the percentage height of coco plant based on T1 is increased by 26.82% while T2 only 16.04%. The percentage increment of leaves based on T1 is 36.31% while T2 is 20.70%. more...

In this study, ANN model for a standard air-conditioning system for a passenger car was developed to predict the cooling capacity, compressor power input and the coefficient of performance (COP) of the automotive air-conditioning (AAC) system. This paper describes the development of an experimental rig for generating the required data. The experimental rig was operated at steady-state conditions while varying the compressor speed, air temperature at evaporator inlet, air temperature at condenser inlet and air velocity at evaporator inlet. Using these data, the network using Lavenberg–Marquardt (LM) variant was optimized for 4–3–3 (neurons in input–hidden–output layers) configuration. The developed ANN model for the AAC system shows good performance with an error index in the range of 0.65–1.65%, mean square error (MSE) between 1.09 × 10 −5 and 9.05 × 10 −5 and the root mean square error (RMSE) in the range of 0.33–0.95%. Moreover, the correlation which relates the predicted outputs of the ANN model to the experimental results has a high coefficient in predicting the AAC system performance. more...

This work focuses on the resistive switching behavior of sol-gel spin coated zinc oxide (ZnO) thin films on ITO substrate. The deposited ZnO thin films were annealed at various temperatures from 300°C to 500°C in a furnace for 60 minutes in order to study the effect of annealing temperature on the resistive switching behavior of ZnO thin film. The electrical property of the thin film was characterized using 2-point probe current-voltage (I-V) measurement. The surface morphology and film thickness were examined and measured using atomic force microscopy (AFM) and surface profiler respectively. The I-V characteristic showed that the heat treatment on the ZnO thin films at 300 and 400°C resulted in the resistive switching characteristic behavior. Further increasing the temperature up to 500°C on the other hand leads to the formation of asymmetrical hysteresis loop. more...