Inactivity and sedentary behavioural patterns among children contribute greatly to a wide range of diseases including obesity, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes. It is also associated with other important health effects like mental health issues, anxiety, and depression. In order to reduce these trends, we need to focus on the highest contributing factor, which is lack of physical activity in children’s daily lives. 'Exergames' are believed to be a very good solution in promoting physical activity in children. Such games encourage children to engage in physical activity for long periods of time while enjoying their gaming experience. The purpose of this thesis is to provide means of directing child behaviour in a healthy direction by using gaming enhancements that encourage physical exertion. We believe that the combination of both exercising and learning modalities in an attractive gaming environment could be more beneficial for the child's well-being. In order to achieve this, we present an adaptive exergaming system, the "ExerLearn Bike", which combines physical, gaming, and educational features. The main idea of the system is to have children learn about new objects, new language, practice their math skills, and improve their cognitive ability through enticing games and effective exercise. Three games have been incorporated to provide children with various educational benefits. The system has personalized features that allow guardians to customize the learning content, skill level, and required physical activity to meet their child’s needs. A stationary bike is used as a gaming controller to encourage children to undertake daily aerobic exercise. A modular design approach was adopted so that it is possible to use any stationary bicycle as an input interface by simply attaching a number of devices to it. This thesis provides detailed information about the design requirements, the design model, the proposed system and its related hardware components, the design and development of the gaming software, and the qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the system’s performance.

Active safety vehicle systems are continuously being researched to make vehicles safer to drive. Active steering is a new active safety system that involves controlling the vehicle steering angle during the vehicle's loss of stability. The steering signal, which an active steering system intervenes with, is brought to study in this thesis. Using a pulsed signal instead of a constant signal as the output of an active steering system arises new areas to study. This thesis focuses on the effect that the different pulse parameters have on the yaw and roll dynamics of a passenger vehicle. The parameters of a pulse consist of its frequency, amplitude, and pattern. Simulations were done with different vehicle models in different simulation softwares to assess the effect that each of the pulse parameters has on the vehicle dynamics. These simulation softwares include DynaFlexPro, Matlab/Simulink and Adams/Car. In addition, a whole test bed was designed and assembled to carry out Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulation experiments involving active steering systems. The test bed was used to firstly validate the results obtained from the simulations, and secondly to assess the applicability of a pulsed active steering system. Conclusions of the obtained results as well as future work are mentioned at the end of this thesis.

Active safety vehicle systems are continuously being researched to make vehicles safer to drive. Active steering is a new active safety system that involves controlling the vehicle steering angle during the vehicle's loss of stability. The steering signal, which an active steering system intervenes with, is brought to study in this thesis. Using a pulsed signal instead of a constant signal as the output of an active steering system arises new areas to study. This thesis focuses on the effect that the different pulse parameters have on the yaw and roll dynamics of a passenger vehicle. The parameters of a pulse consist of its frequency, amplitude, and pattern. Simulations were done with different vehicle models in different simulation softwares to assess the effect that each of the pulse parameters has on the vehicle dynamics. These simulation softwares include DynaFlexPro, Matlab/Simulink and Adams/Car. In addition, a whole test bed was designed and assembled to carry out Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulation experiments involving active steering systems. The test bed was used to firstly validate the results obtained from the simulations, and secondly to assess the applicability of a pulsed active steering system. Conclusions of the obtained results as well as future work are mentioned at the end of this thesis.

In order to meet industry demands for improved productivity and part quality, machine tools must be equipped with faster and more accurate feed drives. Over the past two decades, research has focused on the development of new control strategies and smooth trajectory generation techniques. These developments, along with advances in actuator and sensor technology, have greatly improved the accuracy of motion delivery in high speed machine tools. However, further advancement is limited by the vibration of the machine’s structure. The purpose of the research in this thesis is to develop new control techniques that use active vibration damping to achieve bandwidths near the structural frequencies of machine tools, in order to provide better dynamic positioning of the tool and workpiece. Two machine tool drives have been considered in this study. The first is a precision ball screw drive, for which a pole-placement technique is developed to achieve active vibration damping, as well as high bandwidth disturbance rejection and positioning. The pole-placement approach is simple and effective, with an intuitive physical interpretation, which makes the tuning process straightforward in comparison to existing controllers which actively compensate for structural vibrations. The tracking performance of the drive is improved through feedforward control using inverted plant dynamics and a novel trajectory pre-filter. The pre-filter is designed to remove tracking error artifacts correlated to the velocity, acceleration, jerk and snap (4th derivative) of the commanded trajectory. By applying the least-squares method to the results of a single tracking experiment, the pre-filter can be tuned quickly and reliably. The proposed controller has been compared to a controller used commonly in industry (P-PI position-velocity cascade control), and has achieved a 40-55 percent reduction in peak errors during tracking and machining tests. The controller design, stability analysis, and experimental results are discussed. The second drive considered is a linear motor driven X-Y stage arranged as a T-type gantry and worktable. The worktable motion is controlled independently of the gantry using a loop shaping filter. The gantry is actuated by dual direct drive linear motors and is strongly coupled to the worktable position, which determines its inertial characteristics. A 94 Hz yaw mode is handled in the gantry control law using sensor and actuator averaging, and active vibration damping. The stability and robustness of the design are considered using multivariable frequency domain techniques. For the worktable motion along the gantry, a bandwidth of 130 Hz is achieved. The gantry crossover frequency is 52 Hz, which is 3 times higher than the bandwidth that can be achieved using independent PID controllers (16 Hz). The performance of the proposed control scheme has been verified in step disturbance (i.e., rope snap) tests, as well as tracking and contouring experiments.

The purpose of this thesis is to explore bicycle use and attitudes towards cycling through case study analyses in Halifax Regional Municipality and the Region of Waterloo. There are two main sections of analyses; the first investigates factors that have been shown by previous research to be associated with cycling behavior for each of the study areas, and the second focuses on the results of a bicycle survey administered for the purpose of this research. The statistical analysis in Part 1 applies Fisher’s Exact Test to reveal statistically significant associations in the survey data. These two sections of analysis are compared and the following conclusions offered: 1. Cycling use is likely associated with city size, density, weather, topography, age, and gender. 2. Cycling trip purpose in Halifax is associated with weather; in Waterloo, trip purpose is associated with weather, gender, and employment. 3. Cycling use in Waterloo is associated with weather, age, gender, employment, and income. 4. There is strong evidence that the provision of bicycle infrastructure has a strong association with bicycle use. In the context of increasing bicycle use, the principal finding is the association between the provision of bicycle infrastructure and increased cycling use. In Waterloo, where the rate of cycling use is higher than in Halifax, there is approximately twice the total number of kilometres of on-street bicycle routes and respondents reported living significantly closer to bike paths, lanes, or trails. In Halifax, where cycling use is less common, respondents expressed much more concern regarding inadequate cycling infrastructure and an overall dissatisfaction with the quality of cycling facilities. These findings reaffirm the previous research suggesting that the provision of more bicycle lanes, paths, route signage, and parking facilities is associated with higher rates of bicycle use among the general public.

In the control of the vibration structure, active vibration control is an important topic during these years. In this thesis, an active vibration control strategy is proposed to improve the vibration problem in a linear motor positioning system. The main purpose of the present research is to reduce the vibration of the positioning system. A force estimator is applied to suppress extra force produced from a linear motor positioning system. However, uncertain parameters of the system and external disturbance degrade the accuracy of the force estimator. A sliding controller has been designed to enhance the performance of the control system. The performance of the force estimator and the improvement of the control strategy have been discussed thoroughly in this research. The computer simulation and experiments both show encouraging results of the proposed control strategy. The vibration induced from a linear motor positioning system can be suppressed to the expected amplitude 0.0956 when the linear motor position completed.

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<p>Active technology in database management systems (DBMS) enables the movement of behaviour dependent on the system’s state, from the application software to a rule base in the DBMS. With active technology in database systems, the problem of how to design active behaviour has become an important issue. Modelling processes do not foresee support for design of active rules which can lead to conflicts between the event-condition-action (ECA) rules representing the active behaviour and the application systems, using the active DBMS. The unified modelling language (UML) is a widely used notation language and is the main subject in this project. Its features will be investigated to acknowledge to what extend UML modelling diagrams provide information that can be used to formulate ECA rules.</p><p>To achieve this, two methods where developed. One of the methods was applied on use-case UML modelling diagrams. The use-case models were developed by means of reflecting a real-life organisation. The results from applying the method on the use-case models were that there are features in UML that can be expressed with ECA rules.</p><p>Active technology in database management systems (DBMS) enables the movement of behaviour dependent on the system’s state, from the application software to a rule base in the DBMS. With active technology in database systems, the problem of how to design active behaviour has become an important issue. Modelling processes do not foresee support for design of active rules which can lead to conflicts between the event-condition-action (ECA) rules representing the active behaviour and the application systems, using the active DBMS. The unified modelling language (UML) is a widely used notation language and is the main subject in this project. Its features will be investigated to acknowledge to what extend UML modelling diagrams provide information that can be used to formulate ECA rules.</p><p>To achieve this, two methods where developed. One of the methods was applied on use-case UML modelling diagrams. The use-case models were developed by means of reflecting a real-life organisation. The results from applying the method on the use-case models were that there are features in UML that can be expressed with ECA rules.</p>

Thesis (M.A.)--Northern Michigan University, 2009. / Bibliography: leaves 34-36.

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