Bakgrund: Vårdrelaterade infektioner är ett globalt problem som orsakar ett onödigt lidande för patienten samt stora kostnader för vården och samhället. Den mest primära åtgärden för att förebygga vårdrelaterade infektioner är basala hygienrutiner där handskar ingår. Sveriges kommuner och regioner utför årligen undersökningar kring följsamheten till basala hygienrutiner. Ytterligare undersökningar behövs dock för att identifiera vad som underlättar eller försvårar användningen av handskar. Syfte: Syftet var att belysa vilka främjande och hindrande faktorer som påverkar hälso- och sjukvårdspersonalens attityder och följsamhet till användningen av handskar inom omvårdnaden i slutenvården. Metod: Examensarbetet utfördes som en allmän litteraturstudie med en induktiv ansats där tio vetenskapliga artiklar granskades och inkluderades i resultatet. Data bearbetades och sammanställdes därefter genom en innehållsanalys. Resultat: Resultatet visade att den mest förekommande främjande faktorn för handskanvändning av hälso- och sjukvårdspersonal inom slutenvården var att skydda sig själva. Den mest förekommande hindrande faktorn var stress som relaterade till tid- och personalbrist. Konklusion: Ytterligare forskning inom området behövs då ämnet är begränsat utforskat de senaste tio åren. / Background: Nosocomial infections is a global issue that causes the patient unnecessary suffering and a major cost to the healthcare. Standard precautions, which includes glove use, are the most essential measure to prevent nosocomial infections. Measurements of the compliance to standard precautions are performed every year in Sweden. However, research is needed to illustrate factors that promote or hinders the use of gloves. Aim: The aim of the study was to illustrate factors affecting health care personnel’s attitudes and compliance to glove use in nursing in the inpatient care. Method: This literature study was conducted as a general literature review with an inductive approach. Ten articles were analysed and included in the result. The data was processed and compiled through a content analysis. Result: The result showed that the most common promotive factor of glove use among health personnel in the inpatient care was to protect themselves. The most common hindering factor was stress caused by lack of time and health personnel. Conclusion: Due to the lack of research of the subject in the past ten years, further research is needed.

The introduction of artificial intelligence techniques in the retail market is making a revolution in shopping experience. It allows shoppers to walk into a store, grab what they want and simply walk out without scanning barcodes or having to stand in long queues. That is what we call cashierless stores. In this project, it aims to provide an efficient solution to the automatic retail product identification. This solution presents an artifact one can use to build an end-to-end smart system for cashierless stores. Henceforth, a solution based on text classification is proposed to recognize and identify the products. For that, deep learning techniques are used such as RNN and LSTM to build the classifier. The performance of this classifier is evaluated using various metrics and it shows its efficiency with an accuracy exceeding 86%.

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For over 30 years, the development and control of anthropomorphic robotic hands has been a highly popular sub-discipline in robotics research. Because the human hand is an extremely sophisticated system, both in its mechanical and sensory abilities, engineers have been fascinated with replicating these abilities in artificial systems. The applications of robotic hands typically fall under the categories of standalone testbed platforms, mostly to conduct research on manipulation, prosthetics, and robotic end effectors for larger systems. The teleoperation of robotic hands is another application with significant potential, where users can control a manipulator in real time to accomplish diverse tasks. In controlling a device that seeks to emulate the function of the human hand, it is intuitive to choose a human-machine interface (HMI) that will allow for the most intuitive control. Data gloves are the ideal HMI for this need, allowing a robotic hand to accurately mimic the human operator's natural movements. In this paper we present a combined review on the critical design aspects of data gloves and robotic hands. In literature, many of the proposed designs covering both these topical areas, robotic hand and data gloves, are cost prohibitive which limits their implementation for intended tasks. After reviewing the literature, new designs of robotic hand and data glove technology are also presented, introducing low cost solutions that can serve as accessible platforms for researchers, students, and engineers to further the development of teleoperative applications. / Master of Science

Controlling an exoskeleton glove with a highly efficient human-machine interface (HMI), while accurately applying force to each joint remains a hot topic. This paper proposes a fast, secure, accurate, and portable solution to control an exoskeleton glove. This state of the art solution includes both hardware and software components. The exoskeleton glove uses a modified serial elastic actuator (SEA) to achieve accurate force sensing. A portable electronic system is designed based on the SEA to allow force measurement, force application, slip detection, cloud computing, and a power supply to provide over 2 hours of continuous usage. A voice-control-based HMI referred to as the integrated trigger-word configurable voice activation and speaker verification system (CVASV), is integrated into a robotic exoskeleton glove to perform high-level control. The CVASV HMI is designed for embedded systems with limited computing power to perform voice-activation and voice-verification simultaneously. The system uses MobileNet as the feature extractor to reduce computational cost. The HMI is tuned to allow better performance in grasping daily objects. This study focuses on applying the CVASV HMI to the exoskeleton glove to perform a stable grasp with force-control and slip-detection using SEA based exoskeleton glove. This research found that using MobileNet as the speaker verification neural network can increase the speed of processing while maintaining similar verification accuracy. / Master of Science / The robotic exoskeleton glove used in this research is designed to help patients with hand disabilities. This thesis proposes a voice-activated grasping system to control the exoskeleton glove. Here, the user can use a self-defined keyword to activate the exoskeleton and use voice to control the exoskeleton. The voice command system can distinguish between different users' voices, thereby improving the safety of the glove control. A smartphone is used to process the voice commands and send them to an onboard computer on the exoskeleton glove. The exoskeleton glove then accurately applies force to each fingertip using a force feedback actuator.This study focused on designing a state of the art human machine interface to control an exoskeleton glove and perform an accurate and stable grasp.

Vast improvements in robotics and wireless communication have made teleoperated robots significantly more prevalent in industry, defense, and research. To help bridge the gap for these robots in the workplace, there has been a tremendous increase in research toward the development of biomimetic robotic hands that can simulate human operators. However, current methods of control are limited in scope and do not adequately represent human muscle memory and skills. The vision of this thesis is to provide a pathway for overcoming these limitations and open an opportunity for development and implementation of a cost effective methodology towards controlling a robotic hand. The first chapter describes the experiments conducted using Flexpoint bend sensors in conjunction with a simple voltage divider to generate a cost-effective data glove that is significantly less expensive than the commercially available alternatives. The data glove was able to provide sensitivity of less than 0.1 degrees. The second chapter describes the molding process for embedding pressure sensors in silicone skin and data acquisition from them to control the robotic hand. The third chapter describes a method for parsing and observing the information from the data glove and translating the relevant control variables to the robotic hand. The fourth chapter focuses on the feasibility of the brain computer interfaces (BCI) and successfully demonstrates the implementation of a simple brain computer interface in controlling a robotic hand. / Master of Science

Patients suffering from brachial plexus injury or other spinal cord related injuries often lose their hand functionality. They need a device which can help them to perform day to day activities by restoring some form of functionality to their hands. A popular solution to this problem are robotic exoskeletons, mechanical devices that help in actuating the fingers of the patients, enabling them to grasp objects and perform other daily life activities. This thesis presents the design of a novel exoskeleton glove which is controlled by a neural network-based controller. The novel design of the glove consists of rigid double four-bar linkage mechanisms actuated through series elastic actuators (SEAs) by DC motors. It also contains a novel rotary series elastic actuator (RSEA) which uses a torsion spring to measure torque, passive abduction and adduction mechanisms, and an adjustable base. To make the exoskeleton glove grasp objects, it also needs to have a robust controller which can compute forces that needs to be applied through each finger to successfully grasp an object. The neural network is inspired from the way human hands can grasp a wide variety of objects with ease. Fingertip forces were recorded from a normal human grasping objects at different orientations. This data was used to train the neural network with a R2 value of 0.81. Once the grasp is initiated by the user, the neural network takes inputs like orientation, weight, and size of the object to estimate the force required in each of the five digits to grasp an object. These forces are then applied by the motors through the SEA and linkage mechanisms to successfully grasp an object autonomously. / Master of Science / Humans are one of the few species to have an opposable thumb which allows them to not only perform tasks which require power, but also tasks which require precision. However, unfortunately, thousands of people in the United States suffer from hand disabilities which hinder them in performing basic tasks. The RML glove v3 is a robotic exoskeleton glove which can help these patients in performing day to day activities like grasping semi-autonomously. The glove is lightweight and comfortable to use. The RML glove v3 uses a neural network based controller to predict the grasp force required to successfully grasp objects. After the user provides the required input, the glove estimates the object size and uses other inputs like object orientation and weight to estimate the grasp force in each finger linkage mechanism. The motors then drive the linkages till the required force is achieved on the fingertips and the grasp is completed.

I takt med att informationsmängden ökar i samhället ställs högre krav på mer förfinade metoder för sökning och hantering av information. Att utvinna relevant data från företagsinterna system blir en mer komplex uppgift då större informationsmängder måste hanteras och mycket kommunikation förflyttas till digitala plattformar. Metoder för vektorbaserad ordinbäddning har under senare år gjort stora framsteg; i synnerhet visade Google 2013 banbrytande resultat med modellen Word2vec och överträffade äldre metoder. Vi implementerar en sökmotor som utnyttjar ordinbäddningar baserade på Word2vec och liknande modeller, avsedd att användas på IT-företaget Kundo och för produkten Kundo Forum. Resultaten visar på potential för informationssökning med markant bättre täckning utan minskad precision. Kopplat till huvudområdet informationssökning genomförs också en analys av vilka implikationer en förbättrad sökmotor har ur ett marknads- och produktutvecklingsperspektiv. / As the abundance of information in society increases, so does the need for more sophisticated methods of information retrieval. Extracting information from internal systems becomes a more complex task when handling larger amounts of information and when more communications are transferred to digital platforms. Recent years methods for word embedding in vector space have gained traction. In 2013 Google sent ripples across the field of Natural Language Processing with a new method called Word2vec, significantly outperforming former practices. Among different established methods for information retrieval, we implement a retrieval method utilizing Word2vec and related methods of word embedding for the search engine at IT company Kundo and their product Kundo Forum. We demonstrate the potential to improve information retrieval recall by a significant margin without diminishing precision. Coupled with the primary subject of information retrieval we also investigate potential market and product development implications related to a different kind of search engine.

Introdução: A inspeção e o acondicionamento dos instrumentais cirúrgicos limpos em caixas e bandejas, implicam na manipulação desses produtos. Na prática, é possível observar grande descompasso entre o cuidado dispensado a essa etapa, quando comparado ao rigor exigido para remoção completa de contaminantes por meio da limpeza. A falta de consenso quanto ao uso de luvas nessa etapa do processo chama a atenção e não se sabe se esse detalhe repercute na qualidade final do material quanto à segurança para o paciente cirúrgico. Objetivos: Determinar se há diferenças na resposta citotóxica relacionada ao uso de distintos tipos de luvas e das mãos nuas na inspeção e preparo do instrumental cirúrgico limpo e avaliar a carga microbiológica de instrumentais cirúrgicos preparados sem luvas e sua repercussão na esterilização. Método: Esta pesquisa realizou um experimento laboratorial com abordagem pragmática, utilizando cânulas de oftalmologia que foram manipuladas com diferentes tipos de luvas e com as mãos nuas. Posteriormente, o teste de citotoxicidade foi realizado por meio da difusão em ágar. Pinças anatômicas também fizeram parte da amostra para a análise exploratória microbiológica, após serem manipuladas sem luvas, e posteriormente, submetidas à avaliação de sua esterilidade, após autoclavação. Resultados: Nenhuma das amostras de cânulas de oftalmologia manipuladas por diferentes tipos de luvas e por mãos nuas apresentou efeito citotóxico.Todas as culturas microbiológicas das pinças anatômicas manipuladas sem luvas apresentaram crescimento de microrganismos aeróbios e anaeróbios, embora nenhum microrganismo tenha sido recuperado após a autoclavação. Conclusão: Não houve evidências de diferenças de resposta citotóxica relacionada ao uso de diferentes tipos de luvas e das mãos nuas na manipulação do instrumental cirúrgico limpo que sinalizasse risco de iatrogenia. Ressalta-se que o uso de luvas implica aumento dos custos do processo e na geração de resíduos, além do potencial risco alergênico ao látex. Esta pesquisa teve como relevância subsidiar a elaboração de protocolos para a etapa de preparo de instrumentais cirúrgicos limpos / Introduction: The aim of reprocessing surgical instruments is to provide instruments that are clean, in good working condition and ultimately sterile thus ensuring patient safety. During instrument there is no agreement about the necessity for glove use. Therefore, there is little reason for employees to wear gloves to protect themselves from possible residual contaminants on cleaned instruments that had previously been used during clean or sterile surgery. On the other hand, the use of the gloves to handle surgical instruments during preparation increases medical waste, increases medical costs and could increase the prevalence of glove allergies in staff. Aim: In this study we investigated the risk posed to patients from staff wearing different types of gloves or no gloves to prepare surgical kits. Method: Five cleaned ophtalmic cannulas were handled using different kinds of gloves and with bare hands, package and steam sterilized. An in vitro cytotoxicity test was conducted, using the agar diffusion test. Microbiological tests were conducted as well, in samples handled with bare hands. Results: All test samples showed the same mild reactivity (grade 2) indicating that handling instruments with gloves or bare hands did not leave any residual toxic products on the instrument surface. Conclusion: We found no difference in the iatrogenic risk to patients of either increased toxicity or increased risk of microbial contamination if surgical instruments are prepared with or without gloves. However, the use of gloves has some inherent disadvantages, such as the risk of latex sensitization of the workers and increased medical costs due to purchase and waste disposal

Introdução: A inspeção e o acondicionamento dos instrumentais cirúrgicos limpos em caixas e bandejas, implicam na manipulação desses produtos. Na prática, é possível observar grande descompasso entre o cuidado dispensado a essa etapa, quando comparado ao rigor exigido para remoção completa de contaminantes por meio da limpeza. A falta de consenso quanto ao uso de luvas nessa etapa do processo chama a atenção e não se sabe se esse detalhe repercute na qualidade final do material quanto à segurança para o paciente cirúrgico. Objetivos: Determinar se há diferenças na resposta citotóxica relacionada ao uso de distintos tipos de luvas e das mãos nuas na inspeção e preparo do instrumental cirúrgico limpo e avaliar a carga microbiológica de instrumentais cirúrgicos preparados sem luvas e sua repercussão na esterilização. Método: Esta pesquisa realizou um experimento laboratorial com abordagem pragmática, utilizando cânulas de oftalmologia que foram manipuladas com diferentes tipos de luvas e com as mãos nuas. Posteriormente, o teste de citotoxicidade foi realizado por meio da difusão em ágar. Pinças anatômicas também fizeram parte da amostra para a análise exploratória microbiológica, após serem manipuladas sem luvas, e posteriormente, submetidas à avaliação de sua esterilidade, após autoclavação. Resultados: Nenhuma das amostras de cânulas de oftalmologia manipuladas por diferentes tipos de luvas e por mãos nuas apresentou efeito citotóxico.Todas as culturas microbiológicas das pinças anatômicas manipuladas sem luvas apresentaram crescimento de microrganismos aeróbios e anaeróbios, embora nenhum microrganismo tenha sido recuperado após a autoclavação. Conclusão: Não houve evidências de diferenças de resposta citotóxica relacionada ao uso de diferentes tipos de luvas e das mãos nuas na manipulação do instrumental cirúrgico limpo que sinalizasse risco de iatrogenia. Ressalta-se que o uso de luvas implica aumento dos custos do processo e na geração de resíduos, além do potencial risco alergênico ao látex. Esta pesquisa teve como relevância subsidiar a elaboração de protocolos para a etapa de preparo de instrumentais cirúrgicos limpos / Introduction: The aim of reprocessing surgical instruments is to provide instruments that are clean, in good working condition and ultimately sterile thus ensuring patient safety. During instrument there is no agreement about the necessity for glove use. Therefore, there is little reason for employees to wear gloves to protect themselves from possible residual contaminants on cleaned instruments that had previously been used during clean or sterile surgery. On the other hand, the use of the gloves to handle surgical instruments during preparation increases medical waste, increases medical costs and could increase the prevalence of glove allergies in staff. Aim: In this study we investigated the risk posed to patients from staff wearing different types of gloves or no gloves to prepare surgical kits. Method: Five cleaned ophtalmic cannulas were handled using different kinds of gloves and with bare hands, package and steam sterilized. An in vitro cytotoxicity test was conducted, using the agar diffusion test. Microbiological tests were conducted as well, in samples handled with bare hands. Results: All test samples showed the same mild reactivity (grade 2) indicating that handling instruments with gloves or bare hands did not leave any residual toxic products on the instrument surface. Conclusion: We found no difference in the iatrogenic risk to patients of either increased toxicity or increased risk of microbial contamination if surgical instruments are prepared with or without gloves. However, the use of gloves has some inherent disadvantages, such as the risk of latex sensitization of the workers and increased medical costs due to purchase and waste disposal