Now showing 1 - 10 of 14
  • Publication
    Early Detection of Diabetic Foot Ulcers through Wearable Shoe Design
    Diabetes Mellitus is categorized as a chronic metabolic disease where blood glucose levels are abnormal. Diabetic foot ulcer is a complication often associated with this disease. Diabetes foot ulcer is also commonly known as diabetes foot pain. It is a type of foot damage medical condition that progresses from diabetes mellitus. According to scientific data, almost 15% of diabetes patients may develop diabetes foot ulcer in their lifetime [1]. A foot ulcer is an open wound that commonly found under the feet, it can be a shallow open wound on the surface of the skin (less severe) or it can be a deep wound which exposes bones, tendons and joints [2]. However, if early prevention is carried out, diabetes patients might be able to avoid problems from diabetes foot ulcer. Thus, in this study, a wearable shoe prototype for early detection of foot ulcers is proposed to be used in home. The developed device will be associated with temperature sensor, vibration motor and pressure sensor. This device enables diabetes patients to carry out evaluation on their foot in daily life. With this device, early symptoms of foot ulcer can be detected and the seriousness of foot ulcer can be monitored.
  • Publication
    Investigation on Medicated Drugs in ECG of Healthy Subjects
    Heart diseases are now the leading cause of death worldwide, it is estimated that around 7 million patients who are living in developed countries, lost their lives due to diseases related to their cardiovascular system. In Malaysia, cardiovascular diseases represents one fifth of total deaths in the country in the past three decades. Currently patients need some sort of drugs that help them to stabilize and restore the regular patterns of their heart beat because if the patients cannot manage to restore the normal heart beat pattern, the undesired heart condition could lead life threatening situations. Advancement of biotechnology has enabled the creation of new medicated drugs to provide better treatment options. However, when this treatment option fails and there is a need to provide emergency intervention to the patients in hospitals, the medical experts often need to know about the patients' intake of any medications prior to hospital admittance for providing suitable treatments. Sometimes, this would be a difficult task as the patient might be admitted in semi-conscious or unconscious state. Therefore, this study focusses on identification of different medicated drugs usage through analysis of ECG data of the users. The data for the experiment was obtained from physionet library, which provides ECG data of subjects administered with a combination of Dofetilide, Mexiletine, lidocaine, Moxifloxacin and Diltiazem medicated drugs. The use of morphological and non-linear features derived from the ECG signals were able to provide prediction accuracy of 77.26% using SVM classifier.
  • Publication
    Optimum Binder Content of Asphaltic Concrete (ACW14) Mixture Incorporating Limestone
    Due to the high demand for natural aggregates in pavement construction, researchers have been looking for alternative materials to replace natural aggregate. In this research, the optimum binder content of asphalt mixture incorporate limestones was investigated. The optimum binder content of asphalt mixture was tested according to Marshall method. About 20 % of limestone was used as aggregate replacement in asphaltic concrete mixture. To determine the stability, volumetric properties, and bitumen binder content, three percentage of asphalt binder content, namely 4.0%, 5.0% and 6.0% was prepared. From analysis, it indicated that stability and volumetric properties of asphalt mixture incorporate limestone meet the requirement set by JKR. From the result obtained, the optimum binder content of the control sample is 5.0% and optimum binder content of limestone mixture is 5.2%. The slightly different in optimum binder content value indicate that the optimum binder content of limestone mixture was comparable with control mixture.
  • Publication
    Compatibilizers Effect on Recycled Acrylonitrile Butadiene Rubber with Polypropylene and Sugarcane Bagasse Composite for Mechanical Properties
    Compatibilizers effect on recycled acrylonitrile butadiene rubber (NBRr) with polypropylene (PP) and sugarcane bagasse (SCB) composite for mechanical properties is evaluated. Trans-Polyoctylene Rubber (TOR) and Bisphenol a Diglycidyl Ether (DGEBA) are used as compatibilizers in this study. Three (3) different composites (80/20/15, 60/40/15, and 40/60/15), with fixed filler (15 phr) and compatibilizers (10 phr) content, were carried out. These composites were arranged via melt mixing technique utilizing a heated two-roll mill at a temperature of 180 C for 9 minutes employing a 15-rpm rotor speed. Tensile and morphological properties were evaluated. The result shown average tensile strength dropped by 48.50% as the recycle NBR content rises 20 phr. Nevertheless, subsequent compatibilization reveals that the compositesâ tensile properties were all greater than control composites. The morphology discovered validates the tensile properties, indicating a stronger interaction between the PP/SCB and recycle NBR composites with the addition of compatibilizer DGEBA.
  • Publication
    Predictive Maintenance System Design for Infant Intensive Phototherapy Lamp
    Planned-Preventive maintenance (PPM) is an essential part of clinical engineering to ensure correct functionality of the medial equipment. PPM involves the extension of equipment's life and reducing failure by performing selective substitution of its components in contrast to the "fix it when it fails"concept. However, this strategy often leads to un-necessary downtime and increased costs, especially in hospital environment. Therefore, a maintenance system for predictive preventive maintenance that can monitor the usage of medical equipment is much preferred option. In this regards, a predictive maintenance system design is proposed that focuses on the LED Infant Intensive Phototherapy Lamp. In order to improve the weakness arise from the schedule Planned-Preventive Maintenance (PPM), the predictive maintenance system will be real time performance based in which the performance of the LED Infant Intensive Phototherapy Lamp will be monitored. The purpose of this monitoring system is to ensure that the light intensity, which is measured in irradiance level, can be delivered in sufficient amount for the baby with jaundice. In order to monitor the performances of LED infant intensive phototherapy lamp, a cloud based webpage has been implemented for real time monitoring of LED infant intensive phototherapy lamp which can be accessed by authorized personals.
  • Publication
    Assessment on Water Footprint of Paddy Cultivation in Kedah
    A measurable metric to gauge both the amount of water pollution and water consumption per unit of crop is the water footprint (WF). WF can be used as a thorough indicator of the utilization of freshwater resources. To increase the yield of crops, agriculture, consumed large amount of water. To prevent water shortages, it is crucial to understand how much water is consumed during agriculture. This study's goal is to estimate the region of Kedah's water footprint for paddy cultivation in the year 2017. By using CROPWAT 8.0 computer programming, climatic parameters were used for the estimation of water evapotranspiration for blue and green to proceed with the water footprint accounting. The methodological framework followed the crop water requirement (CWR) option based on the water footprint assessment manual. Focusing on the water footprint accounting phase, the blue, green and grey water footprint was calculated. The findings demonstrated that the three forms of water footprints differ significantly from one another. In Kedah, the value of the green water footprint (1201m3/ton) is higher than that of the blue water (130m3/ton) and the grey water (357m3/ton) footprints. 71% of green water footprint indicates that there is enough rainfall to support paddy growth.
  • Publication
    Investigation on effect of gas concentration in distinguishing conventional plastic and bioplastic for plastic recycling
    Distinguishing type of plastic was important for the recycling process. In this project, the effect on gas concentration released from composite was studied to distinguish between conventional plastic and bioplastic. This project involved the fabrication of a composite from polypropylene (PP), empty fruit bunches (EFB), and recycle acrylonitrile butadiene rubber (NBRr), with PP used as a conventional plastic and PP/NBRr/EFB used as a bioplastic. Trans-polyctylene (TOR) was used as a compatibilizer to evaluate the effect on the PP/NBRr/EFB. Tensile testing and SEM were conducted to study the mechanical properties and morphological properties on the PP/NBRr/EFB and the PP/NBRr/EFB/TOR composite. The gas sensor (MQ135) was used in this study to detect the presence of NH3 and CO2 released from heating conventional plastic and bioplastic. From the overall result, composite with TOR as compatibilizer has shown better performance than composite without TOR in mechanical, morphological and gas sensor testing. By using MATLAB software, it shows that from gas sensor testing, it can be verified to distinguish between conventional plastic and bioplastics for plastic recycling. The average classification obtained from the Probabilistic Neural Network (PNN) was 99.29 % accurate.
  • Publication
    Environmental impacts of construction projects in Pauh Putra Main Campus, Universiti Malaysia Perlis
    Buildings are enduring, and cities have even longer lives. Their impacts extend into the lives of several generations of our predecessors to the consequences of unspecified resources, environmental pollution, and decaying climate conditions. The identification of likely impacts of construction projects on the environment according to severity is a task that must be accomplished for minimizing those effects. This study identifies the most common environmental impacts of construction projects in the Pauh Putra Main Campus, Universiti Malaysia Perlis and proposes the measures for their mitigation. The methodology includes a review of pertinent literature, observations of the general environmental effects of on-site construction activities, focus groups, and a survey among university staff, students, and construction workers to determine their perception regarding the environmental impacts of construction activities. The collected data from 50 respondents was presented in tabular form and analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Science software. The responses on the impacts of the ecosystem, natural resources, and public are linked to their relative importance index (RII). Most participant s were aware of environmental impacts caused by the construction project which prominently affected the ecosystem in terms of "noise pollution,""dust,"and "air pollution"(which are ranked first, second, and third with RII values of 0.57, 0.52, and 0.52, respectively). The majority of the participants ranked "use technological innovations materials and methods such as the industrialized building system"as the mitigation measure of controlling the adverse environmental impacts. The long-term asset value of a building depends on its capability to fulfil user needs, withstand changing environmental circumstances, and survive the progressing expectation of sustainability design quality.
  • Publication
    Identification of habitual smokers through speech signal
    Smoking is an addictive behavior and can result major health complications. Nowadays, many young adults tend to pick up this unhealthy habits which could potentially harm their health and affects the future workforce of the nation. Most of the habitual smokers have difficulties in ceasing this habit and require external assistance in the form of group therapy, medical interventions to quit smoking. Therefore, the main aim of this study is to investigate the speech signals of the subjects in an effort to identify the habitual smokers non-invasively. Through this detection, young smokers could be identified. Voice samples from VOice ICar fEDerico II from PhysioNet database were used for this study. Wavelet Packet Transform was used to extract non-linear features from the signals. Due to uneven data, ADASYN algorithm was used to produce a balanced dataset through synthetic data sampling. Subspace KNN and SVM classifiers were used for the investigations and classification accuracies up to 83.7% and 94% of AUC curve were observed from the analysis. The results suggests that the proposed method is effective in detecting habitual smokers, and can be considered as an early screening for smoking habits in young adults for targeted rehabilitation strategies.
  • Publication
    Influence of Torrefaction on Sewage Sludge
    ( 2023-01-01) ; ;
    Mohammed S.A.
    ;
    Wan Ahmad W.A.M.
    ;
    ; ;
    Ibrahim N.R.
    ;
    Udin N.
    Sewage sludge (SS) from sewage treatment plants has been seen as a waste for decades and little attention to investigate the potential and its beneficial product. SS contain a large amount of recoverable energy; however, it has high moisture, ash, heavy metals, and organic contents. Thus, the goal of this research is to use torrefaction to produce upgraded or torrefied SS. The proximate and ultimate analysis was used to determine the physical and chemical characteristic of raw SS. Torrefaction was performed through inert atmosphere in fixed bed reactor. According to the findings, at torrefaction temperature of 300 °C, torrefaction had improved the quality of raw SS, increasing its fixed carbon content by 47.8%, and its moisture content by 61.3%. The optimum temperature for torrefaction was at 300 ℃ with holding time of 60 minutes. This study improved the quality of sewage sludge to be utilised in subsequent thermochemical conversion.