199 results about "Sensor selection" patented technology

In one embodiment, an implantable neurostimulator comprises a pulse generator that generates an electrical pulse signal to stimulate a neural structure in a patient, a stimulation lead assembly coupled to the pulse generator for delivering the electrical pulse signal to the neural structure, a plurality of sensors coupled to the pulse generator, and sensor select logic. Each sensor is individually selectable and the sensor select logic selects any two or more of the plurality of sensors for sensing a voltage difference between the selected sensors. In other embodiments, two or more physiologic parameters are sensed. In yet another embodiment, a method comprises sensing intrinsic electrical activity on a person's nerve and stimulating the nerve based on the sensed intrinsic electrical activity of the nerve.

A simple user interface for touchless control of electrically operated equipment. Unlike other systems which depend on distance to the sensor or sensor selection this system depends on hand and or finger motions, a hand wave in a certain direction, or a flick of the hand in one area, or holding the hand in one area or pointing with one finger for example. The device is based on optical pattern recognition using a solid state optical matrix sensor with a lens to detect hand motions. This sensor is then connected to a digital image processor, which interprets the patterns of motion and outputs the results as signals to control fixtures, appliances, machinery, or any device controllable through electrical signals.

In one embodiment of an optical pointing device, an illumination system includes a plurality of light sources. Each light source is characterized by a unique set of illumination characteristics. Illumination characteristics include impinging angle, light wavelength, light homogeneity, and the like. A sensor receives electromagnetic energy originating at the light source to scan an imaged area. The sensor measures performance indexes associated with the light sources, which depend on the illumination characteristics. The sensor includes an imaging module, which may include passive filters, and control logic, which includes at least a DSP module and a light sensor selection module. Another embodiment includes additional signaling light sources that do not interfere with the illumination system and are for signaling to the user. A method to select the most adequate light source for any given surface is based on measured performance indices.

An optical detection system according to the present invention includes: a spatial light modulator for modulating the phase of incoming light; a photodetector having a plurality of photosensitive areas to receive the light of which the phase has been modulated by the spatial light modulator; a photosensor selecting section for selecting at least one of the photosensitive areas and activating the selected photosensitive area effectively; and a modulation control section for providing a modulation pattern, associated with the photosensitive area that has been selected by the photosensor selecting section, for the spatial light modulator.

In one embodiment of an optical pointing device, an illumination system includes a plurality of light sources. Each light source is characterized by a unique set of illumination characteristics. Illumination characteristics include impinging angle, light wavelength, light homogeneity, and the like. A sensor receives electromagnetic energy originating at the light source to scan an imaged area. The sensor measures performance indexes associated with the light sources, which depend on the illumination characteristics. The sensor includes an imaging module, which may include passive filters, and control logic, which includes at least a DSP module and a light sensor selection module. Another embodiment includes additional signaling light sources that do not interfere with the illumination system and are for signaling to the user. A method to select the most adequate light source for any given surface is based on measured performance indices.

By flexibly coping with both image sensors of a CCD sensor and a CMOS sensor without providing any external circuit, a signal processing is performed. In a sensor selecting switch provided in an image-sensor signal-processing circuit, first and fourth switches are turned on when the CMOS sensor is connected, and second and third switches are turned on when the CCD sensor is connected. The sensor selecting switch is controlled by a control signal generated in a control circuit, based on sensor selection data which is stored in a register and which is data for selecting the CCD or CMOS sensor. By so doing, even if polarity of an output signal of the image sensor is reversed, a normal signal is inputted to both inputs of the CDS amplifier, whereby it is possible to flexibly cope with both of the CCD and CMOS sensors.

Disclosed in the present specification is a method for driving a display device capable of scanning an image, the display device comprising: a display module including a plurality of unit pixels arranged in a display area in which an image is displayed; and a contact sensor module forming a sensing area, which overlaps with the display area, and including at least one contact sensor respectively corresponding to the unit pixels, and the method comprising: a sensing mode identification step of identifying a sensing mode of the display device; a contact sensor selection step of selecting contact sensors to be activated, according to the identified sensing mode; and a contact sensor activation and sensing step of activating the selected contact sensors and receiving sensing signals from the activated contact sensors.

The present invention relates to an in-vessel or down-hole optical imaging sensor or system for operating in structures which may contain media with different spectral transmission characteristics. The imaging sensor of the present invention selectively emits and / or detects two or more independently controllable wavelengths or wavebands. The imaging sensor comprises an illuminator for emitting radiation of a specified wavelength or waveband through a medium to a target, at least one detector for detecting the radiation deflected by said target and at least one amplifier for providing non-linear amplification of the detector output.

A controller for selectively adjusting a power seat includes a seat adjuster including a base panel, a stepped panel extending laterally from a surface of the base panel, selector areas inclined with respect to and extending between the base panel and the stepped panel and along at least a portion of a periphery of the stepped panel. Multiple spaced depressions are formed on an outer surface of the selector areas. A contactless sensor is secured to an inner surface of the selector areas at each a depression, each sensor selectively producing a signal representing a seat adjustment function.

A water control system includes a control panel connected to a power source and is mountable adjacent to a bathtub. The system further includes a plurality of sensors connected to the control panel for determining water temperature and water flow rate wherein the plurality of sensors are selectively connected to a plurality of water supply lines. The water control system further includes a plurality of valves connected to the control panel for regulating water flow wherein the plurality of valves are selectively connected to a plurality of water supply lines. The water control system further includes at least one heating device fluidly connected to a water source for regulating water temperature. The control panel may be programmable for selectively operating the plurality of valves and the at least one heating device.

This invention relates generally to a conveyor system including a speed control slide sorter system disposed perpendicular to a pass through conveyor wherein the speed control improves efficiency in loading and utilizing available area on the belt and selects the conveyor speed to induce a diverter action according to sensors which detect portions of the irregular shaped packages, parcels, and bags which can be engaged by the pop-up belt at a selected time to slow the conveyor and engage the pop-up transfer conveyor without stopping the conveyor.

An automotive vehicle courtesy message display system allows the driver of a automotive vehicle to visually display courtesy messages to the drivers of vehicles located to the rear. Such messages may be for an occasional urgent request to "cut in" for safe passage. The message display system provides the driver of the vehicle in which the visual display is installed with an audible feedback so that the vehicle driver can verify that the correct message has been selected, without visually distracting the driver's attention. The system includes three main components, namely a wireless control unit located on the vehicle operator's steering wheel, a processor unit containing most of the electronics of the system positioned in an unobtrusive location so as to avoid impairing the drivers view, and one or a pair of display screens which are typically located behind the rear seat headrests of an automotive passenger vehicle. A microprocessor controller withing the microprocessor unit selects a text message corresponding to the particular touch sensor depressed, and transmits it to an appropriate one the display screens. The audible announcement of the message selected by the touch sensor provides the operator with a positive feedback indicating selection of the correct message.

A system and method that determines whether a heat exchanger within a complex networked system is fouling is provided. The system and method includes training classifiers indicative of a plurality of fouling conditions associated with the heat exchanger and testing the classifiers with optimal sensor data from optimal sensors to determine whether the fouling is being experienced by the heat exchanger.

Methods and apparatus for structural health monitoring are described. In one example, a method for use in designing a structural health monitoring (SHM) system for use in monitoring a host structure is described. The method includes one or more of a process for designing SHM systems for any given piece of structural hardware, a process for evaluating a given SHM system, a method to quantify the performance of a given SHM system in comparison to current inspection processes, a finite element modeling approach to determining excitation frequencies to detect damage and for selecting the best time window to use for sensed excitation signals, a Bayesian Network based data fusion technique that fuses in environmental information (load cycles induced on the structure) with a damage index (DI) to produce crack detection and estimation of crack length, and a damage location and sensor selection technique.

Provided is an apparatus for gas sampling from a harsh environment which comprises a chemically resistant plastic housing suitable for suspension in a confined spacial environment. The housing has apertures for inlet and outlet tubes by which sampled air is drawn into and then discharged from the housing. Included are two three way valves to control selective fluid communication with the environment, a gas sensor, a filter selectively remove contamination from the housing and prevent saturation of the gas sensor, a pump disposed within the housing to effect selective fluid flow through the gas sensor and filter, and a power source that is preferably batteries. The apparatus electronics are all integrated into an electronics module configured so as to communicate with an external readout in a remote location via several methods. Sampling data is accumulated by a data logger which includes the capacity to retain such information as date and time of sampling, concentration of each sample, and the unit's identification data. The electronics module is in electrical communication with the power source. Power is also supplied to the pump and valves that control the admission of sample gas, direction of it to the sensor, discharge of gas to the harsh environment, and filtration of all the atmosphere within the housing to (1) flush the sensor and (2) clear contamination from the interior of the housing.

The invention belongs to the multiphase flow measurement field, which mainly relates to the multiphase flow phase holdup measurement field and particularly discloses an oil-gas-water three-phase flow phase holdup measurement device which is based on an double helix capacitive sensor and can carry out precise measurement of the oil-gas-water three-phase flow holdup. The measurement device comprises at least one double helix capacitive sensor, a signal processing circuit, a weak capacitance measurement circuit and a moisture content measurement circuit which are respectively connected with the signal processing circuit, wherein, the double helix capacitive sensor is connected with the weak capacitance measurement circuit or the moisture content measurement circuit selectively; when a pipeline is filled with oil gas, the double helix capacitive sensor is connected with the weak capacitance measurement circuit, the signal processing circuit outputs the phase holdup of the oil; when the pipeline is filled with water, the double helix capacitive sensor is connected with the moisture content measurement circuit, and the signal processing circuit outputs the phase holdup of the water.

The invention provides a health evaluation method and system for key components and a complete machine of a numerical control machine tool and an evaluation terminal. The system comprises a data acquisition and preprocessing module, a sample working condition identification module, a health index fusion module, an evaluation index mapping module, a baseline value construction and key component relative evaluation module and a complete machine health evaluation module. Based on cooperation of the above modules, through analysis of redundancy, relevance, sensitivity and stability of measuring point information, sensor selection and layout optimization are achieved, numerical control machine tool sensing information is obtained, and evaluation is conducted. The trend characteristics of the numerical control machine tool can be fused, evaluation indexes of the degradation state of the whole life cycle of the numerical control machine tool are reflected, the problem that the weights of front and back time sequence information are unbalanced due to the fact that the input information cycle is too long is effectively solved, and the health evaluation accuracy is improved. Health evaluation is carried out by establishing the baseline value, and the health evaluation precision of the key components and the complete machine of the numerical control machine tool is improved.

A portable information handling system powered through a docking station charges an internal battery based on available power sensed at the docking station and communicated to a charger of the information handling system. A dock sensor on the information handling system selectively interfaces a local power sensor if the information handling system is not docked or a docking station sensor if the information handling system is docked. Available power sensed at the docking station is communicated to a battery charger of the information handling system by a differential wire pair interfaced through a docking connector.

Methods are described for near optimal Antenna and / or sensor selection via population-based probabilistic evolutionary algorithms such as estimation of distribution algorithm (EDA) and bio-inspired Optimization (BIO). The aspects of the invention includes a method for joint transmit and receive antenna selection using EDA; and an enhanced EDA, which uses cyclic shift register and biased estimation of distribution; and methods for joint transmit and receive antenna selection using improved population-based optimization. The proposed EDA-based and bio-inspired selection methods results in performances that are close to the ESA (exhaustive search algorithm) and yet impose mush less computational burden than ESA. Another advantage of our methods is that they can be easily implemented on parallel processors.

A portable information handling system powered through a docking station charges an internal battery based on available power sensed at the docking station and communicated to a charger of the information handling system. A dock sensor on the information handling system selectively interfaces a local power sensor if the information handling system is not docked or a docking station sensor if the information handling system is docked. Available power sensed at the docking station is communicated to a battery charger of the information handling system by a differential wire pair interfaced through a docking connector.

A liquid crystal device is provided, for example in the form of a combined display and sensor forming a touch screen. The device comprises an array, for example of active matrix type, of sensor circuits. Each sensor circuit comprises a liquid crystal sensing capacitor (CV) connected to a transistor M1 arranged as a source-follower. A sensor selecting capacitor (C1) in the form of a voltage dependent capacitor is connected between the transistor (M1) and a row select line (RWS). The capacitance of the voltage dependent capacitor (C1) is dependent on the voltage across it and has a larger value for a small voltage and a smaller value for a large voltage.

The invention proposes a wireless sensor network clustering method based on K-means. The method comprises the steps of (1) calculating center point position coordinates of each sensor in a network, and calculating coordinates of clustering points according to the center point position coordinates, (2) calculating a distance from each sensor to each clustering point in the network, and adding each sensor to a same cluster through selecting a clustering point with a nearest distance, wherein in the sensors added into the same cluster, a sensor with the smallest distance to the corresponding clustering point and energy higher than average energy of the sensors in the cluster is selected as the cluster head of the cluster, and (3) calculating the center point position coordinates of the sensors in the cluster for each cluster, taking the center point position coordinates as new cluster point coordinates, repeating the step (2) and the step (3) until the sensors in the cluster are not changed. According to the method, the power consumption of each sensor is reduced, and the overall survival time of a wireless sensor network is prolonged.

An array of vertical color filter (VCF) sensor groups, optionally including or coupled to circuitry for converting photogenerated carriers produced in the sensors to electrical signals, and methods for reading out any embodiment of the array. The array has a top layer (including the top sensors of the sensor group) and at least one low layer including other ones of the sensors. Only the top layer can be read out with full resolution. Each low layer can only be read out with less than full resolution to generate fewer sensor output values than the total number of pixel sensor locations. Typically, the sensor groups are arranged in cells, each cell including a S sensor groups (e.g., S=4), with S sensors in the top layer and fewer than S sensors in each low layer of the cell. Typically, each cell includes at least one shared sensor (a sensor shared by two or more VCF sensor groups) in each low layer, and each cell includes sensor selection switches (e.g., transistors) between the cell's sensors and a sense node.

A hot water supply apparatus including: a hot-water supply pipe for guiding hot water generated by a hot-water generator to a hot-water supplying terminal; two hot-water supply temperature sensors for detecting water temperature in the hot-water supply pipe; a temperature control unit for adjusting a temperature of the hot water supplied to the hot-water supplying terminal; a sensor abnormality determining unit for determining sensor abnormality when a difference between temperatures detected by the two hot-water supply temperature sensors is larger than a predetermined permissible error; a sensor selector for selectively setting one hot-water supply temperature sensor detecting a higher temperature as a hot-water supply temperature sensor for temperature control; and a hot-water supply temperature controller for controlling the temperature control unit so that a temperature detected by the hot-water supply temperature sensor for temperature control selected from the two hot-water supply temperature sensors is matched with a set temperature.

The invention discloses a method for predicting the complete residual life of an aero-engine under variable working conditions based on working condition identification and similarity matching. According to the method, the problem that the complete residual life is difficult to predict due to degradation trend of the real performance, covered by complex working condition variation, of the aero-engine is focused to be solved. The method comprises the following steps: identifying operation conditions of the aero-engine; carrying out data standardization on historical degradation data under different working conditions; carrying out sensor selection and parameter dimensionality reduction on the standardized data; matching degeneration tracks of each reference engine and a to-be-predicted engine by virtue of a similarity matching method, so as to obtain an estimated value of the residual life of the to-be-predicted engine and the similarity distance between the reference engine and the to-be-predicted engine; and generating a weight according to the similarity distance, and weighing life estimated values, so as to obtain the residual life of the to-be-predicted engine. By verification, the method has relative high prediction accuracies for different engine test samples.

An information processing apparatus includes a device detecting section that detects a heating device provided in a housing; a device determining section that determines the type of the heating device detected by the device detecting section; a sensor selecting section that selects a predetermined one of a plurality of temperature sensors provided in the housing in accordance with existence / absence of the heating device and the type of the heating device; and a fan controlling section that controls the number of rotations of a cooling fan provided in the housing in accordance with a measured temperature of the temperature sensor selected by the sensor selecting section.

In one embodiment, an implantable neurostimulator comprises a pulse generator that generates an electrical pulse signal to stimulate a neural structure in a patient, a stimulation lead assembly coupled to the pulse generator for delivering the electrical pulse signal to the neural structure, a plurality of sensors coupled to the pulse generator, and sensor select logic. Each sensor is individually selectable and the sensor select logic selects any two or more of the plurality of sensors for sensing a voltage difference between the selected sensors. In other embodiments, two or more physiologic parameters are sensed. In yet another embodiment, a method comprises sensing intrinsic electrical activity on a person's nerve and stimulating the nerve based on the sensed intrinsic electrical activity of the nerve.

A method and apparatus for parameter-based sensor selection is disclosed. In one embodiment, a system includes an integrated circuit (IC) having a first power management circuit, and a second power management circuit external to the IC. The IC includes various functional units implemented in various power domains, while the second power management circuit (which may be implemented on an IC) includes a number of voltage regulators for providing power to the power domains. The second power management circuit also includes sensors that provide data about a system parameter, with the data being provided at telemetry to the first power management circuit. When the system parameter is less than a first threshold, the telemetry data may be based on a first sensor. When the system parameter is greater than the first threshold, the telemetry data may be based on a second sensor.

A flowmeter includes: a propagation time difference method unit having a sensor and a reception signal amplification control unit and a flow rate calculation unit which are connected to the sensor via a sensor selector switch; a pulse Doppler method unit having a reception signal amplification control unit and an integration calculation unit which are connected to the sensor; a transmission / reception timing control unit common to them; a measurement method selection control unit for controlling switching between the propagation time difference method unit and the pulse Doppler method unit and parallel operation; and a measurement value output selector switch for selecting the output of the propagation time difference method unit and the pulse Doppler method unit. That is, the single flowmeter can perform flow rate measurement by the propagation time difference method having no restriction on the measurement range as well as the pulse Doppler method having an upper limit of the measurement range but enabling a highly accurate measurement.

A controller for selectively adjusting a power seat includes a seat adjuster including a base panel, a stepped panel extending laterally from a surface of the base panel, selector areas inclined with respect to and extending between the base panel and the stepped panel and along at least a portion of a periphery of the stepped panel. Multiple spaced depressions are formed on an outer surface of the selector areas. A contactless sensor is secured to an inner surface of the selector areas at each a depression, each sensor selectively producing a signal representing a seat adjustment function.