MACHINE VISION FOR AUTOMATICVISUAL INSPECTION OF WOODENRAILWAY SLEEPERS USING UNSUPERVISED NEURAL NETWORKS

The motivation for this thesis work is the need for improving reliability of equipment and quality of service to railway passengers as well as a requirement for cost-effective and efficient condition maintenance management for rail transportation. This thesis work develops a fusion of various machine vision analysis methods to achieve high performance in automation of wooden rail track inspection.The condition monitoring in rail transport is done manually by a human operator where people rely on inference systems and assumptions to develop conclusions. The use of conditional monitoring allows maintenance to be scheduled, or other actions to be taken to avoid the consequences of failure, before the failure occurs. Manual or automated condition monitoring of materials in fields of public transportation like railway, aerial navigation, traffic safety, etc, where safety is of prior importance needs non-destructive testing (NDT).In general, wooden railway sleeper inspection is done manually by a human operator, by moving along the rail sleeper and gathering information by visual and sound analysis for examining the presence of cracks. Human inspectors working on lines visually inspect wooden rails to judge the quality of rail sleeper. In this project work the machine vision system is developed based on the manual visual analysis system, which uses digital cameras and image processing software to perform similar manual inspections. As the manual inspection requires much effort and is expected to be error prone sometimes and also appears difficult to discriminate even for a human operator by the frequent changes in inspected material. The machine vision system developed classifies the condition of material by examining individual pixels of images, processing them and attempting to develop conclusions with the assistance of knowledge bases and features.A pattern recognition approach is developed based on the methodological knowledge from manual procedure. The pattern recognition approach for this thesis work was developed and achieved by a non destructive testing method to identify the flaws in manually done condition monitoring of sleepers.In this method, a test vehicle is designed to capture sleeper images similar to visual inspection by human operator and the raw data for pattern recognition approach is provided from the captured images of the wooden sleepers. The data from the NDT method were further processed and appropriate features were extracted.The collection of data by the NDT method is to achieve high accuracy in reliable classification results. A key idea is to use the non supervised classifier based on the features extracted from the method to discriminate the condition of wooden sleepers in to either good or bad. Self organising map is used as classifier for the wooden sleeper classification.In order to achieve greater integration, the data collected by the machine vision system was made to interface with one another by a strategy called fusion. Data fusion was looked in at two different levels namely sensor-level fusion, feature- level fusion. As the goal was to reduce the accuracy of the human error on the rail sleeper classification as good or bad the results obtained by the feature-level fusion compared to that of the results of actual classification were satisfactory.

Värdigt liv och välbefinnande, enligt vem? : en kvalitativ studie om brukare och biståndshandläggares beskrivningar av ett värdigt liv och välbefinnande : Dignity and well-being, according to whom? : a qualitative study of elderly and assistance officer´s descriptions of a dignified life and wellbeing

We are two students named Susanne Grönlund and Anna Zaar and have jointly worked together this c-essay called "dignity and well-being according to whom? The paper is written at Högskolan dalarna in Falun.The purpose of this study was to investigate how the elderly and assistance officer describes dignity and well-being and how it is consistent with the government's bill on the national values that the National Board has developed.Our empirical study consists of four qualitative interviews, two older people dependent on community care and two assistance officers. The study's theoretical basis is Antonovsky's salutogenic approach and SOC. The survey focuses on different themes such as dignity, integrity, participation, treatment, wellbeing, security and meaningfulness which are also central themes in the Government Bill on the national values for elderly.The results show that the respondents believe that a life of dignity is difficult to define and also a subjective experience. The results also show a consistency between what the elderly, assistance officer and the national values that define dignity and well-being. Social Services Act, national values should serve as a starting point for municipalities to improve elderly care, thereby creating a sense of coherence for the individual. Keywords: Elder care, dignity, integrity, participation, attitude, well-being, security and meaningfulness.

The core characteristics and nursing care activities in psychiatric intensive care units in Sweden

Internationally, research on psychiatric intensive care units (PICUs) commonly reportsresults from demographic studies such as criteria for admission, need for involuntary treatment, andthe occurrence of violent behaviour. A few international studies describe the caring aspect of thePICUs based specifically on caregivers’ experiences. The concept of PICU in Sweden is not clearlydefined. The aim of this study is to describe the core characteristics of a PICU in Sweden and todescribe the care activities provided for patients admitted to the PICUs. Critical incident techniquewas used as the research method. Eighteen caregivers at a PICU participated in the study bycompleting a semistructured questionnaire. In-depth interviews with three nurses and two assistantnurses also constitute the data. An analysis of the content identified four categories that characterizethe core of PICU: the dramatic admission, protests and refusal of treatment, escalating behaviours, andtemporarily coercive measure. Care activities for PICUs were also analysed and identified as controlling– establishing boundaries, protecting – warding off, supporting – giving intensive assistance, andstructuring the environment. Finally, the discussion put focus on determining the intensive aspect ofpsychiatric care which has not been done in a Swedish perspective before. PICUs were interpreted asa level of care as it is composed by limited structures and closeness in care.

Friskfaktorer på en enhet : Identifiera & fortsatt bevara

Detta är en kvalitativ studie med syftet att inom en enhet på Stockholms Stad identifiera friskfaktorer och undersöka vad som krävs för att fortsatt bevara dessa. Vidare är syftet att undersöka vilket stöd som är nödvändigt för bevarandet samt HR-funktionens roll i detta avseende. Enheten är, sett till sjukfrånvaro, en välmående grupp som står inför förändringar inom marknaden och målsättning då de påverkas av det nyligen genomförda regeringsskiftet. Ett frågeverktyg användes för att framställa de åtta viktigaste dimensionerna av det attraktiva arbetet och en fördjupad diskussion kring dessa fördes sedan under en fokusgruppsintervju tillsammans med enhetens medarbetare. Resultatet visade att de viktigaste dimensionerna var bland annat arbetstid och relationer. Vidare påvisades att en balans mellan arbetsliv och privatliv är av stor vikt för medarbetarnas hälsa och välmående. För att fortsatt bevara det attraktiva i arbetet visade empirin att gruppens relationer och ledaren var nyckelfaktorer och att HR-funktionen, den personalstrategiska avdelningen, enbart bidrar med en administrativ och vägledande roll i frågan om stöd. Arbetets slutsatser innefattar att bevarandet av friskfaktorer kräver att tillvaron måste vara begriplig, hanterlig och meningsfull men även att medarbetarna behöver rimliga krav i relation till deras handlingsutrymme. En vidare slutsats är behovet av en förändring i ledarskapsbeteendet i kommande stadier då gruppen eventuellt kommer att hamna i en ny mognadsfas på grund förändrade omständigheter. Författarna drar även slutsatsen att friskfaktorer är till viss del individuellt beroende på livssituation men att balansen mellan arbetsliv och privatliv är betydande för de flesta. HR-funktionen, den personalstrategiska avdelningen, har en informativ och administrativ roll i frågan om stöd och författarna anser att det ligger en logik i denna roll. Sett till organisationens storlek är det lättare att vända psykosociala frågor till företagshälsovård eller en psykologgrupp och få det arbetsrättsliga stödet eller information från HR-funktionen.