Development of an Intelligent Standing Wheelchair with Reclining Characteristics

The widespread of motor neurone weakness has become a major concern as a result of accidents, ageing, birth defects and other hereditary diseases. A huge number of paraplegics can barely do activities for themselves without assistance from helpers. This study seeks to develop an intelligent wheelchair that has an assistive lifting and multi-posture reclining mechanisms to help in elevating the user from sit to stand posture as well as recline the seat for angles between 90 and 180 degrees through use of hydraulic linear actuators. The design would incorporate strain gauge sensors on the lower back area of the seat to enable the user to stand by merely leaning forward; thereby decreasing the strain on the lower back seat to trigger the lift mechanism until the required height is attained. While pressing the sit button on the console would enable the lowering of the user to a sitting position. The wheelchair development would also enable intelligent mobility through use of ultrasonic sensors to detect obstacles and assist in the braking effort by the user. An economic analysis was done to assess the feasibility viability of the design for local production. Some user requirement validation was undertaken to establish the extent to which the design would satisfy the key requirements of the intended beneficiaries.

Requirement Validation Method using Social Network Service (SNS)

Low quality requirements contribute to many problems throughout the software development life cycle. For this reason, requirements validation step, a last step of the requirements development, is a very important activity for finding potential problems of requirements and preventing failures. However, in practice, there are a lot of cases that omitted or simply processed. It causes scheduling delays and over-costs, and result in fail in software project. In the requirement validation step, the various aspects of the specific requirements are reviewed, and the one important factor is "Are the functions the user wants included in the specification?" at that time. This can be verified by the opinions of a lot of various users, and the appropriate method is the method to use social network services where users freely post and share their opinions. Interviews, questionnaires that are methods to identify user needs for a long time required a lot of time and costs, but, contrary to that, the identifying user needs through social network services have a characteristics that can identify the needs of a large number of different people at a relatively low cost and time. Therefore, this paper suggested a systematic method of requirements validation using social network services that can identify the needs of a large number of and various users with low cost and time relatively. It is available to check whether the functions desired by user are included in the software requirement specification correctly through this method and, also, prevent the problems caused by low quality requirementA

Unstructured source artifacts ontology for requirement validation in GDSD

Analyst while transformation, may not capture true representation of user opinion thus creating deviation from actual user needs. Role of stakeholder is primary in both requirement elicitation and validation process. In elicitation stage they are initiator whereas in validation stage they are authenticator of their needs. Invalid requirements if verified may not be a deviation from specified behavior but deviation from user needs. Requirement validation process ensure that requirements should be representing all primary and intermediary artifacts as well a shared opinions of their contributors. This highlights the importance of source artifacts without which requirement validation cannot assured. Researchers didn’t propose any framework for requirement validation in context of GDSD in which source artifacts grows exponentially, and stakeholders are located in diversified locations. Due to unstructured nature of source artifacts, they are not electronically indexed and versioned controlled and this makes difficulty in preserving them. Requirement validation is not possible when source artifacts are not available along with their contributors. The major contribution of this paper to address problem of requirement validation in GDSD in absence of stakeholder to make it collocating environment. This paper introduced ontological solution of requirement validation in which target artifacts are validated against source artifact using their semantic relationship. This paper proposed an unstructured source artifact based ontological model for requirement validation in GDSD environment.