The Best Paper Award shines a light on some great papers. PSES is the source that professionals go to first for critical information on product safety engineering and compliance issues. So check out the Best Paper Nominees and think about a topic that could make you a winner!
Experiments of DC Human Body Resistance I: Equipment, Setup, and Contact Materials
Direct Current (DC) applications have become more prevalent in recent years, primarily due to the increased usage of renewable energy and energy storage systems. A review of the existing safety standards and other literature shows that there is limited experimental data on DC human body resistance. In particular, no information was found by the authors describing the repeatability of DC body impedance and the effect of contact material and other variables. The experimental work described here investigated DC human body resistance and the effects of electrode contact material, wet or dry conditions of the skin, and the repeatability of body impedance for a given set of test conditions. Three male adult volunteers participated in this study; each volunteer completed twenty sets of experiments, with each set including four different combinations of test conditions. The results show that the electrode material has an influence on the measured body impedance when the voltage was less than 15 V, supporting the supposition that the observed nonohmic behavior is attributable to Schottky effects. The variability of the tests (measured by the use of the coefficient of variance) is higher at lower voltage and drops as the voltage increases. Wet conditions were found to provide more consistent test results than dry conditions. Due to the improved measurement consistency and its lowered impedance relative to dry conditions, data under wet conditions are preferred for further analysis.
An Automatic RFID Detection based Railway Identification System
Railway safety is a very complicated subject, which is determined by numerous aspects. In Hong Kong, with increasing patronage and traffic density of MTR Railway System, public attention is focused much more on the rail integrity. This paper proposed an automatic RFID detection based railway identification system (RVI) to give the risk assessment to the rail. In the RVI system, RFID detection is applied. In addition, Monte Carlo analysis is applied to select the best position for RFID tags. A trial has considered simulated situation of Hong Kong MTR. The trail involved 8 scenarios, which achieved 89% detection success rate. RVI system helps to enhance the reliability, accuracy and efficiency of remote condition monitoring of rail integrity.
Integration of Industry 4.0 and Assessment Model for Product Safety
Assessment models are widely applied in new product development process in manufacturing industries to identify potential hazards in the new product development and enhance the core company competence in the consumer product market. The number of product related-accidents has been growing in the past decade. Industry 4.0 is a new concept to increase the product manufacturing efficiency. This paper studies the opportunities of integrating the use of assessment model and Industry 4.0 to improve product safety in new product development process. This paper discusses (i) current assessment models, (ii) current new product development problems, (iii) Industry 4.0 applications, (iv) Integration of assessment model and Industry 4.0, and (vi) two major product-recall cases of consumer products in the US.
Risk Management Challenges in Medical Application Platforms
Medical devices and systems are increasingly being built using interoperability and platform approaches. Work in the standards community is laying the foundations for safety, security, and risk management approaches for "systems of systems" of medical devices built using "medical application platforms" (MAP). A MAP is a safety- and security- critical real-time computing platform for (a) integrating heterogeneous devices, medical IT systems, and information displays via a communication infrastructure and (b) hosting application programs ("apps") that provide medical utility via the ability to both acquire information from and update/control integrated devices, IT systems, and displays. Risk management, including performing component-level and system-level hazard analyses, is very challenging in this context because activities are spread across different organizations and across different component roles including infrastructure components, conventional medical devices, and software-based application logic. In this paper, we give an overview of risk management challenges associated with building interoperable medical systems using medical application platforms. The presented is framed in terms of ISO 14971 -- the primary medical device risk management standard. In particular, we take each part of the ISO 14971 risk management process and describe how we believe the risk management process should be extended to address interoperable medical systems. This work is funded in part by the National Science Foundation's FDA Scholar-in-Residence program and a Phase II SBIR from the US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (USAMRMC).
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