Falls are unpredictable accidents and resulting injuries can be serious to the elderly. A preventative solution can be the use of vibration stimulus of white noise to improve the sense of balance. In this work, a pair of vibration shoes were developed and controlled by a touch-type switch which can generate mechanical vibration noise to stimulate the patient's feet while wearing the shoes. In order to evaluate the balance stability and treatment effect of vibrating insoles in these shoes, multivariate multiscale entropy (MMSE) algorithm is applied to calculate the relative complexity index of reconstructed center of pressure (COP) signals in antero-posterior and medio-lateral directions by the multivariate empirical mode decomposition (MEMD). The results show that the balance stability of 61.5% elderly subjects is improved after wearing the developed shoes, which is OPEN ACCESSEntropy 2012, 14 2158 more than 30.8% using multiscale entropy. In conclusion, MEMD-enhanced MMSE is able to distinguish the smaller differences between before and after the use of vibration shoes in both two directions, which is more powerful than the empirical mode decomposition (EMD)-enhanced MSE in each individual direction.

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Design of a monitoring system based on virtual instrument technology for a simple bridge. This paper discusses the bridge monitoring system structure, software and hardware. The system can realize functions such as data acquisition, real-time data display, online analysis, offline analysis, data management and so on. Therefore, the monitoring system can be applied to a variety of bridges. The presented monitoring system has an important guidance meaning and practical value for bridge monitoring.

In order to change the current status that machine condition monitoring system is only generally applied to key equipments of large-scaled and high-end business, a low-cost mini condition monitoring system of rotating machinery based on LabVIEW is proposed and designed in this paper. The system is not only of advantages of lower cost, stronger expandability and higher applicability, but also changes the condition that current systems emphasize too much on the comprehensiveness, universality and complexity. It is capable of meeting the wide range of condition monitoring of common rotating machinery, for faults diagnosis and predictive maintenance needs better, then, its potential application can be foreseen.