The impact of formal care (co-paid by long term care (LTC) insurance) on informal care is critical to the improvement and promotion of public policy. We conducted an interview-based survey to examine how the use of formal care impacts the use of informal care in Shanghai, which was one of China’s first long-term insurance pilots in 2016. In addition to total informal care time, the following four types of informal care were considered: (1) household activities of daily living (HDL) tasks, (2) activities of daily living (ADL) tasks, (3) instrumental activities of daily living (IADL) tasks, and (4) supervision tasks. Of the 407 families, an average of 12.36 h (SD = 6.70) of informal care was crowded out each week. Among them, ADL tasks, HDL tasks, and supervision tasks were reduced an average of 4.60 (SD = 3.59), 5.50 (SD = 3.38), and 2.10 h (SD = 3.06) per week, respectively. Each additional hour of formal care reduced 0.473 h of informal care. Care recipients’ gender and health status were also determined to be associated with crowding out hours of informal care. These findings can be utilized as empirical evidence for decision-makers to consider the scope of funding for formal care, and this study provides comparable results to developing countries and regions.

A Nonlinear Proportional-Derivative (NPD) controller with gravity compensation is proposed and applied to robot manipulators in this paper. The proportional and derivative gains are changed by the nonlinear function of errors in the NPD controller. The closed-loop system, composed of nonlinear robot dynamics and NPD controllers, is globally asymptotically stable in position control of robot manipulators. The comparison of the simulation experiments in the position control (the step response) of a robot manipulator with two degrees of freedom is also presented to illustrate that the NPD controller is superior to the conventional PD controller in a position control system. The experimental results show that the NPD controller can obtain a faster response velocity and higher position accuracy than the conventional PD controller in the position control of robot manipulators because the proportional and derivative gains of the NPD controller can be changed by the nonlinear function of errors. The NPD controller provides a novel approach for robot control systems.

Multispeed transmissions are helpful for improvement of the economy and drivability of electric vehicles (EVs). In this paper, we propose a two-speed transmission based on dual planetary gear mechanism, in which shifts are realized by torque transfer between two brakes located on ring gears. To synthesize the dynamic and economic performances of the vehicle, a multiobjective optimization problem is constructed for gear ratio optimization and Pareto-optimal solutions of gear ratio combinations are obtained by Nondominated sorting genetic algorithm-II (NSGA-II). In particular, the minimum electric energy consumption of the EV is calculated with a fast Dynamic Programming (DP) in each iteration. Following this, a constant-output-torque control (COTC) scheme is adopted for the torque phase and inertia phase of gearshift process to ensure constant output torque on the wheel. To enhance transient responses, the feedforward–feedback controller structure is applied and a disturbance observer is integrated to improve robustness. Simulation results demonstrate that the two-speed transmission has much better performance in terms of acceleration time and energy economy compared to the fixed-ratio transmission, and the proposed gearshift control method is able to achieve fast and smooth gear shift robustly while maintaining constant output torque.

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