Lower-limb complications associated with diabetes include the development of plantar ulcers that can lead to infection and subsequent amputation. While we know from force-plate analyses that medial/lateral and anterior/posterior shear components of ground-reaction forces exist, little is known about the actual distribution of these stresses during daily activities or about the role that shear stresses play in causing plantar ulceration. Furthermore, one critical reason why these data have not been obtained previously is the lack of a validated, widely used, commercially available shear sensor, partly because of the various technical issues associated with measuring shear. In this study, we present a novel means of transducing plantar pressure and shear stress with a fiber-optic sensor. The pressure/shear sensor consists of an array of optical fibers lying in perpendicular rows and columns separated by elastomeric pads. We constructed a map of normal and shear stresses based on observed macrobending through the intensity attenuation from the physical deformation of two adjacent perpendicular fibers. Initial results show that this sensor exhibits low noise and responds to applied normal and shear loads with good repeatability.

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Selecting an appropriate contractor or supplier is essential to the successful implementation of a public procurement project. The Taiwan government frequently applies the best-value (BV) tendering method, a multi-criteria evaluation method, to procure projects. However, the selection process of the winner for a BV-based procurement project is generally subjective and thus is easily accused of corruptions. To develop a systematic method to support contractor selection, this study proposes using the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to facilitate the criteria evaluations for each bidder during the short-listing stage. The evaluation results of using the DEA are a list of potential BV winners who are then suggested to enter into the final selection stage. Based on three case studies related to service procurement projects, this research finds that the DEA is suitable of assessing the relative efficiencies among bidders when the BV approach is applied. Lessons learned here should be helpful in applying the DEA to aid bid evaluations in other supplier selection problems.

The purpose this paper is the development a novel polymeric fiber-optic magnetostrictive metal detector, using a fiber–optic Mach-Zehnder interferometer and polymeric magnetostrictive material. Metal detection is based on the strain-induced optical path length change steming from the ferromagnetic material introduced in the magnetic field. Varied optical phase shifts resulted largely from different metal objects. In this paper, the preliminary results on the different metal material detection will be discussed.