Studies of arm movement have suggested that the control of stiffness may be important for maintaining stability during interactions with the environment. Here we have examined the voluntary control of stiffness in the human jaw. The goal was to determine whether changes in jaw stiffness might be used to maintain jaw position in the face potentially destabilizing mechanical loads. A series of force pulses was applied to the jaw using a robotic device. The loads were designed to disrupt the ability of subjects to maintain a static jaw posture. In all cases, subjects increased the magnitude of jaw stiffness in order to maintain jaw position. A clear effect of the magnitude of the destabilizing load was observed — greater increases in stiffness were observed when larger forces were applied. Moreover, subjects were able to differentially modify stiffness in the direction of the destabilizing load in the case of loads in the vertical direction. The observed change in the relative magnitude of stiffness in different directions indicates some ability to control the pattern of stiffness of the jaw. The results indicate that jaw stiffness can be adjusted voluntarily, and thus may play a role in maintaining stability. Stiffness regulations may similarly provide a means to achieve the differential precision requirements of speech.

Certain plastic film materials can be used as sensitive tactile and impact sensors covering large surfaces. In surveillance and health care applications they can sense movement, activity or some physiological parameters. Various available film materials and their operational principles are reviewed. Comparison has been made between piezoelectric polymer film, thin porous electret material, and soft capacitive film materials in their sensing capabilities. Generation of the signal and measurement instrumentation for different sensor configurations is discussed. The structure and properties of a voided polypropylene film material and some applications and measurement results are presented. It can be shown that especially in large area applications the electret type porous films show several benefits when compared with the other solutions.

A new method for objective voice quality measurements is described in the article. It is based on wavelet transformation that enables intrinsically also time localisation of eventual impairments. In comparison with other methods (based on P.861 and P.862 algorithms), the described method saves about one half of operations needed for achievement of comparable results, thus saving computation power and time.

This paper presents an application of a fuzzy rule-based aggregation to a dataglove for the recognition of gestures. The fuzzy glove is a dataglove that has fuzzy sensor functionalities. The approach used for the definition of numerical to linguistic conversion, and for the definition of the sets of rules is discussed.

Having been realized the Timber Barking Model Device with the Operational Dimensions, which used the new untraditional timber barking way – by means of the Electric Current Effects Passing through the Subcortical Layers, the number of Sensors have to be used, to be set the adaptive intelligent barking device on the robotized level. To be reached the successful timber barking - the key problem is the electric power controller’s setting with respect - first – to the subcortical layers quality (being changed in time); - second – with respect to the log’s cone; - third – with respect to the input (output) log’s diameter to (out) of the device. The other problem is timber – barking surface quality processing.