To reduce the dependence on oil and environmental pollution, the development of electric vehicles has been accelerated in many countries. The implementation of EVs, especially battery electric ...vehicles, is considered a solution to the energy crisis and environmental issues. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the technical development of EVs and emerging technologies for their future application. Key technologies regarding batteries, charging technology, electric motors and control, and charging infrastructure of EVs are summarized. This paper also highlights the technical challenges and emerging technologies for the improvement of efficiency, reliability, and safety of EVs in the coming stages as another contribution.
This paper explores the paradoxical impact of environmental regulations on green innovation in the manufacturing of new energy vehicles (NEVs) from a stakeholder perspective. We address the dual ...challenge of accelerating green innovation across various diffusion stages and refining environmental regulations for effective stakeholder engagement, including the central government, upstream suppliers, and internal operations teams. First, we utilize Stackelberg game theory to analyze the strategic interaction and behavioral rationale between local governments and NEV manufacturers at different stages of innovation diffusion, represented by specific parameter sets. Second, we examine the roles of four key stakeholders, exploring their unique impact mechanisms and potential to influence the game’s Nash equilibrium. Finally, the game models’ validity and primary conclusions are corroborated with real-world case studies, prominently including the ongoing shift of Chinese automakers towards NEVs. Results demonstrate that: (1) environmental regulations should be calibrated according to the diffusion stages of green innovation, and (2) misaligned stakeholder interests can lead to environmental regulations that inadvertently hinder, rather than promote, NEV manufacturers’ green innovation efforts.
Microneedle technology relates to pharmacy, polymer chemistry and micromachining. Microneedle can effectively deliver insulin into systemic circulation across the skin. This process does not affect ...the activity of insulin. Compared to subcutaneous injection, microneedles cause less pain for their special structure. This review thoroughly discusses the preparation technologies of the microneedles-based insulin delivery system including solid, hollow, dissolving, phase transition, glucose-responsive microneedle patches. In the meantime, the properties, challenges and clinical/commercial status of the microneedles-based insulin delivery system are also discussed in this review.
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Knowledge Graphs (KGs), as a structured human knowledge, manage data in an ease-of-store, recognizable, and understandable way for machines and provide a rich knowledge base for different artificial ...intelligence applications. However, current multi-source KGs have heterogeneity and complementarity, and it is necessary to fuse heterogeneous knowledge from different data sources or different languages into a unified and consistent KG. Entity alignment aims to find equivalence relations between entities in different knowledge graphs but semantically represent the same real-world object, which is the most fundamental and essential technology in knowledge fusion. This paper investigated almost all the latest knowledge graph representations learning and entity alignment methods and summarized their core technologies and features from different aspects. Our full investigation gives a comprehensive outlook on several promising research directions for future work. We also provide an efficient and efficiency entity alignment toolkit to help researchers quickly start their own entity alignment models.
The power gap between supply and demand in the microgrid caused by the uncertainty of wind and solar output and users’ electricity consumption needs to be absorbed by the hybrid energy storage ...devices and the demand-side electricity price response. To maximize the service life of the lithium battery pack, this paper optimizes a reasonable ratio of the supercapacitor pack’s daily charge and discharge times to the daily cycle times of the lithium battery pack. The model construction includes two parts: power prediction and multi-objective optimization modeling. In the case study, a microgrid district under the Guizhou Power Grid is analyzed and discussed. Based on the predicted wind output, solar output, and load demand on a certain day, the optimal scheduling results have been obtained. On the one hand, a reasonable ratio regarding the daily charge and discharge times of hybrid energy storage devices has been obtained under the optimized parameter k in the model. Correspondingly, the daily operation and maintenance of the lithium battery pack is minimum. On the other hand, when the hybrid energy storage devices and demand-side electricity price response are included and not, the changes on the supply and demand sides (a) and of three evaluation indicators (b) are compared, respectively. Thus, the effectiveness of the model in this paper is verified.
Mobile health (mHealth) services have been widely used in medical services and health management through mobile devices and multiple channels, such as smartphones, wearable equipment, healthcare ...applications (Apps), and medical platforms. However, the number of the users who are currently receiving the mHealth services is small. In China, more than 70% of internet users have never used mHealth services. Such imbalanced situation could be attributed to users’ traditional concept of medical treatment, psychological factors (such as low self-efficacy) and privacy concerns. The purpose of this study is to explore the direct and indirect effects of mHealth users’ self-efficacy and privacy concerns on their intention to adopt mHealth services, providing guidelines for mHealth service providers to enhance users’ intention of adoption. A questionnaire was designed by the research team and 386 valid responses were collected from domestic participants in China. Based on the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model, a research model integrated self-efficacy and privacy concerns was constructed to investigate their effects on users’ intention to adopt mobile mHealth services. The results show that self-efficacy could facilitate users’ intention to adopt mHealth services, and had a significantly positive effect on perceived ubiquity, effort expectancy, performance expectancy and subjective norm. This study verifies the direct and indirect effects of self-efficacy and privacy concerns on users’ intention to adopt mHealth services, providing a different perspective for studying mHealth adoption behavior. The findings could provide guidelines for mHealth service providers to improve their service quality and enhance users’ intention of adoption.
Understanding user demand is the basis for enterprises to improve their product quality and services. Online reviews have become a critical reflection of user demand. In particular, complaint ...information usually indicates defects in products or services. This study proposes a user demand mining method that integrates online reviews and complaint information. The term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF–IDF) method and expert consultations were adopted to generate a product attribute set. The latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) method was also used to add more attributes to the product attribute set. This study analysed the aspect-level sentiment of each product attribute using the fine-tuning bidirectional encoder representation from transformers (BERT) model. The labelled dataset was used to train the BERT classification model to classify the product complaint information. Finally, the sentiment analysis results of online reviews and the classification results of complaint information were comprehensively analysed to obtain more accurate and comprehensive user demand elements. An example of a car product verified the effectiveness of the proposed method in the current paper. The results reveal that the method proposed in this study can integrate online reviews and complaint information to improve the accuracy and comprehensiveness of data mining results, thereby playing an auxiliary decision-making role for enterprises to accurately obtain user demand information and formulate product development strategies.
This systematic review aimed to investigate whether diabetes mellitus is a risk factor for low bone density, as this might be important and necessary for doctors specialized in treating patients with ...low bone density.
PubMed, Embase, CINAHL, and SciELO were searched for cohort, case-control, and cross-sectional studies that investigated the effects of diabetes mellitus on bone mineral density till January 2020. Data screening and extraction are done independently, whereas the methodological quality of the studies was assessed according to the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale (NOS).
A total of 14 studies that met the eligibility criteria including 24,340 participants were enrolled. The overall quality of the studies had a scale of over 6 points. The overall odds ratio (OR) regarding the risk of diabetes mellitus in low bone density patients was 1.20 95% confidence interval (CI)0.80-1.79, P = 0.30, and type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) (OR = 0.69 0.11, 4.55, P = 0.70). Subgroup analysis revealed that whether females or males, developed or developing countries, T2DM, studies after 2015, and quality over 7 points (all P values > 0.05) showed no significant differences with the risk of low bone density, except type 1 diabetes mellitus (T1DM) (OR = 3.83 1.64, 8.96, P = 0.002), and studies before 2015 (OR = 1.76 1.06, 2.92, P = 0.03), and quality below 7 points (OR = 2.27 1.50, 3.43, P = 0.0001). Funnel plot showed no significant asymmetry.
These findings revealed no relationship between T2DM and low bone density, and also, the evidence between T1DM and low bone density is inadequate, requiring further analysis of well-designed cohort studies.
It has been more than 30 years since the French pioneered the research of the apple harvesting robot, and with the joint efforts of scholars all around the world, a variety of prototypes have been ...developed. However, the existing apple harvesting robot prototype is still in the experimental research stage because of its low harvesting efficiency. With the help of information technology, the related research has ushered in a milestone development, and it is full of opportunities and challenges for apple harvesting robotic researchers. In this article, it briefly introduced the development history, structure, and composition of apple harvesting robots and the operation process, which makes readers have a clear understanding of apple harvesting robot and its harvesting principle. Then systematically summarizing the research results of apple harvesting robots both at domestic and at foreign, we carried out in following three aspects: rapid and accurate recognition and positioning of target fruit, all-weather operation mode, and application of intelligent computing theory in apple harvesting robots, and it analyzes the research progress of apple harvesting robot in detail. The results show that improving the harvesting efficiency is the key and hot spot for the research on apple harvesting robots. Under the impetus of information technology, how to achieve fast and accurate recognition of the fruits of multienvironment and multiple information, obtain reasonable path planning, and further optimization of control strategies are all important research directions.
As a new alternative fuel vehicle for energy reserve strategy, the development of methanol vehicles in China has been at the forefront. Completed pilot projects have demonstrated that methanol ...vehicles can effectively reduce fuel costs and pollutant emissions during driving. In addition to methanol vehicles, alternative fuel vehicles such as electric vehicles and compressed natural gas vehicles also maintain a sound development momentum in China. It is essential to understand which one has more advantages from sustainable development. This paper uses the Energy, Environment, and Economy (3E) evaluation method to analyze the energy consumption, environmental emission, and economy of methanol, electric, gas, and gasoline vehicles from the whole life cycle perspective. A comprehensive index evaluation model was constructed, and the development potential of the three alternative fuel vehicles was ranked under four different scenarios (energy-oriented, environment-oriented, economic-oriented, and equilibrium scenarios). This research shows that methanol vehicles have higher total energy consumption than gasoline vehicles in the whole life cycle. In terms of greenhouse gas emissions, compared with gasoline vehicles, methanol, and compressed natural gas vehicles decreased by 8.79 tons and 12.45 tons, respectively. At the same time, methanol vehicles have a better economic benefit than gasoline vehicles (37%), which is the same as the completed pilot projects. In addition, results also show that due to the advantages of low renovation cost and fuel price, the user’s cost of methanol vehicles is more down than blade electric vehicles, which makes them have better development potential compared with electric and compressed natural gas vehicles in the economic-oriented and equilibrium scenario. Therefore, methanol vehicles can be used as alternative fuel vehicles for long-term development in China.
•The difference of energy consumption of vehicle is the most significant in the fuel cycle.•Environmental impacts that can hinder the completed transition of methanol to clean fuels.•Methanol vehicles perform best in the economic orientation and equilibrium scenario.•Methanol vehicles are expected to be the key to China’s automotive energy transformation.
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